The movements of Russia's leader and others are scrutinized to gain insights into their decision-making. 
 
 Russian President Vladimir Putin gestures. (Photo: Alexey Nikolsky, AFP/Getty Images) Story Highlights Movement pattern analysis theory says that each person's movements are unique, like DNA 
 
 One outside researcher has been paid $165,000 since 2011 
 
 Theory developed in the 1940s by a Hungarian dance instructor 
 
 A Pentagon research team is studying the body movements of Russian President Vladimir Putin and other world leaders in order to better predict their actions and guide U.S. policy, Pentagon documents and interviews show. 
 
 The "Body Leads" project backed by the Office of Net Assessment (ONA), the think tank reporting to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, uses the principles of movement pattern analysis to predict how leaders will act. 
 
 U.S. policymakers are seeking any advantage they can find as they try to anticipate Putin, who in the past week has ordered Russian troops into neighboring Ukraine and laid claim to the Crimea Peninsula. The ensuing crisis has led to U.S. and European sanctions against Russia, spurred weapons and aircraft shipments to Eastern European nations and revived tensions last seen during the height of the Cold War. 
 
 ONA has backed the work of Brenda Connors, the director of Body Leads and a research fellow at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., since 1996, records show, and has paid about $300,000 since 2009 to outside experts to work with her. Part of her work includes a 2008 report for ONA on Putin called "Movement, The Brain and Decision-making, the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin." 
 
 Connors acknowledged her work on Putin and other leaders, but declined comment and referred all questions to Hagel's office. 
 
 Pentagon officials declined to comment on the record about the program, but confirmed ONA's involvement and that Putin was among the foreign leaders studied. 
 
 An ONA official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the research was not publicly available, said "the goal is to learn about the physical movements of national leaders and determine if these can be used to gain insight about a leaders' attitudes, mindset, etcetera. ONA does not make policy recommendations, so we cannot assert with any certainty how the studies have been used by policy makers." 
 
 Movement pattern analysis means studying an individual's movements to gain clues about how he or she makes decisions or reacts to events. First developed in Great Britain in the 1940s by Rudolf Laban, a Hungarian movement analyst and dance instructor, the practice was expanded after World War II by Laban's protegé, Warren Lamb, a British management consultant. 
 
 Lamb and his associates believed each individual has a unique "body signature" consisting of how one body movement links to the next. These "posture/gesture mergers" can lead investigators to learn more about a person's thinking processes and relative truthfulness when matched with what the person says. 
 
 The patterns, Lamb believed, were as unique to each person as DNA. 
 
 Lamb, who died in January at age 90, was paid $24,000 by the war college in February 2011, military contract records show. An obituary in the British newspaper The Independent credited Lamb for performing a study of Putin that was "especially appreciated." 
 
 Since July 2011, the war college had paid $165,735 to Richard Rende, a Brown University psychiatrist and specialist in the field of movement pattern analysis, federal spending records show. Last week, the war college announced Rende had received another no-bid contract to study "movement analysis relative to human development and the brain and decision-making" as part of the Body Leads project. 
 
 Timothy Colton, a Harvard University expert on Russia, has been paid $113,915 since 2009 for his research with Connors, military contract records show. 
 
 Last September, Rende, Connors and Colton published a paper in the academic journal Frontiers in Psychology that detailed the uses of movement pattern analysis to determine leaders' decision-making process. Such analysis, they wrote, "offers a unique window into individual differences in decision-making style." 
 
 While Connors declined to characterize her current work, she has written previously about Putin's movements, including what she identified as an irregularity in the way he walks. In a 2005 interview in The Atlantic magazine, she said Putin's physical problems "created a strong will that he survive and an impetus to balance and strengthen the body. ... When we are unable to do something, really hard work becomes the way." 
 
 "He is like that ice skater who had a club foot and became an Olympic skater," Connors said in 2005. "It is really poignant to watch him on tape. This is a deep, old, profound loss that he has learned to cope with, magnificently." 
 
 ONA was created in 1973 and has been led since its inception by 92-year-old Andrew Marshall, a former RAND Corp. analyst and National Security Council aide in the Nixon administration. Its allies consider it an indispensable source of information about the future and credit it and Marshall with anticipating the demise of the Soviet Union, while skeptics say it inflates the threat posed by U.S. adversaries, including China. 
 
 In December, Hagel announced that ONA would no longer report directly to the secretary of Defense but to a lower-level official. 
 
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 Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1ietbXy ||||| Russian President Vladimir Putin gestures as he meets with Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko on March 5, 2014 in the Novo-Ogaryovo residence outside Moscow. (AP Photo/Yuri Kadobnov, Pool) Associated Press 
 
 Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has not read the military’s studies of Vladimir Putin’s body language, the Pentagon insisted Friday. 
 
 Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, did his best at Friday’s briefing for reporters to put more than an arm’s length of distance between the department’s leadership and the body language study by the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment. 
 
 “They have not informed any policy decisions of the Department of Defense,” Adm. Kirby said, after a number of media reports about the body language project. 
 
 Adm. Kirby said that the ongoing study of the body language of world leaders had examined Mr. Putin in 2008 and 2012. 
 
 Adm. Kirby said the body language reports were delivered to the Office of Net Assessment, and stayed there. 
 
 “The researcher examines the body movements and body language of various world leaders to determine a better understanding of their decision-making process, as I understand it,” Adm. Kirby said. 
 
 Led for decades by Andrew Marshall, the Office of Net Assessment is a think tank within the Pentagon that is given wide latitude to study strategic trends and global security shifts. Its budget this year is about $12 million. 
 
 The body-language program was originally run out of the State Department, Adm. Kirby said, but the Pentagon took it over around 2003. Since 2009, Adm. Kirby said that the Pentagon had spent $300,000 a year on the body language study. The study, known as the Body Leads Project, has examined more than a dozen world leaders. 
 
 The study is not classified, but Adm. Kirby made clear the Pentagon has no intention of releasing the study. 
 
 “We don’t release them,” Adm. Kirby said. “I didn’t say we couldn’t release them. I said we wouldn’t release them … Mr. Marshall is an out-of-the-box thinker who likes to study all kinds of issues. Many of them never go beyond his office. This is one of them.” 
 
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 ||||| The Pentagon has studied and researched the “body movements” of Russian President Vladimir Putin twice over the past six years in an effort to predict his future decisions and actions, defense officials revealed Friday. 
 
 The revelation came as U.S. officials try to get a handle on the crisis in Ukraine and Putin's moves in the disputed Crimea. 
 
 The program called the “Body Leads Project” released a 2008 report entitled “Movement, The Brain and Decision-making, the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin." Pentagon researchers again studied the Russian president in 2012, Defense Press Secretary Rear Adm. John Kirby said. 
 
 Since 1996, Pentagon researchers have studied the body language of 15 people, including Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, former Russian president and current prime minister Dmitry Medvedev and Putin. No Americans have been studied under the program, Kirby said. 
 
 Related: Putin's Body Language Betrayed Anxiety, Aggression 
 
 Kirby stressed there is no current effort underway to read Putin’s current body moves in regard to the Crimea crisis. President Barack Obama has engaged in two tense phone calls with Putin in recent days, and yet the crisis in the Ukraine has only escalated. 
 
 While the results of the research is not classified, Kirby said Friday the Pentagon has no intention of publicly releasing the two previous reports on Putin to the media. 
 
 The body movement projects are conducted under the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment which provides updated thinking and insights regarding a wide range of military and foreign policy issues. 
 
 Since 2009, the Pentagon expanded the program and has paid $300,000 to outside contract researchers to study body movements of various world figures in an effort to determine their truthfulness and how they may react or what decisions they may make in a variety of circumstances. 
 
 — Jim Miklaszewski and Courtney Kube 
 
 JULIAN STRATENSCHULTE / EPA Russian President Vladimir Putin applauds during the Opening Ceremony of the Sochi 2014 Winter Paralympic Games at Fisht Olympic Stadium in Sochi, Russia, 07 March 2014. 
 
 First published March 7 2014, 12:32 PM
– How to figure out what Vladimir Putin might be up to next? You might stare into his eyes to plumb his soul, as George W. Bush famously did. Or you can spend serious money to study his body language, as the Pentagon has done. Defense officials confirmed yesterday that they've commissioned two such studies, one in 2008 and the other in 2012, reports NBC News. In fact, the Pentagon has shelled out $300,000 since 2009 to study the body movements of Putin and other world figures, though no Americans are among them. It's called the "Body Leads" project, and USA Today explains that it builds off research that first emerged in the 1940s. Here's a taste: Researchers "believed each individual has a unique 'body signature' consisting of how one body movement links to the next. These 'posture/gesture mergers' can lead investigators to learn more about a person's thinking processes and relative truthfulness when matched with what the person says." Sound a little strange? Apparently, the Pentagon itself thinks so. The studies "have not informed any policy decisions of the Department of Defense,” the Pentagon's press secretary insisted yesterday. He added that defense chief Chuck Hagel hasn't read the studies of Putin, notes the Wall Street Journal.