US MILITARY EMBRACES HUMAN TERRAIN TEAM CRAP SCIENCE: Gamey hearts and minds mutton rebranded as tasty lamb
It is standard American hubris to believe when things are going badly, homegrown eggheads will ride to the rescue with something capable of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat.
Sometimes nowhere does this flavor of wishful thinking seem more entrenched than in the US military.
In today's New York Times, the latest miracle -- which has been gaining speed as a cliche for a few months -- is the Human Terrain Team at the battlefront.
"In this isolated Taliban stronghold in eastern Afghanistan, American paratroopers are fielding what they consider a crucial new weapon in counterinsurgency operations here: a soft-spoken civilian anthropologist named Tracy," reported the Times.
"Tracy, who asked that her surname not be used for security reasons, is a member of the first Human Terrain Team, an experimental Pentagon program that assigns anthropologists and other social scientists to American combat units in Afghanistan and Iraq."
The Human Terrain Team is a hot military fad, something which generals can employ to momentarily delude themselves and journalists into thinking a new technique can win a war that, as far as the rest of the world and well over half the people in this country are concerned, has been decisively lost in Iraq.
In March of this year, DD blog touched upon the Human Terrain Team -- or HTT -- fad.
HTT was and is old mutton now reseasoned as lamb because what it used to be -- the winning of hearts-and-minds -- got you laughed at as out of it.
Now -- winning hearts and minds, which the American military has always been notoriously rotten at practicing -- is packaged as a system defined by corporate-type jargon so someone in the service can call it their unique contribution, a new giftbox of allegedly more considerate personnel to take to foreign lands where things are blowing up beyond control.
From a military publication called the Military Review on "The Human Terrain System" by Jacob Kipp, Lester Grau, Karl Prinslow and Capt. Don Smith, one reads:
"The core building block of the system will be a five-person human terrain team (HTT) ... The HTT [provides] the commander [with]...civilian social scientists trained and skilled in cultural data research and analysis."
"During the Vietnam war, [a project] was administered to win the 'hearts and minds' of the South Vietnamese people ... In the above photo, a soldier ... is playing with children of An Dien ... a Viet Cong stronghold west of Saigon..."
DD has included the specious photograph of the smiling Vietnamese children included in "Human Terrain System," meant by the authors to show how it was first implemented.
Yes, I think we can all agree that HTT/hearts-and-minds in Vietnam really worked.
"In the current climate, there is broad agreement among operators ... that many, if not most, of the challenges we face in Iraq and Afghanistan have resulted from our failure early on to understand the culture in which [US] forces were working," continues the journal. "In other words, we failed to heed the lessons of Vietnam ... and we did not take the steps necessary to deal appropriately with the insurgencies within the context of their unique cultural environments."
"...With the introduction of the Human Terrain System and its human terrain teams, future deploying brigades will get a running start once they enter threater. They will be culturally empowered and able to key on the people and so prosecute counter-insurgency ... not by fire and maneuver but by winning hearts and minds. In turn, the Army, our Nation, and the people of Iraq and Afghanistan will benefit from the fielding of this powerful new instrument for conducting stability operations and reconstruction."
It's hard to think of anyone with common sense and whose pay grade, rank or job description not preclude they keep their mouths shut, not laughing at such conceits.
The keys to look for in the HTT delusion are the national tics of empty bragging and wishful thinking.
"...[The] people of Iraq will benefit from the fielding of this powerful new instrument," reads like a contribution from apple-polishers rather than deep thinkers.
Our military will get "a running start" and it will be "culturally empowered."
In his 1991 book, BAD, World War II veteran Paul Fussell wrote: "The United States especially overflows with [bad thinking] because of all countries it is the most addicted to self-praise ... even more than France."
As remarkable as "Human Terrain System" is in its weird and clouded military groupthink, get it here.
"[Criticism] is emerging in academia," reports the Times on HTT.
"Citing the past misuse of social sciences in counterinsurgency campaigns, including in Vietnam and Latin America, some denounce the program as 'mercenary anthropology' that exploits social science for political gain. Opponents fear that, whatever their intention, the scholars who work with the military could inadvertently cause all anthropologists to be viewed as intelligence gatherers for the American military."
When the reader is done perusing the "Human Terrain System" article they'll have noticed that its authors specifically invoke Vietnam.
The idea, of course, is a variation on the old excuse -- if we had just done this more we could have won that war. Just like if we just would have bombed them more, we could have won that war. Or if we hadn't been stabbed in the back at home, we would have won that war.
Examination of the footnotes is also in order.
The authors bow to T. E. Lawrence's "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" -- notoriously turned into a PowerPoint slide exhibit by David Petraeus, now used as a Magic Eight-Ball of Answers in much the same way as Sun Tzu's little book of idiot savant aphorisms on war was prior to the invasion.
"Hugh Gusterson, an anthropology professor at George Mason University, and 10 other anthropologists are circulating an online pledge calling for anthropologists to boycott the teams, particularly in Iraq," continues the Times.
"While often presented by its proponents as work that builds a more secure world ... at base, it contributes instead to a brutal war of occupation which has entailed massive casualties," continued Gusterson.
Crap Science for the War Zone in today's NY Times.
From the DD blog archive -- on HTT from March.
It is standard American hubris to believe when things are going badly, homegrown eggheads will ride to the rescue with something capable of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat.
Sometimes nowhere does this flavor of wishful thinking seem more entrenched than in the US military.
In today's New York Times, the latest miracle -- which has been gaining speed as a cliche for a few months -- is the Human Terrain Team at the battlefront.
"In this isolated Taliban stronghold in eastern Afghanistan, American paratroopers are fielding what they consider a crucial new weapon in counterinsurgency operations here: a soft-spoken civilian anthropologist named Tracy," reported the Times.
"Tracy, who asked that her surname not be used for security reasons, is a member of the first Human Terrain Team, an experimental Pentagon program that assigns anthropologists and other social scientists to American combat units in Afghanistan and Iraq."
The Human Terrain Team is a hot military fad, something which generals can employ to momentarily delude themselves and journalists into thinking a new technique can win a war that, as far as the rest of the world and well over half the people in this country are concerned, has been decisively lost in Iraq.
In March of this year, DD blog touched upon the Human Terrain Team -- or HTT -- fad.
HTT was and is old mutton now reseasoned as lamb because what it used to be -- the winning of hearts-and-minds -- got you laughed at as out of it.
Now -- winning hearts and minds, which the American military has always been notoriously rotten at practicing -- is packaged as a system defined by corporate-type jargon so someone in the service can call it their unique contribution, a new giftbox of allegedly more considerate personnel to take to foreign lands where things are blowing up beyond control.
From a military publication called the Military Review on "The Human Terrain System" by Jacob Kipp, Lester Grau, Karl Prinslow and Capt. Don Smith, one reads:
"The core building block of the system will be a five-person human terrain team (HTT) ... The HTT [provides] the commander [with]...civilian social scientists trained and skilled in cultural data research and analysis."
"During the Vietnam war, [a project] was administered to win the 'hearts and minds' of the South Vietnamese people ... In the above photo, a soldier ... is playing with children of An Dien ... a Viet Cong stronghold west of Saigon..."
DD has included the specious photograph of the smiling Vietnamese children included in "Human Terrain System," meant by the authors to show how it was first implemented.
Yes, I think we can all agree that HTT/hearts-and-minds in Vietnam really worked.
"In the current climate, there is broad agreement among operators ... that many, if not most, of the challenges we face in Iraq and Afghanistan have resulted from our failure early on to understand the culture in which [US] forces were working," continues the journal. "In other words, we failed to heed the lessons of Vietnam ... and we did not take the steps necessary to deal appropriately with the insurgencies within the context of their unique cultural environments."
"...With the introduction of the Human Terrain System and its human terrain teams, future deploying brigades will get a running start once they enter threater. They will be culturally empowered and able to key on the people and so prosecute counter-insurgency ... not by fire and maneuver but by winning hearts and minds. In turn, the Army, our Nation, and the people of Iraq and Afghanistan will benefit from the fielding of this powerful new instrument for conducting stability operations and reconstruction."
It's hard to think of anyone with common sense and whose pay grade, rank or job description not preclude they keep their mouths shut, not laughing at such conceits.
The keys to look for in the HTT delusion are the national tics of empty bragging and wishful thinking.
"...[The] people of Iraq will benefit from the fielding of this powerful new instrument," reads like a contribution from apple-polishers rather than deep thinkers.
Our military will get "a running start" and it will be "culturally empowered."
In his 1991 book, BAD, World War II veteran Paul Fussell wrote: "The United States especially overflows with [bad thinking] because of all countries it is the most addicted to self-praise ... even more than France."
As remarkable as "Human Terrain System" is in its weird and clouded military groupthink, get it here.
"[Criticism] is emerging in academia," reports the Times on HTT.
"Citing the past misuse of social sciences in counterinsurgency campaigns, including in Vietnam and Latin America, some denounce the program as 'mercenary anthropology' that exploits social science for political gain. Opponents fear that, whatever their intention, the scholars who work with the military could inadvertently cause all anthropologists to be viewed as intelligence gatherers for the American military."
When the reader is done perusing the "Human Terrain System" article they'll have noticed that its authors specifically invoke Vietnam.
The idea, of course, is a variation on the old excuse -- if we had just done this more we could have won that war. Just like if we just would have bombed them more, we could have won that war. Or if we hadn't been stabbed in the back at home, we would have won that war.
Examination of the footnotes is also in order.
The authors bow to T. E. Lawrence's "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" -- notoriously turned into a PowerPoint slide exhibit by David Petraeus, now used as a Magic Eight-Ball of Answers in much the same way as Sun Tzu's little book of idiot savant aphorisms on war was prior to the invasion.
"Hugh Gusterson, an anthropology professor at George Mason University, and 10 other anthropologists are circulating an online pledge calling for anthropologists to boycott the teams, particularly in Iraq," continues the Times.
"While often presented by its proponents as work that builds a more secure world ... at base, it contributes instead to a brutal war of occupation which has entailed massive casualties," continued Gusterson.
Crap Science for the War Zone in today's NY Times.
From the DD blog archive -- on HTT from March.
posted by George Smith at 3:00 PM
1 Comments:
That note on the use of TE Lawrence is most enlightening. Lawrence, of course, is not much counted as an Arabis. His achievements as a guerilla warrior were fairly limited. But he was a great propagandist in his own cause.
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