It doesn’t matter for the story, but I wonder what type of pizza is being ordered during war planning. — Dan

When it comes to war, knowing what the other side is up to is a huge advantage. As a result, nations invest a lot of money hiding what we’re up to — classifying critical information, speaking in code, and more. Adversaries, though, make similarly large investments in military intelligence — training spies, launching satellites, intercepting messaging, and more.

Including, perhaps, monitoring Domino’s Pizza orders. But only in Northern Virginia.

Welcome to the Pentagon Pizza theory.

The idea is simple: war takes work, and often, that work happens at off-hours. When military and intelligence personnel are working through the night on something significant, they get hungry. And there are few places to grab a bite that late. A really good option is pizza — a fresh pie is usually just a phone call (or app launch) away. And there’s no harm (to national security, at least) in ordering some pizza, right?

Well, maybe there is. Monitoring military communiqués is hard. Monitoring pizza orders? Not at all. Position an operative near some popular pizza delivery joints, tap the phones of a local Domino’s, or just get a spy hired as a delivery driver, and you have access to the delivery schedules. If you see a spike in orders, the theory goes, something’s cooking — and it’s not just a calzone.

The Pentagon Pizza theory isn’t new. The concept dates back to at least the Cold War, when Soviet operatives reportedly monitored Washington pizza delivery patterns as an unconventional surveillance method — they allegedly called it "PIZZINT," short for pizza intelligence. But the theory became famous thanks to Frank Meeks, a man who owned 43 Domino's franchises in the D.C. area in the early 1990s. As the Los Angeles Times reported in January 1991, Meeks noticed that Pentagon orders doubled the night before the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989 and spiked again before Operation Desert Storm. He told the paper that on August 1, 1990 — the night before Iraq invaded Kuwait — the CIA ordered a record 21 pizzas in a single night. "The news media doesn't always know when something big is going to happen because they're in bed," Meeks said, "but deliverers are out there at 2 in the morning."

The pattern kept showing up. During Operation Desert Fox in December 1998, the Washington Post noted a 32 percent increase in extra-cheese pizza orders to the White House alone. And the index has gone digital in the modern era, with a website dedicated to tracking pizza orders and social media accounts like @PenPizzaReport on X doing similarly. On June 12, 2025, the account noted that "nearly all pizza establishments nearby the Pentagon have experienced a HUGE surge in activity" at 6:59 PM ET. Hours later, as the Guardian reported, Iranian state TV confirmed airstrikes on Tehran.

The Pentagon denies that there’s any such connection, regularly asserting that operatives have plenty of food options within the walls of the five-sided building, but that hasn’t stopped many others from looking for similar data. For example, similar social media accounts now monitor traffic at gay bars near the Pentagon; if a normally busy establishment is unusually quiet on a Thursday night, it might mean government personnel are stuck at work. And again, the data shows a correlation.

Whether any of this is scientifically valid is another matter entirely. But if you ever notice a sudden spike in late-night mozzarella orders near Arlington, it might be worth turning on the news — and maybe, ordering a pie for yourself.

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Today’s Bonus fact: In 1983, the United States, fearing that the new government there would give the Soviet Union a foothold in the Western Hemisphere, the military executed Operation Urgent Fury, an invasion of the small Caribbean nation of Grenada. In the early days of preparing for the invasion, though, military leaders weren’t told where they’d be attacking — that operational detail was kept secret from as many people as possible. A few days earlier, Marine barracks in Beirut was attacked, so planners assumed that Urgent Fury would take place in Lebanon. When they were told the actual target was Grenada, they had a problem: no one had ever planned to invade the nation before. In fact, as Military.com reported, “the U.S. military knew so little about the country, it had to plan the invasion using maps normally sold to tourists.” Those maps turned out to be fine — operation went off successfully.

From the Archives: The Spies in the Toy Box?: Why you can’t have a Furby in your Pentagon office.

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And thanks! — Dan