Keywords

The most expensive social science program in history—the US Army’s human terrain system (HTS)—has quietly come to an end. During its eight years of existence, the controversial program that can be seen as the paradigmatic institutional expression of counterinsurgency’s ‘local turn’ cost US tax payers more than $725 million. The Pentagon distributed much of the funding to two large defense firms that became HTS’s principal contractors: BAE Systems and CGI Federal.

HTS supporters frequently claimed that the program would increase cultural understanding between US forces and Iraqis and Afghans—and therefore reduce American and civilian casualties. The program’s leaders, in turn, insisted that embedded social scientists were delivering sociocultural knowledge to commanders. The reality was more complex, however. HTS personnel conducted a range of activities including data collection, intelligence gathering, and psychological operations. In at least one case, an HTS employee supported interrogations in Afghanistan (Weinberger 2011).

The program also served a more insidious function: It became a propaganda tool for convincing the American public—especially those with liberal tendencies—that the US-led occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan were benevolent missions in which smart, fresh-faced young college graduates were playing a role. It appeared to demonstrate how US forces were engaged in a kinder, gentler form of occupation. US Department of Defense (DoD) photos portrayed HTS personnel sitting on rugs while drinking tea with Afghan elders, or distributing sweets to euphoric Iraqi children. Here was a war that Americans could feel good about fighting.

When HTS was first announced in late 2006, I followed its development with concern. Along with many other anthropologists, I opposed the program because of the potential harm it might bring to Iraqi and Afghan civilians—and to future generations of social scientists who might be accused of being spies when conducting research abroad.

Apart from anthropologists, HTS had other critics. A small but vocal group of military officers publicly criticized the program, noting that it was ‘undermining sustainable military cultural competence’ (Connable 2009) and that in practice, ‘the effectiveness of the HTTs [human terrain teams] was dubious at best’ (Gentile 2013). Yet despite these criticisms, the program grew exponentially. At its peak in 2010, HTS employed more than 500 people ranging from career academics with PhDs to retired Special Forces personnel. Over the next few years, more than 30 human terrain teams (HTTs) were deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the program’s annual budget exploded to more than $150 million.

Then in 2014, an odd thing happened. News reports and official statements about HTS virtually disappeared. Its slick website was no longer updated. HTS’s boosters fell silent. And when I tried phoning its headquarters at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas earlier this year, no one answered the phone.

I became curious about the fate of HTS. I heard conflicting accounts from military social scientists, former employees, and journalists who had written about it in the past. A few claimed that the program had ended—as did Wikipedia’s entry on the human terrain system. However, none of these sources included concrete evidence confirming its termination.

In an effort to verify the program’s official status, I contacted the US Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), which had served as HTS’s home since its inception. I had resisted contacting TRADOC because, in the past, my inquiries had gone unanswered. I decided to try once more. To my surprise, I received a response from Major Harold Huff of TRADOC’s Public Affairs Office. In a two-line email message, Huff confirmed that HTS had indeed ended on September 30, 2014. While the program has officially been terminated, it has shown a lasting legacy, and elements of HTS have been transformed into techno-scientific manifestations of counterinsurgency.

To get a more complete picture of HTS and its significance, this chapter will analyze different aspects of the program. I will begin by discussing the origins of the program and its early years. Then I will briefly review the history of the odd term ‘human terrain’. I will then examine the rise and fall of HTS. The chapter concludes by analyzing more recent efforts to incorporate ethnographic intelligence into military planning and operations.

HTS: the Early Years

In 2006, US military and intelligence officials expressed deep concern about growing chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan. American casualties were mounting, Iraqi insurgent groups were becoming stronger, and Taliban fighters were regrouping. Some war planners began advocating counterinsurgency tactics, according to an uncritical account prepared for the US Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute by anthropologist Sheila Miyoshi Jager (2007: 1, 3):

In sharp contrast to former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s heavy-handed approach to counter-insurgency which emphasized aggressive military tactics, the post-Rumsfeld Pentagon has advocated a ‘gentler’ approach, emphasizing cultural knowledge and ethnographic intelligence. […] This ‘cultural turn’ within DoD highlights efforts to understand adversary societies and to recruit ‘practitioners’ of culture, notably anthropologists, to help in the war effort in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

An early advocate of this cultural-centric approach was Major General Robert Scales, who told the US House Armed Services Committee that ‘the British Army created a habit of “seconding” bright officers to various corners of the world so as to immerse them in the cultures of the Empire […] At the heart of a cultural-centric approach to future war would be a cadre of global scouts […] They should attend graduate schools in disciplines necessary to understand human behavior and cultural anthropology’ (Scales 2004). The political groundwork was set for anthropological participation in cultural-centric warfare and fighting insurgents ‘by going local’.

Scales would not need to wait long. In 2005, the cultural anthropologist Montgomery McFate, who would soon become the social science advisor to the HTS, and Andrea Jackson, by that time director of research and training at the Lincoln Group, a now defunct security contractor, published a pilot proposal for a Pentagon Office of Operational Cultural Knowledge focused on human terrain and consisting of social scientists with ‘strong connections to the services and combatant commands’ (McFate and Jackson 2005: 20). They suggested providing:

  1. 1.

    ‘on-the-ground ethnographic research (interviews and participant observation)’ on the Middle East, Central Asia, and other strategically important regions;

  2. 2.

    ‘predeployment and advanced cultural training…[and] computer-based training on society and culture’;

  3. 3.

    ‘sociocultural studies of areas of interest (such as North Korean culture and society, Iranian military culture, and so on)’;

  4. 4.

    ‘cultural advisers for planning and operations to commanders on request’ and ‘lectures at military institutions’;

  5. 5.

    ‘experimental sociocultural programs, such as the cultural preparation of the environment—a comprehensive and constantly updated database tool for use by operational commanders and planners’ (McFate and Jackson 2005: 20–21).

Initial costs for the first year were estimated at $6.5 million. The proposal was consistent with the earlier provocative (if historically dubious) suggestions of one of the authors: ‘the national security structure needs to be infused with anthropology, a discipline invented to support warfighting in the tribal zone’ (McFate 2005: 43).

Soon after, Jacob Kipp and colleagues from the army’s Foreign Military Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, outlined the HTS to ‘understand the people among whom our forces operate as well as the cultural characteristics and propensities of the enemies we now fight’. Captain Don Smith headed the implementation of HTS from July 2005 to August 2006, and the program was housed in the TRADOC at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas (Kipp et al. 2006: 8, 15). Each team was to consist of an HTT leader (major or lieutenant colonel), a cultural analyst (civilian MA/PhD cultural anthropologist or sociologist), a regional studies analyst (civilian MA/PhD in area studies with area language fluency), an HT research manager (military intelligence background), and an HT analyst (military intelligence background).

In early 2007, BAE Systems began posting HTS job announcements on its company website. Soon afterwards, it was joined by Wexford Group (CACI) and MTC Technologies. Before deployment, HTT members received military and weapons training, and in February 2007 the first team arrived in Afghanistan, followed by others in subsequent months. During the 2007 summer, teams began arriving in Iraq.

Proponents insisted that HTTs were ‘extremely helpful in terms of giving commanders on the ground an understanding of the cultural patterns of interaction, the nuances of how to interact with those cultural groups on the ground’—a dubious claim, since none of the PhD-qualified anthropologists working in HTTs had prior regional knowledge at the time when Montgomery McFate made this claim (McFate quoted in ‘Anthropology and War’ 2007). However, HTTs were designed to collect regionally specific data on political leadership, kinship groups, economic systems, and agricultural production. The data was to be sent to a central database accessible to other US government agencies. Furthermore, databases would ‘eventually be turned over to the new governments of Iraq and Afghanistan to enable them to more fully exercise sovereignty over their territory’ (Kipp et al. 2006: 14).

HTTs were to supply brigade commanders with ‘deliverables’ including a ‘user-friendly ethnographic and sociocultural database of the area of operations that can provide the commander data maps showing specific ethnographic or cultural features’. HTTs were to use mapping human terrain (MAP-HT) software, ‘an automated database and presentation tool that allows teams to gather, store, manipulate, and provide cultural data from hundreds of categories’ (Kipp et al. 2006: 13) According to Secretary of Defense budget documents, the goal was:

to reduce IED [improvised explosive device] incidents via improved situational awareness of the human terrain by using “green layer data/unclassified” information to understand key population points to win the “will and legitimacy” fights and surface the insurgent IED networks. […] [C]apability must be further developed to provide a means for commanders and their supporting operations sections to collect data on human terrain, create, store, and disseminate information from this data, and use the resulting information as an element of combat power. (US OSD 2007)

In unvarnished language, the statement revealed a fuller picture of the DoD’s vision for the program. HTS data would be used to help ‘win the “will and legitimacy” fights’ (perhaps through propaganda), to ‘surface the insurgent IED networks’ (presumably for targeting), and to serve ‘as an element of combat power’ (i.e. as a weapon).

HTS supporters adamantly denied that such a database might be used to target Iraqis or Afghans, or that HTTs were essentially gathering intelligence. In a radio interview, HTS architect Montgomery McFate stated: ‘The intent of the program is not to identify who the bad actors are out there. The military has an entire intelligence apparatus geared and designed to provide that information to them. That is not the information that they need from social scientists’ (quoted in ‘Anthropology and War’ 2007). Yet she provided no evidence that safeguards existed to prevent others from using the program data against informants.

There is, in fact, abundant evidence that HTS was deeply involved in intelligence gathering. In the words of former HTT member Ryan Evans (2015), ‘HTS was absolutely an intelligence program and the Army and HTS leaders should have embraced it from the start […] the program fell under the G2 (‘2’ indicates ‘intelligence’) at the US Army’s Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) […] Many human terrain teams, including my own, worked closely with and were embedded with the intelligence staff sections in the brigades they served […] we absolutely collected and analyzed information that informed military operations’.

Human Terrain: Evolution of a Concept

Human terrain is not a new concept. Its reactionary roots stretch back nearly half a century, when it appeared in a report by the infamous US House Un-American Activities Committee about the perceived threat of Black Panthers and other militant groups. From the beginning, human terrain was linked to population control:

Traditional guerrilla warfare […] [is] carried out by irregular forces, which just about always dispose of inferior weapons and logistical support in general, but which possess the ability to seize and retain the initiative through a superior control of the human terrain. This control may be the result of sheer nation-wide support for the guerrillas against a colonial or other occupying power of foreign origin; it may be the result of the ability of the guerrillas to inflict reprisals upon the population; and it can be because the guerrillas promise more to the population. (US HUAC 1968: 62)

Human terrain appeared again in the 1972 book The War for the Cities by Robert Moss, a right-wing journalist who, in the 1970s, edited Foreign Report, a journal affiliated with The Economist. Like HUAC, Moss examined the threat of diverse ‘urban guerrillas’ including the Black Panthers, Students for Democratic Society, and Latin American insurgents, illustrating how the human terrain concept was from the start linked to population control. Human terrain appeared in reference to the latter: ‘[T]he failure of the rural guerrillas to enlist large scale peasant backing in most areas also showed up in their distorted view of the political potential of the peasantry and their failure to study the human terrain. […] Che Guevara’s ill-conceived Bolivian campaign was the supreme example of these deficiencies’ (Moss 1972: 154).

Contemporary human terrain studies date back seven years, when retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters published The Human Terrain of Urban Operations. Peters has written more than 20 books, yet is more widely known as a neoconservative pundit. For years, Peters has espoused a bloody version of Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis. He has argued that the US military will have to inflict ‘a fair amount of killing’ to promote economic interests and a ‘cultural assault’ aimed at recalcitrant populations:

There will be no peace […]. The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing. We are building an information-based military to do that killing […] much of our military art will consist in knowing more about the enemy than he knows about himself, manipulating data for effectiveness and efficiency, and denying similar advantages to our opponents. (Peters 1997: 14)

Peters (2000: 4) has also argued that it is the ‘human architecture’ of a city, its ‘human terrain […] the people, armed and dangerous, watching for exploitable opportunities, or begging to be protected, who will determine the success or failure of the intervention’. He describes a typology of cities (‘hierarchical’, ‘multicultural’, and ‘tribal’) and the challenges that each present to military forces operating there: ‘the center of gravity in urban operations is never a presidential palace or a television studio or a bridge or a barracks. It is always human’ (ibid.: 12).

As Peters’s ideas began circulating among military analysts, others gradually adopted human terrain. Lieutenant Colonel Michael Morris (2005: 46) noted that the ‘purpose of [al Qaeda’s] covert infrastructure [or “shadow government”] is to operationalize control of human terrain’. Soon after, Lieutenant Colonel Richard McConnell et al. (2007: 11) suggested that US ‘military transition teams’ training Iraqi troops needed a better understanding of human terrain: ‘You are not here to make this into an American unit—you are here to help this unit become the best Iraqi unit it can be’. Lieutenant Colonel Fred Renzi (2006: 16) made the case for ‘ethnographic intelligence’ to help understand ‘terra incognita […] the terra in this case is the human terrain’.

Some US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agents also appropriated the term. Henry Crumpton, leader of the CIA’s Afghan campaign post-9/11, has written about agents working there during that period, including one ‘who spoke Farsi/Dari, [and] was a cultural anthropologist intimately familiar with the tribes of the region. […] These CIA officers needed to map the human terrain of their patch in Afghanistan, while understanding and contributing to the larger strategy’ (Crumpton 2005: 170). In spite of Crumpton’s use of the term, so far there is no indication of CIA involvement with HTS.

Pundits and think tanks have, furthermore, enthusiastically embraced the ‘human terrain’ notion. Conservative columnist Max Boot (2006) wrote a commentary entitled ‘Navigating the “Human Terrain”’, in which he referred to the need for ‘Americans who are familiar with foreign languages and cultures and proficient in such disciplines as intelligence collection and interrogation’. The RAND Corporation commissioned two counterinsurgency monographs advocating the importance of ‘understanding the human terrain’, though the emphasis is on information technologies and cognitive mapping rather than ethnographic expertise (Libicki et al. 2007; Gompert 2007).

Before further exploring the establishment of the HTS, it is worth looking at the notion of ‘human terrain’ from a linguistic perspective. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (which postulates that language influences the thought—and consequently actions—of its users) suggests that the term ‘human terrain’ tends to have objectifying and dehumanizing effects. Consider the words of US Army Lieutenant Colonel Edward Villacres, who led an HTT in Iraq: The team’s objective is to ‘help the brigade leadership understand the human dimension of the environment that they are working in, just like a map analyst would try to help them understand the bridges, and the rivers, and things like that’ (Villacres, quoted in ‘Anthropology and War’ 2007). The unusual juxtaposition of words portrays people as geographic space to be conquered—human beings as territory to be captured, as flesh-and-blood terra nullius. Much more serious is the way the term (like ‘collateral damage’ and ‘enhanced interrogation’) vividly illustrates George Orwell’s notion of ‘political language […] designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable’ (Orwell 1953: 171).

Peddling Counterinsurgency

During HTS’s first four years, Montgomery McFate and retired US Army Colonel Steve Fondacaro (who was hired as manager) tirelessly promoted the program. Their PR blitz included front-page stories in the New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle Magazine and dozens of articles in magazines and newspapers. The corporate media generally described HTS in glowing terms and, occasionally, journalists portrayed McFate as a bohemian bad girl. One infatuated reporter described her as a ‘punk rock wild child […] with a penchant for big hats and American Spirit cigarettes and a nose that still bears the tiny dent of a piercing 25 years closed’ (Stannard 2007). McFate was the perfect shill.

HTS’s meteoric ascent paralleled and was accelerated by the rise to power of General David Petraeus, who was a staunch supporter. As a commander in Iraq, Petraeus became known for an unusual strategy—converging perfectly with the HTS spirit—which relied upon ‘securing’ the population by interacting with civilians and paying off local tribal leaders in exchange for political support (see Erslev Andersen this volume). This ‘population-centric’ approach became known as the Petraeus Doctrine and was welcomed by some Army officers. Many Pentagon officials (particularly Defense Secretary Robert Gates) were impressed with the strategy, which was soon codified when Petraeus oversaw the publication of a new Army field manual, FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency. Counterinsurgency warfare had an air of theoretical legitimacy—indeed, Petraeus surrounded himself with a team of advisors with doctoral degrees in political science and history. These men referred to counterinsurgency as ‘the graduate level of war’.

Many brigade commanders fell into line once the Petraeus Doctrine was established as the army’s preferred method for fighting insurgents. Criticizing counterinsurgency—or HTS for that matter—was a bad move for officers seeking to advance their careers. Congressmen and women generally liked the new approach because it appeared to be succeeding (at least in Iraq) and because many viewed it as less lethal and more ‘locally attuned’ (see also Moe and Müller, this volume). And HTS fit perfectly with the narrative that Petraeus had crafted with the help of compliant reporters: Counterinsurgency is the thinking man’s warfare.

However, HTS encountered a series of obstacles. As mentioned above, the program met organized resistance from academic anthropologists. Less than a year after the first HTT was deployed to Afghanistan, the American Anthropological Association issued a sharply worded statement in which it expressed disapproval of the program. An ad hoc group, the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, succeeded in gathering the signatures of more than 1000 anthropologists who pledged to avoid counterinsurgency work.

HTS was also beset by tragedy. Between May 2008 and January 2009, three employees of the program—Michael Bhatia, Nicole Suveges, and Paula Loyd—were killed in action. Some suggested that in its rush to supply the army with social scientists, BAE Systems (which had been granted large contracts to manage HTS) was not providing personnel with sufficient training (‘Failure in the Field’ 2008: 676).

It, moreover, soon became clear that BAE Systems was on a hiring binge and was inadequately screening HTS applicants. Most of the academics who were hired had no substantive knowledge of Iraqi or Afghan culture. Very few could speak or understand Arabic, Pashto, Dari, or Farsi. But the pressure kept the hiring process going—the army needed human terrain analysts as soon as possible and was willing to pay top dollar to get them. Vanessa Gezari succinctly summarizes the results of these bizarre hiring patterns:

Some were bright, driven, talented people who contributed useful insights—but an equal number of unqualified people threatened to turn the whole effort into a joke. The Human Terrain System—which had been described in the pages of military journals and briefed to commanders in glowing, best-case-scenario terms—was ultimately a complex mix of brains and ambition, idealism and greed, idiocy, optimism, and bad judgment. (Gezari 2013: 197)

As early as 2009, reports of racism, sexual harassment, and payroll padding began to emerge, and an army investigation found that HTS was plagued by severe problems (Vander Brook 2013a, b).

Over the years, reports of the rampant sexual harassment of women also emerged. To make matters worse, the investigators found that many brigade commanders considered HTTs to be ineffective. In the wake of these revelations, Fondacaro and McFate resigned from the program. Army Colonel Sharon Hamilton replaced Fondacaro as program manager, while anthropologist Christopher King took over as chief social scientist.

But at this point, HTS was nonetheless making a transition from ‘proof-of-concept’ to a permanent ‘program-of-record’—a major milestone toward full institutionalization. As a Pentagon correspondent told me, once such programs become permanent, ‘these things never really die’. This makes HTS’s recent expiration all the more perplexing.

Downward Spiral

Given its spectacular growth and the army’s once insatiable demand for embedded social scientists, one might ask: Why did HTS fall into a downward spiral?

One reason had to do with the scheduled pull-out of US troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. As early as 2012, HTS’s management team was desperately searching for a way to market the program after a US troop withdrawal:

With Iraq behind it and the end of its role in Afghanistan scheduled for 2014, the operative term used by US Army Human Terrain System managers these days is ‘Phase Zero’. The term refers to sending small teams of Army human terrain experts to gather information about local populations—their customs and sensitivities—perhaps in peacetime and certainly before areas boil over into a conflict that might require a larger number of U.S. forces. Human Terrain System advocates see Phase Zero as a way for the program to survive in a more austere military. (Hodges 2012)

Apparently, none of the military’s branches or combatant commands were interested in funding the program beyond fiscal year 2014. Perhaps HTS’s reputation preceded it. In an email message, an army reserve officer told me that ‘like the armored vehicles being given to police departments, they [HTS personnel] are sort of surplus […] mostly looking for customers’.

Others employed by the military have recounted similar stories. For example, an anthropologist who works in a military organization (who asked not to be named and was not speaking in an official capacity) noted, ‘many military personnel did express objections to the program for a variety of reasons. They just expressed their critiques internally’.

Another factor that undoubtedly damaged HTS’s long-term survival was Petraeus’s spectacular fall from grace during his tenure as CIA director. ‘From Hero to Zero’, reported the Washington Post after his extramarital exploits and reckless handling of classified information were publicized (Moyer 2015). In the aftermath of the Petraeus-Broadwell affair, some journalists began to acknowledge that their enthusiasm for counterinsurgency was due in large part to ‘hero-worship and runaway military idolatry’ centered around Petraeus’s personality cult (Vlahos 2012). In a remarkably candid confession, Wired magazine’s Spencer Ackerman (2012)—who met and interviewed Petraeus several times and wrote a Wired blog entry entitled ‘The Gold Standard for Wartime Command’ when Petraeus retired from the US Army in 2011—admitted:

the more I interacted with his staff, the more persuasive their points seemed […] in retrospect, I was insufficiently critical. […] Another irony that Petraeus’s downfall reveals is that some of us who egotistically thought our coverage of Petraeus and counterinsurgency was so sophisticated were perpetuating myths without fully realizing it.

The Petraeus-Broadwell scandal ripped away the shroud of mystique that had enveloped counterinsurgency’s promoters. Perhaps HTS unfairly suffered from the collateral damage—but then again, the program’s architects had conveniently cast their lot with the Petraeus boys. (Mark Twain might have said of the situation: You pays your money and you takes your choice.)

By 2013, a fresh wave of criticism began to surround HTS. Anthropologists continued their opposition, but HTS’s newest critics were not academics; they were investigative journalists and an irate Congressman. USA Today correspondent Tom Vanden Brook published a series of excoriating articles based upon documents that the newspaper had obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. Independent reporter John Stanton cultivated a network of HTS insiders and published dozens of reports about the program’s seedier aspects. Journalist Vanessa Gezari was another critical observer. After several years of careful research, she published a riveting exposé in 2013, entitled The Tender Soldier. In it, she tells readers: ‘I wanted to believe in the Human Terrain System’s capacity to make the US military smarter, but the more time I spent with the team, the more confused I became’ (Gezari 2013: 169). And later in the same chapter: ‘The Human Terrain System lied to the public and to its own employees and contract staff about the nature of its work in Afghanistan […] [it] would prove less controversial for what it did than for its sheer incompetence’ (ibid.: 192).

As if these critiques were not enough, US Representative Duncan Hunter, a Republican member of the House Armed Services Committee, launched a one-man crusade against the program. His frustration was palpable: ‘It’s shocking that this program, with its controversy and highly questionable need, could be extended. It should be ended’, he said in early 2014 (quoted in Vanden Brook 2013b). The pressure was mounting.

Another problem facing HTS was the broad shift in Pentagon priorities, away from cultural intelligence and toward geospatial intelligence. As noted by geographer Oliver Belcher (2013: 189), the latter ‘marks a real move towards conducting human terrain intelligence at a distance within strategic centers of calculation in Washington, DC and Virginia’. Counterinsurgency was a passing fad. ‘The US military has a strong cultural aversion to irregular warfare and to devoting resources to sociocultural knowledge’, according to researchers at National Defense University (Lamb et al. 2013: 28). This, combined with HTS’s record of incompetence, undoubtedly emboldened those opposing the idea of incorporating social science perspectives in the military.

By 2014, the rapidly growing fields of computational social science and predictive modeling had become fashionable. They aligned neatly with the Obama administration’s sweeping embrace of big data (see also Bell this volume; Moe and Müller this volume). Many Pentagon planners would prefer to collect data from mobile phone records, remote sensors, biometric databases, and drones equipped with high-resolution cameras than from human social scientists with dubious credentials (González 2015). In the words of Oliver Belcher (2013: 63): ‘It’s algorithms, not anthropology, that are the real social science scandal in late-modern war’.

Human Terrain After HTS

The final days of HTS’s existence were ugly. By one account, its last moments were tumultuous and emotional. It seems that HTS still had true believers among its ranks, employees who were in denial even as the plug was being pulled. A former HTS employee described those on the payroll at the time of closure as ‘angry, shocked, bitter, retaliatory […]. The last 3–4 months involved some of the most toxic culture of embittered people I have ever witnessed’.

Some voices, most notably former HTS employees, publicly complained over the loss of what they insisted was an indispensable military tool. After HTS’s termination was publicized, a series of policy pieces began calling for a new improved version of HTS, reflecting a deep longing by strategists for ethnographic intelligence (Dearing and Lee 2015; Kassel 2015; Evans 2015). Christopher King, HTS’s former chief social scientist, reflected these sentiments:

While HTS may be mothballed until needed again, the program did hammer home to the military the need for social science research. Military commanders re-learned the advantage of knowledge as much as possible about the people they are having to interact with on a daily basis. This ultimately led to better decision making on the ground. Today, social scientists still are active in the intelligence and rest of military community as both contractor and government employees […] they are still bringing value added to commanders. (comments in Perlmutter 2015)

Although HTS has officially ended, questions remain about its future. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal year 2015 allows the army to carry out a ‘Pilot Program for the Human Terrain System […] to support phase 0 shaping operations and the theater security cooperation plans of the Commander of the United States Pacific Command […] this section shall terminate on September 30, 2016’ (US Congress 2014: Section 1075).

Furthermore, a March 16, 2015 letter from Army General Ray Odierno to US Representative Nita Lowey includes HTS on a list of unfunded requirements for fiscal year 2016. Odierno’s letter describes HTS as an unfunded program to be used by the Pacific Command as suggested in the NDAA. Yet no job advertisements have been posted to recruit employees for the program. Only time will tell if HTS will rise Phoenix-like from the ashes, or if it has truly disintegrated.

It would be premature for those concerned about the militarization of culture to breathe a sigh of relief. The needs of empire—especially an empire in denial—are far too great to ignore cultural concerns. HTS’s sudden death can obscure the fact that elements of the program continue to survive, though in distinct and sometimes unrecognizable forms. The basic idea behind HTS—to equip the military with cultural expertise for battlefield operations—has not been eradicated. If anything, the concept has firmly taken root as a core element of the ‘local turn’ in counterinsurgent warfare.

An example of these trends is the emergence of the Global Cultural Knowledge Consortium, which can be seen as an offshoot of the human terrain system. Four years ago, as HTS funding peaked, the TRADOC launched the Cultural Knowledge Consortium (CKC). It began in 2011, at about the same time that the defense firm CGI Federal was awarded a $227 million contract to manage HTS. CKC emerged as the US Department of Defense’s Minerva Initiative, a ‘university-based social science research initiative’ that was launched by the Secretary of Defense in 2008, and which focuses ‘on areas of strategic importance to U.S. national security policy’, 1 reached out to scholars at American universities, seeking to draw in social scientists willing to align their research interests with those of the military.

Minerva forged new linkages between the military and academic researchers. According to a resource guide prepared for the Pentagon’s Second Annual Minerva Conference, the army initiated CKC ‘to support the availability, analysis, and storage of socio-cultural data to satisfy the information requirements of the COCOMs [combatant commands] and the defense intelligence enterprise [… and to create] an operationalized expertise network’ (US OSD 2011: 4–5). The resource guide outlined an impressive list of objectives to be pursued by ‘CKC Scholars’ including relationship building, electronic collaboration, regional working groups, the creation of a pool of subject matter experts (SMEs) and the coordination of symposia, seminars, and teleconferences.

Despite its lofty goals, CKC had limited impact. It established a (now-defunct) website, www.culturalknowledge.org, which included a blog, regionally focused discussion boards, and lists of resources such as academic journals. The website included a seemingly random assortment of topics including ‘current trends in Hungary’, Syrian cultural information, analysis of developments in Sudan, and information from humanitarian workers in Somalia (CKC 2011). (We were able to locate snapshots of the website using the Internet Archive’s ‘Way Back Machine’.) It also developed a series of YouTube lectures in 2012 covering a scattershot collection of topics such as ‘Human Trafficking in Moldova’, ‘The Evolution of Boko Haram’, ‘The US/Mexico Border and Hezbollah in the Western Hemisphere’, and ‘Socio-Cultural Fieldwork’, the latter of which features the Kansas University anthropologist Felix Moos (CKC 2012). According to a social scientist familiar with CKC, the program ultimately ‘didn’t produce much’ and ‘very few people at the commands knew who they were’.

CKC was terminated in December 2013, but TRISA (TRADOC Intelligence Support Activity) officials initiated a project called the Global Cultural Knowledge Network (GCKN) in October 2014, right after the closure of HTS. It appears that GCKN may have been pushed through by a private contract firm, CGI Federal, which managed HTS in its final years. TRISA Director Gary Phillips recently stated that he and others began working on a ‘transition plan’ to provide cultural expertise in the post-HTS era (Doubleday 2015). At this point GCKN appears to be a relatively lean operation, staffed by a commissioned officer, a geospatial analyst, three social scientists, and a ‘knowledge manager’, but as we saw with HTS, small programs can grow to monstrous proportions within months. Phillips acknowledged problems with HTS, but stressed that the GCKN would improve upon its predecessor: ‘We spent about five months going through everything we learned and [are] building this from scratch to not make the same mistakes again’ (Doubleday 2015).

Phillips’s claim that GCKN was built ‘from scratch’ appears dubious. One source familiar with GCKN said that it was essentially a ‘reboot of CKC […] [without the] headache of deployed teams and the drama that was HTS’s poorly selected personnel’. Perhaps not surprisingly, Phillips nowhere mentions that the defense firm CGI Federal—the same corporation that managed HTS in its final years—now manages GCKN.

One social scientist with extensive contacts in the military branches told a similar story: ‘It picks up the SME-Net [subject matter expert network] aspect of HTS and CKC […] it will serve as a sort of clearinghouse/reachback capability that allows Army units planning to deploy or conduct exercises to request information or access to expertise’. ‘Reachback capability’ is a reference to a key component of HTS, the so-called reachback research centers. These were designed to link human terrain teams with specialists located in the US who could provide databases of cultural information to assist with counterinsurgency operations, but the effort was plagued with technical problems. The specialists were also notorious for recycling anecdotal information mined from Wikipedia and blogs, mixed with indiscriminate samplings of peer-reviewed literature. ‘Reachback capability’ was, in a sense, HTS’s unrealized high-tech dream—and we find this element of the dream intact, still luring military clients to promises that culture can successfully be engineered for militarized goals.

Like CKC, it appears that GCKN will rely primarily upon the Internet as a means of linking SMEs with the combatant commands. Apart from its primary portal (not available for public use), GCKN has a secondary portal accessible to broader publics via the DoD’s All Partners Access Network (APAN). Theoretically, APAN will allow GCKN to build social networking communities that include DoD personnel, academics, and independent researchers. Whether GCKN succeeds where CKC failed has yet to be seen, but it seems unlikely given the similarities between the two programs.

Cultural Intelligence, Special Ops Style

Even though the human terrain system program has, technically, ended, the ‘human terrain’ concept survives—and appears to be multiplying. Just months after HTS was being shuttered, the US Army began expanding its cadre of civil affairs officers. According to the Army Times, these ‘warrior-diplomats’ are often organized in four-person teams who operate ‘in a low-profile way, leveraging soft power to quietly strengthen and stabilize friendly governments’ (Gould 2015)—tasks that resonate with at least some of the activities conducted by embedded personnel during HTS’s heyday. On the surface, civil affairs troops appear to engage with local people ethnographically: ‘Through their ground-level interactions and understanding of local cultures and the people, [they] are able to glean a sense of local dynamics’ (Gould 2015). But such ‘interactions and understandings’ are easily mobilized for intelligence purposes or for bolstering psychological operations programs.

The military branches are increasingly taking an interest in cultural sensitivity as a counterinsurgency tool. An interesting example is the effort to develop gender inclusive approaches (on the role of gender in counterinsurgency, see Streicher, this volume). The US Army and Marine Corps have deployed female engagement teams (FETs) for counterinsurgency, under the assumption that ‘one of the best ways to achieve strategic goals is to use female marines and soldiers to influence the family unit’ (Holliday 2012: 90). More recently, US Army, Navy, and Marine Corps Special Operations Commands have introduced cultural support teams (CSTs) which, despite the gender-neutral name, were comprised exclusively of female service members. According to Megan Katt (2014), ‘the primary difference between the two was that FETs were used to soften coalition forces’ footprint as they moved through an area, whereas CSTs were designed to provide persistent presence and engagement, a key tenet of population-focused operations conducted by SOF [Special Operations Forces]’.

An equally disturbing development is the recruitment of human terrain experts by the US Special Operations Command (SOCOM). According to researchers from the National Defense University, SOCOM created ‘some classified programs related to human terrain’ before HTS was launched in 2007, and we can assume these classified programs continue in some capacity (Lamb et al. 2013: 29).

More recently, SOCOM appears to have dramatically stepped up its efforts. In contrast to HTS’s brash public relations campaign, SOCOM has taken a quieter approach by contracting small- to medium-sized defense companies relatively unknown to those outside the industry. Today, companies such as Cyberspace Solutions, Streamline Defense, Charles F. Day & Associates, Bluehawk LLC, Atlas Advisors, Quick Services, and Red Gate Group are using popular online job search engines to advertise dozens of positions with titles like ‘Human Terrain Analyst’, ‘Cultural Subject Matter Expert’, and ‘Human Terrain Specialist’.

As an example of how the new privatized version of HTS is being deployed, consider the case of Engility Corporation, a Virginia-based company that, according to its website, provides ‘critical services and support to the U.S. Department of Defense, Federal civilian agencies and allied foreign governments’. 2 Engility is currently advertising human terrain analyst positions ‘to support a SOCOM contract’ (Engility 2015). The job involves assessment of ‘tribal, cultural, and geographic data […] in order to create human terrain data layers and apply socio-cultural principles to intelligence collection and targeting’. The position requires employees to be ready to deploy to combat zones ‘with permissive, uncertain, or hostile environments while living in austere conditions’. The job listing is unambiguous about how the position fits into the lethal architecture of special ops: ‘The Human Terrain Analyst will have advanced targeting skills and a comprehensive understanding of the operational cycle as well as the data, tools, and techniques used for each phase of the F3EA targeting cycle’ (Engility 2015). It is worth defining ‘F3EA’, as described by General Michael Flynn, Director of Intelligence at US Central Command:

An aggressive targeting model known as find, fix, finish, exploit, and analyze (F3EA) features massed, persistent ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] cued to a powerful and decentralized all-source intelligence apparatus in order to find a target amidst civilian clutter and fix his exact location. This precision geolocation enables surgical finish operations [kill/capture] that emphasize speed to catch a fleeing target. (Flynn et al. 2008: 57)

In a similar vein, another Virginia-based firm, Charles F. Day & Associates, continues seeking applicants to fill human terrain analyst positions who ‘will have advanced targeting skills […] [and] firsthand experience targeting networks or individual within networks and identifying vulnerabilities for exploitation’ (Charles F. Day & Associates 2015). Like Engility, Day & Associates is supporting a SOCOM contract. Defense firm Silverback7 also seeks a human terrain analyst who has ‘advanced targeting skills and a comprehensive understanding of the operational cycle as well as the data, tools, and techniques used for each phase of targeting […] Human Terrain Analysts shall have firsthand experience targeting networks or individuals within networks and identifying vulnerabilities for exploitation’. The employee will work as part of a special operations analytical team (Silverback7 2015).

Yet another company, Colorado-based DigitalGlobe, seeks human terrain analysts for ‘research, analysis and production of products supporting United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) irregular warfare (IW) unconventional warfare (UW) planning initiatives […] [to] provide the initial cultural and social overview for assigned area of interest and continue to research the cultural information for the area to prepare detailed analyses of populations’ (DigitalGlobe 2015). Analysts ‘will nominate and analyze significant socio-cultural variables for analysis; acquire and extract HT and geographic information from relevant current open source data and archival material; collaborate with geospatial analysts to recreate and integrate HT data layers into geospatial systems and databases; analyze and develop the data into working databases that create a baseline of information on tribal and geographic data for assigned area of interest’. Job requirements include an ‘MA/MS in a social science discipline and training and/or experience with identity studies (e.g. anthropology, sociology, political science)’ (DigitalGlobe 2015).

The emphasis on integrating sociocultural, geospatial, and biometric data for targeting purposes confirms what I have found in previously published research (González 2015): That a prime objective for collecting human terrain data has do with the requirements of automated, mechanized killing via drones, algorithms, and predictive modeling programs (see also Bell this volume).

Conclusion

Some argue that HTS was a good idea that was badly mismanaged. It would be more accurate to say that HTS was a bad idea that was badly mismanaged. Cultural knowledge is not a service that can be easily provided by contractors and consultants, or taught to soldiers using a training manual. HTS was built upon a flawed premise, and its abysmal record was the inevitable result. The fact that the program continued as long as it did reveals the US Army’s superficial attitude toward culture.

Viewed with a wide-angle lens, it becomes clear that HTS had broader social significance. The program encapsulated deep cultural contradictions underlying America’s place in the world after 9/11—contradictions that continue haunting the USA today. In Vanessa Gezari’s words:

[HTS] was a giant cultural metaphor, a cosmic expression of the national zeitgeist: American exceptionalism tempered by the political correctness of a postcolonial, globalized age and driven by the ravenous hunger of defense contractors for profit. If you could have found a way to project on a big screen the nation’s mixed feelings about its role as the sole superpower in a post-Cold War world, this was what it would have looked like. (Gezari 2013: 198)

A great deal can be learned by examining the wreckage left behind in the wake of HTS. From one perspective, the program can be interpreted as an example of the ineptitude, incompetence, and hubris that characterized many aspects of the US-led invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. As historian Niall Ferguson has observed, the US is an empire in denial. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that wars of imperial conquest would be couched in terms of ‘cultural awareness’ and ‘securing human terrain’. From another perspective, HTS represents the perverse excesses of a military-industrial complex run amok, a system that caters to the needs of the defense industry and celebrity generals rather than the needs of Iraqis or Afghans.

We would be far better off if more government-funded social science was used to build bridges of respect and mutual understanding with other societies, rather than as a weapon to be used against them.

Notes

  1. 1.

    See http://minerva.dtic.mil/overview.html.

  2. 2.

    http://www.engilitycorp.com.