One of the more conciliatory ideas to emerge in military circles of late is the concept of the Human Terrain System (HTS), which is "designed to address cultural awareness shortcomings at the operational and tactical levels by giving brigade commanders an organic capability to help understand and deal with 'human terrain' – the social, ethnographic, cultural, economic, and political elements of the people among whom a force is operating," according to the publication Military Review.

"In the current climate, there is broad agreement among operators ... that many, if not most, of the challenges we face in Iraq and Afghanistan have resulted from our failure early on to understand the culture in which [United States] forces were working," wrote Jacob Kipp, Ph.D., Lester Grau, Karl Prinslow and Captain Don Smith in Military Review this time last year. "In other words, we failed to heed the lessons of Vietnam ... and we did not take the steps necessary to deal appropriately with the insurgencies within the context of their unique cultural environments."

The U.S. military has not always made the necessary effort to understand the foreign cultures and societies in which it has intended to conduct military operations, the military men went on. Consequently, it has not always done a good job of dealing with the cultural environment within which it eventually found itself.

Overseen by the Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO), a U.S. Army Training and Doctrine command (TRADOC) organization that supports the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., the Pentagon set up the HTS to help address shortcomings in cultural knowledge and capabilities.

In practice, the HTS entails recruiting and deploying anthropologists and other social scientists as part of small teams deployed with forward-operating forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, among other places.

The concept for the current HTS was suggested by Montgomery McFate Ph.D., J.D., and Andrea Jackson as described in their July-August 2005 Military Review article An Organizational Solution for DoD's Cultural Knowledge Needs.

Reads an article entitled The Human Terrain System: A CORDS for the 21st Century from the U.S. Army last December:

The core building block of the system will be a five-person Human Terrain Team (HTT) that will be embedded in each forward-deployed brigade or regimental staff. The HTT will provide the commander with experienced officers, NCOs, and civilian social scientists trained and skilled in cultural data research and analysis.

The idea is for the HTS to provide deployed brigade commanders and their staff direct social-science support — in the form of ethnographic and social research, cultural information research and social data analysis — so U.S. forces can improve their decision-making process and operate more effectively in the insurgent-awash human terrain.

"The decision to avoid Vietnam-style counterinsurgency warfare led to the creation of large-scale, high-tech, heavily armored conventional forces that could play the Soviets to a draw and utterly overwhelm any other foe," The San Francisco Chronicle recalled in April. "Military training mirrored that strategy, as young officers were encouraged to pursue careers in combat leadership over more academic pursuits."

History reveals that U.S. counterinsurgency efforts in the early part of the conflict were "severely hobbled by a lack of understanding of, or appreciation for, Vietnamese culture, and a paucity of cultural skills, especially language ability," according to Kipp, Grau, Prinslow and Smith in Military Review.

The broader idea, however, has sparked considerable debate among anthropologists and others in academia. Some of the debate evokes the Pentagon's Vietnam War-era social science research, including the controversial Dept. of Defense program Project Camelot, as Wired's Danger Room blog pointed out during the summer.

The New York Times reported of the HTT last week:

Citing the past misuse of social sciences in counterinsurgency campaigns, including in Vietnam and Latin America, some denounce the program as "mercenary anthropology" that exploits social science for political gain. Opponents fear that, whatever their intention, the scholars who work with the military could inadvertently cause all anthropologists to be viewed as intelligence gatherers for the American military.

The program's critics are other social scientists who say embedded anthropologists are following a path of good intentions toward a diabolical future where science meant to improve humanity becomes a weapon of mass destruction.

Yet at some point over the past year and a half, the focus in Iraq started shifting away from a military solution. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was replaced by Robert Gates, a former CIA director with a doctorate from Georgetown University. Operations in Iraq went to a general with a Ph.D. from Princeton, "fresh from overseeing a new counterinsurgency manual that urged field commanders to consult outside experts in governance, economics and anthropology," the San Fran paper pointed out.

"After four years of a war that was supposed to last more like four months," reported The San Francisco Chronicle in April, "the military is now listening to McFate's ideas — and committing money and manpower to make them a reality."

In September, Defense Secretary Gates authorized a $40 million expansion of the experimental program, "which will assign teams of anthropologists and social scientists to each of the 26 American combat brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan," according to The NYT.

There are currently six such teams deployed in the Baghdad area.

Accounts by HTT Anthropologists:

From an Anthropological Perspective
by Marcus B. Griffin, Ph.D.

Iraq's Human Terrain
by Matt Tompkins

Resources

The Human Terrain System: A CORDS for the 21st Century
by Jacob Kipp, Ph.D., Lester Grau, Karl Prinslow and Captain Don Smith
Military Review, September-October 2006

An Organizational Solution for DOD's Cultural Knowledge Needs
by Montgomery McFate, Ph.D., J.D., and Andrea Jackson
Military Review, July-August 2005

The MiTT and Its "Human Terrain"
by Lieutenant Colonel Richard A. McConnell, Major Christopher L. Matson and Captain Brent A. Clemmer
Field Artillery, January-February 2007

Army Enlists Anthropology in War Zones
by David Rohde
The New York Times, Oct. 5, 2007

Montgomery McFate's Mission: Can One Anthropologist Possibly Steer the Course in Iraq?
by Matthew B. Stannard
The San Francisco Chronicle, April 29, 2007

When Anthropologists Go to War
by Sharon Weinberger
Danger Room (Wired), July 16, 2007

Knowing the Enemy
by George Packer
The New Yorker, Dec. 18, 2006

US Army's strategy in Afghanistan: Better Anthropology
by Scott Peterson
The Christian Science Monitor, Sept. 7, 2007