Navigating the 'Human Terrain'
Moderator's Note
This thread contains a number of previously stand-alone threads and seven small ones were merged in today. I have left RFI threads on terrain alone. The thread has been re-opened to enable a new post and capturing the announcement recently that the programme was being ended (Ends).
7 Dec. Los Angeles Times op-ed by Max Boot - Navigating the 'Human Terrain'.
Quote:
The U.S. Armed Forces have a problem. They have the technical capability to hit any target on the planet. But which targets should they hit? Unfortunately, our enemies in the war on terrorism don't operate tanks or warships that we could blow up. They lurk in the shadows and emerge only briefly to set off bombs. Rooting them out requires getting inside their minds. But there's no machine that can pull off such a feat, at least not yet.
We need smart people, not smart bombs — Americans who are familiar with foreign languages and cultures and proficient in such disciplines as intelligence collection and interrogation. Yet these are precisely the areas in which the U.S. government is the weakest.
The Iraq war has brutally exposed the cost of these shortcomings and led to a belated recognition by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that his "transformation" agenda needs to incorporate the skills needed for peacekeeping, nation building and related tasks — what the Pentagon calls stability operations...
Army Human Terrain Teams: Were they deployed to Iraq/Afghanistan?
I was reading an old article from Sept-Oct 2006 Military Review titled "The Human Terrain System: A CORDS for the 21st Century", and saw that five HTTS were to be deployed from Fort Leavenworth to Afghanistan and Iraq beginning in the fall of 2006. Does anyone know if they were and if so how successful they were?
Blog by Iraq-bound Anthropologist
The Danger Room over at Wired Magazine tips readers off to a new blog by one Marcus B. Griffin, Ph.D. He's headed to Iraq to develop the Army's Human Terrain System. Some interesting reading, including this post:
Quote:
Going Native
Going “native” in anthropology is a fairly common strategy to gain a better understanding of the people with whom one is working. I am about a month away from deploying to Baghdad as part of the US Army’s new Human Terrain System and have almost gone completely native.
...
By going native, I am better able to see social life from the viewpoint of the people I am working with. I did this as a child among the Agta of northeastern Luzon, the Philippines by wearing a loincloth. As I got older I wore beads and arm bracelets. Today among soldiers, I am looking and more often acting just like them. There is an old Native American saying not to judge another person’s actions until you have walked two moons in their moccasins. That is what going native is all about: walking in someone else’s shoes in order to know what their life is like and therefore why they do what they do. This is called acquiring an emic point of view.
My apologies if this is a repost, but this blog looks promising.