• By Bryan Bender, Globe Staff  |  October 8, 2007
• The handful of anthropologists working with so-called human terrain teams designed to help commanders navigate the cultural thickets of both countries are being accused of "prostituting science" and presiding over the "militarization of anthropology," the study of the social practices and cultural origins of humans.
• Internet blogs oppose the project, urging "anthropologists of the world, unite!" Academic journal articles with titles such as "Anthropologists as Spies" criticize the efforts. And some of the scientists under attack fear they could be blackballed by their profession.
• Felix Moos, who has been an anthropology professor at the University of Kansas for 47 years, is helping train the human terrain teams at nearby Fort Leavenworth. Colleagues who oppose his actions have called him a "killer for hire."
• "Academia looks at me as being too close to the military," he said in recent interview in his crowded campus office, copies of the Nepali Manual of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency strewn about. "It has affected me negatively. I have been accused of introducing spies into academia."
• At issue is a longstanding code of ethics for the discipline, one which decrees that anthropological research should never be used to inflict harm, must always have the consent of the population being studied, and must not be conducted in secret.
• While anthropology conducted on behalf of the military is "often presented by its proponents as work that builds a more secure world, protects US soldiers on the battlefield or promotes cross-cultural understanding," the pledge states, "at base it contributes instead to a brutal war of occupation which has entailed massive casualties."
• Such work "breaches relations of openness and trust with the people anthropologists work with around the world," it added.

• One of its authors is David Price, a professor at Saint Martin's University in Lacy, Wash., who is also a member of the ethics commission set to report in November.

  "I am not sure that adequate consent [from the research subjects] is going on," said Price. He said he believes it will be difficult to know how the military and intelligence agencies will use the population studies.

  "I am not opposed to anthropologists engaging with the military, but I am very concerned when it happens under conditions of secrecy," he said. "There will always be spies but it shouldn't be anthropologists who are doing it."
• The military's own descriptions of the new teams give pause to Price and others - such as one Pentagon official who likened them to the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support project during the Vietnam War. That effort helped identify Vietnamese suspected as communists and Viet Cong collaborators; some were later assassinated by the United States.
• "The military is changing in a dramatic way," said Brian Selmeski, an anthropology researcher at the Royal Military College of Canada who consults with the US Army and Air Force. "It is reevaluating itself not just to make war but to fix some profound deficiencies."
• He stressed that the highly controversial human terrain teams are just one way anthropologists assist the military. Others include teaching at military colleges and helping draft cultural training programs for soldiers operating overseas.
• "I don't want to help them kill people," Selmeski said. "What I want to do is help them avoid conflict."
• Jim Greer, the deputy program manager
• But Greer worries that unless the academic world can get past its deep suspicions about the military's intentions, finding enough brainpower to make the project work "could get tough."
• Selmeski of the Royal Military College of Canada believes the US armed forces must do more to ease anthropologists' concerns, and more independent monitoring of the project could help. "There is no charter or civilian oversight or a human subjects review board," he said.
• Jim Peacock, an anthropologist at the University of North Carolina who is chairman of the ethics commission, says he believes there is enough room to help the military if there is enough transparency and oversight to make anthropologists more comfortable. Using anthropological data for use in a military offensive would probably "violate the code," he said. But teaching cultural sensitivities to military personnel before they deploy "might not do harm and it might even diminish harm."

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• By: 
Robin Melville

• Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War (Duke University Press, 2008), by David H. Price



   

  Reviewed by Robin Melville
• This book is the latest product of David Price's long and deep engagement with extremely touchy issues raised by American anthropology's relationship to the state, particularly to its military.
• it also forms part of an ongoing enterprise designed to explore, and to encourage others to explore, what it means to be an anthropologist while observing one's obligations to scholarship, to an academic discipline, and to one's fellow human beings.
• Price holds that if the state is too intrusive, then self-questioning is likely to be constrained; and should the sword be thrown on the scales, vae victis.
• "Today, most anthropologists consider their field's contribution to the war in the context of the noble fight against fascism, totalitarianism, and racial oppression. I share these views." (p. xiii)

• "But," he goes on,
"my reading of this history also leaves me with concerns over some of anthropology's contributions to this war. . . World War Two anthropology unleashed something dangerous that was not easily contained. While the fight against fascism and tyranny is perhaps the most noble and just of fights, the American wars that have followed have been far less noble and just. Now, some sixty years after the fact, the wartime applications of anthropology in the early 1940s continue to bedevil us in new and unforeseen contexts."

• Even were one to agree wholeheartedly with Price's judgments, it surely has to be acknowledged that there is something a bit troubling about this characterization. Surely not every adult American at that time thought that war noble and just, although a majority may have come around to that view. And surely, at least for a time, many Americans thought noble and just the succeeding wars of which Price so obviously disapproves. But though he does open himself to the hostile rejoinder that if he may have his wars of choice why should others not have theirs, unless he is seeking to refute the charge that his argument is a pacifist one, his assertions about the high purposes of World War Two seem unnecessary to his basic argument.
• In his opening chapter, a prelude to World War Two, Price, focuses on the difficulties Franz Boas ran into on account of his opposition to World War One and to the behavior of a number of colleagues who, he believed, brought anthropological practice into disrepute. His accusation that several people used anthropology as a cover for spying led to his censure by the American Anthropological Association a year after the Armistice--a censure only revoked in 2005. Thus began in 1919, Price tells us, "American anthropology's public debates about the propriety of mixing anthropology with intelligence and military operations" (p. 14).

• In succeeding chapters, Price discusses the response of anthropology's leading professional associations, the AAA and the SFAA (the Society for Applied Anthropology, formed in 1941), to the Second World War; the role played by anthropologists in the allied and in the Axis countries; the bending of the academy towards war-determined purposes; the rapid organization of anthropologists to provide expertise to government; and several specific projects anthropologists engaged in, including ones ensuring that the United States would become economically dominant in Latin America, helping to control the interned Japanese Americans, and exploring the potential vulnerability of the enemy to cultural and biological attacks.
• Generally, Price is intent upon pointing out how anthropologists misused their science, ignoring the constraints integral to participant observation, and how their doing stirred distrust of anthropologists, and so compromising the very practice of anthropology, making it more difficult and dangerous for those who followed.
• It would have helped, Price argues, had in the post-War era all those anthropologists who understandably threw themselves into the War effort been more open and self-reflective about what they had lent themselves to. But for the most part those who had engaged in war-related anthropological projects kept mum. Some even erased from their post-War scholarly studies all mention of the War and its shattering impact on the cultures they studied. Some who returned to the academy retained, usually covertly, their links to the military and intelligence services and their non-public projects, some even going so far as to recruit young scholars.

• Nevertheless, although all this made problematical the task of defining limits of the permissible, wartime experiences did motivate anthropologists to try to come up with codes of ethics to safeguard their science (pp. 272-279). But Price regards the various codes produced as either flawed, or, where not so flawed, as substantially weakened at various critical times.
• And of the American Anthropological Association's 1971 "Statement of Professional Responsibility"-- which held that "all anthropologists' reports should be available to the public, anthropologists had primary responsibilities to those they studies, and covert research should not be conducted" (p. 272)--Price notes that this quite radical set of adjurations came under pressure from those working for corporations or for governmental or non-governmental agencies. Indeed, those seeking their science's imprimatur to conduct and report on proprietary research managed in 1990 to have these restrictions on covert anthropology withdrawn (p. 278).
• If one attends to the dates Price attaches to shifts in the struggles over anthropology's ethical guidelines, one sees how responsive the discipline has been to shifts in the political-ideological struggle within American society as a whole.
• To be sure, as Price emphasizes, anthropology is not the only American science that found itself in this awkward bind. Neither, it may be interjected, does this mean that a compromised science may not progress in some (perhaps burlesque) fashion.
• Every science, no matter how esoteric, is embedded within an actually existing society from which it derives sustenance and to which it has obligations. Moreover, every science worthy of the designation must also try to transcend these societal constraints. For every scientific conversation is in principle, at least, global in its scope and universal in its consequences.
• Hence, Price's larger aim is the necessary and worthy one of opening and keeping open the doors within and between American and other anthropologies.

• Although the wealth of detail he provides is evidently required by the fact that so much of anthropology's history has been and is being hidden or forgotten, it seems to me in this fine volume, at least, that he is in some danger of concealing the forest with the trees.

   

    

    
Robin Melville. "Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War." Logos a journal of modern society & culture. 2009: Vol.8, Issue 2. ISSN 15430820.

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• December 13, 2007
• Anthropologists Up in Arms Over Pentagon’s “Human Terrain System” to Recruit Graduate Students to Serve in Iraq, Afghanistan
• A new $40 million Pentagon program called the Human Terrain System has begun enlisting recruits with graduate degrees in anthropology to serve in the military. The move has anthropologists up in arms. They point to the ethical implications of renewing a program like CORDS during the Vietnam War, that assassinated over 26,000 suspected Viet Cong. We speak with David Price, a founding member of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists

• JUAN GONZALEZ: Yes. Well, the Pentagon has a new strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan. An experimental $40 million program called the Human Terrain System has begun enlisting recruits of a different kind to win the battle of hearts and minds. They have graduate degrees in anthropology and serve as cultural advisers to the US military.

  Some military analysts have hailed the program as the twenty-first century equivalent of a Vietnam-era military project called CORDS, or Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support. 
   

  But the move has anthropologists up in arms. They point to the ethical implications of renewing a program like CORDS, that assassinated over 26,000 suspected Viet Cong.

  In September, a group of scholars formed the Network of Concerned Anthropologists. Inspired by physicists who opposed the Reagan-era Star Wars program, they drafted a “Pledge of Non-Participation in Counter-Insurgency.” 
• AMY GOODMAN: By late October, the executive board of the American Anthropological Association issued a preliminary statement calling the Human Terrain System project “an unacceptable application of anthropological expertise.” The Association’s Ad Hoc Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology with U.S. Security and Intelligence Communities released its final report in November. It emphasized certain kinds of involvement with the military would violate the Association’s Code of Ethics.

• DAVID PRICE: Well, this debate very much cuts to the core of what the appropriate uses of anthropology are, regarding warfare and regarding large ethical issues about what does it mean to have anthropologists embedded with military forces during a time of war. You know, there are large ethical issues about embedding ethnographers with troops. Basically, fundamental research ethics require that research subjects have voluntary meaningful informed consent, that they’re told, you know, what’s going to be done with the research, and that no harm come to those who are studied.  
   

  The executive board of the American Anthropological Association weighed these and others issues and made a very strong statement against the Human Terrain program, because it saw it clearly wandering into these very ethical problematic areas and not really showing due concern for the people who are studied.  

• DAVID PRICE: The Human Terrain program is run through BAE, which is a contracting agency. You know, in some ways it’s very similar to Blackwater in the way that it works. What they do is they take ethnographers, they take anthropologists, who may or may not have cultural expertise in the areas where they’re working, and they take these ethnographers, embed them with the troops, they travel with them, and then they try and advise commanders about taking culturally appropriate action.  
   

  Now, the claim by Human Terrain is that they can reduce casualties by giving more nuanced information to people in battle situations. But there’s a lot more to it than that, especially in that people in the Pentagon see this as being linked to the CORDS program. CORDS program in Vietnam was used to map human terrain, to identify suspected individuals and groups that the military believed were sympathizers for the Viet Cong, who were, in the Vietnam era, targeted for assassination.  
• Now, supposedly what’s going on with Human Terrain is that, you know, it’s essentially a manners lesson for people in the battlefield. But the problem is, is that there are armed ethnographers. Not all the ethnographers working for Human Terrain carry weapons, but we do know there are instances where they do. They’re given the option to do so. So they travel with troops and independently in the countryside, gathering culture information that they bring back and give to the command.

• JUAN GONZALEZ: So these are not necessarily people who are already in the military? They’re, in essence, contracted to work alongside the military and embedded with them; is that accurate?  
   

  DAVID PRICE: That’s correct, yes.
• JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, my understanding is that this is also potentially very lucrative. One of the folks who apparently spoke at the convention, who had been involved—at the anthropologist convention—who had been involved in this, claims she was getting offered a salary of $100,000 with special pay as a result of being in Iraq. It totaled up to $300,000 annually, was the salary?
• DAVID PRICE: Yeah. These are certainly the reports that are coming out, well in excess of $100,000. And again, these are people with sort of marginal regional expertise who are being used. So, yeah, starting pay is certainly over $100,000, and by the time you’re done—especially if you’re living abroad for more than a year, you can wind up doing it tax-free—there are reports that people are getting close to $300,000 for their payment for services.
• AMY GOODMAN: David Price, I want to follow up on this woman that Juan is talking about, Zenia Helbig, the doctoral student in religious studies at the University of Virginia, who spoke to the AAA. David Glenn wrote a piece about her—also this story was broken in Wired magazine—talking about how she was released from the Human Terrain System program amidst an investigation of her national loyalty shortly before she was to deploy to Iraq.

• The investigation stemmed from a quip she made over beers late one night in June. As she recalls, she said, “OK, if we invade Iran, that’s where I draw the line, hop the border and switch sides.” Helbig says her firing, which was first reported in Wired magazine, was a ludicrous overreaction to a casual piece of hyperbole. With the help of at least one senior administrator in the Human Terrain program, she is fighting to expunge her security record and to clear her name.  
   

  Can you talk a little more about what you know of Ms. Helbig’s case?

• DAVID PRICE: Yeah. I know basically the facts that you stated there. I was on a panel with her in a session organized by the Network of Concerned Anthropologists at the anthropology meetings, and her critique was very interesting. Her critique of Human Terrain is not my own. Part of it is. She had serious complaints, from the inside, about basically the intellectual incompetence of the people who are involved in the program. The ethnographers really don’t have linguistic or cultural competence for the regions that they’re working in. And so, her critique was that it’s being run very poorly.  
   

  But this is where I differ with her. She believed that if, you know, better anthropologists or people with higher degrees of competence were involved, then the program would be a good one. I disagree with that entirely, because that would not resolve the ethical issues, you know, as well as the moral issues of being involved in a very corrupt war being fought in Iraq today.  

• AMY GOODMAN: Talk about how this debate is being played out in the Anthropological Association and what this oath is all about.  
   

  DAVID PRICE: Well, the oath is very simple. You know, it’s a pledge that’s modeled after actions taken by physicists during the Reagan era, during Star Wars, where physicists said that they just wanted to be clear, individuals wanted to be clear, they did not want their research and they were not willing to be involved in the Star Wars program. Hugh Gusterson, an anthropologist who studies nuclear weapons production, came up with the idea of modeling a very similar pledge. So, you know, a small group of us, eleven of us, got together and hammered out some language—it’s very simple—saying that we’re not—you know, all of us are not even necessarily opposed to some work with the military, but anything involving counterinsurgency, such as this, or anything that violates ethical standards of research, we’re opposed to, and we’re simply asking our colleagues to stand up and be counted with us, saying that they’re not willing to use anthropology to these ends.
• DAVID PRICE: Yeah, Human Terrain certainly casts a large shadow of suspicion on the entire discipline of anthropology. But, you know, I’m very proud that the American Anthropological Association’s executive board took very proactive action and has done what they can to outline what the problems are with this and, you know, to clarify for the world that this is inappropriate action for anthropologists to undertake.
• DAVID PRICE: Yeah. There’s a largely unexplored history of anthropologists being involved in military action. You know, in fact, you can look at it going back to the Indian wars and, you know, early anthropology in the nineteenth century, where anthropological knowledge was used or, in many cases, anthropologists protected the knowledge in ways that the military could not access it.
• My book on the Second World War uses the Freedom of Information Act, a lot of archival research, oral history and such, to try and piece together how broad was the anthropological contribution to the war. You know, well over half of American anthropologists were involved in some sort of contribution to the war, working for agencies like the Office of War Information. Many worked for the OSS, the intellectual or the institutional predecessor to the CIA—you know, and many other uses.
• Some of this, in my view, was not really ethically problematic. It involved sort of library work and such. But even during World War II, there were ethically troubling things that happened. Probably the most egregious example those involves anthropologists at the OSS who were consulted and agreed to work on efforts to try and identify biological weapons that would—to be used against the Japanese, under the belief that the Japanese were somehow a different race and they might be able to find and exploit a biological difference, you know, in Japanese physiology.
• You know, there are many other cases. There were also anthropologists at the Office of War Information who spent the last year of the war basically beating their head against the wall, trying to convince the White House and Pentagon that the Japanese were ready to surrender and were culturally capable of surrendering. And they did very good work. They did very good work on this, but, you know, the Pentagon marched on and the administration marched on and didn’t really listen to them.
• DAVID PRICE: Vietnam, you know, the American Anthropological Association really blew up in a large uproar, when it was disclosed that there were ethnographers that were providing information for use in counterinsurgency, basically modeling what was known about village life in Thailand and also the highlands of Vietnam, that was used by Special Forces. So that really created rifts in the association that are still there today. And, you know, Human Terrain is really resurrecting some of these issues today.

• AMY GOODMAN: Finally, David Price, can you compare what’s going on in the American Anthropological Association to what’s going on in the American Psychological Association, this group of 150,000 psychologists, largest in the world, that is really being ripped apart inside by whether psychologists should be participating in these interrogations, like take place at Guantanamo?  
   

  DAVID PRICE: You know, fortunately, as far as we know, we don’t have the interrogation issues, in terms of anthropologists being present for something as horrendous as that. But there are still many of the same dynamics. I see the leadership of the American Anthropological Association as acting much more conscientiously, if not progressively, in dealing with these issues. But many of the same dynamics are there in play, and there are real battles going on with people, you know, on both sides being very passionate, worrying about the soul of their discipline.  
   

  AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you very much for being with us, David Price, associate professor of anthropology at St. Martin’s University in Washington, speaking to us from Seattle. His forthcoming book is called Weaponizing Anthropology: American Anthropology and the Second World War.

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• October 16, 2007

    

  Army of Anthropologists Enters War Zones

     

  By David R. Butcher
• The United States military is testing a new strategy in which anthropologists are embedded with combat units in war zones, but critics fear the social sciences are being used for political gain.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 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.
• 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.

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• HTS damages relationships with academia:

   

  “Moreover, the practice of deploying academics to a combat zone may undermine the very relationships the military is trying to build, or more accurately rebuild, with a social science community that has generally been suspicious of the U.S. military since the Viet Nnam era” (58)

   

  “Each human terrain team fields at least one civilian social scientist. In recruiting these social scientists for active military operations, the program staff has widened a long-existing schism between academics willing to work with the military and those who are not. The HTS program has provided groups like the Network of Concerned Anthropologists a legitimate target in their efforts to prevent social scientists from supporting the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan” (63).

   

  “Members of this network and others contend that the civilians on HTT are violating academic ethical standards. These standards are in many ways akin to the Hippocratic Oath: field researchers are restricted from disturbing or harming the subject of their studies. Academic critics of HTS see social scientists wearing military uniforms, carrying weapons, and providing direct input to combat staffs that may use the information to apply deadly force” (64).

   

  “Whether the criticisms or comparisons are legitimate is irrelevant; the controversy is real, and it degrades the ability of patriotic social scientists who help the military through less controversial means. Many cultural anthropologists working with the military have been ostracized by their academic peers as a result of HTS blowback” (64)

• We do not need you, we already do culture:

   

  “The other side of the debate, represented by the advocates of the Human Terrain System (HTS), calls for an immediate solution in the form of non-organic personnel, new equipment, and the direct application of external academic support. HTS essentially adds a quick-fix layer of social science expertise and contracted reachback  capability to combatant staffs. This “build a new empire” proposal is based on the assumption that staffs are generally incapable of solving complex cultural problems on their own” (57).

   

  “The HTS approach is inconsistent with standing doctrine and ignores recent improvements in military cultural capabilities. American military staffs have proven capable of using cultural terrain to their advantage in the small wars of the early 20th century, in Viet Nam, and contrary to common wisdom, in Aafghanistan and Iraq” (57-58).

   

  “By doctrine, mission, and organization, the U.S. military is mandated to train and maintain organic cultural expertise. Staffs are required to conduct training in the navigation of cultural terrain. Cultural information is inextricably linked to the intelligence process. Reachback centers do exist and are actively supporting combat operations. There is no justification to support a, “we fight wars, we need to pay someone to do culture.” Despite the initial failures of poorly trained military personnel to “do culture” there is no valid, systemic requirement for nonorganic personnel or equipment” (59-60).

• Redundancies, overlaps, misrepresentations of military operations:
   

   

  “According to the [HTS' own] website, the [Civil Affairs] CA staff is responsible for “developing, coordinating, and executing plans to positively influence target populations to support the commanders’ objectives, and to minimize the negative impact of military operations on civilian populations and interference by civilians during combat operations.” officers “provide technical expertise, advice, and assistance on FN/HN [foreign nation/host nation] social and cultural matters.” This doctrinal description almost directly mirrors the claimed capabilities of an HTS human terrain team” (61).

   

  “According to the 15 July 2008 HTS briefing, the HTT is staffed by at least two officers or enlisted soldiers with FAO [Foreign Area Officers], CA, [Civil Affairs] Special Forces, or intelligence backgrounds. The team is led by an experienced combat arms officer. Why is it necessary to create a separate program, costing (at a minimum) tens of millions of dollars, to assign these personnel to the very staffs at which they were trained to serve? What do the Human Terrain Team FAO and officer bring to the table that organic and CA officers do not? If HTS can find these qualified officers, why can’t the U.S. military services?” (61).

   

  “As early as 2004, the First Marine Division held regular tribal councils and established a ‘graybeard’ board of disgruntled former Iraqi general officers. Provincial reconstruction teams and infantry battalions often attend and support loya jurga meetings in Afghanistan. Without input from the Human Terrain System reachback cells, FAOs, CAofficers, and PSYOPS officers have been actively engaging with local leadership and proposing culturally savvy solutions since the onset of the war” (62).
   

   

  “One quote published on the HTS ‘impact’ webpage stands out. Rreferring to the local populace, an Army brigade operations officer states, “We don’t ask them about their needs—paratroopers just don’t think that way.” By prominently displaying this quotation, the program managers imply that this officer’s inability to understand or execute simple counterinsurgency tactics is typical” (62)

• HTS does damage to, or does not serve long-term military needs:

   

  “Post-9/11 joint doctrine pounds away at the solution to the systemic weaknesses identified in cultural training, education, and intelligence: Soldiers, Marines, and combatant staffs must become cultural-terrain experts. Cultural terrain considerations must be closely woven into the full spectrum of military training and operations. excessive focus the Department of Defense (DOD) has placed on the extraordinarily expensive Human Terrain System has, and may continue to come, at the expense of precisely those long-term programs that will develop this mandated, comprehensive level of expertise” (58)

   

  “The HTS program has attempted to create its own contracted reachback capability in the form of an expensive cell at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. This cell provides feedback to HTTs but is incapable of providing cultural support to the full range of deployed forces around the world. Despite this demonstrated limitation of capability, the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence (USDI) has seriously considered the HTS reachback cell as the best solution to provide cultural support to combat staffs” (63).

• HTS is stuck between conflicting purposes:

   

  “The civilian academic, the military cultural experts, and the leader of the team serve as special advisors to the brigade commander, providing a separate stream of data and advice that in theory is not “polluted” by the intelligence cycle. This separation makes it easier for the managers to sell the terrain team to academia and to recruit social scientists. If HTS is not related to military intelligence, then the fraught concept of applied academics seems more palatable” (59).
   

   

  “The progenitors of took a requirement that called for a comprehensive and sustainable solution-train combat units to navigate the cultural terrain-and instead created a costly quick-fix response to an immediate need. That response relied heavily on nonorganic technology and contracted support. In theory, could have addressed the perceived immediate need while the services addressed the long-term programs. In effect, the fundamental flaws in the HTS concept put the system at cross-purposes with the services’ short-term goals and future needs” (59).

   

  “The HTS team’s response to the cultural intelligence failures of the early war period was to argue that cultural information is generally unclassified and is best processed by academic researchers. This proposed solution ignores the fact that the intelligence staff is, by doctrine, specifically designated to collect and analyze cultural data. The inference that cultural information is inherently unclassified shows a clear lack of appreciation for the contemporary operating environment” (63).

• What is a solution?

   

  “The alternative to deploying academics into combat theaters is to enlist their support in training and educating our staff officers. In this role they do not risk endangering their research subjects, provide no direct input into targeting cycles, and they do not provide antimilitary elements within their own community any substantial ammunition with which to undermine the military-academic relationship. Keeping them in an academic setting will help build an untarnished and sustainable relationship” (64).

• It is time for HTS to go:

   

  “HTS has sapped the attention or financing from nearly every cultural program in the military and from many within the military intelligence community. The human terrain teams have given a number of staff officers an excuse to ignore a complex and challenging training requirement. We have been at war for eight years. When do the ‘quick fix’ solutions give way to long-term, doctrinally sound programs? It is time for HTS to give way” (64).

5 more annotations...

• I presented the paper below, “(Re)Imperializing Anthropology and Decolonizing Knowledge Production,” at the 8th Annual Critical Race and Anti-colonial Studies Conference of Researchers and Academics of Colour for Equality (R.A.C.E.), held at Ryerson University in Toronto, 14-16 November, 2008.
• In promoting a “long war” against so-called “extremism,” U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates has spearheaded initiatives to assimilate social scientists into the so-called “global war on terror,” with culture and ethnography being the two most salient areas of interest that drive the renewed military creep into universities, coupled with the expansion of military activity into areas previously dominated by civilian efforts, such as relief work (also see this, this, this). The result is a realignment of academic research with the imperatives of the national security state. Canada is by no means immune to this, it is merely a latecomer, as I will discuss later.
• HTS claims that its aim is to save the lives of U.S. troops first and foremost, and to lessen the need for directing firepower at local populations. Critics have argued, among many points, that social scientists are being used to better refine targeting, given that the Assistant Undersecretary of Defense, John Wilcox, noted: “the human terrain enables the global kill chain.” The embedded academics wear American military uniforms and carry weapons if and when they conduct interviews.
• My belief is that it was created above all for domestic consumption, as part of a domestic propaganda effort and a public relations war conducted through the mainstream media. The aims include, in my view, quelling the homegrown intellectual insurgency of critical academics, by luring academics with salaries up to $300,000 when they are in the field, while at the same time promoting a new image for increasingly unpopular wars by emphasizing that smart people [and smart power] are replacing smart bombs, that a new intellectual elite is at the helm as personified by General David Petraeus, and that wars are now winnable because they are being fought within the cultures of the occupied. Ethnography is the shiny new tool in the armory of intellectual counterinsurgency. While the Pentagon takes over civilian developmental efforts elsewhere, it is bringing in more outsourced civilians into the war zone, contracted by British Aerospace in the case of HTS, and celebrating their counterinsurgency effort as an increasingly civilian affair.
• Moreover, the principles and mechanisms behind the Human Terrain System have been incorporated in newly expanded designs for the U.S. military’s Africa Command (AFRICOM), which came into being on October 1^st, and its Latin American and Caribbean Command (SOUTHCOM), to better penetrate local cultures and expand the nature of U.S. military presence in those regions, in part with the aid of social science research. The aim is to get U.S. troops used to the climates, cultures, and so-called human terrain of these various zones, through so-called humanitarian, development, and relief work, so as to maintain a regular presence and a higher sense of familiarity should more forceful action be required. Here too Canada is directly involved once more

• Anthropology: Sucker for Power

   

  Where the employment of anthropologists in HTS is concerned, this is a repeat or continuation of the long history of anthropological service to expansionist states, colonial management, and imperial domination, a history with which institutional anthropology has yet to come to terms, if the relative paucity of literature on anthropology and colonialism, or the rarity of courses on decolonizing anthropology attest. This is not say that anthropology does not contain within it a significant critical and even activist tradition, especially since the 1960s, as much as it is to suggest that anthropology has no real core, as David Price argues, with which to either align or collide with state power.

• Research in the National Security State

   

  Both HTS and the Minerva Research Initiative (Minerva or MRI from now on) are additions to an already existing array of programs that meld the national security state with academia in the U.S. These programs include the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program (PRISP), formed with the guidance and active support of an anthropology professor (Felix Moos) at the University of Kansas, as well as the National Security Education Program (NSEP), the Intelligence Community Scholars Program (ICSP), and the National Academic Consortium for Homeland Security (NACHOS), and an array of private think tanks that link social science research to the so-called “global war on terror” with some of these, like the Hoover Institution at Stanford, housed on campuses. One could also mention the presence of ROTC on many campuses, and the fact that as far back as 1988 a CIA spokeswoman publicly proclaimed that the CIA had enough professors on its payroll to staff a large university.
• This past summer the National Science Foundation, with the support of the American Anthropological Association, successfully lobbied to administer $8 million of the Pentagon’s $75 million for Minerva, offering its seal of approval to projects by offering semi-independent peer review. The NSF boasted of its long service to the state: “To secure the national defense was one of the original missions we were given when we were chartered in 1950,” said David Lightfoot, assistant director of NSF’s Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Directorate, “We’ve always believed that sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists and other social scientists, through basic social and behavioral science research, could benefit our national security. In fact, we’ve always done so through various research projects.” Craig Calhoun, president of the Social Science Research Council, at a recent Minerva workshop organized and hosted by the Pentagon, went on the record cheerfully praising Minerva and calling for more ways of expanding the nature and range of academic collaboration with the military and intelligence communities.

• One way in which this program can directly engage Canadian academics and universities is apparent from the fact that foreign universities are also encouraged to participate, as the Pentagon announced with the call for applications,

   

   

  “This MRI competition is open to institutions of higher education (universities) including DoD institutions of higher education and foreign universities, with degree-granting programs in social sciences. Participation by foreign universities either as project lead or in a supporting role is encouraged”.

• The Pentagon continues:

   

   

  “there is an urgent need to be able to locate the points of influence and characterize the processes necessary to influence populations that harbor terrorist organizations in diverse cultures as well as individuals who identify with terrorist group figures”.

• The Pentagon announcement states,

   

   

  “Especially helpful…is understanding where organized violence is likely to erupt, what factors might explain its contagion, and how to circumvent its spread. Research on belief formation and emotional contagion will provide cultural advisors with better tools to understand the impact of operations on the local population. This research should also contribute to countermeasures to help revise or influence belief structures to reduce the likelihood of militant cells forming”.

• Hugh Gusterson, an anthropologist of military industries and national security, recently wrote a compelling overview of the many dangers of Minerva and other programs for the social role of academia. He writes:

   

   

  “When research that could be funded by neutral civilian agencies is instead funded by the military, knowledge is subtly militarized and bent in the way a tree is bent by a prevailing wind. The public comes to accept that basic academic research on religion and violence ‘belongs’ to the military; scholars who never saw themselves as doing military research now do; maybe they wonder if their access to future funding is best secured by not criticizing U.S. foreign policy; a discipline whose independence from military and corporate funding fueled the kind of critical thinking a democracy needs is now compromised; and the priorities of the military further define the basic terms of public and academic debate”.

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• One does not need to seek employment with the Pentagon, take part in counterinsurgency, or work for the Human Terrain System in order to provide useful, even if involuntary, support for the national security, intelligence and military goals of the U.S., or any NATO state for that matter. In fact, one does not even need to be an American anthropologist in order to provide the U.S. military and intelligence with the information they seek. One needs to simply produce useful anthropology and not be mindful of the consequences of how it can be used by unintended audiences, now or in the future, to support agendas of which one may have limited awareness and even less desire to support. With this and much more in mind, my ambition is to seek the creation of a useless anthropology, and while some would say I was always on the right track for achieving that, I think more of us need to share a goal of producing useless research, to make worthless contributions, and by useless I mean useless to power, to empire, to domination, to regimes of scrutiny and inspection of the periphery. And not just useless, but even toxic and repulsive to the scientists of conquest – an anthropology of both withdrawal and resistance, free of false dilemmas that work to support business as usual, willing to set fire to the crops we planted if it stops them from being harvested by the tyrant, liberating ourselves from being our own best hostages. The idea is to refuse further engagement with the international traffic in information and knowledge that supports the workings of empire, capital, and the state.
• In this presentation I seek to make three main points.
• First, to indicate some of the ways that all of us can be even unwillingly useful in supporting U.S. military and intelligence interests.
• Second, to reflect on the meaning of useful anthropology.
• Third, to point the way to possible alternatives, that could entail unthinking anthropology as we know it.

• General William “KIP” Ward, Commander, United States Africa Command, said this about the Pentagon’s work in Africa:

   

   

  “A lot of activity goes on in the continent through our non-government organizations. Academia is involved. When I was in previous assignments, someone came to me and would talk about, well, ‘Ward, you need to get a cultural anthropologist on your team.’ I said, what! A cultural what? Anthropologist? To do what? Get out of here. Or, ‘Ward, you need to have someone to help you understand the human dimension. You need some human terrain analysis.’ I said, ‘what? Get out of here.’ But it’s important, and where do those skills, talents reside — academia.”
• What we cannot do, however, and pretend to be innocent about it, is simply to leave here today and continue to conduct business as usual.

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• Going ‘Tribal’: Notes on Social Scientists’ Involvement in Twenty-First Century Pacification Efforts

    

  Roberto Gonzalez (San José State University)
• The concept of the “tribe” has captured the imagination of U.S. military planners, even as most contemporary anthropologists avoid using the term. The military’s interest in “tribal engagement” stems in part from events in Iraq’s al-Anbar province, where the U.S. military has co-opted Sunni “tribal” leaders. Some social scientists have capitalized on these developments by doing contract work for the Pentagon specifically geared towards understanding and enlisting “tribal” peoples. For example, the influential Iraq Tribal Study—a report prepared by a private company consisting of anthropologists and political scientists among others—bluntly suggests employing colonial techniques (such as divide-and-conquer) for tightening social control in western Iraq. It also advocates bribing local leaders, a method that has become part of the U.S. military’s counterinsurgency tactics. In recent months, American and British commanders have begun extending “tribal engagement” strategies to the Afghan war, even though critics suggest that such measures are likely to increase violence in Iraq and Afghanistan over the long run. This paper will give a contextual analysis of “tribal engagement” in the past and present, with a particular focus on the role of social scientists’ influence in this process.

• The political consequences of military operations in Indonesia 1945-99 : a fieldwork analysis of the political power-diffusion effects of guerilla conflict
• Kilcullen, David J., Politics, Australian Defence Force Academy, UNSW
• University of New South Wales - Australian Defence Force Academy. School of Politics
• Problem Investigated.
  This dissertation is a study of the political effects of low-intensity warfare in Indonesia since 1945. In particular, it examines the interaction between general principles and contextual variables in guerrilla conflict, to determine whether such conflict causes the diffusion of political power.
  
  Analysis of insurgent movements indicates that power structures within a guerrilla group tend to be regionalised, diffuse and based on multiple centres of roughly equal authority. Conversely, studies of counter-insurgency (COIN) techniques indicate that successful COIN depends on effective political control over the local population. This tends to be exercised by regional or local military commanders rather than by central authority. Based on this, the author’s initial analysis indicated that one should expect to see a diffusion of political authority from central leaders (whether civilian or military) to regional military leaders, when a society is engaged in the conduct of either COIN or guerrilla warfare.
  
  The problem investigated in this dissertation can therefore be stated thus:
  
  To what extent, at which levels of analysis and subject to what influencing factors does low-intensity warfare in Indonesia between 1945 and 1999 demonstrate a political power-diffusion effect?
• Procedures Followed.
  The procedure followed was a diachronic, qualitative, fieldwork-based analysis of two principle case studies: the Darul Islam insurgency in West Java 1948-1962 and the campaign in East Timor 1974-1999. Principle research tools were:
  
  • Semi-structured, formal, informal and group interviews.
  
  • Analysis of official and private archives in Australia, Indonesia, the Netherlands and the UK.
  
  • Participant observation using anthropological fieldwork techniques.
  
  • Geographical analysis using transects, basemapping and overhead imagery.
  
  • Demographic analysis using historical data, cartographic records and surveys.
  
  Research was conducted in Australia, Indonesia (Jakarta and Bandung), the Netherlands (The Hague and Amsterdam) and the United Kingdom (London, Winchester, Salisbury and Warminster). Fieldwork was conducted over three periods in West Java (1994, 1995 and 1996) and one period in East Timor (1999-2000).
• General Results Obtained.
  The two principal case studies were the Darul Islam insurgency in West Java 1948-62 and the campaign in East Timor since 1974.
  
  The fieldwork data showed that low-intensity warfare in Indonesia between 1945 and 1999 did indeed demonstrate the political power-diffusion effect posited by the author. This effect was triggered by the outbreak of guerrilla warfare, which itself flowed from crises generated by processes of modernisation and change within Indonesian society from traditional hierarchies to modern forms of social organisation. These crises were also affected by events at the systemic and regional levels of analysis – the invasion of the Netherlands East Indies by Japan, the Cold War, the Asian financial crisis and increasing economic and media globalisation. They resulted in a breakdown or weakening of formal power structures, allowing informal power structures to dominate. This in turn allowed local elites with economic, social or religious influence and with coercive power over the population, to develop political and military power at the local level while being subject to little control from higher levels. This process, then, represented a power diffusion from central and civilian leadership levels to local leaders with coercive means – most often military or insurgent leaders.
  
  Having been triggered by guerrilla operations, however, the direction and process by which such power diffusion operated was heavily influenced by contextual variables, of which the most important were geographical factors, political culture, traditional authority structures and the interaction of external variables at different levels of analysis. Topographical isolation, poor infrastructure, severe terrain, scattered population groupings and strong influence by traditional hierarchies tend to accelerate and exacerbate the loss of central control. Conversely good infrastructure, large population centres, good communications and a high degree of influence by nation-state and systemic levels of analysis – particularly through economic and governmental institutionalisation – tend to slow such diffusion. Moreover, while power may be diffusing at one level of analysis (e.g. nation-state) it may be centralising at another (e.g. into the hands of military leaders at local level).
  
  Analysis of the Malayan Emergency indicates that, in a comparable non-Indonesian historical example, the same general tendency to political power diffusion was evident and that the same broad contextual variables mediated it. However, it would be premature to conclude that the process observed in Indonesia is generally applicable. The nature and relative importance of contextual factors is likely to vary between examples and hence additional research on non-Indonesian examples would be necessary before such a conclusion could be drawn. Further research on a current instance of guerrilla operations in Indonesia is also essential before the broader contemporary applicability of these findings can be reliably demonstrated.
• Major Conclusions Reached.
  Based on the above, the theses developed to answer the initial problem can be stated thus:
  
  The command and control (C2) structures inherent in traditional, dispersed rural guerrilla movements that lack access to mass media or electronic communications tend to lessen the degree of control by central (military or political) leaders over regional leaders.
  
  If COIN or Internal Security Operations are conducted, two factors will operate. First, there will be an increase in the degree of control over the civil population by local military leaders, at the expense of local or central political leaders. Second, where military command structures are pyramidal or segmentary, there will be an increase in control by local commanders at the expense of central military leaders. Where the central government is civilian or has interests divergent from the military’s, the first of these factors will dominate. Where the government is military or has interests largely identical to those of the military, the second factor will be dominant.
  
  The process of power diffusion can thus be summarised as follows:
  
  A crisis driven by processes of societal change or by external causes, leads to the outbreak of violence, one facet of which may include guerrilla operations. If guerrilla operations do occur, the C2 structures inherent in such operations give a high degree of autonomy and independence to local military leaders.
  
  The same (or a contemporaneous) crisis produces a breakdown of formal power structures, causing organisations to fall back upon informal power structures.
  
  The nature of these informal power structures is determined by geography, political culture, patterns of traditional authority within the society and the degree of interaction of systemic/regional factors with local events.
  
  Thus the guerrilla operations and the concomitant breakdown in formal power structures form the trigger for political power diffusion. The precise nature and progress of this diffusion is then determined by contextual variables.
• front material 864.9 kB Adobe Acrobat PDF  SOURCE01  chapter1 653.3 kB Adobe Acrobat PDF  SOURCE02  chapter2 1.9 MB Adobe Acrobat PDF  SOURCE03  chapter3 5.2 MB Adobe Acrobat PDF  SOURCE04  chapter4 8.3 MB Adobe Acrobat PDF  SOURCE05  chapter5 2.5 MB Adobe Acrobat PDF  SOURCE06  appendices 3.3 MB Adobe Acrobat PDF  SOURCE07  bibliography 1.9 MB Adobe Acrobat PDF  SOURCE08

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• The notion of anthropologists being helpmates in the First World conquest of the Third World seems now to have become embedded in the day-to-day understanding of the Bush-initiated Iraq-Afghanistan cultural-military fiasco.  Whether political scientists, philosophers, area specialists, or whoever actually fills the “societal” expert position on the Human Terrain Systems (HTS) teams, anthropologists apparently are to take the blame.  And anthropologists themselves are not exempt from furthering this notion.
• Perhaps the most notorious anthropologist associated with the U.S. military’s HTS is Montgomery McFate, who writes primarily for military publications and whose pivotal article “Anthropology and Counterinsurgency” appeared in the April 2005 issue of Military Review.
• A hapless mix of shoddy history and misdirected anthropology, her article was, nevertheless, reprinted in the 2007 edition of Annual Editions Anthropology -- along with articles by Conrad Kottak, Richard Lee, and Ralph Linton, and in the 2009 second edition of Classic Readings in Cultural Anthropology, edited by Gary Ferraro -- along with brand-name anthropologists such as Horace Miner, Clyde Kluckhohn, Edward T. Hall, Richard Lee, and E. E. Evans-Pritchard.
• Anthropology hardly needs a renewed association with First World empires; it has obviously had difficulty living down its close association with colonialism in its formative recent past.
• Bronislaw Malinowski
• director of the International African Institute in London
• he was concerned primarily with helping British colonial officials with their problems
• One specific problem for Britain centered on getting the indigenes to work hard on the cash-crop plantations owned by the Europeans.  In a 1929 article Malinowski wrote:
• “The simplest experience teaches that to everybody work is . . . unpleasant, but a study of primitive conditions shows that very efficient work can be obtained, and the Natives can be made to work with some degree of real satisfaction if propitious conditions are created for them. . . . In Melanesia I have seen this applied on some plantations.  Use was made of such stimuli as competitive displays of the results, or special marks of distinction for industry, or again of rhythm and working songs. . . . Such things must never be improvised -- an artificial arrangement will never get hold of native imagination.  In every community I maintain there are such indigenous means of achieving more intensive labour and greater output.”
• And in further advising about the duties of the anthropologist Malinowski wrote, "He should formulate his conclusions in a manner so that they can be understood by those who carry out policies.  He also has the duty to speak as the natives' advocate, without, however, succumbing to an outburst of pro-native ranting.  Through comparative study he can discover and define the common factor of European intentions and of African response. . . . Knowledge gives foresight, and foresight is indispensable to the statesman and to the local administrator, to the educationalist, welfare worker, and missionary alike." 
• Notice that it is European intentions and African response.  Notice that "knowledge" and "foresight" is for the European colonialists, not for the “natives.”
• No anthropologist in these early years suggested that anthropology should be used to help the indigenes throw off the yoke of colonial oppression or that anthropologists should study the contradictions and weaknesses of colonial imperialism so that the indigenes could strike at the heart of the oppressors.
• Malinowski was, of course, a product of his time
• And before World War II it was widely assumed in the colonial metropoles, that colonialism was beneficial in the long run to everyone; backward peoples were, after all, being civilized so that they could enjoy the benefits of modernization and civilization in the future.
• And these early anthropologists strove to enlighten the rulers and protect the ruled from the more brutal aspects of colonialism, such as forced labor. 
• Today, however, most anthropologists have moved beyond this 1920s colonial version of the discipline.
• Some anthropologists even at the time escaped this ethnocentric perspective.  Franz Boas, the founder of U.S. anthropology, famously critiqued anthropologists involved with the U.S. military in World War I in his 1919 letter to the Nation titled “Scientists as Spies.”  His student, and my first anthropology instructor, the great Melville J. Herskovits, refused government financial assistance for Northwestern University’s African Studies program and he also refused to accept government officials into the Ph.D. program.
• These towering figures certainly would not allow anthropology to be sullied.  The discipline did, however, suffer some sullying during World War II and the subsequent Cold War.
• One would hope, however, that modern-day anthropologists have learned the lesson and that such sullying and empire-helpmate activities would no longer occur.
• Out of the 261 comments from members of the American Anthropological Association in the blog accompanying the statement of the executive board the vast majority overwhelmingly condemn the participation of anthropologists in HTS.
• The few anthropologists engaged in these neocolonial enterprises cannot be said to represent the discipline, but they have received considerable publicity thereby sullying anthropology’s reputation.

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