How HTS is Undermining Sustainable Military Cultural Competence
Military Review, Mar-Apr 09: All Our Eggs in a Broken Basket: How the Human Terrain System is Undermining Sustainable Military Cultural Competence
Quote:
Field-experienced warfighters and other experts in operational art have identified a range of weaknesses in military cultural training, education, and intelligence. Each “culture gap” has been painstakingly codified in military journals and official publications, most notably in Field Manual (FM) 3-24, Counterinsurgency (COIN). Finding an effective and lasting solution to these shortcomings has framed the latest phase of an ongoing debate over how to meet operational cultural requirements.
One approach argues for comprehensive change. This method would take all the criticism of military cultural training and intelligence analysis to heart, applying recent doctrine to long-term knowledge and cultural terrain analysis programs. Forcing the services to view the cultural terrain as a co-equal element of military terrain—without abandoning core warfighting capabilities—would ensure the kind of all-inclusive focus on culture that the Army and Marine Corps applied to maneuver warfare theory in the 1990s.
The other side of the debate, represented by the advocates of the Human
Terrain System (HTS), calls for an immediate solution in the form of nonorganic personnel, new equipment, and the direct application of external academic support. HTS essentially adds a quick-fix layer of social science expertise and contracted reachback capability to combatant staffs. This “build a new empire” proposal is based on the assumption that staffs are generally incapable of solving complex cultural problems on their own.....
That's a really, really good question. I suspect I may know the answer
but since I haven't been there and am woefully out of date, I could be wrong so I'll let someone who's more current answer.
You confirmed my worst fears but I do have a question
My perception was that possibly (or more likely probably) the Bn / Bde S2 crews were understaffed (as likely was the 4 while while the 1 and 3 were probably overstaffed... :rolleyes:) and that aside from that adverse impactor, two other things hit. You confirmed that one is excessively large and perhaps misemployed higher level staffs and I sense that another is an insistence by the chain of command on focusing on the 'kinetic' * slash 'real warfighting' aspects as opposed to the human factors -- which is what we're supposed to be all about...
Is that sensing correct in your view?
* I'm beginning to dislike 'kinetic' almost as much as I disliked 'target servicing' and 'H&I Fires.'
All been done before without Anthropologists
Just reading this - thanks to finding a cheap-copy, and a recommendation from Jedburgh.
It contains an extract from the Middle-East 1918 Intelligence Handbook,
The Arab Bureau was really a Tribal Department where all the information about tribes was recorded, and which also compiled and issued various analyses of tribes, genealogical tables, tribal maps, personalities and who's who and so on...
...so basically given that this is provably a military G2 area, and, as I have said, always has been, so why the HTT route?
...and as one reviewed notes here, HUMINT can be massively over played.