It's the Tribes (merged thread)

[marct]

Hello Sam,

Further, I wonder why we didn't have this information 6 years ago, when we needed it the most.

Well, there are a lot of reasons why that material was not part of the available information, although most of them boil down to a simple one: it didn't fit with the main stream institutional paradigm (organizational culture if you will) of most of the US forces. Tom, as an ex-FAO, is one of the outliers .

The tribal system leads to many fruitful paths with respect to targeting in a counterinsurgency, and explains why our western paradigmatic targeting method has a tendency to fall short of out right victory over insurgent forces, as it can't get down to the root of the problems - which are found in small entities called sub tribes.

I assume you are referring to what Anthropologists call a segmented lineage system? We (Anthropologists) have know about and written about that in some detail since the 1930's (cf Evans-Pritchards The Nuer and, latterly, most of the political Anthropology of Africa from the 1950's). There is also an extensive literature on the evolution of tribal organizations and their interactions with and adaptations to the urban environment in archaeology (the late 1980's - early 1990's debates on the "world war" of ~3500 bce come to mind) amongst other places.

From the sounds of it, you have managed to get and translate some really good data - something that is often scarce . Glad to have you here, and i'm looking forward to your input.

Cheers,

Marc