But various sources have painted a picture of second rate program management and an atmosphere that is polluted secrecy shunning internal or independent auditors. It is cult like in some sense, unaccountable in major respects.  The flimsy nature of much of the program's intellectual output has led to speculation that part of the $227 million is being funneled to classified programs elsewhere in the mammoth American national security apparatus. There was even speculation that the Pentagon's new Defense Clandestine Service would use HTS Phase Zero to insert DCS personnel, ostensibly as social scientists, for the purpose of infiltrating into various foreign populations to gather intelligence. But professional intelligence operatives require years of training and that is not HTS Phase Zero's specialty. On the other hand, sticking an operative in an HTS Phase Zero gig for AFRICOM or some other US combatant command may be a probability. These theories arise because no one outside of HTS Phase Zero can figure out what it is and what it is meant to do?

So is it some sort of placeholder program? Are the Pentagon and US Army leadership just plain incompetent or, perhaps, corrupt? Is the $227 million a gift to Canada, to a Canada-based company, for supporting the US war effort? Was it a gift to the British? Will it be to Australia when CGI is done with it?

At any rate, HTS Phase Zero, at least as far as anyone in the USA can tell, has not changed much from its predecessor. Poor decision making remains. For example, the HTS Phase Zero Pilot Program for NORTHCOM saw Teams visit local towns to experiment/question American citizens. Only later did someone apparently inform the program director that the practice might be highly controversial: the apparent extraction of intelligence from private citizens.

A number of sources have provided insights into HTS Phase Zero. Those are listed immediately below.

"There is nothing new to learn about indigenous cultures with respect to why they participate in the drug trade, and attempts to identify key drug operatives or even to engage them, would bring negative publicity from local governments, put those teams in extreme danger, and invite closer scrutiny from congressional oversight committees, not to mention serious ethical and legal implications.

"There is not a single credible academic organization or institution that approves of the Human Terrain System Phase Zero research methodologies. There is not a single [US] Brigade commander who provides any evidence of the effectiveness or use of the research provided by HTS teams. At any one time, at least half of all deployed HTS personnel are on leave, reducing the overall efficiency of each team by 20-50 percent. Not one HTS research product has been subjected to peer-review. They would do better with more linguists and regional or local Subject Matter Experts and HTS provides neither.

Hamilton got spooked last summer when she was informed that the interview training students were conducting in surrounding towns [in the USA] might be interpreted as collecting intelligence on American citizens. Hamilton pulled the plug on that part of training. The quick fix was to use contractors, volunteers, and HTS faculty to role-play people to give the students practice at conducting interviews. This was a disaster in too many ways to cite, but it was subsequently written into the CGI contract to provide up to nine part-time employees who would role-play Brigade staff officers (wearing ACU uniforms in violation of AR 670-1) and local citizens. Can you say "sampling error?" Of course this added to the cost of the contract, and there is no reliable evidence that the training conducted was effective or useful.

An internal report by HTS itself revealed that seven teams are generating about 90% of all the accepted reports....Hamilton directed that a slew of articles be generated for a Military Intelligence Bulletin [available at the Federation of American Scientists Secrecy News site], so that it would appear, that HTS is actually doing something.

A social scientist was reclassified as a team leader and received about a week or so of training at Fort Leavenworth and is going to NORTHCOM in Colorado Springs, Colorado. There is no conceivable purpose for this other than an attempt to recover from what appeared to be an abysmal failure of the two-person team that was sent to Vicenza, Italy.

HTS is a cash cow for CGI [contractor based in Quebec, Canada] and it seemed ordained by senior leadership that HTS would distance itself from BAE no matter what the cost. Most of the BAE contractors were hired by CGI thanks to a recent federal law allows the hiring of people who previously worked on the contract at significantly reduced salaries. CGI cuts corners by recruiting lower ranked enlisted men and officers, most of whom have little military experience; bringing back former HTS members who either resigned before completing training; taking away individual rental cars, and moving the students around by van or bus; and cutting all the salaries for all the former BAE contractors.

There are allegations/suspicions that CGI got insider information from the senior leadership at US Army HTS. There seem to be too many coincidences connected with CGI winning the contract. Oberon, a company started by a retired female senior US Army officer, was purchased by CGI. Second, CGI seemed to know the position descriptions, salaries of BAE employees, work requirements and salaries of all HTS employees. Why does this matter? Because downgrading requirements from GS 15 to GS 14 results in a significant cost savings for the Army for which CGI can claim credit.  There may some type of incentive tied into this contract. CGI circulates lists of prospective candidates to the HTS leadership (remember, these are prospective private contractors). HTS approves or disapproves and this improves the probability of acceptance and graduation rates for CGI. This may be a prohibited personnel practice."

HTS Phase Zero: Peace is their Profession?

Peace is Our Profession was the marketing phrase for the US Air Force's Strategic Air Command (SAC).  It was coined by Brigadier General Edward Martin for use in USAF recruitment campaigns. According to the Official Website of the USAF, "General Martin next was assigned to Headquarters Strategic Air Command at Offutt Air Force Base, Neb., where he assumed duties as chief of the Airmen Retention Branch and then deputy chief, Plans and Programs Division, in the Directorate of Personnel. While in this assignment, he authored the phrase Peace is our Profession which was subsequently adopted as Strategic Air Command motto and [he] managed a retention program which produced the highest reenlistment rates known to the Air Force."

The ironic motto would gain national and international attention thanks to one of Stanley Kubrick's classic movies Doctor Strangelove or How I Stopped Worrying and Leaned to Love the Bomb. Legendary lines from the movie include: "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room...Mr. President, I am not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks...

We were afraid of a doomsday gap... Mr. President, we must not allow a mineshaft gap!

Mr. President, it is not only possible, it is essential. That is the whole idea of this [doomsday] machine, you know. Deterrence is the art of producing in the mind of the enemy the FEAR to attack. And so, because of the automated and irrevocable decision-making process which rules out human meddling, the Doomsday machine is terrifying and simple to understand and completely credible and convincing..."

We Must Not Allow a Cultural Knowledge Gap!

A Defense News report titled U.S. Army's Human Terrain Experts May Help Defuse Future Conflicts dated March 2012 features material from the US Army Human Terrain website and an interview with Colonel Sharon Hamilton, USA, director of HTS 2.0.

"If we raise the level of understanding [among U.S. troops], we establish a context baseline of beliefs, values, dreams and aspirations, needs, requirements, security - if we can do all of that in Phase Zero, we might not be talking about being somewhere else for 10 years...The Phase Zero concept calls for sending human terrain teams to regions as part of theater-engagement and security-cooperation plans, and to exercises and humanitarian assistance missions - anything involving the military in an area in which it needs socio-cultural information," said Hamilton.

The sequel to the Defense News March of 2012 story was April 2012's New Tool Eyed for Anti-Drug War.

In this article Colonel Hamilton is reported to have been "working on a plan to expand HTS to other regions such as Africa and Latin America. The teams would participate in phase zero operations, which refer to collaborating with local authorities to try to prevent wars or insurgencies. The U.S. Army could send a team of socio-cultural experts to Mexico to aid in counter-narcotics work...The move would be in keeping with the broader role the U.S. Defense Department has assigned to the U.S. Army's Human Terrain System...HTS members were sent to Northern <!-- pagebreak -->Command's headquarters at Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado., about two weeks ago to explore whether there are gaps in cultural knowledge that might warrant sending human terrain experts to Mexico said Hamilton. They sit down with the staff and help identify gaps in their plans; their engagements, and their training. What don't you know about the populations? If Northern Command gives the order, the experts could be sent to Mexico sometime after the September conclusion of a six-month pilot effort in Colorado Springs. Before sending experts to Mexico, 'we will conduct thorough secondary research using all available sources to try to fill those gaps,' Hamilton added by email.

John Stanton is a Virginia based writer specializing in national security matters. Reach him at cioran123@yahoo.com

 Dr. Martin Scott Catino, a counterinsurgency adviser and specialist in U.S. foreign and security policy, will speak at Virginia Military Institute Wednesday, Dec. 7. The talk, “Counterinsurgency and Culture: A Report from Afghanistan,”....Currently a counterinsurgency adviser for DevelopMental Labs Inc., Catino has served in the United States, Iraq, and Afghanistan in intelligence, supervisory, and advising posts for the U.S. government. In 2009-2010, during Operation Iraqi Freedom, he served as the deputy team leader and lead social scientist of the Human Terrain Analysis Team at Multi-National Division-South, Basra, Iraq. This past year, in Operation Enduring Freedom, he worked as the acting senior intelligence officer for a Defense Intelligence Agency unit at Camp Julien, Kabul, Afghanistan. This past spring he was embedded with a platoon of the 34th Infantry Division conducting operations in Kabul province.

 ...a new program that selects and trains female soldiers to embed with special operations teams across Afghanistan to cultivate relationships with local women and children, who make up about 70 percent of the population....The program is designed to assist counterinsurgency operations by tapping into a reservoir of female voices that have largely gone unheard because of local customs that frown upon American men and Afghan women interacting....Baldwin assessed schools and health clinics, facilitated meetings between village elders and nongovernmental organizations and participated in three women’s shuras From those meetings, she discovered many women wanted to learn how to read and write or sew. She was able to map “the human terrain,” like piecing together family trees, from her interactions with the Afghan women.

 ...Eric Rotzoll, a military man with intelligence community connections. As a deputy commander of a "provincial reconstruction team" (PRT) in Zabul Province, Afghanistan in 2004 and 2005, he planned and led civil affairs operations in support of counterinsurgency in the region. From 2006 to 2010, he worked as an "all source analyst" for Defense Department intelligence subcontractor Northrop Grumman. Still with the military at that time, he also served from July 2008 to July 2009 as a Human Terrain Team (HTT) leader in Afghanistan. The HTTs, ostensibly comprising privately contracted civilian anthropologists and other social scientists, have been assigned to each Army brigade in Iraq and Afghanistan since late 2005. Armed on patrol, such "academic embeds" have worked to provide cultural and social "human intelligence," or "Humint," on various "locals" as part of the counterinsurgency effort in both countries. In January, 2009, an embedded journalist moving with an HTT unit on the ground in Afghanistan identified Rotzoll as "the man in charge" and "a former analyst for the CIA...." No mere enlisted man, but an academically trained intelligence warrior, Rotzoll apparently brought a particular added expertise to the "Grand Strategy Workshop." His name also subsequently appeared on the UW JASONs roster for 2009-2010, his affiliation listed simply as "US Army."

 As in Iraq, the United States military has responded to bad news with counterinsurgency: eliminate troublemakers in the dark of night, with the most lethal arts, and befriend tribal elders by day, with cultural sensitivity and expertise. The Army has gone so far as to embed credentialed social scientists with front-line troops in “Human Terrain Teams” that engage in “rapid ethnographic assessment” — conducting interviews and administering surveys, learning about land disputes, social networks and how to “operationalize” the Pashtun tribal code. The military, in short, demands local knowledge. But what kind of local knowledge is in supply, and what does it indicate? Though the chief purveyors of such insight, academic ethnographers, have balked at working with the military — the American Anthropological Association issued a report condemning the Human Terrain program as a violation of professional ethics — they have not ignored the country.

 Morgan State University has been selected to receive a five-year, $1.8 million federal grant to begin a degree program in national security. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence's Intelligence Community Centers of Academic Excellence Program chose Morgan and the University of South Florida to be awarded with grants to establish programs in National Security Studies. The National Security Studies program will be aimed at honing skills needed in the intelligence community such as international relations, foreign language and cultural immersion, scientific and technical programs of study, including cyber security....Under its five-year grant deal, Morgan will establish a consortium of historically black schools in Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina to do research in human terrain systems and bio-systems with specific applications to South Asian countries such as Afghanistan, India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan. The National Security Studies Program was established during 2005 in response to the nation's increasing need for professionals in the intelligence community who are educated and trained with the unique knowledge, skills and capabilities to carry out America's national security objectives.

 

 For decades, the Army's Aviation and Missile Command, Space and Missile Defense Command, NASA, and other institutions have turned to UAH [University of Alabama, Hunstville] in the search for solutions to complex technical issues. But Horack [Dr. John Horack, UAH Vice President for Research] thinks there is an element they're missing.   The Department of Defense, he says, is "transforming in ways that aren't fully predictable," facing new threats in a highly-charged political environment and constrained budget situation. And while the military has always looked to America's universities for help in solving complex technical issues, Horack thinks they should also look for help with what he terms "the human terrain." University faculty, he says, can take a fresh look at problems and issues, and bring insights and perspectives to problems facing America's military planners. "There is a need for improved socio-economic awareness. But there is no place to go on the GSA schedule to get this type of information." The military, he says, have underutilized America's universities, failing to get from them vital information that could aid strategy and operations in missions around the globe. "We're not using university muscle as well as we could," he says. 

 ....when the anthropology “tribe” assembles this year, it will have a new topic to discuss: its links with “power” – or, at least, the US military. Last month, the AAA posted an article from Nature on its website that claimed that the US military has been employing the services of anthropologists in Afghanistan to improve its data-gathering techniques. In particular, during the past five years, it has apparently run so-called “human terrain analysis” programmes, to make its Afghan operations more culturally sensitive....But what has made this latest revelation so controversial is that Julia Bowers, the anthropologist named by Nature, was not just writing tomes about Afghan marriage rituals, she was aiding interrogations too. Or as Nature reported her telling a conference: “Typically human-terrain analysis is more of a human data-gathering and mapping approach…” but cultural expertise was “key in the support I was providing to the interrogator to develop a relationship with the detainee”. While, crucially, it is unclear how widespread this practice might be, the revelation has reawakened the debate about just how far social scientists should allow themselves to aid the elite....“Advising people on how to extract information from people who don’t want information extracted, that is the antithesis of what the anthropological encounter is supposed to look like,” Hugh Gusterson, a network leader, has observed. But the pressures will not die away soon; not when budgets are being cut, jobs are scarce and governments (and corporations) are desperate to get better information about culture. To put it another way, precisely because anthropologists are good at analysing cultures and power structures, their research is of interest to people in… er… power. It is a bitter irony; even – or especially – in Afghanistan.

 NEAH Power Systems, Inc. announced today it has appointed Col. Lamont Woody, US Army (Retired), most recently a principal of the Laconia Group, as its defense advisor to its Board of Directors. In this role, Col. Woody will advise the company in international defense and government relations and various potential collaboration, partnership and business development opportunities....Col. Woody [in his military career] also implemented human terrain, social networking systems, and law enforcement systems and programs.

 Even the panel on the Human Terrain System (HTS) – a topic of great interest and personal involvement for me – was too tactical in its focus....My own take as an outsider (i.e., a person who does not tow any party line) is that our Achilles heel related to intelligence is the ever-growing complexity of our Intel bureaucracy and the mountainous nature of Intel data. We collect a lot, but have no clue as to what to do with it. I heard the evidence of that during the panel on HTS.

 The panel (video link) speculated on socio-cultural intelligence as a new facet of intelligence, ie SOCINT. Sharon Hamilton provided a lot of information about the HTS (now over 40 in total, with 31 teams in Afghanistan). It has now been given permanent funding (rather than through Supplementals). She said they use the NGA 12 human geography standards of data to make a baseline dataset (video 1:49’50″), and that 55% of their products are unclassified at the moment. Hamilton claimed that HTS does not have to “convince” the social science community (of the value of HTS) because they (the Army) fill their HTS classes (video at 1:34’00″). You can take that statement with a pinch of salt, no doubt.

 Cultural expertise was “key in the support I was providing to the interrogator to develop a relationship with the detainee”, said Julia Bowers, principal senior analyst for human terrain at SCIA, a company based in Tampa, Florida, that provides socio-cultural services for the military and intelligence community....Bowers worked with the U.S. Central Command’s human terrain analysis branch, which is separate from the Army’s Human Terrain System (HTS), a better known program that embeds social scientists in combat units. Both, however, are designed to provide the military with better cultural understanding and expertise....The interesting question is whether anyone associated with the HTS, which has been dogged with controversy over its five year existence, has been involved with interrogations. An internal memo — dated March 16, 2009 and signed by then-HTS program manager retired Col. Steve Fondacaro — notes that “HTS does not have DoD [Department of Defense] approval to conduct interrogation operations.” “HTS personnel are not trained and certified in interrogation methodology and as a result will not conduct interrogations,” the memo continues. Nevertheless, one former employee me that this is precisely what appears to have happened in 2009; but when the employee complained to the program’s senior leadership, they did nothing. When asked about this, Fondacaro replied in an email that “all the units we supported ran interrogations, just like they ran mess halls, vehicle maintenance, medical support ops, civil affairs etc. and HTS supported the unit.”....“Our team members may have been asked to help or advise in any or all of these areas where it related to greater insight and understanding of the population,” he told Nature. “But it did not result in any of these operation becoming core mission capabilities HTS focused upon.”

 So far, the HTS has been involved in interrogations in just one experiment. A former employee of the HTS, who asked not to be identified, says that they learned in 2009 that HTS personnel were involved at one point in interrogations in Afghanistan. "I sent it up the chain at Fort Leavenworth; they knew about it," the employee says. "It struck me as blatantly unethical. I didn't want anything to with it." The employee, who describes the work as "the exact opposite of what the program says it is", left the HTS shortly after voicing their concerns. Retired Army Col. Steve Fondacaro, who headed HTS until he was ousted in a management shakeup last year notes that all the units that HTS teams support are involved in interrogations.

 The real irony of Governor Scott's remarks [about anthropology being an impractical degree area that is not useful for finding employment] is that anthropology can be so practical that it even makes many anthropologists uneasy, as in the Defense Department's Human Terrain Program, condemned as unethical by a commission of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) in 2009. 

 To enable the military to fuse together the data at its disposal and make better decisions, faster, the HumanGeo Group developed ISEBOX (Integrated Socio-Cultural Environment for Behavior Observation Exploitation), a geospatial threat-forecasting application that allows data with different spatial resolutions to be intermixed while preserving the original data. ISEBOX identifies friendly forces, trends, geo-political activity, and threat indicators to provide operations planners with critical access to data required to perform Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield (IPB). ISEBOX uses variable precision data encodings of location to facilitate non-obvious pattern detection and predictive analysis in the geospatial domain....ISEBOX ingests the widest range of open sources of geospatial data (such as social media, civilian government sources, NGO data, and community-driven data collections) and provides a means of combining the sources to enable analysts to detect non-obvious patterns in the data in order to “tip and cue” planners, collectors, and analysts to points on the ground defined by geography, time, function, and analytic discipline.

 The villagers are bits of software code, and the Americans who “visit’’ are players in a videogame-like program designed not only for training purposes but for intelligence analysis. The program, which loosely resembles the game SimCity, is part of a US government effort to develop sophisticated computer models of real Afghan villages — complete with virtual people based on actual inhabitants — in an attempt to predict their reaction to US raids and humanitarian aid. The project, spearheaded by a University of Pennsylvania engineer at the behest of an undisclosed US government agency, straddles the line between research and intelligence as part of a wider US effort to design software capable of forecasting human behavior in war zones. This type of research, often referred to as “human terrain mapping,’’ has attracted increased funding in recent years from US military planners who believe it will become a crucial tool for combating terrorism and insurgencies...

"16 Within the domestic realm there are a number of audiences that are critical for the Canadian Forces to fully understand — each with its specific beliefs, values, and attitudes and, consequently, behaviors. The first target domestic audience is the general Canadian public itself. Understanding Canadian beliefs, values, and attitudes is critically important for a number of reasons. First, public confidence and support is crucial for the continuing vitality of the CF. The 'decade of darkness' of the 1990s, when a series of scandals eroded governmental and public confidence and support in the CF, demonstrated the danger of losing touch with Canadian societal sensitivities and beliefs in such basic concepts as accountability, integrity, and transparency. This erosion in CF support impacted the Department of National Defence (DND) and the CF in a myriad of ways from budgetary support to recruiting and the ability to investigate and regulate itself as an autonomous profession. In essence, public support engenders political support, which can lead directly to credibility and trust, which in turn leads to freedom of action. Indeed, continuing Canadian participation in Afghanistan is directly tied to public sentiment and support.
 
 "17 A 'cultural' comprehension of the general Canadian public also has an impact on recruiting. An understanding of what is important to Canadians, and what triggers their commitment and support, is key to developing the necessary approaches to attract young Canadians to join the CF. If the public understand the CF and its members, if there is a deep-rooted connection between them and the CF, particularly its mission and importance to national security, temporary crises or scandals will be less traumatic and have a shorter lasting effect.
 
 "18 Finally, a cultural understanding of the general Canadian public is an important source of information. As the threat to Western societies grows through both the interconnected globalized world and through radicalization of home-grown terrorists through the internet or simply from domestic disenfranchised elements, the CF will increasingly be called on to assist law enforcement agencies (LEA) in a domestic context. As such, understanding what is important to Canadians from a cultural, ideological, and/ or attitudinal perspective will be critical for ensuring active support of the CF and equally to prevent alienation, passivity, or even active resistance while assisting LEAs in Canada."

"The Human Terrain System (HTS) is an innovative method of gaining an appreciation for and understanding of the cultural aspects that shape different perspectives within a given society. When properly implemented, the Human Terrain System (HTS) helps clarify previous assumptions or gaps in understanding that had plagued the Army in previous years. This tool allows the commander and his or her staff the ability to visualize the complexity of the social systems within their area of operations so that they are more capable of understanding root causes of conflict and conceptualizing possible second and third-order consequences of their actions. It further allows the commander and his staff the ability to better understand the situation from the perspective of the population and potential adversaries." (page 55)

The Gregg Centre for the Study of War and Society, at the University of New Brunswick:
 

Our strengths: Internationally recognized faculty specializing in peacekeeping, modern stability building, terrorism, intelligence and military and naval history...

The Journal of Conflict Studies, from the Gregg Centre (above):
 

Topics Include:
 

• revolutionary or civil war
• guerrilla warfare
• terrorism
• counter-insurgency and counter-terror operations
• propaganda and psychological warfare
• intelligence activities
• media coverage of such conflict
• peacekeeping
• foreign/military policy
• strategic studies as they relate to the field

The Human Terrain System, headquartered at Ft. Leavenworth, has been dogged by controversy since it was set up two years ago.

Three HTS social scientists have been killed in the course of their work in Afghanistan over the past two years. One of its researchers pled guilty to killing an Afghan who had attacked a fellow HTS social scientist. An HTS translator was charged last year with spying for Saddam Husseins Iraq for a dozen years.

Jennifer,

Unless an assessed and selected member of a Tier 1 unit, you will NOT see a Ranger (as in member/former member of the 75th Inf Regiment) wearing a beard or long hair, period.

Agree on the photos…I would not want my face seen in photos on a public blog, particularly if I was one of the two Soldiers assigned to the A Det in those pix…same for HTS.

What is a “targeting unit”? I spent 24 years in uniform, and a fair amount of it in SOF, and have never heard or read the term.

Again, just because they were in the same photos does NOT confirm they were at that location on the same mission…and if the A Det (ODA) was there on a FID mission (an SF core competency) in which there is a specific HCA/CA slant, there could have been some utility in a lash up, assuming if that was, in fact, the case.

Just sayin’…