Can pizza orders predict military action? One man keeps track.

Washington Post

21 hours ago

If foreign adversaries want to predict when and where the United States will launch a military campaign, they might rely on satellite imagery, intercepted communications or AI analysis. But if garden-variety subreddit conspiracy theorists want to gain such insights before news breaks, they might just follow the pizza.
Run by an anonymous software engineer, the social media account Pentagon Pizza Report tracks Google data for pizzerias around the military complex in Arlington. (The anonymous Google Maps data is aggregated from 'timeline' or 'location history' on phones, including visits made to establishments.) Often posting multiple times a day on X, PPR frequently singles out spikes in pizzeria activity, allowing its 200,000-plus followers to draw conclusions about what might be happening at the Pentagon. Mostly, it seems, these posts suggest little more than a busy (or slow) night at a pizzeria.
But occasionally, the tracker publishes a chart or two implying the Pentagon brass is burning the midnight oil just ahead of a military action, their offices littered with greasy boxes.
At around 7 p.m. on June 12, PPR noted that pizzerias around the Pentagon were booming; an hour later, Israel attacked Iran's nuclear program. At 7:13 p.m. on June 21, PPR pointed out the Papa Johns nearest the Pentagon was experiencing 'HIGH activity,' while Freddie's Beach Bar and Restaurant, a straight-friendly gay bar in Arlington with lots of Pentagon customers, was dead. Less than an hour later, President Donald Trump announced the United States had attacked three nuclear sites in Iran.
Since its founding in August, PPR has become 'a joke more than anything else,' former Pentagon official Alex Plitsas, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, said in an interview. 'There are people who are still really watching this thing seriously who don't really understand how things work.'
PPR has a presence on Bluesky, TikTok, Threads and Twitch but has found its audience on Elon Musk's X, where its fan base goes well beyond the tinfoil-hat crowd. Followers include members of the military and the open-source intelligence community, or OSINT; professors and podcasters; journalists and other information junkies. Edward Byers, a retired Navy SEAL who won a Medal of Honor in 2016, and Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, both follow the account.
A man who called himself PPR's founder responded to a direct message from a Washington Post reporter on PPR's Bluesky account and also messaged from its X account.
'I think a large reason for the rapid growth is the OSINT community sharing my reports the past few weeks, which is super cool,' he said in a direct-message chat over Bluesky. 'There also seems to be a lot of Crypto traders very interested in my reports which I didn't really expect.' (The founder agreed to chat on the condition of anonymity because his identity 'would tarnish the spirit of the pizza report.' 'I think people have all sorts of different assumptions about the kind of guy that sits and stares at Google Maps data all day long,' he wrote.)
He seems to approach the account with the open-mindedness of a scientist — and the perspective of someone who enjoys a good joke. He has no military background, and he can't even remember the first time he heard about the pizza index. He can be as enigmatic as his tracker: He won't be pinned down to a location other than the East Coast, and he won't reveal his age. But he's up-front about one thing: He understands that he's providing entertainment as much as information.
'I wouldn't be surprised if most people follow for the same reason I made the account,' he wrote on the Bluesky chat. 'It's stupid, it's funny, but you can't help but feel there's also something there.'
The theory that spawned PPR has been frequently traced back to the Cold War, when Soviet agents allegedly monitored takeout orders to the highest reaches of the U.S. government. Yet it isn't clear the KGB ever relied on such methods.
Simon Miles, an associate professor of history at Duke University who has studied Cold War-era spycraft, won't say that he's skeptical of the lore, exactly. 'You can't prove a negative,' he noted.
But Miles has seen records from the Stasi, the East German intelligence service that shared information with the Soviets and other Eastern Bloc nations, and nowhere is there a mention of monitoring takeout. 'That's one of these Cold War stories that never goes away,' he said. 'I've never seen documentation to that effect.'
Not that Russian spies weren't eyeing the streets around Washington for clues. Documents that Miles studied outlined some of the methods the KGB did use, including whether the government was moving founding documents from the National Archives into secure bunkers and whether many cars were parked past normal working hours at the White House.
'The idea was basically to create a list of indicators which, if enough of them started blinking red, so to speak, you would interpret that to mean that something was actually happening,' Miles said.
Pizza, he said, wasn't on the list.
Regardless, the 'pizza index' has fascinated people for decades, often fueled by media reports. In 1991, Frank Meeks, then the owner of 43 Domino's outlets in the D.C. area, told the AP that in the days leading up to Operation Desert Storm he had delivered dozens of pizzas to the Pentagon. Fifty-five pies, Meeks bragged, were sent to the White House in the hours before the U.S.-led coalition started an air campaign against Iraq over its invasion of Kuwait.
In December 1998, Meeks was quoted by a Washington Post reporter during impeachment hearings against President Bill Clinton and preparations for Operation Desert Fox against Iraq. The White House and Congress broke previous three-day records for pizza deliveries, Meeks told The Post.
'The Pentagon Pizza Index has been a surprisingly reliable predictor of seismic global events — from coups to wars — since the 1980s,' Alex Selby-Boothroyd, head of data journalism for the Economist, wrote in a recent LinkedIn post. 'On the night of August 1st 1990 for example, the CIA ordered 21 pizzas in a single night just before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait (a new record). Who says pie charts aren't useful?'
But Pentagon ex-workers say times are different now than in the 1980s and '90s. Since the launch of Uber Eats, Grubhub, DoorDash and other delivery services, a new universe of food options has opened up for workers at the Pentagon, White House or CIA. Why would anyone limit themselves to chain pizza?
Besides, as multiple people pointed out, the Pentagon already has plenty of food options inside, including Lebanese Taverna, McDonald's, Moe's Southwest Grill, Panda Express, Panera Bread, Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen, Potbelly Sandwich Works, Subway, Taco Bell, Hissho Sushi and SmokeDatt Barbecue. There's even a pizzeria — Mosaic Pizza Company — but like many of the eateries there, it closes in the afternoon, catering to a rank-and-file staff that's often out the door by 5 p.m. The late-night options are pretty much limited to vending-machine sushi and the Market Basket Basement Cafe.
Besides, leaders may not even want to break for food, said a U.S. Army reservist who regularly works in the Pentagon. 'It's just how we're wired,' said the reservist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she wasn't authorized to talk to the media. 'We're just trying to work so we can get it done.'
None of the Pentagon workers contacted for this story had ever ordered a pizza at work — cell service is notoriously bad inside the building, one said — nor had they ever seen pizza boxes on a conference room table or in the trash. Which raises the question: Can pizza even be delivered to one of the most secure structures in the country?
The Pentagon declined to comment for this story. But the Pentagon Force Protection Agency, its law enforcement agency, said all visitors must pass a background check and have authorized credentials; they and their belongings are also physically screened. All deliveries must be screened and inspected at the Pentagon Remote Delivery Facility just north of the complex. And anything perishable is 'confiscated and discarded,' spokesman Chris Layman noted in an email.
But, Layman said, employees may bring in food that they've gotten directly from a restaurant. This appears to include food a staffer might pick up from a delivery driver at, say, the Pentagon Metro. These meals must also be screened and inspected.
'I can see having pizza delivered to a spot outside, but I don't recall we ever did it,' said Philip Greene, a retired U.S. Marine Corps attorney who had an office inside the Pentagon for 12 years. 'It's very anecdotal, but it makes sense. We're going to be burning the midnight oil. Let's get some pizza or Chinese food or whatever.'