Janice, welcome to the board. "Human Terrain" has long been a focus of those involved in Small Wars, and the relatively recent injection of social science academia into the military arena - even if still yet to be fully realized - has been something that many of us have been observing closely. We certainly appreciate any feedback you are able to give in response to our comments.Originally Posted by jhlaurence
Ted
Hi Janice,
Great to have you here! I do have a couple of questions about the program that maybe you can answer.
First, especially given the current uproar n Anthropology right now, it certainly looks to me like you are going to have a lot of difficulty meeting recruiting targets for Ph.D.'s. While I would agree that lowering the academic standards is one way to meet them, have you also thought about relaxing the US citizenship requirements, say, to include Canadians, Brits and Oz/NZ academics?
Second, is here a specifically stated policy that is open that meets the ethical concerns about secrecy and informed consent that are at the core of the current Military-Anthropology debate? I have heard rumours that there are, but I haven't been able to find anything on them.
Third, if I remember the original HTS proposal correctly, there were supposed to be reach back teams in CONUS. I haven't heard anything about them, though, since that proposal. Could you fill us in on that?
Marc
Sic Bisquitus Disintegrat...
Marc W.D. Tyrrell, Ph.D.
Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies,
Senior Research Fellow,
The Canadian Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies, NPSIA
Carleton University
http://marctyrrell.com/
Anthropologists and a True Culture War
A True Culture War – Richard Shweder, 27 October New York Times Op-Ed.
Is the Pentagon truly going to deploy an army of cultural relativists to Muslim nations in an effort to make the world a safer place?
A few weeks ago this newspaper reported on an experimental Pentagon “human terrain” program to embed anthropologists in combat units in Iraq and Afghanistan. It featured two military anthropologists: Tracy (last name withheld), a cultural translator viewed by American paratroopers as “a crucial new weapon” in counterinsurgency; and Montgomery McFate, who has taken her Yale doctorate into active duty in a media blitz to convince skeptical colleagues that the occupying forces should know more about the local cultural scene.
How have members of the anthropological profession reacted to the Pentagon’s new inclusion agenda? A group calling itself the Network of Concerned Anthropologists has called for a boycott and asked faculty members and students around the country to pledge not to contribute to counterinsurgency efforts. Their logic is clear: America is engaged in a brutal war of occupation; if you don’t support the mission then you shouldn’t support the troops. Understandably these concerned scholars don’t want to make it easier for the American military to conquer or pacify people who once trusted anthropologists. Nevertheless, I believe the pledge campaign is a way of shooting oneself in the foot...
Anthropologists should not fool themselves. These Human Terrain Teams whether they want to acknowledge it or not, in a generalized and subtle way, do at some point contribute to the collective knowledge of a commander which allows him to target and kill the enemy in wars like Iraq.
I commanded an Armored Reconnaissance Squadron in West Baghdad in 2006. Although I did not have one of these HTTs assigned to me (and I certainly would have liked to) I did have a Civil Affairs Team that was led by a major who in his civilian life was an investment banker in New York City and had been in the area I operated for about 6 months prior. He knew the area well and understood the people and the culture in it; just like a HTT adviser would. I often used his knowledge to help me sort through who was the enemy and who was not and from that understanding that he contributed to I was able to target and sometimes kill the enemy. So to anthropologists like Ms McFate should stop sugarcoating what these teams do and end up being a part of; to deny this fact is to deny the reality of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I am in favor of this program of HTTs and see great utility in it for combat commanders. I understand the debate too between these field anthropologists who are part of the HTTs and academia as this oped point outs. I think academia is wrong to chastise these people for being a part of the HTTs. But I also think that these anthropologists who make up the HTTs should call a spade a spade and accept the reality of the effects that these HTTs produce.
Agree 100% with LTCOL Gentile. If anthropologists weren't helping commanders figure out who to detain/kill, they wouldn't really be all that much use.
The alternative that anthropologists in opposition should understand is that that American troops without local knowledge will possibly detain/kill many who don't deserve it.
Human Terrain Teams at the NTC
Interesting read about antropologists deploying in support of US Forces and interests and the debate it has caused. Again, it is the selfish American who can not see beyond his nose that we are really trying to give these people a better opportunity and the HTTs will help. All to often we (Americans) are focused on the what we can do to help someone and then move onto the next someone, great for triage, but bad if we want to develop an understanding of other cultures and peoples and help them move forward.
At the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, we have incorporated a Human Terrain Team into the rotational brigade so they learn what the other is about. The HTT members learn what a day in the life of a Soldier is like, by going through patrols in sector and interacting with civilians on the battlefield and the brigade combat team gets an idea on what the HHT will give to them, a better understanding of the local culture along with a better ability to forsee how US actions might be percieved by the local population and how the unintended consequences might be averted or contained (long sentence I know). Yeah, these academics are helping US forces, but they are helping us understand the population so that we can end our involvement overseas by setting conditions to allow our withdrawal without a collapse of the government. As for the nay sayers, they can't get over themselves and don't have the stones to step out of the school yard and actually be apart of history instead of reading about it.
More crap from the anti-COIN/HTT crowd.
But a second development in the ongoing militarisation of State has been courtesy of the military’s new allies in the diplomats’ own Ivory Tower colleagues. The US Army and Marine Corps recently published its new Counterinsurgency Field Manual (No. 3-24), its new Little Red Book, at the prestigious University of Chicago Press, tastefully printed in a camouflage, faux-field ready edition, designed to slip into flack jackets or Urban Outfitter accessory bags. General (Dr) David Petraeus himself wrote the forward along with posterboy Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, and Harvard JFK School of Government’s Sarah Sewell wrote the introduction. It has spawned a minor media orgy, with sexy Nagl decked out in parade dress pitching it in Newsweek and on all the TV networks as Petraeus’s intellectually fuelled “smart bomb” -- the secret weapon for victory in Iraq. In what looks like a surprise meeting of minds with the armchair diplomats, the Manual is being hyped by all as a move away from the crude logic of “shock and awe” in the common goal of pacifying the natives, or as it’s called in newspeak, “winning hearts and minds," through a new appreciation of local culture. The big stick’s “speak softly."
A co-author, one of a supposedly new breed of warrior-anthropologists, Montgomery McFate (curiously a woman), PhD (Yale), is currently the US Army’s Human Terrain System’s senior social science adviser. Human Terrain Teams (HTTs) -- I’m not making this up -- are now embedding anthropologists with troops operating in Iraq and Afghanistan, using ethnographic knowledge to advise and inform troops in the field, while travelling with armed escorts (Blackwater, anyone?) and are, in some instances, themselves armed and wearing uniforms, yet McFate incredibly maintains that these anthropologists are in compliance with basic anthropological ethical standards, that terrified locals used in research projects participate under conditions of “voluntary informed consent." When asked how voluntary ethical informed consent was produced in the presence of occupation soldiers and mercenaries, McFate told writer and anthropologist David Price that was not a problem because “indigenous local people out in rural Afghanistan are smart, and they can draw a distinction between a lethal unit of the US military and a non-lethal unit.”
Last edited by skiguy; 11-15-2007 at 11:41 PM.
Holy Crap, this has turned into a bile fest!
Sorry for the somewhat salty verbiage in the title. Nevertheless, I feel like we have tapped into a huge zit of discontent. And unfortunately that zit is not only particularly discontented, it also seems fairly irrelevant. Although this is a particularly heartening as it is a confirmation of my belief that there is a anti-academia bias (please remember that biases can be justified, and the biased always think that they are), although it seems to be considerably more widespread than the military. Nevertheless, whether it is a waste of time to go to college or frustrating to spend years to get a PhD. and then not be able to find a job is thoroughly outside the scope of the Small Wars Journal.
However, the use of HTT's at the NTC is germane. That we have clawed together enough knowledgeable people to help the military at least in the training box. I think this is a huge step forward. An even better option would be to allow people who are curious, or perhaps want peripheral and not as integral a role to participate in the NTC rotations. This would allow people to see that soldiers are just people like everyone else, and that indeed the military is interested in saving lives, and not taking them.
In the end, this all goes to the thesis I originally introduced, that better communication will lead to better results. Let the light shine in!
Audentes adiuvat fortuna
"Abu Suleyman"
Culture as a Weapon System
“Culture as a Weapon System”
Rochelle Davis
Middle East Report 255, Summer 2010
At the fourth Culture Summit of the US Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) in April 2010, Maj. Gen. David Hogg, head of the Adviser Forces in Afghanistan, proposed that the US military think of “culture as a weapon system.”[1] The military, Hogg asserted, needs to learn the culture of the lands where it is deployed and use that knowledge to fight its enemies along with more conventional armaments. This conceptual and perhaps literal “weaponization of culture” continues a trend that began with the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.[2] Endorsed at the highest level by Gen. David Petraeus, head of Central Command, the Pentagon unit in charge of the greater Middle East, the idea of culture as a weapon grows out of the “‘gentler’ approach” to America’s post-September 11 wars adopted after the departure of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.[3] This approach is best articulated in the Counterinsurgency Field Manual, that Petraeus oversaw and that the Army released in December 2006.
In the Field Manual, this peculiarly military application of culture uses cultural anthropologists’ definitions of culture as the behaviors, beliefs, material goods and values of a group of people that are learned and shared.[4] The weaponization of culture posits that culture can be a crucial element of military intelligence, used to influence others, to attack their weak spots and, more benignly, to understand the others the military is trying to help. While scholars and military analysts have shown how “culture” was enlisted to play a role in the Vietnam war,[5] today’s wars are the first in which culture has been so clearly articulated. Maj. Gen. John Custer, commander of the Army’s Intelligence Center of Excellence, describes this shift as “a tectonic change in military operations.”[6]
...
They mostly come at night. Mostly.
- university webpage: McGill University
- conflict simulations webpage: PaxSims
Thanks for posting the link, Rex. It does nicely encapsulate some of the problem areas I've been working with.
Sic Bisquitus Disintegrat...
Marc W.D. Tyrrell, Ph.D.
Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies,
Senior Research Fellow,
The Canadian Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies, NPSIA
Carleton University
http://marctyrrell.com/
“Desperate People with Limited Skills”
“Desperate People with Limited Skills” by LTC John Nagl at the SWJ Blog.
Much more at the link...Writing and Employing the Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual
In the current issue of “Counterpunch”, anthropologist Dr. David Price continues his assault on social scientists assisting national efforts to succeed in Iraq and Afghanistan. This time he impugns the work of anthropologists who helped write Field Manual 3-24, the Counterinsurgency Field Manual that was published by the Army and Marine Corps in December 2006 and republished by the University of Chicago Press in July 2007.
Price’s essay is extensive, but the argument and the tone of the whole can be extrapolated from this paragraph on the first page:
I will attempt to explain the motivation for the project that led to the writing of the Field Manual as I observed it, provide a few words explaining the process of writing doctrine, and then discuss the effects of the Counterinsurgency Field Manual in the field and on the American military. This is not an official response to Price’s essay, and I do not speak on behalf of the Army, General Petraeus, or any of the other members of the team that produced the Counterinsurgency Field Manual, but only for myself...Most academics know that bad things can happen when marginally skilled writers must produce ambitious amounts of writing in short time periods; sometimes the only resulting calamities are grammatical abominations, but in other instances the pressures to perform lead to shoddy academic practices. Neither of these outcomes is especially surprising among desperate people with limited skills-- but Petraeus and others leading the charge apparently did not worry about such trivialities: they had to crank out a new strategy to calm growing domestic anger at military failures in Iraq.
Army Response to Counterpunch
Army Response to Counterpunch
In response to a SWJ e-mail concerning Dr. David Price’s recent Counterpunch article U.S. Army spokesman Major Tom McCuin:
As Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl stated:
Military Field Manuals have their own grammar and their own logic. They are not doctoral dissertations, designed to be read by few and judged largely for the quality of their sourcing; instead, they are intended for applied use by Soldiers. Thus authors are not named, and those whose scholarship informs the manual are only credited if they are quoted extensively.
The essential point to be made is that the messages contained in the manual are valid, regardless of any discussion of academic standards. Any argument over missing citations should in no way diminish the manual's utility in the current counterinsurgency fight. The emphasis on cultural understanding and increased reliance on non-lethal forms of engagement to achieve military goals represents a giant leap forward in U.S. military doctrine.
Unfortunately, Dr. Price has chosen to focus his disagreement with current American foreign policy on the Human Terrain System. Rather than accept the Army's several offers to enter in a reasoned dialogue on the merits – or lack of merits - of the role anthropologists can play in helping to reduce the use of lethal force to achieve military and political objectives, Dr. Price has chosen to wage a public and increasingly personal media campaign to discredit HTS and the dedicated social scientists associated with it.
The Human Terrain System is recognition of the fact that academic study and applied social science has practical uses, and those who have chosen to devote their time and efforts to exploring non-lethal alternatives to combat are making a vital contribution to the nation's efforts to secure a peaceful, stable and secure future for the people of Iraq and Afghanistan.
The long term by-product of their heroic efforts will be better informed military decisions that minimize casualties and suffering, and ultimately, optimized policy decision making within government that is harmonized with the ethical principles social science values the most.
I've vowed to stop paying attention to this whole thing. Dr. Price is an obscure and rather clueless academic at a third tier university who, unfortunately, has found a theme to address the fact that his normal work is largely ignored. I'm no longer going to play along.
Last edited by SteveMetz; 11-01-2007 at 04:44 PM.
The obvious grammatical effluvia of academic discourse wrapped in the absent specter of Pericles pen shows the dishonesty of the academician. There is only shame for the academic hiding behind bellicose diatribes in obfuscation of honest discourse. An attack on grammar is the last gasp held in an attempt to impoverish intellectual discourse while toiling in the dung heap of “ad hominem” sophistry. In a culture of his vanity and imperiled ideas the social order of the academician is challenged by those who he can only engage in fallacious name calling with because his homilies will not withstand the test of daylight and logic. The academician mistakenly imperils his science while in a stupor of ill-considered ideas he lashes out with the sword of injustice only to be bitten by the poison of his politics.
Attacks on grammar and people is but one thread in the unraveling tapestry of scholarship. There is a presumptive arrogance in hiding behind imprecise and obfuscated language of academia. In attempting to be use $3 words for $1 concepts there is not much to be said other than they have ceded the high ground. English is a living language of emotion and ideas and those are what we should be talking about. Attempting to foil politics while holding up singularly ideas of scholarship baked in the ovens of Popper, Kuhn, Newton ignores that even science is a political process and subject to the scrutiny of the public. Hiding behind large words and citation is a travesty and failure of the academy in its primary role as service to society. It shows an ultimate hubris in the rampant paternalism found in the attacking of other peoples work.
Sam Liles
Selil Blog
Don't forget to duck Secret Squirrel
The scholarship of teaching and learning results in equal hatred from latte leftists and cappuccino conservatives.
All opinions are mine and may or may not reflect those of my employer depending on the chance it might affect funding, politics, or the setting of the sun. As such these are my opinions you can get your own.
I agree with you. But the question of whether Crane and Nagl are, in fact, "desperate people with limited skills” nonetheless remains open. Being friends of theirs, I can see where a reasonable case can be made on both sides of the argument.
To paraphrase from LTC Nagl's title, desperate academics with limited skills are the kind of folks who produce low brow criticism focused on the form rather than the content of others' work. Unable to find significant areas on which to comment, charlatan scholars focus on trivialities like failure to cite sources properly. All that I might choose to say to David Price regarding his critique of the counterinsurgency field manual was best said by the Bard, William Shakespeare (or whoever wrote the works passed around under that author's name, works, by the way which themselves are rife with unacknowledged borrowings from classical authors like Plautus, who also lifted his work from other, earlier Greek comic playwrights). "a tale Told [sic] by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying [sic] nothing." (Macbeth, Act V Scene V, lines 26-28). As for Price himself, I might add this characterization from the same source, "a poor player, That [sic] struts and frets his hour upon the stage And [sic] then is heard no more" (op. cit., lines 24-26).
Were I to stoop to ad hominem attacks, I might choose to draw inferences from the following information about St. Martin’s University, a school with 1049 full time undergraduates at which Price is an associate professor. It has a 33% graduation rate within 4 years of matriculation and a less than 50% graduate rate 6 years after matriculation. 80% of its 2005 admittees were from the bottom half of their high school class, and the non-returning rate for the 2005 admittees in 2006 was 24%. All these data are drawn from the institution’s publicly posted common data set from 2007. Instead, I will let the readers make their own inferences.
I certainly hope I have met the appropriate documentation criteria.
Last edited by wm; 11-01-2007 at 06:06 PM.
What I like about LTC Nagl's writing is he makes it simple enough for us common folk to understand....yet it still remains effective. I also like that he doesn't attack any person, school, or organization. He just tells it like it is.
I particularly like this:
It sort of plays to the emotions of the Left-leaning crowd, yet it's completely accurate and true and what we all want.I am sincerely hopeful that the broader and deeper understanding of other societies that anthropologists like Drs. Kilcullen and McFate bring to the table will diminish not just the casualties in the wars we are fighting today, but also make future wars less likely.
Good job as always and thank you, sir.
Oh yeah, here's the citation to what I quoted, just in case anyone complains.
Nagl, John, Desperate People with Limited Skills, Small Wars Journal Blog, 1 Nov 2007, <http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2007/11/desperate-people-with-limited/>.
David Price
I find it quite amusing that a mediocre professor at a mediocre university writing mediocre academic work and languishing there as a non-tenured professor for 13 years <http://homepages.stmartin.edu/fac_staff/dprice/> should chose to attack a COIN manual prepared by Petraeus (West Point and Princeton); McFate (Yale); Kilcullen (U. New South Wales) and Nagl (West Point and Oxford). All of the COIN contributors (as far as I am aware), have excellent academic records from fine schools, and moreover, they have put forth scholarship that is saving American lives and winning wars. Like many other commentators here, I hate giving Price his 15 mins., but it needs to be said. Maybe this is his attempt at finally getting tenure, not by way of fine scholarship, but by attacking better scholars.
Con Crane, who was actually the primary writer, is USMA and Stanford (Ph.D)
Sorry I don't see where he doesn't have tenure. It looks like he's tenured to me which means as long as he's on topic in his discipline he's untouchable (the way it should be like it or not). He's an associate professor and that usually is a tenured rank.
We talk about academic freedom and such but this is the actual document that explains it http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/pol...0statement.htm
Sam Liles
Selil Blog
Don't forget to duck Secret Squirrel
The scholarship of teaching and learning results in equal hatred from latte leftists and cappuccino conservatives.
All opinions are mine and may or may not reflect those of my employer depending on the chance it might affect funding, politics, or the setting of the sun. As such these are my opinions you can get your own.
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