In 2005, anthropologist Mongtomery McFate co-authored a pair of articles in the journal *Military Review *that helped set the stage for the Human Terrain System, the Army's effort to embed social scientists in combat units. Four years later, a Marine Corps officer is lashing out at the program -- and he's using Military Review to do it.
Major Ben Connable, like McFate, believes that it's crucial for the U.S. armed forces to understand the cultural landscapes of its battlegrounds. But he thinks the Human Terrain approach -- employing civilian social scientists as commanders' cultural advisors -- is all wrong, and that most of the assumptions behind the program are "broadly inaccurate." Instead, Connable argues, soldiers and marines can do the job just fine on their own. He titles the article, "All Our Eggs in a Broken Basket: How the Human Terrain System is Undermining Sustainable Military Cultural Competence." He could've easily called it, "We Don't Need No Stinkin' Anthropologists."
McFate and others have promised that Human Terrain teams would be able to find non-violent means to resolve conflicts, by exploiting a war zone's cultural seams. Social scientists may not have specific expertise in, say, Afghanistan or Iraq. But they know how to ask the right questions.
Specialized troops have been doing cultural deep-dives for years, Connable responds. Plus, they know the turf -- and the military -- way better than any academic.
Connable also blasts the Human Terrain's examples of its successes -- including a plan to engage with local mullahs in Afghanistan, to hold a tribal congress to address grievances, and to provide a volleyball net to build rapport with local villagers. These examples demonstrate common sense in a COIN [counterinsurgency] environment, not breakthroughs. Hundreds of Army and Marine staffs that accepted culture as a significant element of terrain have been doing these things on a daily basis across Afghanistan and Iraq for years without HTS support."
The $130 million Human Terrain System (HTS) has come under heavy criticism, pretty much since its inception. But most of the assaults -- well, at least the public assaults -- have come from outsiders. Connable's opposition is notable, because it comes from within the military community. To anthropologist and Human Terrain critic David Price, Connable's article shows that "HTS as designed has no hope of meeting the needs of those it was designed to serve and it even undermines doctrine."
Connable isn't exactly a disinterested observer, however. He's a "Foreign Area Officer," or FAO. They're the troops who are supposed to their "linguistic, historical, and cultural knowledge about particular regions" to aid commanders. Which makes the Human Terrain program his bureaucratic nemesis. Much of Connable's article reads like a cry for the Pentagon to provide more cash to FAOs, rather than the competing social science project. If there isn't enough cultural expertise on a battlefield, Connable writes, "then it is the clear responsibility of the services and the commanders to better train and prepare their Soldiers and Marines so they can fulfill their roles. If there is an insufficient number of available FAOs then... it is the responsibility of the services to create more. Further investment in the preexisting and combat-proven FAO program would show long-term commitment to military cultural competence." Stop paying those social scientists, in other words -- and give us the money, instead.
UPDATE: There's also a whiff of inter-service rivalry in Connable's work, one commenter notes. Human Terrain is an Army program. In an early paper, Connable argues that the Marines are the military's "preeminent culture warriors."
