HTS and Newsweek

In resposnse to a recent Newsweek article – A Gun in One Hand, A Pen in the Other by Dan Ephron and Silvia Spring – Dr. Montgomery McFate; the Senior Social Science Adviser to the U.S. Army’s Human Terrain System Program; has this to say:

Dear Editors,

Having long been an admirer of Newsweek, I found your failure to fact check the story by Dan Ephron & Silvia Springs entitled “A gun in one hand, a pen in the other” (21 April issue) completely shocking. One naturally expects more from Newsweek than such sloppy journalism.

Below you will find a list of factual corrections and some more general points about the article.

FACTUAL ERRORS:

1) “the idea is to recruit academics whose area expertise and language skills” – Incorrect. In fact, the goal of HTS is to recruit social scientists with the appropriate research skills and methodological approaches. There are very, very few social scientists in the US who have the requisite knowledge of Iraq or Afghanistan, since these countries have been closed to research for many decades. However, if the social scientist on a team is not an Arabic speaker, other members of the team possess the requisite area expertise and language skills.

2) “only three speak Arabic” – Incorrect. Each team in Iraq and Afghanistan has members who speak the local language, although this person is not necessarily the social scientist. As of 14 April, there are 38 HTS personnel in Iraq distributed among 5 teams (slightly higher than normal, since we are in transition and executing some individual Reliefs in Place). 8 of those personnel are Social Scientists. 13 of those personnel speak Arabic,of which 2 are Social Scientists and 11 are Human Terrain Analysts or Research Managers.

3) “Johnson served in Afghanistan on a pilot Human Terrain team last year” – Incorrect. Tom Johnson was never a team member, but merely visited theater for two weeks.

4) Tom Johnson is a “Pashto speaker”, and “spent much of his time there interviewing Afghans in their homes” – Incorrect. According to Tom Johnson, he has no idea where this information came from — “surely not me.”

5) “Omar Altalib was one of only two Iraqi-Americans in the program” – Incorrect. Actually the program currently has about 20 Iraqi Americans.

6) Social scientists earn “$300,000” a year – Overstated. This is true only if hazard pay, overtime, and danger pay are included. The base salary is a low six figures.

7) “Steve Fondacaro………..a retired Special Forces colonel..” – Incorrect. COL Fondacaro (ret’d) has never been in Army Special Forces. His experience as Special Operations Force (SOF) officer was exclusively with 75th Ranger Regiment and higher Headquarters.

8) “Fondacaro says overseers had to rush through the start-up phase because Pentagon planners wanted the terrain teams in Iraq quickly” – Incorrect. The requirement to put teams in country was in response to the Joint Urgent Operational Needs Statement (JUONS) that came from the units in the war zone. Pentagon planners actually slowed the process down to carefully analyze and validate the need.

9) the contract “was handed to British Aerospace Engineering (BAE) without a bidding process” – Overstated. BAE is the omnibus contractor for TRADOC and for a start-up program, this was a normal process. Once HTS becomes a program of record, the contract will be bid out.

10) “The rest are social scientists or former GIs” – Incorrect. Actually, much of the manpower is made up of US Army reserves.

11) “the anthropologists sent to Iraq…” – Incorrect. Not all of the social scientists on teams are anthropologists.

12) “the relationship between civilian academics and military or ex-military team members was sometimes strained” – Incorrect. The environment in the training program is very different than a year ago, which is the period the quoted sources were familiar with.

13) “40-year-old expert on trash” – Incorrect. Actually, Dr. Griffin is an anthropologist with an interest in food security and economics.

GENERAL ISSUES

1) The main input to the article came from two individuals who were terminated, and whose knowledge is outdated.

2) The article’s main premise is that the majority of HTS social scientists are not Middle East specialists with fluency in Arabic. Fair enough, but Human Terrain Teams include personnel with language, regional, and local area knowledge in addition to social scientists. The teams are not just the lone social science advisor that the media has tended to focus upon. As teams, they include a variety of individuals uniquely suited to understanding the social, political, economic and cultural aspects of the population in question — both military and civilian.

3) In the article, the significance of research methods was downplayed in favor of language and culture area skills. Certain subfields require formal area studies training, but as whole, social scientists are trained to apply their knowledge of analytical frameworks and research methodologies across different locales, based on the premise that the dynamics of human behavior exhibit certain universal features. This does not mean that social scientists cannot be area experts: many are, given their past research. However, what social scientists bring to the table is a way of looking at the social world, studying it, and analyzing it in a way that is distinct from the way the military approaches these issues.

4) That soldiers on their second- or third- tours possess inestimable knowledge about the area in which they are operating is undeniable. Yet, as currently organized, combat brigades do not possess the organic staff capability or assets to organize this knowledge and look at the broad questions that HTTs are concerned with. While civil affairs soldiers are the closest to such an organic asset, along with information operations, these assets are mission-focused and often lack the manpower to engage in the sort of question-formulation and asking that HTTs can. Nor do these assets always include personnel trained in social scientific analysis. Therefore, it is the job of HTTs to take the knowledge these soldiers have gleaned, to examine the information already being gathered on the ground on a daily basis, engage in original research, and consider this information in terms of broader issues from a different perspective in order to add to the brigade commander’s situational awareness of the social, economic, political, cultural and psychological factors at work in the environment.

5) All this was explained to both Dan Ephron & Silvia Spring, but none of it is reflected in the article.

GEN Wallace, the commander of TRADOC, has written a letter to the editors of Newsweek regarding this article, which I hope you will consider publishing. You may also consider this email as a ‘letter to the editor’ and publish any or all of it.

I hope in the future that Newsweek will hold itself to a higher standard of journalism.

Warm regards,

Montgomery McFate, JD PhD