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.....
How HTS is Undermining Sustainable Military Cultural Competence
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