Newsweek has posted a Human Terrain System profile piece by Dan Efron and Silvia Spring - A Gun in One Hand, A Pen in the Other.
Marcus Griffin had never been to the Middle East before he arrived in Iraq last fall, as part of a project to help the U.S. military decipher the country's intricate social nuances. An anthropologist from Christopher Newport University in Virginia, Griffin knew much more about the Philippines, having accompanied his social-scientist father on a two-year research project there as a teen. In Virginia he'd been studying Freegans, those superenvironmentalists who forage for food in restaurant and supermarket Dumpsters. And so, during a recent outing with the unit he's attached to in Baghdad, Griffin rummaged through the trash of an Iraqi sheep rancher, looking for patterns that would tell him something worthwhile about the neighborhood—and by extension, about Iraqi society. "Well, they're drinking a great deal of Pepsi," he said dryly to a Newsweek correspondent. When a man in a checked kaffiyeh emerged from one of the homes, Griffin peppered him with questions. Where did he get his electricity? (A generator.) Did his children attend school? (No, they're too young.) How did he make a living? (From his sheep.)
Though he wears Army fatigues and carries a gun, Griffin is a civilian, part of a controversial program known as the Human Terrain System. According to a Pentagon blueprint from 2006, the idea is to recruit academics whose area expertise and language skills can help the military wage a smarter counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. These specialists, among other things, are meant to map the population of towns and villages, identify the clans that matter and the fault lines within them, then advise U.S. commanders on the right approach for leveraging local support...
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