[R-G] Anthropologists At War

[Anthony Fenton]

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3749/

Anthropologists At War
New military program that embeds anthropologists with soldiers has  
academics up in arms
By Bill Stamets	June 19, 2008

Not in our name. That could be the battle cry of American  
anthropologists resisting the recent use of their discipline in Iraq  
and Afghanistan.

The U.S. Army is sending anthropologists into the field to help  
soldiers counter insurgents. The program, called Human Terrain System  
(HTS), responds to combat brigade commanders' 2006 call for  
"operationally relevant cultural knowledge."

In June, 12 Human Terrain Teams (HTT) -- each made up of three  
military members and three civilians -- were expected to join combat  
brigades in either Iraq or Afghanistan. By the end of September,  
another 12 will deploy.

Training for the six-member teams occurs at the Army's Combined Arms  
Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. The teams spend six to nine months in  
Iraq or Afghanistan and spend anywhere from three days to three weeks  
in a given locale, according to James K. Greer, deputy program manager  
of the Human Terrain System.

According to HTT's website: "The role of the HTTs is to help the  
troops better understand who is NOT their enemy." The teams help the  
U.S. Army "influence the population through non-lethal means."

At an April 24 hearing at the House Armed Services Subcommittee on  
Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities, Col. Martin  
Schweitzer testified that HTS helped decrease "kinetic operations" by  
60 to 70 percent in his brigade's area of operations in Afghanistan.

"We must understand the culture to win," Schweitzer testified.

In 2007, his 4th Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division was the first  
to use a Human Terrain Team. It was also the first to have an HTT  
fatality. On May 7, 2008, a roadside bomb in the Afghan province of  
Khowst killed Michael Bhatia, an Oxford doctoral candidate and the  
brigade's field social scientist. After his year-long contract, Bhatia  
had planned to finish his dissertation titled "The Mujahideen: A Study  
of Combatant Motives in Afghanistan, 1978-2005."
Anthropologists outsourced

BAE Systems, a global defense firm, has recruited and trained HTT  
members since 2006. To date, BAE has placed about 30 field social  
scientists in HTTs, says Scott Fazekas, a BAE press contact.

Academics at home have been raising a ruckus over the military's use  
of a mobilized, militarized and weaponized anthropology. In September,  
the Network of Concerned Anthropologists formed to circulate a Pledge  
of Non-participation in Counterinsurgency. The pledge has since  
garnered nearly 1,000 signatures.

Last November, at its annual meeting in Washington, D.C., the  
executive board of the American Anthropological Association (AAA)  
issued a statement deeming HTS's "application of anthropological  
expertise" both "problematic" and "unacceptable."

"The impact of anti-HTS activists on program recruitment in  
universities, especially in anthropology departments, is profound,"  
Zenia Helbig, an academic kicked out of HTS, tells In These Times.  
Helbig brought BAE Systems -- and its three HTS contracts, estimated  
at $160 million -- to the attention of the Project on Government  
Oversight, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that investigates  
corruption in the federal government.

Felix Moos, an anthropology professor at the University of Kansas who  
has taught some HTT classes, concedes, "Because we are outsourcing the  
war, we are giving the title of 'anthropologist' to people who are not  
really anthropologists."

In a May 6 letter to Sen. John Warner (R-Va.), Roberto J. González, an  
anthropology professor at San Jose State University and a member of  
the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, attacked HTS: "The program  
is dysfunctional, wasteful, and perhaps even fraudulent. As an  
anthropologist, it is also clear to me that HTS simply cannot work as  
its proponents claim."
Key players

Counterinsurgency is the specialty of two key players in the  
Pentagon's post-9/11 turn to culture.

Anthropologist Montgomery McFate is the senior social science adviser  
to the HTS program. Her 1995 thesis at Yale University was "Pax  
Britannica: British Counterinsurgency in Northern Ireland." David J.  
Kilcullen is a policy-planning adviser in the State Department. His  
2000 thesis at the University of New South Wales–Australian Defense  
Force Academy was titled "The Political Consequences of Military  
Operations in Indonesia 1945-99: A Fieldwork Analysis of the Political  
Power-Diffusion Effects of Guerrilla Conflict." Kilcullen's non- 
academic credentials include a stint in the Australian Army as a  
commander of counterinsurgency operations in East Timor.

McFate is credited with jumpstarting a program -- called the Cultural  
Operational Research Human Terrain System -- at the Department of  
Defense (DOD) that was the springboard for HTS.

"Cultural ignorance can kill," argued McFate in a 2005 article  
published in Joint Forces Quarterly. "Cultural knowledge and warfare  
are inextricably bound. ... The U.S. Armed Forces must adopt an  
ethnographer's view of the world."

It has begun to do so. A piece in the Jan. 1, 2007, Field Artillery  
Journal briefed officers on greeting their Iraqi Army counterparts:  
"If you are especially close, a kiss on the cheek may become  
commonplace. You will get used to it -- it is a compliment indicating  
that your status has been raised to 'brother.' " Marines now receive  
how-to pamphlets, such as "Cultural Considerations in House  
Occupations," for tips "on the Iraqi human dynamics when coalition  
forces enter Iraq residences."

"Normality in Kandahar is not the same as in Kansas," Kilcullen wrote  
in a 2006 memo e-mailed to military officers. "Armed social work" is  
his pithy take on culturally aware counterinsurgency.

He posts tips from the front: "Stop your people fraternizing with  
local children. Your troops are homesick; they want to drop their  
guard with the kids. But children are sharp-eyed, lacking in empathy  
and willing to commit atrocities their elders would shrink from."

Troops can also acquire "practical cultural knowledge, sensitivity and  
awareness" by playing "Mission to Iraq." According to its promo  
materials, this $795 video game has "socially intelligent virutal  
humans" driven by "cultural puppets." Alelo, the company that makes  
it, also sells Dari and Pashto versions for Afghan deployments.

Testifying before the 2004 Armed Services Committee, retired Maj. Gen.  
Robert H. Scales proposed "a cadre of global scouts, well educated,  
with a penchant for languages and a comfort with strange and distant  
places."

He continued: "These soldiers should be given time to immerse  
themselves in a single culture and to establish trust with those  
willing to trust them," saying that ethnographic embedees ought to  
"stay for extended periods within the countries, not just a few years  
but perhaps decades."

Scales, a defense consultant with a doctorate in history from Duke  
University, has other ideas for anthropologizing the Army. He wrote  
this in a 2004 article "Culture-Centric Warfare" for the Naval  
Institute's Proceedings magazine:
The military spends millions to create urban combat sites designed to  
train soldiers how to kill an enemy in cities. But perhaps equally  
useful might be urban sites optimized to teach soldiers how to coexist  
with and cultivate trust and understanding among indigenous peoples  
inside foreign urban settings. Such centers would immerse young  
soldiers within a simulated Middle Eastern city, perhaps near a mosque  
or busy marketplace, where they would be confronted with various  
crises precipitated by expatriate role players who would seek to  
agitate and incite a local mob to violence.

"War is a thinking man's game," argues Scales. Gen. David Petraeus, a  
Princeton Ph.D. and commander of the Multi-National Force, agrees,  
telling Germany's Der Spiegel magazine in December 2006:  
"Counterinsurgency operations are war at the graduate level, they're  
thinking man's warfare."
Contested cultural terrain

Between April 25 and 27, the Human Terrain System came under fire at  
the Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency conference held at the  
University of Chicago. Organized by John D. Kelly, chair of U.C.'s  
Anthropology Department, and three U.C. doctoral candidates, the  
conference aimed to "pursue the full implications of the connection  
now being sought by the U.S. military between culture and insurgency."

"HTS is among the largest social science projects in history," argued  
González, who has sparred in the pages of Anthropology Today with  
Kilcullen, who was invited but did not attend, and with McFate, who  
was not invited.

"I would have been delighted to attend," she wrote in an e-mail to In  
These Times. "It's not everyday that there's a conference on the  
subject."

"The national security structure in the U.S. needs to be infused with  
anthropology, a discipline invented to support warfighting in the  
tribal zone," McFate urged in her 2005 Joint Forces Quarterly article.

Many of McFate's colleagues at the Chicago gathering challenged that  
spin on their discipline. González told the conference-goers, "In the  
end, it is by sharing what [anthropologists have] learned with the  
general public -- not political, military or corporate elites -- that  
we might spark lasting progressive change in democratic societies."

Another dissenter is David Price, an anthropology professor at Saint  
Martin's College in Lacey, Wash., who researches the history of  
American anthropologists colluding with the American government.

Military planners "dream that culture can fix what thousands of tons  
of munitions broke," Price said at the gathering. "We should use  
anthropology to keep us out of these invasion fiascos in the first  
place."

Bill Stamets is a Chicago-based freelance writer who once took 10 grad  
school courses in anthropology at the University of Chicago.