The Human Terrain System “is a United States Army program which embeds anthropologists with combat brigades (currently in Iraq and Afghanistan) to help tacticians in the field understand local cultures … The goal of the HTS is to give commanders insight into the population and it’s culture in order to enhance operational effectiveness, and reduce military and civilian conflict.” Social scientists who have participated in the program have sometimes been accused by their colleagues of cooperating with the enemy, meaning the US military.
The American Anthropological Association has published a statement opposing the Human Terrain System. They denounced the program in October 2007, concerned it could lead to compromise of ethics, disgrace to anthropology as an academic discipline, and the endangerment of research subjects. Some academics denounce the program as “mercenary anthropology” that exploits social science for political gain, fearing HTT could cause all anthropologists to be viewed as intelligence-gatherers for the US military.
A recent incident in Afghanistan illustrates the tangle of values involved in the program. A human terrain contractor, who once worked as a bodyguard for VIPs, shot and killed an Afghan after the Afghan burned an American woman worker over 60% of her body. The net result is the ex-bodyguard was charged with murder as this article in Wired describes.
On November 4th, Ayala was on a foot patrol in the village of Chehel Gazni, about 40 miles outside of Kandahar. He was accompanying social scientist Paula Loyd, who was interviewing locals. Three local interpreters, and a platoon of U.S. soldiers from C company, 2-2 Infantry Battalion, rounded out the group.
Loyd approached Abdul Salam, who was carrying a fuel jug. They began talking about the price of gas. Suddenly, the man doused Lloyd in a flammable liquid and set her on fire. She suffered second- and third-degree burns over 60 percent of her body. …
“Ayala drew his pistol but did not fire at Salam. Ayala instead extended his arm, causing Salam to run into his arm and fall to the ground. Ayala attempted to restrain Salam and was assisted by soldiers from the platoon who responded to the scene. Salam was restrained with plastic restraints (also called “flexcuffs” or “zipcuffs”), around his wrists, which were behind his back.” …
“After about ten minutes, a soldier approached the location where Ayalahad Salam detained and informed the personnel in the area that Loyd was burned badly. Ayala pushed his pistol against Salam’s head and shot Salam, killing him instantly.”
The article goes on to ask why a non-anthropologist like Ayala should be included in the team and whether the Army wasn’t using unqualified social scientists as part of their human terrain research teams.
Inside the military, there was been intense criticism of BAE’s hiring and training practices. Researchers have been hired who have never even visited -– much less studied –- the areas in which they’re supposed to serve as experts. Social scientists have been thrown off of their teams, and even sent home early from Iraq. Qualified candidates were booted out of the program, for flimsy reasons.
Civilian academics, on the other hand, have blasted the program for putting both researchers and research subjects at risk. There’s also grave concern that the anthropological data being gathered by the program could be used for bombs-and-bullets military targeting, rather than non-violent conflict resolution.
The gulf between military and academic cultures may be so large that the only way to bridge the divide is to train military men as social scientists (like David Kilcullen) or turn academics into soldiers (like TE Lawrence). This may take a long time to produce results but it may be better than trying to contract people who are determined to remain outsiders or who must remain outsiders in order to retain academic viability as students of human terrain.
Here’s director Howard Hawks commenting on the difference between academic and military viewpoints in 1951.
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ya mon
The gulf is between social scientists and reality.
I have watched the same idiocy infect psychology over the past five or six years. The pathogen is multiculturalism and the self-loathing of mental health professionals who know all too well, deep in their hearts, that what they know about human nature and what they contribute to the rest of us is of little value, possibly even negative.
Once upon a time, psychologists and other mental health and medical professionals were dedicated to the advancement, i.e. the ELEVATION of consciousness. Now, we write books about how there is no such thing as free will and how consciousness is just the by-product of electrical impulses. There is no longer a higher and a lower, only the ground level. So we dedicate ourselves to helping people feel better about crawling around on their bellies like snakes.
And when there’s no higher or lower, then it’s considered unethical to act on behalf of a more advanced culture to help subdue and/or elevate a more backward one. There’s been a movement to charge any psychologists who helps with military interrogations with ethical violations that would prompt loss of license. For all I know, it may have been successful by now. I no longer follow such perversions.
So, if you’re going to train a special breed of military psychologists, you’re going to have to call them something else. Like maybe sane.
See previous thread. Duh.
OK so we now have the “weaponized” anthropoligist. Way kewl.
At what point, when being eaten by the bear, do we protest the ingestion? If never, or at least after the point of no return, we will never get to know the bear that bit us.
An anthropolical Heisenburg (sp?) principle?
This idea, embed anthropologists and other academics to provide “conflict resolution” is profoundly stupid.
Only a society that has experienced unprecedented peace, prosperity, and unbounded economic growth for generations could come up with something so profoundly stupid-clever and so stupidly against the lessons of history and human nature.
What we are going to see, is militarization of all societies as conflict slips boundaries. As more and more violent attacks escalate, with both sides finding ways to attack previously thought “safe” sanctuaries, goals and methods and means will all escalate. As the Kaiser’s regime changed it’s goals during WWI, from very minor ones to essentially total domination of Europe (and the Western Hemisphere) according to the body count.
Putting academics into military operations, or even training military men as academics, won’t work because the conflict at this point cannot be contained. Technology and social pressures guarantee escalation and a final military solution for dominance — in the usual ways.
Pardon my naivete, but I got the impression from the Iraq conflict that many American military individuals — especially lower to mid level officers — have done a pretty good job of learning about the local culture without any “certified experts” to guide them. The only drawback with this “OJT” is that it takes time to acquire such expertise.
Still, teaching anthropological skills to soldiers and combat mercenaries makes more sense than contracting academic civilians. The American military officer corp is perhaps the best-educated in the world. It would seem to me that the Pentagon ought to be able to find the people it needs among its own ranks.
At what point, when being eaten by the bear, do we protest the ingestion? If never, or at least after the point of no return, we will never get to know the bear that bit us.
The movie “Grizzly Man” seeks to answer that very question.
@maineman has it right. Without a goal activity is pointless. It becomes a merely mechanical act puffed up by the pretense of being professional. The goal of the military should be to subdue assigned enemies to submit to the will of whoever commands. That means for us to submit to the will of our constitutional officials that the assigned target ceases to be a threat. To achieve that goal a trained officer may learn many subjects, including engineering, history, anthropology and logistics. The point is that they remember why they are studying a topic. Similarly the politicians in the Executive and Legislative branches, and I would say also the Jurists of the third branch; have a responsibility to acquaint themselves with the military arts so that they can intelligently focus on their tasks. Those include determining when and how the military force should be employed. Our enemies are better at this than we are. Despite their relative ignorance and poverty they are always focused on their goals and will study any skill or discipline, not for its own sake but to advance their cause.
The dialog in that film is absolutely great. It’s real. People do sound like that. And while it perhaps does not quite do full justice to Campbell’s “Who Goes There,” it is a gem in its own right.
We have the same problem in this area as we do with the Creative Class discussed in an earlier post. They think of themselves in such a way as to preclude actual action. You are just supposed to communicate and that will do the job. Actual getting your hands dirty is so icky, and beneath them. And if anything goes wrong with their theories then it’s not their fault; it was the idiots trying to implement their brilliance that screwed up, not them.
Meanwhile, it appears that before you take an antibiotic some people think that you need to read the germs their rights. See http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/823qaarg.asp
Gotta go rhinoceros here.
Anybody besides me read the credits at the end?
Notice who played “The Thing”?
It was “Mr Dillon”. James Arness. Picked for the role I suppose because he was/is rather outsized. His Peacemaker in “Gunsmoke”
dwarfed a regular 1873 Colt. Had he carried the standard, it would have looked tiny in his hand on camera.
Back to our regular programming.
One Man Human Terrain Teams for IW
We need a hard core group of stayers, who aren’t putting X’s on the Maxim calendars in their hooches for every day down, guys committed to multiple-year tours and/or contracts, promoted/paid appropriately for that level of committment and sacrifice. We need the stayers drinking chai with the elders, speaking Pashto, taking off the battle rattle, walking around like they aren’t afraid of anybody, gaining respect, developing informers, telling wedding parties from gangs of Taliban, knocking on doors instead of kicking them down, going native. But they’d be our natives, vetted, trustworthy, cleared professional soldiers, law enforcement officers, and intelligence agents, each a one-man Human Terrain Team. The British called them Political Officers. Honest Indian Agents could win us the war, or at least tamp things down enough for us to Afghanize the war, achieve Peace With Honor, and leave on our own terms instead of being run out.
Rod, over the last 110 years many American military men have become amateur anthropologists when they stayed overseas long enough. They used to call it “going Asiatic.” Going South West Asiatic is much tougher, because the South West Asians keep their sleeping dictionary cultural advisors locked away.
2. maineman:
Once upon a time, psychologists and other mental health and medical professionals were dedicated to the advancement, i.e. the ELEVATION of consciousness. Now, we write books about how there is no such thing as free will and how consciousness is just the by-product of electrical impulses. There is no longer a higher and a lower, only the ground level. So we dedicate ourselves to helping people feel better about crawling around on their bellies like snakes.
……….
Its been a pet theory of mine for awhile that the reason for the interest in the ELEVATION of consciousness was that the culture itself was largely religious based. So psychology needed to keep “up”. But with the decline of religion in the culture there was no longer a need to keep “up”. You can see the same thing in religious denominations whose morality is not internally anchored but rather a reflection of the culture around them. The prime example of this is the unitarians. They were the liberals of the 18th century. In the 19th century 5 presidents were unitarians. When cultural decline became rapid after WWII the unitarians declined with the culture. These days the sort of issues that are cracking up the episcopals–are old hat to unitarians. They have moved on to more exotic kinds of sexual expression
Likely for this reason its unlikely that a president will unitarian any time soon. But likely if the culture turned moslem the unitarians would move with it.
Don’t forget V I Day tomorrow.
Charles,
I suppose what you’re getting at is that religion, when it’s right, is how people are helped to NOT crawl around on their bellies like snakes.
Daniel Pearl.
Q: At what point, when being eaten by the bear, do we protest the ingestion?
A: IMHO as soon as the bear comes over the horizon with the means of protest arriving bearside at something more than 3000 ft/s.
Too bad Ayala didn’t have another gallon of gas handy (…I can’t be the only person thinking that).
Sorry, I do try. But this one trips too many of my “civilization” circuit breakers.
This Abdul character didn’t like being quizzed by an uppity woman, and his response was to set her on fire? Not acceptable. Full stop.
“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind?”
How about “Don’t START nothin’, won’t BE nothin’.”
Cannoneer: But that approach would mean that we would have to plan to be there for 100 YEARS! We would have to focus on winning that war and overall strategy in the larger conflict rather than getting out! WhatsaMatterYou?
Nortius: Back a few days before the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, troops at a guard post at border crossing between Iraq proper and the Kurdish sector saw the following: A Kurdish woman carried a container of gasoline to the Iraqi sector to sell it in order to buy food for her children. An Iraqi soldier took the container, dumped it over her, and set her on fire.
I am afraid that if I had been the officer at that guard post OIF would have started right then and there. I would have shot the SOB who burned the woman and then led all available troops to overrun the Iraqi post and not stopped chasing the bastards until we were in e’ffing downtown Baghdad.
And I am, admittedly, what you would call a REMF. If you consider flight lines and launch pads The Rear.
I’m still trying to make up my mind whether I should hate or love the expression human terrain.
There’s this very good article from 2006 about Human Terrain System, based on interviews with David Kilcullen and an anthropologist and Pentagon consultant named Montgomery McFate. It caught my attention that both of them are children of left-wing parents.
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/12/18/061218fa_fact2
“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind?”
As best I can figure, an eye for an eye leaves the World one-eyed, which, I would think, would leave it much more cognizant of the need to avoid commission of eye-destructing activities.
Most of the comments seem to assume that their are “social scientists” in the Human Terrain Teams (HTT) and that these teams are actually doing good and useful work. Both assumptions are false. I have seen many HTT’s and they are staffed more with ex SF types than academics. Paula Lloyd was an exception and she was not a social scientist either – she came from US AID but at least had significant time in the Kandahar Province before going over to the HTT’s. The HTT’s are on the FOBs and subjected to Big Army force protection rules so the only way they go off base is embedded inside huge military forces with no ability to interact with the local population. I have walked in on screaming matches between staff officers and the HTT concerning what, exactly, is it that they are supposed to be doing and for whom they are supposed to work. The HTT position is always “we can’t tell you anything because we can’t get off the base to find anything out ourselves and can’t get on the websites we need to see because they are blocked by the G6 and therefore could be doing a better job for you in CONUS where at least the Jihadist websites are accessible.” And for every guy in the HTT program the US taxpayer is shelling out 1/2 a million per year to companies like the design/build firm PAE. Good work if you can get it – surf the computer (DoD approved sites only,) work out at the gym, brush off a major or captain now and then who is asking for crap you don’t have – that is good living for some.
This program is a giant boondoggle for the guys being paid at the very top rung of the contractor ladder on one hand and the big firms like PAE who have absolutely no experience in anything remotely associated with the HTT program on the other. The HTT’s could be a valuable tool if they lived outside the wire and started developing their own networks like … say the ANSO Eastern Region Coordinator, a former London banker who got bored, came on with ANSO, and now knows more about the eastern region, Pakistan tribal areas, and the Taliban than any HTT member anywhere in the world. Mind you he started as a banker who had nothing more going for him than native curiosity and the ability to organize data and write well. Now he is a one man HTT with embedded language ability and he is making 25% of an HTT member and living on maybe 0.5% of the life support costs being spent on HTT types. That is serious money by the way – we spend crazy money in life support which does not go into the local economy, is unnecessary, and much too lavish in the opinion of this former Marine. I don’t think it imperative for the fobbits to have 7 different flavors of Baskin and Robbins and I don’t care how long their tours are. A cursory glance tells me most of them don’t need the extra calories anyway.
The one thing the ANSO rep has in common with all the others who understand Afghanistan is that he has been here months on end year in and year out. This is not rocket science and it doesn’t take “academics” it takes people willing to spend the requisite time in country to learn the human terrain. Books don’t do it, multimillion dollar contracts don’t do it, large design and build firms like PAE cannot do it and I ask once again when will we see common sense prevail in our approach to Afghanistan?
“eye for an eye” was an improvement over “life for an eye”. it was actually a moderating principle compared to traditional vendettas.
#19: “I’m still trying to make up my mind whether I should hate or love the expression human terrain.”
The vivid mental image that I get when I hear that expression is the future war cutscenes from the first two Terminator movies, with the Skynet ground mech caterpillar treads crushing dry H. sap skulls and such…
There was a British General that said that when an Indian burned a woman alive that he would allow the man his cultural activities and then he would act on his own cultural imperiatives and killed the Indian man.
So the Afghan acted on his culturl imperative and then Ayala acted on American imperiatives which is to punish and kill a a man who would burn a woman alive for no good reason.
I personally would not judge Ayala of murder it was justified homicide.
@RAH,
General Sir Charles James Napier, about 1849 -
“You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”