Army Kills Controversial Social Science Program
06.30.2015 at 04:10pm
Army Kills Controversial Social Science Program by Tom Vanden Brook, USA Today
The Army has quietly killed a program that put social scientists on battlefields to help troops avoid unnecessary bloodshed and improve civilians' lives, an Army spokesman said Monday.
The initiative, known as the Human Terrain System, had been plagued by fraud and racial and sexual harassment, a USA TODAY investigation found.
HTS, which spent at least $726 million from 2007 to 2014 in Iraq and Afghanistan, was killed last fall, Gregory Mueller, an Army spokesman, said in an email. Commanders in Afghanistan, where the U.S. combat mission ended last year, no longer had a need for the advice of civilian anthropologists…
That line, “no longer had a need for the advice of civilian anthropologists”, should read “Never understood the need, and finally killed the program because it continued to tell the Army something they didn’t want to hear”.
This was never more than a tactical Band-Aid designed for a specific tactical mission. That mission is over, so “killing” this program is no different than ending any of the other myriad support activities created to support operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The larger issues are that the Army actually believed this to be a strategic effort that could help overcome the fundamental strategic flaws inherent in the US understanding of these types of conflicts in general, and in those two conflicts in particular. It was not.
And If I never have to listen to one more HTS anthropological “expert” brief that “An Afghani is money, and not a person,” and then sit down with a look of smug “I’ve save these cultural ignoramuses and the war” on their faces, it is a good day.
A bad idea, poorly executed. Good riddance.
Now, lets focus on what we really need: A plan to identify those regions and populations truly critical to US vital interests, and a program of benign, persistent engagement activities (not based on training security forces) to put the right people, in the right places, in the right manner to develop the true cultural understanding necessary to build our understanding, influence and relationships over time.
Second, to step back from the science of how people are unique that is so essential for good tactics, and to dedicate effort on the study of how people are the same that is so essential for good strategy. It is our want of strategic understanding that is the foundation of our strategic failures, not our confusion over what to call an Afghan. (And anthropologists can’t help much with this.)
thedrosophil: Here, here. *hand slap on table* The Army has no idea what to do with real expertise because expertise (defined as experience with a high level of focused education) reveals flaws in the sacred cows of bureaucracy and officer politics. The Army has herds of sacred cows. Here, the chief relevant sacred cow being “that the commander is always right.” Primary corollary to that sacred cow is that “the commander is the smartest/wisest one in the room.” Irregular warfare is too far outside the sacred cow training curricula for most Army officers and senior NCOs to grasp, and bringing in experts who understand the underpinnings of IW (or “wars amongst the people”) highlighted the deep flaws in Army “learning” for those populations.
Having briefed the specific need for human domain information to the then Naval Cmdr of the JIED Task Force in Baghdad in 2005 and even laid out a formulated project at the time together with someone else a civilian handling the contractor info war that had been hired –BUT human domain that we were extremely short on– on the interrogation side —-I watched it grow into a massive boondoggle where civilians and ex militay got GS13 positions and six digit incomes and the two I briefed on the critical needs of field interrogators got hired at the director and asst director then they got kicked out later under fraud abuses in the program.
It has been a boobdoggle from the beginning but was protected by the so called “Training Brain located in VA.” in the last years where it had been nested into as a way to build an empire for the SES there along with other small intel contractor driven projects that should have been killed as well three years ago but kept alive due to “cash flows”.
Good riddance–a sad mistake that has cost the US taxpayer hard
earned cash.
And field interrogators never got what they needed——human domain information.
The HTS did not have qualified personnel to fill the number of positions that were created. The underperforming hires spoiled the program for all. The PRT recruitment was similar. The PRT leads were mass produced and qualifications such as city council member in Tacoma,WA or President of the Fairfax Little League indicated strong candidates for hire. That doesn’t equate to success in Afghanistan. As a whole we need to “do less, better.”
The following are two key lessons learned out of the Ukraine fighting–there have been an unusual number of top US historians who have stepped up and are pushing back against Russian propaganda–when some in congress are actually supporting the propaganda.
The second is serious and the US Army should take notice.
Ukraine’s Language War: American historian opines on make-believe language problem
http://www.politico.eu/article/crisis-in-ukraine-talk-shows-in-language-war/
Biggest threat to militaries of the 21st century seems to be idiot soldiers who take selfies with geolocation info https://twitter.com/RobPulseNews/status/616681311764369408 …
A more detailed story about the recent demise of the Human Terrain System, written by a critical anthropologist, can be found in the magazine Counterpunch here
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/06/29/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-human-terrain-system/. The author’s attitude is quite up front, but SWJ readers will also find some useful background as well.
I am also a long-standing member of the anthropology tribe, and while some of the negative comments about us academics in SWJ are justified — yes, we can be self-promoting, intellectual snobs, naive, grandstanding, opportunism, irrelevant — there are also plenty of people in academia who want to do the right thing, in this case, save innocent lives (U.S. military and Afghan-Iraqi civilian). And that this is harder than it looks. And that the HTS management was too focused on showing how effective it was to its superiors instead of allowing some of the competent social scientists to do their jobs right. Perhaps the military should develop its own anthropology program.
First: A definition of “development” from “Anthropology and Development: Culture, Morality, and Politics in a Globalized World,” Introduction: Hope and Despair, Page 3, by Emma Crewe and Richard Axelby:
Development is: “… the purposeful pursuit of economic, social and political goals through planned intervention.”
http://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-Development-Morality-Politics-Globalised/dp/052118472X (Use the offered “look inside” option.)
This definition of “development” looks stunningly like what I have described as the central foreign policy goal of the United States/the West; thus, my “transforming outlying states and societies more along modern western political, economic and social lines.”
Accordingly, “development” appears to be what we, and our “whole-of-government” partners, are doing throughout the world today. (Development-R-Us.)
This being true, then if anthropologists, in general, do not have a problem with working in the “development” field,
Then why would they have trouble working with our — and our governments’ — military, police and intelligence forces; these such folks also being employed to do “development” work?
Herein, our military, police and intelligence personnel’s job — as part of this “development” process — being to, essentially, deal with those individuals and groups that would actively resist our “development” projects/initiatives.