Conference
USF Patel Center for Global Solutions,
University of South Florida, Tampa, FL
February 18-19 2014
We are at a major inflection point after two wars, major upheaval and change in the Middle East, humanitarian challenges, new military technologies and changes in the character of conflict. The conference examines the increasingly important human, social and cultural dimension in contemporary and emerging warfare and conflict, while seeking to inform the debate about national strategy and military doctrine.
Understanding the human domain is a key consideration for policy and strategy as so many conflicts now arise not from encounters between state-sponsored militaries but rather from among groups more or less embedded within civilian populations. Contemporary conflict and warfare increasingly involves adversaries (insurgents, terrorists, criminal networks, piracy, and guerillas) who exploit specific human environments, such as ungoverned areas, tribal social structures and stressed urban environments. Moreover, in many areas of the world the role of tribal, sectarian, and ethnic factors are critically important for understanding leader and group dynamics, influence networks, and motivations. Planning can no longer marginalize the human dimension. Furthermore, humanitarian concerns—from human rights to refugees, reinforced by new social media—are key considerations for the United States and its closest allies. Beyond the military, other sectors from NGOs to the private sector, have risen in importance.
In the words of Gen. Flynn, who heads the Defense Intelligence Agency, the “perceptions of populations are increasingly the center of gravity of all conflicts. Thus, investments in sociocultural tradecraft contribute to preventing the onset of conflict, to effectively prosecuting conflict if it comes, and to ensuring attainment of political goals and sustainable peace after the end of conflict.” Our whole-of-government approach (which often can involve inter-state and international agencies as well) has to deal with whole-of-society interests, fears, concerns, and power structures. Good decisions required for advancing governance and development initiatives need fidelity on the human dimension because ethnic groups, tribes/sub-tribes, sectarian/religious leadership, political parties and patronage groupings shape the complexity and ambiguity of rural and urban decision-making and support systems.
This conference seeks to aid overcoming inadequate understanding of the human domain for military, civilian agency, NGO and international organization decision-making. We endeavor to examine conflict and the human dimension because we are not as good as we need to be in taking 'the human' into consideration as it impacts governance, politics, development, and security. A common critique of US efforts is US strategy and policy suffered from an inadequate understanding of the human domain’s implications for influence and engagement operations for pre-conflict, conflict and post-conflict. This shortfall equally impacts civil government agencies, NGOs, international organizations and the private sector.
Additional Information:
Comments
The new focus on the human dimension would seem to be an acknowledgement that, with the end of the Cold War, we erroneously came to believe that populations -- who were still being denied a Western way of life and a Western way of governance (obtensibly by their governments and these governments' military, police and intelligence forces) -- were now only waiting for us to liberate them from these unwanted conditions.
Post the Cold War, and with this new kind of thinking in place, we came to believe that "the opponent" was ONLY the oppressive regimes and their oppressing instruments of power, and not also the population as in days past.
The "people," we thought, were with us.
Thus, to achieve sustainable strategic goals (transformation of outlying states and societies along modern western lines) we believed that we need ONLY plan and prepare for military operations that could quickly and efficiently convince, coerce, compel and/or take down an opponent's regime and its military forces.
The "population," we believed, would then easily, rapidly and, mostly on their own, adopt our modern western ways.
(This, I believe, explains why we initially went in "light" in both Iraq and Afghanistan.)
Now we have come to understand that this line of thinking was and is grave error.
Thus, to understand the new emphasis on the human dimension -- or the "human domain" -- one only need acknowledge that we no longer have faith in this "end of history" thinking.
Now we understand that populations today, just like those in the past, will fight and die to retain or regain their familiar and preferred way of life, their familiar and preferred way of governance and their familiar and preferred identity.
And this new/old understanding of the population-as-enemy (as seen from the perspective of our strategic goals identified in the fourth paragraph above), explains -- not only the renewed emphasis on the human domain (the population) -- but also the new changes to such publications as JP 3-24.
Thus, to sum up:
Warfare is no more complex today than it was yesterday. It is simply not as easy as we thought it would be following the Cold War.