The media is aflutter this week with the “revelation” from a classified Department of Defense assessment that Vladimir Putin has autism. The troublesome man in the Kremlin is a problem not because he’s a nasty Chekist, besotted with Russian nationalism and KGB conspiracy thinking, he’s just ‘spergy — think an unfunny Rain Man with several thousand nuclear missiles. Per a 2008 DoD study:
Putin’s “neurological development was significantly interrupted in infancy,” wrote Brenda Connors, an expert in movement pattern analysis at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, R.I. Studies of his movement, Connors wrote, reveal “that the Russian President carries a neurological abnormality.”
This has been met by snickers among the media, while the Kremlin sees nothing funny here at all. Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, angrily denounced the “conclusion” that Russia’s president has Asperger’s as “stupidity not worthy of comment.” This is a rarity for me, but allow me to state that the Kremlin has this exactly right.
POLITICO has obtained two relevant studies by Brenda Connors through the Freedom of Information Act and let’s just say it’s not impressed. As it asks readers:
Do you like watching Internet videos and then drawing broad, sweeping, pseudoscientific conclusions about the people involved? If so, congratulations, you might be qualified to join the Pentagon’s secret team investigating the nonverbal cues of powerful world leaders.
What’s going on here is a tad complex but it’s worth a bit of unpacking since it demonstrates how DoD wastes vast sums of taxpayer money on complete bullshit. I happen to know a bit about this case, since I was at the Naval War College from 2005 to 2014, and got to see some of Ms. Connors’ special genius at work, and let me state that what’s still behind the classification wall is more risible than even this.
Allow me to also state that I don’t actually know if Putin has autism — and neither does Connors. Her credentials for making such an assessment are literally nonexistent. She has a BA and MA in political science and a background in — wait for it — interpretive dance. She was a protocol officer at the State Department and somehow wangled her way into lucrative research (i.e. non-teaching) faculty positions at the Naval War College; all this was a subject of some mystery to NWC faculty, but given that institution’s tendency to give out jobs to unqualified “special friends,” the Connors case isn’t really that much of an outlier. Connors has been at NWC for over a decade…doing whatever it is she does.
She bills herself as an expert in “movement analysis,” which means she watches a lot of video and YouTube clips and generates classified assessments of the subject’s mental state. How she comes to these conclusions is mysterious, to be charitable. Her Putin “assessment” was the topic of head-scratching by NWC faculty who, unlike Connors, knew something about Russia, the Kremlin, and the KGB. Her sole claim to understanding Putin is “movement analysis,” which is a discipline nobody else on the faculty had heard of.
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