DARPA’s Integrated Crisis Early Warning System is described as containing “state-of-the-art computational modeling capabilities that can monitor, assess, and forecast, in near real time, a variety of phenomena associated with country instability.” The Army, Navy, and Air Force, as well as the Department of Homeland Security, have all launched programs aimed at predicting group behavior.
Some say that the military should avoid funding social science, however an estimated $74 million was allocated to this area between 2006 - 2007. William M. Arkin, a national security analyst, is skeptical of much of this work, calling it a “dream counterterrorism program that seeks to create a silver bullet to solve the problem of terrorism." “Those technologies are interesting and worthy of pursuit, but my guess is that they are a poor replacement for examining why it is that terrorism exists in the first place,” Arkin says.
I believe that predictions only go so far, because you can only predict the actions of humans in groups to a certain percentage. Human beings are still animals and therefore can not be pinned down as to performing specific actions 100% of the time.
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