Member of Human Terrain Team talks with
village residents during patrol in Sher’Ali
Kariz, Maiwand District, Kandahar Province
LAMB ET AL.
U.S. Army (Jason Nolte)
THE WAY AHEAD FOR
Human Terrain Teams
By C H R I S T O P H E R J . L A M B , J A M E S D O U G L A S O R T O N ,
MICHAEL C. DAVIES, and THEODORE T. PIKULSKY
Dr. Christopher J. Lamb is a Distinguished
Research Fellow in the Center for Strategic
Research, Institute for National Strategic Studies,
at the National Defense University (NDU). Dr. James
Douglas Orton is an Adjunct Senior Research
Fellow at NDU. Michael C. Davies is a Contributing
Editor in the Center for Technology and National
Security Policy at NDU. Theodore T. Pikulsky is an
Adjunct Research Fellow at NDU.
n d u p res s .ndu.edu
G
eneral Raymond T. Odierno, Chief of Staff of the Army, learned from his
three combat tours in Iraq that the U.S. military needs to better understand
local populations and their social, political, and cultural attributes. He
concluded that the more we understand the human domain, the less combat
force it takes to prevail in counterinsurgency.1 Similarly, during his confirmation hearing
before taking command of U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces in
Afghanistan in June 2010, General David Petraeus told Congress that the decisive terrain
in counterinsurgency was “the human terrain.”2 These leaders understand that effective
counterinsurgency requires protecting and eliciting cooperation from the population—the
human terrain—which, in turn, requires a keen understanding of the population’s social
and cultural characteristics.
issue 70, 3 rd quarter 2013 / JFQ
21
FORUM | The Way Ahead for Human Terrain Teams
The Army created Human Terrain
Teams (HTTs) to provide combat forces in
Afghanistan and Iraq with knowledge of the
human terrain, or put differently, “sociocultural knowledge.” HTTs are small, crossfunctional teams of specially trained military
officers, research managers, and civilian
social scientists that are typically appended
to brigade-sized units. If HTTs do their job
well, they can advise commanders on how to
win popular support and isolate insurgents. If
HTTs perform poorly, or are used unwisely or
ignored by commanders, military operations
are more likely to alienate populations and
make success unattainable. The performance
of HTTs is therefore intrinsically important
both now in Afghanistan and in any future
military operations against irregular forces.
In the past, the U.S. military has been
slow to recognize the need for sociocultural
knowledge, much less to institutionalize the
capability to provide it. Now, however, with
glowing endorsement that captured the attention of Congress.3 Later, it became apparent
that while HTTs often did good work and
were widely appreciated by commanders,
they were slow to provide value, inconsistent
in performance, and insufficient in number.
Ultimately, the HTTs failed to ameliorate
growing cross-cultural tensions between
U.S. forces and Afghans and were unable to
make a major contribution to the counterinsurgency effort.4 Eventually, performance
concerns precipitated a number of internal
and external reviews of HTS and HTTs.
Commanders viewed HTT performance differently than others. Most
commanders, when asked, state that their
HTTs are quite useful, while HTT members
themselves—those who have studied them
and those charged with their oversight—are
more likely to state that HTT performance is
variable. The new study from NDU explains
the origins of the performance variation,
while HTTs often did good work, they were slow to provide
value, inconsistent in performance, and insufficient in number
senior officers believing that the military
must retain the means to generate sociocultural knowledge to be well prepared for the
future security environment, the key issue
is how to do it well and efficiently. The place
to begin answering that question is with
a rigorous, balanced, and evidence-based
evaluation of past HTT performance. If
leaders understand this performance over
the past decade, it is much more likely they
will be able to provide ready and reliable
knowledge of human terrain to U.S. forces
in the future. Toward that end, this article
summarizes a major study conducted at
National Defense University (NDU) that
offers an explanation for past HTT performance and makes recommendations on
how to build on that experience.
Evaluating Performance
The Human Terrain System (HTS),
which deploys HTTs, was formed in
2006 under the supervision of the U.S.
Army Training and Doctrine Command
(TRADOC). HTS deployed its first team to
Khost, Afghanistan, in early 2007. Although
it took time for the team to establish its relevance, it eventually won over the brigade’s
commanding officer, who gave the team a
22
JFQ / issue 70, 3 rd quarter 2013
why the large majority of commanders found
HTTs useful, and why HTTs collectively were
unable to make a major contribution to the
counterinsurgency effort. It also explains the
tremendous challenges the HTS program
faced in starting and rapidly expanding a
nontraditional military program and why
some challenges were met successfully while
others were not. This article identifies HTS
management challenges with an in-depth
history of the program and provides an internal assessment of HTT performance based on
10 key small-team performance factors.5
Any study of HTTs must address the
criteria for evaluating their performance.
Previous studies agree that HTT performance should be judged by how well a team
provides sociocultural knowledge to improve
a commander’s decisionmaking. They also
agree that feedback from commanders is the
primary means of making that assessment.6
Our study used this criterion and these data,
but also considered performance evaluations
from other sources. The study relied on interviews with more than 100 team members,
former HTS managers, commanders, and
other experts to assess the factors that best
explain variations in team performance.
Before analyzing team performance, however,
we first developed a detailed chronology of
HTS history and management issues.
Historical Overview of HTS
A former HTS director acknowledged
some of the controversy surrounding
the program when she observed that the
“HTS story is one of challenges, rewards,
stumbles, and successes.”7 The hundreds
of articles written about HTS are polarized
around advocates who focus too much on
the program’s rewards and successes and
critics who emphasize its challenges and
stumbles. To conduct a rigorous study of
HTS, it was first necessary to generate a
thorough and balanced history that recognizes program achievements without
ignoring shortcomings. That history can be
summarized as a set of sometimes overlapping developmental periods.
The first period, gestation, began following the terror attacks on September 11,
2001, when the need to understand human
terrain in order “to help narrow the search
space for terrorists and terror groups”8
became evident. The momentum for more
investigation in sociocultural knowledge
increased after the intervention in Iraq when
experts pointedly told Congress the United
States did not have sufficient knowledge of
the human terrain to conduct a counterinsurgency operation.9 However, it was not until
2005 that a new organization supporting
warfighters funded an effort to produce a
device that would store information about
the human terrain of a defined area including
the social networks involved in the production and placement of improvised explosive
devices (IEDs). Several HTS progenitors
convinced the Joint IED Defeat Organization (JIEDDO) that the solution required a
nontechnological component with human
experts, a shift in perspective that advanced
further when 10th Mountain Division submitted an operational needs statement in late
2005 requesting such a capability.10
The second HTS phase began with its
actual birth in June 2006 when JIEDDO officially agreed to fund five test teams.11 Getting
the HTS program off the ground proved difficult and time-consuming. HTS leaders had
to quickly recruit a management team and
find a way to field teams to test the concept.
Rapidly hiring 25 people to populate the first
experimental teams was not possible, so by
September the number was scaled down to a
single team to be fielded in early 2007.
ndupres s . ndu. edu
U.S. Army (Charles M. Willingham)
LAMB ET AL.
Human Terrain Team social scientist with interpreter inspect conditions at U.S. Department of Defense–funded Al-Arshad Desert School Agricultural Research
Center, Najaf Province, Iraq
The third developmental stage of the
program was its proof of concept. The 82nd
Airborne Division agreed to test the first
experimental HTT with one of its brigades
deploying to Afghanistan in early 2007. The
HTT, designated AF1, arrived in Afghanistan in February 2007 to join 4th Brigade,
82nd Airborne, in Khost. Initially the brigade
had no idea how to use the team. The team
members tested a variety of activities to
demonstrate their utility, but it was not until
Operation Maiwand in June 2007 that the
brigade realized how useful the HTT could
be. The brigade commander and his staff
concluded that the HTT’s work with the
population in advance of operations helped
reduce kinetic activity and therefore lowered
brigade casualties.
Meanwhile, multiple requests from
other field commanders coalesced into a
Joint Urgent Operational Needs Statement
issued by U.S. Central Command in April
2007 that requested 26 HTTs across two
theaters of war. The original HTS model
for developing HTTs changed with the
n d u p res s .ndu.edu
sudden increase in demand. Previously,
HTS management focused on the need
to create, field, and test the experimental
team in Afghanistan.12 Now there was little
time to analyze the AF1 experience critically. Instead, the replacement team for
AF1 and five new teams that were quickly
being trained and deployed to Iraq became
the proof-of-concept effort for the HTS
program. The performance of the five Iraq
teams, IZ1 through IZ5, was mixed. For
example, the level of interpersonal conflict
on IZ1 was so “untenable” that individual
members left the team to work directly with
battalions, and IZ5 “fractured” and had to
be withdrawn.13
Given developments at the theater level,
the emphasis on building operational HTT
capacity was understandable. The Pentagon
was firmly backing new capabilities for irregular warfare. In November 2007, Secretary
of Defense Robert Gates cited the program
as an example of necessary adaptation for
irregular warfare. He noted that bringing in
“professional anthropologists as advisors”
was healthy and was “having a very real
impact.”14 A few months later, after negative
depictions emerged, Gates continued to back
the program, characterizing any missteps as
“attendant growing pains”15 common in new
programs. With U.S. Central Command,
General Petraeus, and Secretary Gates all supporting HTS, the nascent effort was safe for
the time being and its budget was expanded to
cover the costs of deploying more teams.
HTS then entered a period of rapid
expansion that its leaders would later
describe as a “catastrophic success.”16 HTS
managers quickly had to recruit, select,
train, and retain qualified personnel to field
26 teams. For one thing, securing quality
recruits was a challenge. To attract and
select personnel, HTS was obliged to use the
existing omnibus contract TRADOC had in
place, a contract that was later described by
the HTS program manager as “totally and
completely inadequate” for this purpose.17
Consequently, questionable personnel were
being screened into the program. Even so,
HTS struggled to fully staff the growing
issue 70, 3 rd quarter 2013 / JFQ
23
FORUM | The Way Ahead for Human Terrain Teams
U.S. Army (Crystal Davis)
Human Terrain System Soldiers and civilians speak with Afghans
during key leader engagement in southern Kandahar Province
24
JFQ / issue 70, 3 rd quarter 2013
ndupres s . ndu. edu
LAMB ET AL.
number of teams. In 2008, the program had
a 30 percent attrition rate during training
that effectively cost $7 million18 and meant
a training cycle had to be about 50 percent
larger than absolute demand.
The overwhelming number of trainees
who left the program simply quit. Much of
their dissatisfaction was attributed to the
inadequacy of the training program, and in
particular, the poor relationship between the
training and the tasks performed in the field.
The factors that produced high-quality team
performance were unknown, so training
involved an element of trial and error. HTS
management did not systematically collect
feedback from field experience, but adjusted
the training curriculum based on its impressions of what worked well in the field. The
training was also complicated by variation
in class composition. It was not uncommon
to have an incoming class with many more
team leaders and research managers than
social scientists or human terrain analysts.
An uneven distribution made it difficult to
assemble teams and have them train with
brigades prior to deployment.
counter negative publicity, improve HTT
performance, and find a way to prevent HTT
disasters that alienated commanders and
hurt the program’s reputation even while
overseeing the drawdown of HTTs from
Iraq and increasing the number of teams
in Afghanistan from 6 to 22. Afghanistan’s
human terrain was the centerpiece of
General Stanley McChrystal’s new campaign
plan for Afghanistan, and there was great
pressure to field capable HTTs there quickly.
Congress increased funding to meet the new
requirements in Afghanistan, but it also
signaled reservations about the program
by requiring a study of the management
and organization of HTS to be delivered
by March 1, 2010.21 In a March 31 meeting
with reporters, Secretary of the Army John
McHugh also implied the program was on
a probationary status by refusing to endorse
it, stating instead that he was “neither happy
nor unhappy”22 with HTS.
While HTS took on these challenges,
TRADOC moved to exert more control over
the program. TRADOC leaders approved
a new contract with the company that HTS
under the new management team, the
program entered a period of more intense Army
institutionalization at a precarious time for HTS
Recruitment, training, and other
management challenges were exacerbated by
increasing public criticism. In October 2007,
the American Anthropological Association
cited perceived ethical shortcomings,19 and in
May 2008, the Society of Applied Anthropology similarly expressed “grave concerns”
about the program. Some well-publicized HTT
failures in the field worsened the perception
that the program was struggling, and it seemed
like the tide of informed opinion was turning
against it. For example, a July 10, 2008, editorial in Nature stated that the program could be
a win-win effort for local populations and the
U.S. military. Five months later, the influential
magazine reversed its position and called for
the “swift close” of the program, concluding,
“In theory, it is a good idea. . . . In practice,
however, it has been a disaster.”20
In fall 2009, HTS entered a critical
yearlong period marked by the need to
expand HTTs in the field while management
conflicts were on the rise. HTS leaders had
to resolve training and retention problems,
n d u p res s .ndu.edu
thought was the root cause of its recruitment
problems and agreed to job descriptions for
HTT positions that were not accurate and
that complicated recruitment and retention
of quality personnel, all without HTS input.23
TRADOC also initiated two internal investigations of HTS,24 and finally, in June 2010,
replaced the HTS program manager with
a trusted insider from the TRADOC staff.
Other members of the original HTS team left
as well, and soon there was a completely new
management team in place that was firmly
under TRADOC control.
Under the new management team, the
program entered a period of more intense
Army institutionalization at a precarious time for HTS. A month after the new
program manager assumed her duties, the
study demanded by Congress was delivered
to Capitol Hill. The report identified problems regarding TRADOC’s management
practices. To assuage critics, TRADOC and
the new HTS leaders let a new contract with
a new company. TRADOC also established
new policies and procedures for HTS that it
hoped would improve performance.25
In retrospect, it seems clear that
support from field commanders saved an
HTS program under pressure and undergoing wholesale management changes. The
report to Congress helpfully noted that
combat forces appreciated their HTTs, and
when a journalist asked General Petraeus
about HTS, he responded by email from
Afghanistan: “It is working. I hope it’s here
to stay.”26 In December 2010, HTS was given
a green light from U.S. Central Command to
grow the HTT program from 22 to 31 teams
by summer 2011.
Several important observations can be
made based on this brief history:
■■ The Pentagon was slow to stand
up a program for providing ground force
commanders with sociocultural knowledge,27 deploying the first HTT more than
5 years after Operation Enduring Freedom
commenced.
■■ HTS only stood up because another
new organization—JIEDDO—had the flexibility to push resources at promising new
ideas, and defined its mission broadly to
launch a personnel-intensive program in a
system primarily focused on new technology.
■■ TRADOC, an organization that does
not normally field units, had trouble meeting
the high demand for HTTs from commanders
in the field.
■■ HTS never had a theory of performance, validated by field experience, that
it could use to inform its training program
or explain the optimum role for HTTs
to commanders.
■■ HTS survived because commanders
valued HTTs.
HTS’s tenuous existence is unlikely to
change. Major cuts in the defense budget are
forcing a careful reexamination of all defense
programs, especially those perceived as niche
capabilities created for recent operations in
Afghanistan and Iraq. In this environment,
sociocultural programs must convince senior
leaders that they meet enduring requirements
efficiently. In the case of HTS, this requires
a compelling explanation for past HTT performance variation. Without understanding
the origins of past performance variation, it
will be hard for HTS to convince skeptics that
it can manage the program to better, more
consistent performance in the future.
issue 70, 3 rd quarter 2013 / JFQ
25
FORUM | The Way Ahead for Human Terrain Teams
HTT Performance: An Explanation
To explain HTT performance, it is
first necessary to explain why commanders
typically rated HTTs more highly than the
people who managed or studied them did,
and second, to identify the optimum role
HTTs could play in an integrated cultural
intelligence architecture. It is clear that the
large majority of commanders thought their
HTTs were useful (see table28). However, it is
not immediately apparent why commanders
valued HTTs (or not).
To determine levels of commander
expectations for HTT performance, we categorized commander praise and criticisms
of HTTs according to three levels of cultural
knowledge previously postulated by some
subject matter experts.29 The levels roughly
equate to the social science objectives of accurate description, explanation, and prediction:
■■ First level: Cultural awareness. Basic
familiarity with language and religion and an
understanding and observance of local norms
and boundaries. This roughly equates to good
description of human terrain. It was often
observed by commanders that such description is needed at the tactical level, down to
battalion and company levels if not below.
■■ Second level: Cultural understanding.
The “why” of behavior embodied in perceptions, mindsets, attitudes, and customs. This
roughly equates to explanation of human
behaviors. Perhaps because brigade commanders were the focus of interviews, it is not
surprising that this level of understanding,
which presumably is important at all levels,
was emphasized at the brigade level.
■■ Third level: Cultural intelligence.
The implications of these behaviors and
their drivers. This roughly equates to antici-
pation of popular behavior. The ability to
anticipate reactions can shape theater-level
decisionmaking.
Brigade commanders were not predisposed to believe HTTs would make contributions at one level of cultural knowledge or
another. They generally had a “wait and see
attitude” about HTT performance. However,
the majority of those commanders who provided more specific reasoning for why HTTs
were helpful underscored their contributions
at the first level, noting they provided continuity of situational awareness across multiple
brigade deployments and faster situational
awareness than was possible without an
HTT. They also noted that the teams could
help spread this basic situational awareness
through their forces by providing training on
basic Afghan customs (dos and don’ts) and
instruction on how to collect information on
human terrain effectively.
Fewer commanders, typically those
who worked with the handful of widely
acknowledged superlative HTTs, testified
that the HTTs contributed at the second level
of cultural knowledge. These teams not only
helped describe the human terrain, but they
also explained the behaviors in ways that
helped commanders tailor their brigade operations. In this vein, commanders stated that
with HTT help, they could better understand
the consequences of their decisions, which
facilitated course of action analysis and other
benefits, such as:
■■ reduced friction with the population
(which in turn reduced casualties)
■■ support for political reconciliation
by identifying who had power, trust, and
resources, and what their motives were
■■ improved information operations by
helping tailor message content and style to
reach Afghan audiences better
■■ better “damage limitation” when
untoward events occurred that had to be
explained and compensated for with the
Afghan populace.
Rarely did brigade commanders assess
HTT performance in ways that suggest they
were capable of the third level of cultural
knowledge, which provides deep insights
on the origins and implications of Afghan
behaviors and decisionmaking. The best
explanation for why U.S. forces need all three
levels of cultural knowledge is a 2010 paper
by Major General Michael T. Flynn, USA,
and other military officers entitled Fixing
Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan. The paper articulates a
cultural intelligence architecture that makes
it possible to identify the ideal role for HTTs
and to better interpret commander reactions
to HTTs in practice.
Fixing Intel notes that in counterinsurgency, “the most salient problems are
attitudinal, cultural, and human,” and that
theater commanders need to keep abreast of
these concerns on a daily basis. In a counterinsurgency, small units supply key intelligence to higher commands rather than
the other way around. For this reason, all
soldiers must be intelligence collectors who
enable higher level analysts to create “comprehensive narratives” for each district that
“describe changes in the economy, atmospherics, development, corruption, governance, and enemy activity” and “provide
the kind of context that is invaluable up the
chain of command.”30 However, General
Flynn argues that brigade-level commanders
Comparison of Studies Sampling Commander HTT Assessments
Successful
Partial Success
No Impact or Ineffective
Very useful
Varied usefulness
Not useful
5
8
3
Institute for Defense Analyses
Success: the Brigade Combat
Partial Success:
No impact
Study
Team could not have been suc-
on balance, the HTT did
(regardless of reason)
cessful without the HTT efforts
more good than harm
West Point Study
Highly valued
4
Center for Naval Analyses
Study
National Defense University
Study
26
JFQ / issue 70, 3 rd quarter 2013
26
9
1
Effective
Mixed effectiveness
Not effective
8
4
1
ndupres s . ndu. edu
U.S. Army (Raul Elliott)
LAMB ET AL.
must authorize a select group of analysts to
retrieve information from the ground level
and make it available to a broader audience,
similar to the way journalists work. These
analysts must leave their chairs and visit the
people who operate at the grassroots level—
civil affairs officers, [Provincial Reconstruction Teams], atmospherics teams, Afghan
liaison officers, female engagement teams,
willing [nongovernmental organizations]
and development organizations, United
Nations officials, psychological operations
teams, human terrain teams, and staff
officers with infantry battalions—to name
a few.31
In short, primary collection is done at
the small unit level where there are “many
sensors,” and analysis of the diverse descriptive inputs is done at the brigade level, where
there are more resources, and then the
information is passed along to the regional
(or division) level to create a comprehensive
composite understanding of the situation.
The Flynn explanation for how the
entire force, aided by “select teams of civilian
analysts,” should produce cultural intelligence helps make sense of the diverse commander assessments of HTT performance.
The few, small, and costly HTTs best served
brigade commanders at the second level of
cultural knowledge rather than being used at
the first level as small-unit data collectors. If
the teams were used as data collectors, they
perhaps pleased commanders but ultimately
were too few in number to make a difference.
As one brigade commander commented,
using HTTs as collectors was like using
a squirt gun to fight a forest fire. HTTs
cannot serve as a substitute for a larger, more
comprehensive effort to collect and analyze
cultural intelligence. Instead, the optimum
role for HTTs is to perform at the second level
of cultural knowledge where they can help
explain local human terrain to the command
staff and facilitate decisionmaking. HTTs
that did so improved brigade command decisionmaking and received the most effusive
commander praise.
With the nuances of commander
assessments and the optimal role for HTTs
clarified, it is easier to make sense of other
factors that determined the teams’ performance. There were several broad preconditions for HTT productivity, the first of
which was beyond the control of HTS and
the HTTs:
n d u p res s .ndu.edu
Human Terrain System leader and PRT members listen to briefing during meeting at Contingency
Operating Base Speicher, Tikrit, Iraq
■■ HTTs had to be appended to a brigade
commander and staff that were committed to a
population-centric counterinsurgency approach.
■■ HTTs had to prove to typically skeptical commanders that they could make a
contribution.
■■ HTTs had to overcome the many
intrinsic constraints on productivity that
characterized the HTS program at the organizational, team, and individual levels.
These preconditions for success
underscore several points. First, there are
limits to what any sociocultural program
can do without a consensus among brigade
commanders on the critical importance of
human terrain, the role their own troops
play in collecting human terrain data, and
the analytic capability HTTs are supposed
to provide to the brigade staffs as part of a
larger, theater-wide human terrain–centric
intelligence architecture. Absent a “whole
force” approach to developing and using
sociocultural knowledge such as General
Flynn envisioned, the ability of HTS or any
other small sociocultural teams to make a
difference is quite limited.
Moreover, even if brigade commanders were open to the population-centric
approach to counterinsurgency that theater
commanders were emphasizing—and this
has never uniformly been the case32—they
still took time for HTTs to prove themselves.
This reduced efficiency, especially given
the yearlong brigade tours for Afghanistan
that forced teams to repeatedly adjust to
new commanders. In such circumstances, it
was important to field cohesive teams that
could be immediately productive. Ideally,
HTTs should have been given more general
expertise on Afghanistan and greater access
to specific information about the areas they
would operate in as early as possible. They
should have been well-functioning teams
composed of individuals with diverse expertise that trained together, bonded, and found
their place on brigade staffs prior to deployment. They should have relieved predecessor
teams in the field with a period of overlap
with the outgoing teams, not as individual
replacements. They should have had longer
periods of deployment to deepen their
expertise on local conditions and to permit
the desired overlap with relieving HTTs and
brigades (see the larger study for a detailed
explanation of small cross-functional team
performance factors).
For a variety of reasons, none of these
conditions applied. Instead, HTTs were
conceptualized, created, and managed in a
way that made it hard for them to serve as
cultural knowledge integrators for brigade
commanders. Among other things, quickly
winning commanders’ confidence was
difficult given the way HTTs were raised
and trained. Since HTT members were
individually assigned to teams after arriving in country, they did not typically have
a chance to get to know the other members,
much less the brigade commanders and
issue 70, 3 rd quarter 2013 / JFQ
27
FORUM | The Way Ahead for Human Terrain Teams
staffs. Without predeployment training
as a team, HTTs could not work out team
dynamics in a less stressful environment or
establish team decisionmaking processes
until they reached the field where each new
team member’s arrival potentially disrupted
established productive team practices.
Deploying members singly inadvertently
signaled that they were valued as individual
assets rather than as teams. In a stressful
combat environment, the failure to bond as
teams was sometimes crippling.
by repeatedly integrating newly arriving
members who deployed individually in
staggered timeframes rather than as teams.
This was a difficult proposition, and unfortunately, HTT leader performance was as
variable as HTT performance. Autocratic
team leaders were particularly out of place
given the composition of the teams and their
mission. They were a major factor in notable
team failures. Those leaders who were able
to overcome the many impediments to HTT
effectiveness were indispensable and heroic
leaders had to get their teams operating smoothly
and prove themselves to commanders quickly since their
standard length of deployment was only 9 months
Moreover, the training the teams
received was not based on a theory of HTT
performance that was tested by feedback
from actual in-country experience. Thus,
the HTS program had no way to improve
HTT learning and prepare teams for the
significant challenges they would face. Some
teams overcame their interpersonal conflicts
and learned how to channel conflict into
productive avenues that improved team
performance, but many did not. If teams
could not resolve conflicts productively, they
stood little chance of developing a cohesive
team culture or trust. In addition, the quality
of HTT recruits was highly variable. Many
recruits were alienated during training
or joined for the wrong reasons and were
unproductive after they deployed. In many
cases, team members were not mentally or
physically conditioned to operate in hostile or
austere environments. In the rush to institute
the program, HTS relied on high individual
member remuneration, and even so it was
hard to find and attract individuals with deep
regional and linguistic expertise. Job satisfaction on high-performing small teams is more
a function of team bonding and productivity than individual remuneration, but the
program was structured to make the former
difficult and to rely on the latter.
With so many impediments to high
performance, HTTs were critically dependent on stellar and versatile leadership.
Leaders had to get their teams operating
smoothly and prove themselves to commanders quickly since their standard length
of deployment was only 9 months and
they had to ensure productivity over time
28
JFQ / issue 70, 3 rd quarter 2013
catalysts who were much admired by their
team members. The HTS selection process
did not screen team leader candidates for the
attributes that correlated with such high performance; their presence was largely a matter
of happenstance.
With performance constrained by so
many external and internal factors, it is not
surprising that it was variable. Even so, most
commanders valued HTTs, which is a testimony to the people who populated high-performing HTTs, but also to the general lack
of sociocultural knowledge in U.S. military
forces that made even limited HTT contributions so necessary and conspicuous.
Future of HTS
The HTT experience demonstrates that
it is difficult to develop sociocultural knowledge quickly; difficult to retain, update, and
transfer that knowledge between units; and
almost impossible to do these things without
a well-developed concept for HTT performance that is based on empirical feedback
from actual experience in-theater. Thus, the
U.S. military needs a standing capability to
provide a baseline of sociocultural knowledge
that can be rapidly expanded in wartime.
HTS and the many similar programs that
stood up and proliferated during the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq could have been run
much more efficiently if they emerged from
a standing sociocultural knowledge program
designed for that purpose.
Looking to the future, HTS now faces
the challenge of transitioning to a standing peacetime sociocultural knowledge
capacity that provides a different capability
than the HTTs but can expand quickly to
generate a HTT-like capability when U.S.
forces go to war. To execute this transition,
HTS will have to overcome a great deal of
organizational inertia. The U.S. military has
a strong cultural aversion to irregular warfare
and to devoting resources to sociocultural
knowledge.33 This aversion is demonstrated
repeatedly as the military abandons sociocultural knowledge and the means to acquire it
once conflicts are over. Despite expressions
of senior leader support, the HTS program
is now being curtailed to save resources, and
many believe it is an open question whether
the knowledge painfully acquired by the
program will be retained.
One way to make the future of HTS
more secure would be to house it in an
organization that is predisposed to value
sociocultural knowledge. The U.S. Army
Special Operations Command (USASOC)
meets the requirement for an organization
that is familiar with what it takes to field
small, high-performing, cross-functional
teams such as HTTs. USASOC commands
Special Forces, which already use a female
version of Human Terrain Teams as well
as civil affairs and military information
support operations units that would benefit
from better sociocultural knowledge.
USASOC is part of U.S. Special Operations
Command, which is often assigned the lead
for irregular warfare and has other units
(for example, Navy SEALs) that use Human
Terrain Teams of one sort or another. For
these and other reasons, USASOC might be
a good fit for HTS.
Whether or not HTS is housed in
USASOC, the need for a standing program
to provide sociocultural knowledge should
be well recognized after a decade of difficult
military operations. Some Army observers,
for example, believe the need for cultural
understanding is one of the “top 5” lessons
learned from the post-9/11 wars.34 If this
lesson is acted upon and HTS survives,
those who lead it into the future hopefully
will benefit from a thorough understanding of how and why HTTs performed as
they did over the past decade. In that case,
it should be possible to improve both HTT
performance and chances for success in
future irregular warfare operations. If,
however, the program cannot learn from
the past, or fades away for lack of support
or other reasons, it is quite likely that the
future of sociocultural knowledge in the
ndupres s . ndu. edu
LAMB ET AL.
U.S. military will be much like its past—a
story of too little knowledge, obtained and
disseminated at great cost, often arriving
too late to ensure success. JFQ
This article is based on the
authors’ book entitled Human Terrain
Teams: An Organizational Innovation
for Sociocultural Knowledge in Irregular Warfare (Institute for World Politics
Press, forthcoming).
NOTES
1
Doyle McManus, “McManus: A smaller,
smarter military: The best-equipped army in the
world can still lose a war if it doesn’t understand
the people it’s fighting,” Los Angeles Times, April
22, 2012.
2
Leo Shane III and Kevin Baron, “Petraeus
Confirmation Hearing, Live,” Stars and Stripes,
June 29, 2010.
3
Colonel Martin P. Schweitzer, USA, Commander, 4th Brigade Combat Team/82nd Airborne,
Statement Before the House Armed Services Committee, Terrorism and Unconventional Threats
Subcommittee and Research and Education Subcommittee of the Science and Technology Committee, U.S. House of Representatives, 110th Cong., 2nd
sess., Hearings on Role of the Social and Behavioral
Sciences in National Security, April 24, 2008.
4
See Jeffrey Bordin, A Crisis of Trust and Cultural Incompatibility: A Red Team Study of Mutual
Perceptions of Afghan National Security Force
Personnel and U.S. Soldiers in Understanding and
Mitigating the Phenomena of ANSF-Committed
Fratricide-Murders, May 12, 2011, available at
<www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB370/
docs/Document%2011.pdf>.
5
For an explanation of the variables, see James
Douglas Orton with Christopher J. Lamb, “Interagency National Security Teams: Can Social Science
Contribute?” PRISM 2, no. 2 (March 2011), 47–64.
6
See Cindy R. Jebb, Laurel J. Hummel, and
Tania M. Chacho, Human Terrain Team Trip
Report: A “Team of Teams,” unpublished report
prepared by the U.S. Military Academy’s Interdisciplinary Team in Iraq for U.S. Army Training and
Doctrine Command (TRADOC) G2 (Intelligence),
2008; Paul Joseph, Changing the Battle Space? How
Human Terrain Teams Define “Success” in Iraq and
Afghanistan, paper prepared for the Seventh Interdisciplinary Conference on War and Peace, Prague,
Czech Republic, April 30–May 2, 2010; Yvette
Clinton et al., Congressionally Directed Assessment of the Human Terrain System (Alexandria,
VA: Center for Naval Analyses, November 2010);
Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), Contingency
n d u p res s .ndu.edu
Capabilities: Analysis of Human Terrain Teams in
Afghanistan—Draft Final Report, December 2011;
Jack A. Jackson et al., Contingency Capabilities:
Analysis of Human Terrain Teams in Afghanistan,
Draft Final Report, IDA Paper P-4-4809 (Alexandria, VA: IDA, December 2011).
7
Sharon Hamilton, “HTS Director’s
Message,” Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin 37, no. 4 (October–December 2011).
8
U.S. National Research Council, Experimentation and Rapid Prototyping in Support of
Counterterrorism (Washington, DC: National
Academies Press, 2009), 22.
9
Robert H. Scales, Jr., “Army Transformation:
Implications for the Future,” testimony before the
House Armed Services Committee, Washington,
DC, July 15, 2004.
10
Montgomery McFate and Steve Fondacaro,
“Reflections on the Human Terrain System
During the First 4 Years,” PRISM 2, no. 4 (September 2011), 67.
11
“Authorization to Release Joint IED Defeat
Organization [JIEDDO] Funds for Human Terrain
System,” memorandum for record, signed by
JIEDDO Director Montgomery C. Meigs, June 12,
2006.
12
The Human Terrain System Yearly Report
2007–2008, 5–7. Document in authors’ possession.
13
Ibid., 155, 236–237.
14
Robert M. Gates, “Landon Lecture,” Kansas
State University, Manhattan, Kansas, November
26, 2007.
15
American Anthropological Association
(AAA), “American Anthropological Association’s Executive Board Statement on the Human
Terrain System Project,” October 31, 2007; Sharon
Weinberger, “Gates: Human Terrain Teams Going
Through ‘Growing Pains,’” Wired, April 15, 2008.
16
TRADOC, Office of Internal Review and
Audit Compliance, results briefing, May 12, 2010,
attached as appendix G to Clinton et al., 237–250.
17
Steve Fondacaro, former HTS program
manager, interview by authors, October 25, 2011.
18
TRADOC, Office of Internal Review and
Audit Compliance, results briefing, May 12, 2010,
attached as appendix G to Clinton et al., 237–250.
19
AAA; Zenia Helbig, Personal Perspective on
the Human Terrain System Program, delivered at
the AAA’s annual conference, November 29, 2007;
Fawzia Sheikh, “Army to Boost Human Terrain
Team Effort Despite Growing Pains,” Inside the
Army 20, no. 22 (June 2008).
20
Editorial, “A Social Contract: Efforts to
Inform U.S. Military Policy with Insights from the
Social Sciences Could be a Win-Win Approach,”
Nature 454, July 10, 2008, 138; Editorial, “Failure
in the field: The US Military’s Human-Terrain
Programme Needs to be Brought to a Swift Close,”
Nature 456, December 11, 2008, 676.
21
H.R. 2647, National Defense Authorization
Act for Fiscal Year 2010, 111th Cong. (Washington,
DC: Government Printing Office, 2009), 155.
22
John McHugh, “Transcript: Defense Writers
Group,” A Project of the Center for Media and
Security, New York and Washington, DC, March
31, 2010, 10.
23
“Appendix F: Position Descriptions for
Human Terrain Teams,” documents include a
February 2, 2010, job classification date; attached
as appendix G to Clinton et al., 221–236.
24
Ironically, what is publically known about
these investigations substantiated HTS management’s view that elements of TRADOC responsible
for contracting and personnel hiring performed
poorly. See Clinton et al., 42, 135, appendix G.
25
HTS established new “policies and procedures in areas as diverse as ethical certification,
human resources, peer product review, civilian
evaluations, team product quality control, and
individual position qualification.” See Hamilton.
26
Joanne Kimberlin, “Part 4: In the Enemy’s
Lair, Fighting for Afghanistan’s Future,” The Virginian Pilot, September 29, 2010.
27
U.S. Special Operations Command had
some classified programs related to human terrain
under way earlier.
28
Jebb, Hummel, Chacho, 3; Clinton et al., 153;
data obtained from S.K. Numrich, IDA, email on
April 18, 2012.
29
Arthur Speyer and Job Henning, “MCIA’s
Cultural Intelligence Methodology and Lessons
Learned,” in Socio-Cultural Perspectives: A New
Intelligence Paradigm, Report on the Conference
at the MITRE Corporation, McLean, Virginia,
September 12, 2006, ed. LeeEllen Friedland, Gary
W. Shaeff, and Jessica Glicken Turnley, Document
Number 07-1220, Technical Report MTR070244
(McLean, VA: MITRE, 2007).
30
Michael T. Flynn, Matt Pottinger, and Paul
Batchelor, Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan (Washington, DC:
Center for a New American Security, 2010), 9, 12.
31
Ibid., 17.
32
Not all unit commanders have embraced or
supported a population-centric counterinsurgency
campaign plan for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The debate over its value continues to the
present day. See Elisabeth Bumiller, “West Point Is
Divided on a War Doctrine’s Fate,” The New York
Times, May 27, 2012.
33
See Christopher J. Lamb, Matthew Schmidt,
and Berit Fitzsimmons, MRAPs, Irregular Warfare,
and Pentagon Reform, Institute for National Strategic Studies, Occasional Paper 6 (Washington, DC:
NDU Press, 2009).
34
Colonel Robert Forrester, deputy director
of the Center for Army Lessons Learned, cited
in Drew Brooks, “Lessons Learned in Iraq War
Will Apply in Future Conflicts,” The Fayetteville
Observer, January 1, 2012.
issue 70, 3 rd quarter 2013 / JFQ
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