Human Terrain & Anthropology (merged thread)

[Ken White]

Are you saying it was doctrine, and not a scholarly work?

*grins and ducks behind his dead horse*

Golden Opportunities I have missed number 27...

[Ironhorse]

1. Field manuals are designed for an audience that will apply their contents, whether it be a manual on how to repair a vehicle or a counter-insurgency manual. As such, their writing focus should, and must, be on the application of the knowledge contained in the manual and anything else is, for that audience, unimportant.

Just to squash any risk of this whole tempest in a teapot getting too easy, :

I agree with the core thought there.

But the intro loosely converges the extremes of technical manuals and doctrine. And of course there's the heinous middle ground of tactics, techniques and procedures, and any number of documents expounding thereon. There's a big difference, although not always easy (or useful, or necessary) to agree on where the dividing lines are.

None need be footnoed. Utility in application rules. Utility does, however, mean different things to different audiences, as many here have hammered home already.

[Sargent]

I don't think FM 3-24 would have been strengthened with citation notes, actually--a recommended further reading list, perhaps, but not citations per se. This is an efficacy issue (and on this aspect of it I agree with Steve).

The manual would have been strengthened or weakened by the use of citations/footnotes depending on what those tools demonstrated about the sources used and the methodology of the work.

Part of the purpose of the citation/footnote and bibliography is to demonstrate the breadth of scholarship that informs a particular work. A "selected bibliography" has its utility, but it does not tell you which sources were actually used, and to what degree. Footnotes and citations demonstrate the specific uses of the sources.

I think it would matter very much if it were shown that a doctrinal manual were drawing only from a narrow pool of sources. One is then left to wonder at this selectivity. Alternatively, there is a difference between starting with an answer and then finding the sources to support that and surveying the sources and offering a synthesis of the conclusions that can be drawn from them. If there is no differentiation between these two processes it becomes very easy to cloak the former with an air of objectivity it does not merit. Footnotes and citations make the process utilized in a particular work easier to discern. In all respects, footnotes and citations allow the critical reader to understand more about the work than they can from the text itself. I would like to believe that a doctrinal manual of the American armed forces could only benefit from such intellectual transparency and humility.

Maybe I'm just an academic geek, but I find the information gleaned from footnotes and the reverse engineering of an argument to be fascinating. You start in one place, and before you know it you are somewhere else entirely -- it can be quite exciting.

And now that I've revealed the true depths of my dorkiness...

Regards,
Jill

[Rex Brynen]

And now that I've revealed the true depths of my dorkiness...

Oh, there's a growing crew of us dorks here

[SteveMetz]

Oh, there's a growing crew of us dorks here

I've changed my signature to reflect that.

[selil]

1. Field manuals are designed for an audience that will apply their contents, whether it be a manual on how to repair a vehicle or a counter-insurgency manual. As such, their writing focus should, and must, be on the application of the knowledge contained in the manual and anything else is, for that audience, unimportant.

The purpose of field manuals are to convey a body of knowledge to a wide audience. The verbs of a field manual are active and the lower levels of for example Bloom's taxonomy. Describe, define, enable, act on, implement, and rarely do they go above level 2 or 3 of as in this Example of Bloom. A field manual may ascribe to or attempt to "engineer" or "create" a sense of action at the strategic level but even as doctrine they will rarely attempt to evaluate, consider, or synthesize information. That would be the purpose and activity of the creators.

2. The subject matter of field manuals varies widely in terms of the predictive validity of the knowledge contained in the manual. In some cases, the knowledge should be prescriptive (i.e. do X, Y and Z and the equipment will work), while in other cases the knowledge should be either descriptive (i.e. this has worked in some situations) or attempting to produce highly interactive and adaptable courses of action in a broadly defined environment (sorry, can't come up with a single word for that).

Once again we are at the lowest levels of knowledge attainment. Whether we use a model of Gagne or Bloom the cognitive models in play are going to be very much based on simple factual or restrictive actions. The primary goal of a field manual is to provide exposure to ideas or concepts that will have substantial chance of occurring or will result in significant risk/cost should they happen. (chance X cost = risk). A field manual is exactly that. A manual used in the field and in this case a method of broadening the scope and consideration of a topic thought to be under covered in other areas of training.

3. The value add of references, citations, links to other sources in any format vary based on the nature of the knowledge presented.

• In cases where the writing is prescriptive, references, citations, etc. are just useless verbiage.
• In cases where the writing is descriptive, they may prove useful but could easily be in the form of an bibliography and reading list.
• In that third, unnamed, case they may be useless in the immediate form for training, but are quite useful for those who wish to go deeper into the subject since they help frame the debate.

4. Manual are NOT scholarly works but, in both the second and third case, contain or may contain scholarly elements.

The use case for a field manual is a soldier likely from the platoon leader on down reading in a fox hole reading by the fading light of a parachute flare on the wire. (Oh for the romance and dust of combat). The military is an obvious hiearchical organization where the primary readership is going to be the volumes of enlisted and junior officers. Not a general sitting in an office though that will be the case too. For the absolute horde reading it from the perspective of actionable and sustainable use in the field foot notes and citations will only clutter the reading and have little to no value. Only an academic or other entity with the resources, desire, will, and time to look up something would care and only rarely in the cases of refutation or criticism. There is little to no value in the larger world of where the manual was written for it to have a substantive method of documentation and many reasons not to clutter or obfuscate the reading.

5. Especially in that 3rd case, the scholarly elements contained in the work are likely to be part of ongoing debates with a low predictive value. In other words, since they can't be tested directly in many cases, they are interpretations. Being able to follow up on these debates, should individuals choose to do so, is valuable to the long term reworking of the doctrine.

The likelihood of scholarly debate is minimal to none at the battalion level down where the lions share of readers exist. The debate at the implementation level will be over the utility of restrictive rules of engagement that support the doctrinal nature of the manual. The utility of the information in concordance with the mission of the unit and balanced on the experience of the trigger puller will be the scholarly debate. A highly trained well educated (maybe doctoral or multiple masters degree) trigger puller looking at the cultural map of a village in discussions with his company commanders isn't going to be worried about much more than a current mission and looking at a FM for clues on how to do so and not get his men killed.

I doubt there will be a re-working of the doctrine found in the FM. My experience is that it is out there and will be the new doctrine for the future for a long time. A Nagl or one of the other writers may edit and write scholarly articles about it showing the process or detailing the reasons about it because they are scholars. Other than that all we can look forward to is a likely opaqueness to the process in the future.

[Ken White]

cut and paste is your friend...

Good post.

[TT]

I am way late on this discussion. But given that

Steve Metz (comment #74)

"No horse is so dead that it can't be beaten a little more."

….so just a couple of very light flogs before dinner (horse steak, perhaps?).

MarcT (Comment #70)

I fully expect that the authors of the manual draft chapters included references in their drafts, and I would ask that anyone on the SWC who was an author or reviewer if this was so.

One early draft of a chapter I saw had citations.

Steve Metz (comment #79)

Professors have research assistants

They do? Darn, I have really missed out on this perk..

Rex Comment (#66)

it results in a discipline that often seems to be preoccupied by abstract theorizing and to have little intrinsic grasp of the actual nature of politics and policy processes.
The odd (and even tragic) thing is that many, perhaps most graduate students usually come into the system wanting to not only study the world, but to engage with it too. We put then put them through a series of disciplinary tribal rituals that emphasize the theoretical at the cost of the actual, and in the end reproduce the discipline's own weaknesses. (Or we put them off graduate school altogether--which is a shame, since there is a lot that is useful to learn too.)

Sigh. All too true even on the east side of the pond as well these days (though there are some places where this does not hold). I could tell horror stories….. Even though I do not engage in abstract theorizing, I sadly feel obliged to warn my PhD students that they might be wise to do a theory oriented PhD thesis as most Departs they are likely to apply to will be looking for people who do theory, and so they have to consider whether not adopting a theoretical approach might circumscribe their job prospects.

Sargent (comment 103

Maybe I'm just an academic geek, but I find the information gleaned from footnotes and the reverse engineering of an argument to be fascinating. You start in one place, and before you know it you are somewhere else entirely -- it can be quite exciting.

Certainly as another of those 'dorks' , especially one who studies change in military organizations, I would have appreciated the manual being properly (and fulsomely) cited. For I fully expect that if my future research agenda comes to pass, I will a part of this research look at the process and the sources and citations would make my life easier. But I know there are ways that I will be able to do this (something called research) that will allow me to do this sans citations in the manual, if not perfectly at least very well.

That said, I did not read the manual as a piece of scholarship nor did I expect it to be a piece of scholarship. That it is a doctrinal manual first and foremost is an argument that many others have made very well already.

As for Price, while I find the argument he makes irritating on all sorts of levels, I do wonder if maybe it would have been best simply to have ignored him....

Cheers

PS I was tempted to add to marct and Ken White’s comments on Quality Control from the perspective of working in an academic system that is subjected to a Teaching Quality Control and a Research Assessment Exercise, but I would start at a full out rant and escalate from there. Suffice to say these QCs are enough to make any sane and rational academic seriously crazy or just want to cry. (visualize an icon representing 'being made crazy')

[Ken White]

"(visualize an icon representing 'being made crazy')"

as a "this is the result" but my wife is mumbling about family blogs, the sanity of viewers and other such maternalistic nonsense...

[Adam L]

I've been re-reading this thread...

You wrote earlier that the "primary source for doctrine is collective wisdom of the community of practice." If the information/ideas in FM 3-24 were based on either a group's general knowledge/wisdom or were sufficiently original not to need citation or other attribution, or if releases were obtained, and if, as the U of Chigago ed. (at xlviii) states all copyrighted material is id'd with footnote and other sources are id'd in source notes, why didn't john Nagl just write about that in refuting Price? If a good faith effort was made to comply, and some citations were in fact missed, and picked up by a nit-picker in furtherance of another agenda... it happened.

Instead, Nagl's respone to Price in part tried to justify the failure to cite all sources as a matter of "societal" differences. The argument about not being an academic pursuit seems to lose some power given the number of non-military degrees held by those involved with FM 3-24. Nagl also writes that Field Manuals are not designed to be judged 'by the quality of thier sourcing' but instead of leaving it there, he goes on to write that because they are indended to be used by soldiers, "authors are not named, and those whose scholarship informs the manual are only credited if they are quoted extensively. This is not the academic way, but soldiers are not academic; it is my understanding that htis longstanding practice in doctrine writing... is well within the provisions of "fair use" copyright law." If he had only bothered referencing where his understanding came from and how the Manual met with the it and/or the Army Publishing procedures (thanks, Rex) it would have been very helpful.

In any event, I was curious about why all this struck a "raw nerve." I understand that being compulsively academic can blind people to the merits of the substance of this subject matter, but i don't understand why formal academic rules would get in the way of educatioin at the military staff and war colleges. I would think they woudl enforce ideas of disciplined htought and thoroughness. I am also curious about what would be unacceptable about research and from what perspective. Is this a difference in ethical approaches or in the formality of the methodology? What is it about the accreditation process that changes the character of the colleges, and makes them try to be "ersatz universities" rather than what they are?

Adam

[selil]

AdamL,

Plagiarism strikes a raw nerve with academics because in a world where so little counts for much the little things count for a lot. In academia the only thing you trade upon are your ideas. Ideas may be reprsented in books or patents, but those ideas are your product. If you stole bread from a baker you would understand the theft. In the realm of intellectual exchange the trade of cash for bread is in the attribution. Academics are given accolades for being cited and creating dialog.

Academics are rarely paid extensive sums of money for their work and the only acknowledgment of their work is the report that citation bibliometrics provide. Attribution is about giving due recognition for others work and not claiming others work as yours. In academia you can publish an annotated bibliography which is nothing but citations and have that considered scholarship. There are other reasons such as recreating the science for attribution, but in general I think it is about credit. A history of science shows good scientists being claim jumped by better politically connected scientists which led to funding and respect.

I understand why the Army and Marine Corps would do things a particular way and I'll even take their side, but I'll be honest I walk on hot coals with my colleagues doing so and jeopardize my career. Even just doing so here on SWC. I think Steve Metz and MarcT would back me up in saying in academia plagiarism is not about the money and many careers have ended for less than what these accusations entail. When you talk about ideas being the coin of the realm what appears to be of no consequence can have extreme effects.

Those outside of academia can belittle the specifics of intellectual pursuit that academics engage in, but they are lesser individuals for that. Every career has it's way of dealing with acknowledgement and attribution for acts. In the military medals, and rank are given based on the deeds of the soldier. In academia awards and academic rank are given based on the quality and quantity of scholarship. In the military wearing medals not earned are nearing culturally the same level of abhorrence as plagiarism in academia.

It might not make sense to everybody but you have to respect it. I'm sure there is some silly anthropologist theory about it, but I call it respect.

[SteveMetz]

I've been re-reading this thread...

You wrote earlier that the "primary source for doctrine is collective wisdom of the community of practice." If the information/ideas in FM 3-24 were based on either a group's general knowledge/wisdom or were sufficiently original not to need citation or other attribution, or if releases were obtained, and if, as the U of Chigago ed. (at xlviii) states all copyrighted material is id'd with footnote and other sources are id'd in source notes, why didn't john Nagl just write about that in refuting Price? If a good faith effort was made to comply, and some citations were in fact missed, and picked up by a nit-picker in furtherance of another agenda... it happened.

Instead, Nagl's respone to Price in part tried to justify the failure to cite all sources as a matter of "societal" differences. The argument about not being an academic pursuit seems to lose some power given the number of non-military degrees held by those involved with FM 3-24. Nagl also writes that Field Manuals are not designed to be judged 'by the quality of thier sourcing' but instead of leaving it there, he goes on to write that because they are indended to be used by soldiers, "authors are not named, and those whose scholarship informs the manual are only credited if they are quoted extensively. This is not the academic way, but soldiers are not academic; it is my understanding that htis longstanding practice in doctrine writing... is well within the provisions of "fair use" copyright law." If he had only bothered referencing where his understanding came from and how the Manual met with the it and/or the Army Publishing procedures (thanks, Rex) it would have been very helpful.

In any event, I was curious about why all this struck a "raw nerve." I understand that being compulsively academic can blind people to the merits of the substance of this subject matter, but i don't understand why formal academic rules would get in the way of educatioin at the military staff and war colleges. I would think they woudl enforce ideas of disciplined htought and thoroughness. I am also curious about what would be unacceptable about research and from what perspective. Is this a difference in ethical approaches or in the formality of the methodology? What is it about the accreditation process that changes the character of the colleges, and makes them try to be "ersatz universities" rather than what they are?

Adam

As I mentioned above, John's decision to try to answer Price is, as far as I know, his own. The Army and Marine Corps themselves have not. With hindsight, I wish John had just ignored him and simply said, "this is a government document for which academic standards do not apply."

The fact that many of the 3-24 authors have advanced degrees is absolutely irrelevant. I have an advanced degree and I'm working on a briefing that I will give later this week. I feel no compunction to make this meet academic standards because it is not an academic product. In fact, that's exactly what distinguishes the authors of 3-24 from Dr. Price: they understand the difference between an academic and non-academic product and he, apparently, does not.

I'm not sure why you think John Nagl (or anyone associated with the military for that matter) is obligated to justify the military doctrine development process to those who are not participants. If I were to question the content of Dr. Price's courses, would he be compelled to explain his university's curriculum development process to me?

What I was getting at in my comments on the war colleges is that all the things they have to do to get accreditation have real or opportunity costs, sometimes both. To give just one of many examples, it takes a huge amount of faculty and administrative time (and taxpayer money) to meet accreditation's requirements. That is time they are not spending augmenting their professional knowledge. Ultimately, staff and war colleges are not designed to produce scholars. They are designed to produce professional military leaders.

And I think you're just wrong in your intimation that only academic methods "enforce ideas of disciplined htought and thoroughness." There are many ways of doing that other than academic methods. To repeat an example I used earlier, doctrine manuals are vetted by and briefed to literally hundreds of professional experts before they are published. Does your average academic article undergo that degree of scrutiny? In my experience, if an author can get two or three referees (who very well may be his friends given the degree of hyperspecialization) to go along, there's a good chance of a work being published. Given that, I would contend that despite having a bunch of citations, your average academic publication has undergone a much less rigorous quality check than your average doctrine manual. Between the author of an academic article, the people who refereed it, and the people who were cited, it often reflects the collective wisdom of, at most, a couple of dozen people. A doctrine manual reflects the collective wisdom of hundreds.

[SteveMetz]

AdamL,

Plagiarism strikes a raw nerve with academics because in a world where so little counts for much the little things count for a lot. In academia the only thing you trade upon are your ideas. Ideas may be reprsented in books or patents, but those ideas are your product. If you stole bread from a baker you would understand the theft. In the realm of intellectual exchange the trade of cash for bread is in the attribution. Academics are given accolades for being cited and creating dialog.

Academics are rarely paid extensive sums of money for their work and the only acknowledgment of their work is the report that citation bibliometrics provide. Attribution is about giving due recognition for others work and not claiming others work as yours. In academia you can publish an annotated bibliography which is nothing but citations and have that considered scholarship. There are other reasons such as recreating the science for attribution, but in general I think it is about credit. A history of science shows good scientists being claim jumped by better politically connected scientists which led to funding and respect.

I understand why the Army and Marine Corps would do things a particular way and I'll even take their side, but I'll be honest I walk on hot coals with my colleagues doing so and jeopardize my career. Even just doing so here on SWC. I think Steve Metz and MarcT would back me up in saying in academia plagiarism is not about the money and many careers have ended for less than what these accusations entail. When you talk about ideas being the coin of the realm what appears to be of no consequence can have extreme effects.

Those outside of academia can belittle the specifics of intellectual pursuit that academics engage in, but they are lesser individuals for that. Every career has it's way of dealing with acknowledgement and attribution for acts. In the military medals, and rank are given based on the deeds of the soldier. In academia awards and academic rank are given based on the quality and quantity of scholarship. In the military wearing medals not earned are nearing culturally the same level of abhorrence as plagiarism in academia.

It might not make sense to everybody but you have to respect it. I'm sure there is some silly anthropologist theory about it, but I call it respect.

Agree with what you say but, in my opinion, Price's screed is not really about his abhorrence of plagiarism. He is motivated by his personal ideology; plagiarism is a just a trojan horse. I also think there's an inherent hypocrisy in Price's essay since he contends that the manual doesn't reflect "cutting edge" scholarship. Does he or does he not want the military to be more effective at counterinsurgency?

I think that in the name of fairness, if we're going to submit military doctrine to scholarly standards, then we should require that scholarly publications dealing with armed conflict or military affairs be vetted by those with hands on experience. I'm assuming that Dr. Price wouldn't write about a given ethnic group without field research yet, from what I've seen, he has no problem writing about the internal workings of the U.S. military without direct knowledge. So when Dr. Price reaches conclusions about, say, U.S. policy in Iraq or the military's motives for publishing doctrine, he should be required to validate them by vetting them with people who have the most direct knowledge of the topic. Equity demands it!

[Mark O'Neill]

Those outside of academia can belittle the specifics of intellectual pursuit that academics engage in, but they are lesser individuals for that.

Hmm, you are right.

I would not dare belittle academic intellectual pursuits - just consider the benefit to humanity of some of these pursuits : (since we are big on citation I must acknowledge the source of this info as that paragon of citation, Wikipedia, and its listing of the 2007 "Ignobel" awards)

Aviation: Patricia V. Agostino, Santiago A. Plano and Diego A. Golombek, for discovering that hamsters recover from jetlag more quickly when given Viagra.
Biology: Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk, for taking a census of all the mites and other life forms that live in people's beds.
Chemistry: Mayu Yamamoto for extracting vanilla flavour from cow dung.
Economics: Kuo Cheng Hsieh, for patenting a device to catch bank robbers by ensnaring them in a net.
Linguistics: Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Nuria Sebastian-Galles, for determining that rats sometimes can't distinguish between Japanese, played backward, and Dutch, played backward.
Literature: Glenda Browne, for her study of the word "the"
Medicine: Dan Meyer and Brian Witcombe, for investigating the side-effects of swallowing swords.
Nutrition: Brian Wansink, for investigating people's appetite for mindless eating by secretly feeding them a self-refilling bowl of soup.
Peace: The Air Force Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, for suggesting the research and development of a "gay bomb," which would cause enemy troops to become sexually attracted to each other.
Physics: L. Mahadevan and Enrique Cerda Villablanca for their theoretical study of how sheets become wrinkled.

And people are having a go at the authors of 3-24?

Mark

(a limited person with desperate skills)

[SteveMetz]

Hmm, you are right.

I would not dare belittle academic intellectual pursuits - just consider the benefit to humanity of some of these pursuits : (since we are big on citation I must acknowledge the source of this info as that paragon of citation, Wikipedia, and its listing of the 2007 "Ignobel" awards)

Aviation: Patricia V. Agostino, Santiago A. Plano and Diego A. Golombek, for discovering that hamsters recover from jetlag more quickly when given Viagra.
Biology: Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk, for taking a census of all the mites and other life forms that live in people's beds.
Chemistry: Mayu Yamamoto for extracting vanilla flavour from cow dung.
Economics: Kuo Cheng Hsieh, for patenting a device to catch bank robbers by ensnaring them in a net.
Linguistics: Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Nuria Sebastian-Galles, for determining that rats sometimes can't distinguish between Japanese, played backward, and Dutch, played backward.
Literature: Glenda Browne, for her study of the word "the"
Medicine: Dan Meyer and Brian Witcombe, for investigating the side-effects of swallowing swords.
Nutrition: Brian Wansink, for investigating people's appetite for mindless eating by secretly feeding them a self-refilling bowl of soup.
Peace: The Air Force Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, for suggesting the research and development of a "gay bomb," which would cause enemy troops to become sexually attracted to each other.
Physics: L. Mahadevan and Enrique Cerda Villablanca for their theoretical study of how sheets become wrinkled.

And people are having a go at the authors of 3-24?

Mark

(a limited person with desperate skills)

You nicked my signature, you wanker.

[Mark O'Neill]

You nicked my signature, you wanker.

Only if you are dyslexic...

Sorry... it seems that plagarism is indeed rife in the military , sprung again.

[SteveMetz]

Only if you are dyslexic...

I just assumed that since water spins the other way going down the drain in the Southern Hemisphere, so too do platitudes.

[J Wolfsberger]

Just to add some data points as fuel to the fire, I checked on a couple of documents from my personal technical library:

“The Effects of Nuclear Weapons.” Compiled and edited by Samuel Glasstone and Philip J. Dolan. Prepared and published by the United States Department of Defense and the Energy Research and Development Administration. First publication in 1950, my edition was printed in 1977. This has long been the “bible” for people requiring technical knowledge on the physics of nuclear weapons. It used to be available at GPO bookstores, but obviously no longer. Extensive bibliographies at the end of each chapter; footnotes only to clarify text; no citations.

FM 24-33: “Communications Techniques: Electronic Countermeasures.” Dated March 1985. (Probably a superseded copy.) No authors named; no footnotes; no citations; no bibliography; a section at the end with references to other ARs, FMs, etc.

As additional data points, no authors named; no footnotes; no citations; no bibliography; also applies to: the USMC "Small Wars Manual," dated 1940; MIL-STD-1629A: "Procedures for performing a Failure Mode, Effects, and Criticality Analysis," dated 1980; and a bunch of others.

I can’t lay my hands on any handbooks at the moment, but it’s my recollection that, for example, the handbooks of military chemistry and explosives are the same.

If anyone is open to criticism in this affair, it’s Dr. Price far, apparently, violating the standards of his own discipline. An FM is not a scholarly paper. By imposing those standards on it, he has taken the norms of his own “subculture” and imposed them on another. Granted, the tone of his writing leaves no doubt that his motivation and goals were purely political, he still seems to have clearly violated the standards of his own profession.

[Rank amateur]

I think you're just wrong in your intimation that only academic methods "enforce ideas of disciplined htought and thoroughness."

No sources, but it seems to me that the sloppy and undisciplined are removed much faster - and much more permanently - from the military than they are from academia. Al Qaeda doesn't give anyone tenor.

[SteveMetz]

No sources, but it seems to me that the sloppy and undisciplined are removed much faster - and much more permanently - from the military than they are from academia. Al Qaeda doesn't give anyone tenor.

Are you suggesting the Zawahiri's videos and bin Laden's fatwas aren't peer reviewed? Then how do you account for their similarity to a Noam Chomsky book?