How easy is it for our enemies to know we are about to go to war with them?
Critical Analysis
Find answers to the following questions using the visual above, any links below, your big brain, and your knowledge of American government and politics:
The images shown above by the Pentagon Pizza Report capture a moment right before a major strike on Iran. According to the visual above, what happened to traffic at both Papa Johns near the Pentagon right before the strike?
According to the visual above what happened to traffic at both Dominos near the Pentagon at that time?
According to the visual above, at what time was the biggest pizza surge?
Why do you think pizza orders were so abnormally large right before a military strike?
If the information above is available for anyone to see on Twitter and also on this silly website, do you think Iranian military intelligence is monitoring this same information?
Imagine an enemy of the United States had the information above. How could they use it to their advantage?
A symbol of American military strength, the concrete and steel Pentagon building was completed in 1943 in just 16 months. Nearly 30,000 military and civilian personnel work inside the Pentagon each day. The Pentagon has 6,500,000 square feet of office space (three times the floor space in the Empire State Building!), 7,754 windows and 17 1/2 miles of corridors. Yet, its spoke-and-ring design means it takes only about 7 minutes to walk between the furthest two points in the building. Covering approximately 6.5 million square feet, the building contains a food court and mini-shopping mall. The Pentagon is home to 284 bathrooms, which is twice what would be required for its number of employees. The Pentagon is located in Virginia, and the state still had racial segregation laws during World War II. Which of these facts most surprised you?
This week, as America prepared for a major strike on Iran, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth jokingly said any surge in takeout deliveries to the Pentagon — a phenomenon that has accurately predicted the start of major geopolitical events — could be him ordering pizza “just to throw everybody off.” Asked about the “Pentagon Pizza Report,” an account on the social platform X that tracks activity at local pizza joints near the U.S. military hub, Hegseth said he was aware of the account. “I’ve thought of just ordering lots of pizza on random nights just to throw everybody off,” he said Sunday on Fox News. “Some Friday night when you see a bunch of Dominos orders, it might just be me on an app, throwing the whole system off so we keep everybody off balance. We look at every indicator.” Do you think that Secretary of War Hegseth should ban pizza ordering right before the next strike?
Hours before news broke on Israel’s major attack on Iran on June 12, for example, Pentagon Pizza Report noted a surge in Google Maps activity from four pizza places near the Pentagon around 7 p.m. — a signal military leaders were staying in place to monitor unfolding events. “As of 6:59 p.m. ET nearly all pizza establishments nearby the Pentagon have experienced a HUGE surge in activity,” according to a post on X by the account. Do you think the Pentagon Pizza Report account is a threat to national security and should be banned?
Created in August 2024, the Pentagon Pizza Report account is not the first means through which the public has tracked pizza deliveries in relation to military activity, an observation that has taken place since the 1980s. “The news media doesn’t always know when something big is going to happen because they’re in bed, but our [pizza] deliverers are out there at 2 in the morning,” Frank Meeks, an owner of 43 Domino’s outlets in the Washington area, told the Los Angeles Times in January 1991. He pointed out that on the night of Aug. 1, 1990, the CIA ordered 21 pizzas — a one-night record at the time — hours before Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait and started the Gulf War. Do you think there’s a White House Hamburger index too?
Write and Discuss
Take ten minutes to write about the question at the top of the page and then discuss with your classmates.
Act on your Learning
Order a Dominos pizza on your own and try to throw off the enemy.
Get Creative
If you were an intelligence officer trying to calculate when the U.S. was going to launch a strike, and you did not have access to pizza delivery data, what other way could you try to determine if the U.S. was about to launch an attack?
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