Human Terrain & Anthropology (merged thread)

[Mike Innes]

http://www.sciasolutions.com/index.htm

[marct]

http://www.sciasolutions.com/index.htm

I'm getting that queasy feeling again !

[Tom Odom]

I'm getting that queasy feeling again !

The company is led by Swen Johnson, a former U.S. Army counterintelligence special agent

Hmmm a CI type as a cultural expert? Well alrighty then...

[marct]

posting by Oneman at Savage Minds

Anthropology and Global Counter-Insurgency Conference in Chicago, April 25-27

I’ve been invited to speak at a conference hosted by the University of Chicago later this month on the topic of “Anthropology and Global Counter-Insurgency”. Other speakers will include David Price and Hugh Gusterson, who are doing yeoman’s work on the issue. Despite the fact that my introduction to Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War discusses issues related to counter-insurgency at some length, it is because of my work here at Savage Minds that I’ve been invited to speak. Take that, traditional publishing models!

More...

[selil]

I wonder if they'd allow a walk in.

[marct]

I wonder if they'd allow a walk in.

Probably. I'd be surprised if they didn't. You could always contact the U of C Anthropology department and ask .

[Jedburgh]

Newsweek, 21 Apr 08: A Gun in One Hand, A Pen in the Other

.... implementation of the $40 million project, which was handed to British Aerospace Engineering (BAE) without a bidding process, has fallen short, according to more than a dozen people involved in the program and interviewed by NEWSWEEK. Of 19 Human Terrain members operating in five teams in Iraq, fewer than a handful can be described loosely as Middle East experts, and only three speak Arabic. The rest are social scientists or former GIs who, like Griffin, are transposing research skills from their unrelated fields at home.....

....Recruitment appears to have been mishandled from the start, with administrators offering positions to even marginally qualified applicants. The pool of academics across the country who speak Arabic and focus on Iraq, or even more broadly on the Middle East, is not large to begin with. Some of the best potential candidates probably grew leery of the program when the American Anthropological Association declared participants would most likely be violating the ethics tenets of their profession if they signed up (because they would be contributing data that could be used in military operations). Several team members say they were accepted after brief phone interviews and that their language skills were never tested. As a result, instead of top regional experts, the anthropologists sent to Iraq include a Latin America specialist and an authority on Native Americans. One is writing his Ph.D. dissertation on America's goth, punk and rave subcultures.....

....Tompkins, who is 29 and working on a doctorate in political science, says that for every success in Iraq, he has suffered multiple frustrations and failures. And he doesn't believe his team members were uniquely qualified to provide the input they did. Tompkins says many of the officers and grunts he worked with had more-relevant knowledge and experience than the anthropologists, having served in Iraq twice or three times before. "These are dedicated individuals who are often intimately familiar with many of the nuances of the society and culture they are trying to engage with,"....

...But Fondacaro, whose program recently received an additional $120 million in funding, does not necessarily believe it was wrong to send over anthropologists with no background in the region. "Research methodologies are universal," he says. Interpreters help fill in the gaps. That he clings to this concept raises concern among people who want the program to succeed, including Thomas Johnson, an Afghan expert at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. Johnson served in Afghanistan on a pilot Human Terrain team last year. A Pashto speaker, he spent much of his time there interviewing Afghans in their homes. "If you don't have a good knowledge of the actual country and language, all the methodology can go for naught," he says.....

[marct]

From what I understand, recruitment has been a problem - especially amongst Anthropologists. The idea that "research methodologies are universal" is one of those things that is a true statement that is, in this instance, irrelevant. I could as easily say that "precision guided ordinance kills insurgents", and that would be "true", but inapplicable in a discussion on the best way to separate insurgents out from the general population.

One of the concerns I have had with the HTTs, as a concept and in what I have heard from the field, is that there appears to be a real disconnect in their roles (note the plural, it's important). First, I think I have a feel for how difficult it is to "translate" between Anthrospeak and Militarese - conceptually, the two are very different "languages". Second, there is, I believe, a misunderstanding of what the relative roles are of a social scientist on the HTTs. Are they there to analyze social data? Collect it? Interpret it? Translate it to the military?

The HTS is quite a new system and the bugs still need to be worked out of it. On the whole, I stil think it is valuable - more valuable now that more of the military have experience with other cultures .

[Stan]

The article's authors spend an exorbitant amount of time pondering over language skills. I've known NSA and Agency folks with 10 times my language abilities, yet lacked the ability to negotiate a deal in an African Flea Market... LMDAO.

Far too many complex and unexpected issues resulting from lack of cultural knowledge to hinge the entire outcome on language abilities alone, and certainly not enough time to accurately gauge an outcome to the program anywhere on creation.

Now we go and judge one of the only two "language qualified" candidates based on a beer night out with a bunch of soldiers, who later ends ups engaged to a classmate. Huh ??? Pathetic !

[Ken White]

Thanks for saying what I was thinking about that sadly lacking article...

[selil]

In a book I recently read the author said that too many people equate language skills to cultural and ethnic understanding. To do so was the same as saying if you know English you know engineering. I think to much is made of language skills and not enough of thinking skills.

[Ron Humphrey]

The article's authors spend an exorbitant amount of time pondering over language skills. I've known NSA and Agency folks with 10 times my language abilities, yet lacked the ability to negotiate a deal in an African Flea Market... LMDAO.

Far too many complex and unexpected issues resulting from lack of cultural knowledge to hinge the entire outcome on language abilities alone, and certainly not enough time to accurately gauge an outcome to the program anywhere on creation.

Now we go and judge one of the only two "language qualified" candidates based on a beer night out with a bunch of soldiers, who later ends ups engaged to a classmate. Huh ??? Pathetic !

When I was stationed in Korea I would quite often find that I was more able to work with the ROK and Katusa's then many of the linguists who were far more linguistically capable than I. For the most part it generally came down to the fact that I got along better with them then those other guys and thus they were more willing to excuse my failings on a linguistic front and actually spent a lot of time trying to help me become more proficient.

More often than not most of the problems I saw occur with many of the linguist was that because they understood what the Korean soldiers said, they assumed this actually equated to understanding what they meant. Which quite often would turn out to not be the case.

[Ken White]

...More often than not most of the problems I saw occur with many of the linguist was that because they understood what the Korean soldiers said, they assumed this actually equated to understanding what they meant. Which quite often would turn out to not be the case.

More often than not, I'd bet...

Waa an de Oh.

[Jedburgh]

Discussion thread on BCKS in answer to this question:

Are Transition Teams in theater sharing information with Human Terrain Teams? Are the HTTs providing useful information back?

AKO Log-In required.

[Surferbeetle]

All,

The recent EBO thread got me started on considering HTT's and their effectiveness. On the one hand I am glad to see that we recognize the importance of this type of work and are able to recruit dedicated professionals to help us integrate this important part of the battle into our operations. On the other hand, taking a civil affairs-centric view, I see it as contracting out civil affairs functions which speaks to an inability by 'in-house staff' to deliver a product that our 'customer' needs. Once upon a time we used to commission people with these skills...

Surfing through this mornings news offering on SWJ (nice reorg with the headers by the way) led me to this article's discussion of Newsweek's recent article on HTT's and the resulting rebuttals concerning fact checking issues. The same article led to some additional links on HTT's and the methods used to address the many dimensions that need to be considered in a counterinsurgency, and of course strategic formulations of policy:

Mr. Gates provides a thoughtful analysis, as usual, in this speech about a partnership between academia and the USG called the Minerva Consortia.

Finally, there is the New Disciplines Project. Earlier I mentioned game theory and Kremlinology, two fields developed during the Cold War. In the last few years, we have learned that the challenges facing the world require a much broader conception and application of national power than just military prowess. The government and the Department of Defense need to engage additional intellectual disciplines – such as history, anthropology, sociology, and evolutionary psychology.
These are just a few of the ideas for the Minerva Consortia, and I imagine that there are many more that we would be willing to entertain. The key as we move forward is to be candid with one another. The relationship between DOD and the social sciences – humanities in particular – for decades has covered the spectrum from cooperative to hostile. Bob and I have already discussed some of the thornier issues, such as how to deal with sensitivities like those surrounding the military’s relationship with anthropologists in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Let me be clear that the key principle of all components of the Minerva Consortia will be complete openness and rigid adherence to academic freedom and integrity. There will be no room for “sensitive but unclassified,” or other such restrictions in this project. We are interested in furthering our knowledge of these issues and in soliciting diverse points of view – regardless of whether those views are critical of the Department’s efforts. Too many mistakes have been made over the years because our government and military did not understand – or even seek to understand – the countries or cultures we were dealing with.
As Schlesinger said, we must again embrace eggheads and ideas – and the Minerva Consortia can move us in that direction.

(The bold font is mine)

This article has some interesting lessons learned about 'on the ground integration' of cultural knowledge into operations.

[Jedburgh]

Related discussion and links in this thread.

[marct]

I got an interesting letter this morning over a list I'm on from the Sheiks of the al-Tajy North Region endorsing the actions of the HTT in their area.

I just got permission to post the letter, so here it is. BTW, the names of HTT members have been blanked out and the English is somewhat poor.

Hang on...

Hah, got it! Here's the letter.

[marct]

The conference website is now up and available at http://anthroandwar.uchicago.edu/.

[Stan]

The same week that Newsweek ran a harsh critique of the Pentagon's nascent efforts to send social scientists to work with the military in Iraq and Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Gates addressed the often touchy issue of cooperation between the Pentagon and academia, saying that human terrain teams' work "is still in its infancy and has attendant growing pains."

Also at the link are fantastic comments by Montgomery McFate (Well Done !)

FACTUAL ERRORS:

1) "the idea is to recruit academics whose area expertise and language skills" - Incorrect. In fact, the goal of HTS is to recruit social scientists with the appropriate research skills and methodological approaches. There are very, very few social scientists in the US who have the requisite knowledge of Iraq or Afghanistan, since these countries have been closed to research for many decades. However, if the social scientist on a team is not an Arabic speaker, other members of the team possess the requisite area expertise and language skills.

Much more at the links...

[marct]

There's also an update at Wired on this.

Human Terrain's 'Catch-22' (Updated)
By Sharon Weinberger EmailApril 17, 2008 | 6:00:00 PMCategories: Human Terrain

Human_terrain The debate over the Pentagon's efforts to work with social scientists continues. Yesterday, we laid out the response of Defense Department officials supporting the program, including comments from Defense Secretary Gates. Today, it's worth highlighting one of the main issues raised by the critics, particularly two former members of a Human Terrain Team, Zenia Helbig and Matthew Tompkins.

More...