Wired Magazine’s latest issue lists the 15 people their staff believes the next President should listen to. Of particular interest to SWJ is the inclusion of Dr. Montgomery McFate. McFate a cultural anthropologist who works on defense and national security issues and is currently serving as the Senior Social Science Adviser for the US Army’s Human Terrain System Program in her capacity as a Research Staff Member at the Institute for Defense Analysis.

From Use Anthropology in Military Planning by Wired’s Noah Shachtman:

… Traditionally, the military has relied almost solely on so-called hard sciences like nuclear physics and electronics. But as a simple regime-change operation in Iraq descended into a baffling counterinsurgency, it became clear that you can have the most advanced sensors, the toughest armor, the most precise GPS-guided munitions, but without any insight into the civilian population - or at least some sense of how they'll react to your moves - your war effort is sunk.

By 2004, McFate had made her way into the national security establishment as a researcher at Rand. (This despite an unusual background — she grew up on a barge in the San Francisco Bay and had hung out with well-known beat poets.) McFate's ideas (shared by a growing number in the military) caught the attention of the science adviser to the joint chiefs of staff. She then codified them in a pair of landmark articles in Military Review outlining a rationale and strategy for integrating the social sciences into national defense. Today she is the senior social science adviser for the Human Terrain System, a $130 million Army program that embeds political science, anthropology, and economics specialists with combat units in Afghanistan and Iraq. "What you're trying to do is understand the people's interests," she says. "Because whoever is more effective at meeting the interests of the population will be able to influence it."…

More at Wired and at Shachtman's post on Wired's Danger Room blog.

Discuss at Small Wars Council.