Naomi,
Art history and the cultural implications are essential to good visual products.

For example: Have a German child draw a picture of a happy, successful farm. Then show it to a Hindu kid and a Muslim kid. It is an even money bet that the German kid will put pigs and cows in a "happy, successful farm", because that is what you see driving from Frankfurt to Munich or any other drive outside the cities in Germany. The pigs and cows won't sit well with good Hindus or Muslims.

Another example: a unit's logo has a Crusader style, cruciform sword, and they are getting ready to go to the Middle East...

These are obvious examples of what not to do. What graphic would work well to go on a flyer about cooperation? About hygiene? About financial responsibility? What icons would resonate and help inspire a positive feeling in the reader? What ones do we avoid? What colors should we use? White clothing on characters celebrating life for a Japanese audience?

This is tangential to art history, but what historical works should a unit try to protect? There is a run-down, shabby little white building in the backstreets of Rijeka, Croatia. Easy to go past without realizing that it probably contains important cultural artifacts, as it is the oldest chapel in the city. This sort of awareness is something a commander needs when he rolls into a town.

Re: "anthropologists ... angry that their disipline is being incorporated into COIN"
Read "American Counterinsurgency: Human Science and the Human Terrain" by Roberto J. Gonzalez. It is crap, but it will make it clear that the ever-so-offended anthropologists are still whining about the Viet Nam War (or as the Vietnamese call it, the American War), and under the delusion that Communism is somehow better than Capitalism (and this is really ironic, given how brilliantly successful the Vietnamese have become at the capitalist game). And the hypocracy of their position becomes obvious when the subject of DoD employed anthropologists salaries comes up ("WAAAAH! How dare they get more pay going to Afghanistan than I do as an associate professor at San Jose State University?").

Don't worry about those useful stooges. They are making old Joe Stalin and Vlad Lenin smile from beyond the grave.