Dozens of U.S. academics lose grants from Minerva Research Initiative

[flagged]

I might agree that investigation is a bit unneeded. Overfishing is about to do that way before climate change: like the Chinese deep-water fishing fleet illegally fishing in other nations' waters.

Well, if “we” were deliberately weakening the US, either to destabilize the government in order to being about a radically different system of government, or on behalf of a hostile foreign power (or, perhaps most relevantly, as part of a hybrid movement whose members have a mix of those motivations), then “we” might want to cut a large number of things that would seem nonsensical to cut for people who don’t share that goal.

The research is useful in the sense that actually understanding the issues being investigated would be valuable. The question is, would the funded research actually deliver a better understanding of those issues? Given the state of the social sciences, I don't think that it would.

Feb 27, https://apnews.com/article/mexico-drug-lord-rafael-caro-quin...

> Mexico has sent 29 drug cartel figures, including drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero, who was behind the killing of a U.S. DEA agent in 1985, to the United States as the Trump administration turns up the pressure on drug trafficking organizations.. “This is historical, this has really never happened in the history of Mexico,” said Mike Vigil, former DEA chief of international operations.. The unprecedented show of security cooperation comes as top Mexican officials are in Washington trying to head off the Trump administration’s threat of imposing 25% tariffs on all Mexican imports starting Tuesday.

"Other canceled projects investigated whether climate change could lead to armed conflicts over access to fish stocks and how it affects societies in the Sahel."

It's about understanding how a society can change due to climate change, not understanding the actual mechanics of climate change. Do you think that understanding whether or not conflicts stemming from climate change are not useful?

Makes sense to me that violence could be related to climate phenomena like draught, and that you might want to pay people to study when and how that has happened and predict when and where it may happen again.

> Social scientists researching climate chanage

This misunderstanding lead you astray: this is social scientists studying social impacts. Look at the list of the most recent awards - all of these sound like good social science and useful things for the DoD to fund since, for example, climate change-caused economic woes and migration were key to events they do directly care about like the Syrian civil war and rise of ISIS.

Conflict Resilience Across Scales: Theory and Data to Evaluate Societal Resilience to Water and Climate Shock

Anticipating Coastal Population Mobility: Path to Maladaptation or Sociopolitical Stability

Modeling Climate-Induced Societal Adaptation and Population Displacement

Take a look sometime at where India and Pakistan get much of their fresh water, and what climate change is expected to do for that. Then contemplate the testy relationship between those two countries and consider the likelihood that they will peacefully work out a way to deal with the situation.

They both have nukes. If a war between them turned nuclear it would of course be pretty bad for the people of those countries, but you might think that the rest of the world would be OK. After all both of them only have fairly small warheads, mostly around the size of the nukes the US used in WWII.

Unfortunately that is not the case. Even if they only nuked each other, an exchange of around 100 of their nukes from each side (about 1/3 of their arsenals) directed at each other's major population centers would be felt around the world.

Here's a paper that analyzed this [1], and an article about it [2].

Here's the abstract from that paper:

> A limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan could ignite fires large enough to emit more than 5 Tg of soot into the stratosphere. Climate model simulations have shown severe resulting climate perturbations with declines in global mean temperature by 1.8 °C and precipitation by 8%, for at least 5 y. Here we evaluate impacts for the global food system. Six harmonized state-of-the-art crop models show that global caloric production from maize, wheat, rice, and soybean falls by 13 (±1)%, 11 (±8)%, 3 (±5)%, and 17 (±2)% over 5 y. Total single-year losses of 12 (±4)% quadruple the largest observed historical anomaly and exceed impacts caused by historic droughts and volcanic eruptions. Colder temperatures drive losses more than changes in precipitation and solar radiation, leading to strongest impacts in temperate regions poleward of 30°N, including the United States, Europe, and China for 10 to 15 y. Integrated food trade network analyses show that domestic reserves and global trade can largely buffer the production anomaly in the first year. Persistent multiyear losses, however, would constrain domestic food availability and propagate to the Global South, especially to food-insecure countries. By year 5, maize and wheat availability would decrease by 13% globally and by more than 20% in 71 countries with a cumulative population of 1.3 billion people. In view of increasing instability in South Asia, this study shows that a regional conflict using <1% of the worldwide nuclear arsenal could have adverse consequences for global food security unmatched in modern history.

[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1919049117

[2] https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2020/03/16/even-limited-in...

Social scientists researching the likely social effects of climate change.

They seem more qualified for that specific question than climate scientists, honestly.

[flagged]

That's not the program's goal.

>> The Minerva Research Initiative supports social science research aimed at improving our basic understanding of security, broadly defined. [...] The goal is to improve DoD’s basic understanding of the social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the U.S. [0]

The emphasis here is on background, that should then better inform regional DoD strategy, that will then... well, 'not screw up things like Iraq' seems a fair summary.

For the amounts, this seems like an excellent use of DoD money. Throwing military hardware and soldier time/lives away in pursuit of doomed to fail goals is expensive and often counterproductive.

Fight smarter, not harder.

[0] https://minerva.defense.gov/

You might want to look up DARPA for reasons why the DoD funds general research.

It is great you can quickly judge the value of a 5 year research project.

The Minerva Research initiative was created by Bush’s defense secretary: https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/25482/chapter/3.

> The Minerva Research Initiative was launched in 2008 by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, motivated by the recognition that DoD was underutilizing the intellectual capital of university-based social scientists

Congress doesn’t specifically appropriate money for it. It looks like Congress appropriates money for the DOD’s Basic Research Office, and money is siphoned to this initiative by the executive branch.

EDIT: Corrected which administration.

They aren’t the first. Obama: I’ve got a phone, and I’ve got a pen.

https://www.npr.org/2014/01/20/263766043/wielding-a-pen-and-...

I agreed with you until the last bit. I don’t think there’s a uniform “they” with a stable set of goals. All of the heritage foundation, Vance, Trump, Elon, congress, the Christian nationalists, etc I’m certain have different and probably often conflicting goals… that also shift constantly depending on the context.

>These people think they found a loophole in the constitution where the president can steal congress's power of the purse.

I mean, until someone stops them, and as long as they get away with it, they did.