Download or read book Human Terrain Teams written by Christopher J. Lamb and published by . This book was released on 2013-06 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study explains the performance of Human Terrain Teams, why the large majority of commanders found them useful, and why collectively they did not ameliorate-much less reverse-growing cross-cultural tensions between U.S. forces and Afghans. It examines the tremendous challenges the Human Terrain Team program faced in starting and rapidly expanding a non-traditional military capability, and why some challenges were met successfully while others were not. First, a historical analysis explains how external forces and management decisions affected team performance. An organizational analysis then explains the variations in team performance by examining the teams with variables substantiated by previous studies of small cross-functional teams. Finally, all available commander observations on Human Terrain Team performance are analyzed to better determine why commanders were satisfied or dissatisfied with their teams. The insights from the three analyses-historical, organizational and commander assessments-are then integrated. The results demonstrate that Human Terrain Teams had to overcome numerous organizational limitations to perform well, but that they were able to meet the expectations of commanders who did not fully appreciate the optimum role the teams could play in an integrated counterinsurgency strategy.
Download or read book The Human Terrain System written by Christopher J. Sims and published by Department of the Army. This book was released on 2015 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Human Terrain System embedded civilians primarily in brigade combat teams (BCTs) in Iraq and Afghanistan between 2007 and 2014 to act as a collection and dispersal mechanism for sociocultural comprehension. Set against the backdrop of the program's evolution, the experiences of these social scientists clarifies the U.S. Army's decision to integrate social scientists at the tactical level in conflict. Based on interviews, program documents, material from Freedom of Information Act requests, and secondary sources, this book finds a series of limiting factors inhibiting social science research at the tactical level, common to both Iraq and Afghanistan. Complexity in integrating civilians into the military decision-making cycle, in creating timely research with a high level of fidelity, and in making granular research that resonated with brigade staff all contributed to inhibiting the overall effect of the Human Terrain System. Yet, while high operational tempo in contested spaces complicates social science research at the tactical level, the author argues that there is a continued requirement for a residual capability to be maintained by the U.S. Army. Related items: Other resources produced by the Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College can be found here: https: //bookstore.gpo.gov/agency/1609 Weapon of Choice: U.S. Army Special Operations Forces in Afghanistan can be found here: https: //bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/008-029-00431-3 Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq and Beyond can be found here: https: //bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/008-046-00274-6 Surging South of Baghdad: The 3d Infantry Division and Task Force MARNE in Iraq, 2007-2008 can be found here: https: //bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/008-029-00522-1 Iraq and Persian Gulf Wars collection can be found here: https: //bookstore.gpo.gov/catalog/us-military-history/battles-wars/iraq-persian-gulf-wars Training Humans for the Human Domain can be found here: https: //bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/008-000-01173-7 Paid to Perform: Aligning Total Military Compensation With Talent Management can be found here: https: //bookstore.gpo.gov/node/49300/edit The Effective Use of Reserve Personnel in the U.S. Military: Lessons From The United Kingdom Reserve Model can be found at this link: https: //bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/008-000-01100-1 Afghanistan War collection can be found here: https: //bookstore.gpo.gov/catalog/us-military-history/wars-conflicts/afghanistan-war
Download or read book HUMAN TERRAIN SYSTEM OPERATIONALLY RELEVANT SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH IN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN written by Christopher J. Sims and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Social Science Goes to War written by Montgomery McFate and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-11 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Human Terrain System (HTS) was catapulted into existence in 2006 by the US military's urgent need for knowledge of the human dimension of the battlespace in Iraq and Afghanistan. Its centrepiece was embedded groups of mixed military and civilian personnel, known as Human Terrain Teams (HTTs), whose mission was to conduct social science research and analysis and to advise military commanders about the local population. Bringing social science - and actual social scientists - to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was bold and challenging. Despite the controversy over HTS among scholars, there is little good, reliable source material written by those with experience of HTS or about the actual work carried out by teams in theatre. This volume goes beyond the anecdotes, snippets and blogs to provide a comprehensive, objective and detailed view of HTS. The contributors put the program in historical context, discuss the obstacles it faced, analyse its successes, and detail the work of the teams downrange. Most importantly, they capture some of the diverse lived experience of HTS scholars and practitioners drawn from an eclectic array of the social sciences.
Download or read book Military Anthropology written by Montgomery McFate and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In almost every military intervention in its history, the US has made cultural mistakes that hindered attainment of its policy goals. From the strategic bombing of Vietnam to the accidental burning of the Koran in Afghanistan, it has blundered around with little consideration of local cultural beliefs and for the long-term effects on the host nation's society. Cultural anthropology--the so-called "handmaiden of colonialism"--has historically served as an intellectual bridge between Western powers and local nationals. What light can it shed on the intersection of the US military and foreign societies today? This book tells the story of anthropologists who worked directly for the military, such as Ursula Graham Bower, the only woman to hold a British combat command during WWII. Each faced challenges including the negative outcomes of exporting Western political models and errors of perception. Ranging from the British colonial era in Africa to the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Military Anthropology illustrates the conceptual, cultural and practical barriers encountered by military organisations operating in societies vastly different from their own.
Download or read book The Tender Soldier written by Vanessa M. Gezari and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-08-13 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part of the Pentagon's most daring and controversial attempt since Vietnam to bring social science to the Afghanistan battlefield, three tough-minded American civilians find their humanity tested and their lives forever changed by this little-known mission.
Download or read book Human Terrain System written by Christopher J. Sims and published by Declassified Press. This book was released on 2018-04-19 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To avoid the footpaths which may have been mined with improvised explosive devices (IEDs), Ryan Evans, a U.S. federal civilian, was walking across a wheat field in Babaji, Helmand Province, in the spring of 2011. Evans was attached to the Royal Highland Fusiliers (2 Scots), C Company, a heavy infantry patrol tasked with providing security in the vicinity. Begun 2 years earlier, the Helmand Food Zone Program was a form of development intervention which offered subsidies, seed, and fertilizers to farmers who replaced lucrative opium cultivation from poppies with growing and harvesting wheat and vegetable crops. Babaji had been in the control of insurgents until a few months earlier and had not received any assistance from the program during the previous year; consequently, there were tensions between the community and British forces. As Evans and the patrol emerged from the field, an Afghan man sitting nearby, clearly irate, shouted in Pashto that the British soldiers had wanted the farmer to grow wheat instead of poppy, and then the same British soldiers walked through their fields. At the immediate level, the encounter demonstrated the direct link between conflict, food security, and local trade, but conflict has many interrelated and mutual dependencies such that the anecdote is instructive on myriad broader milieus. Where, for example, is the tipping point that makes a civilian value creating an expression of discontent to a heavily armed patrol above his immediate physical security? Do livelihoods and cultures affect military strategies? Are there interdependencies between insurgencies, societies, and economies? Does the language of war require a sociological grammar in order to be understood? Armed conflict is a human enterprise such that, by extension, understanding of the human dimension in a given area of operations should be thought integral to planning successful operations...
Download or read book Anthropological Controversies written by Gavin Weston and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-11 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book uses controversies as a gateway through which to explore the origins, ethics, key moments, and people in the history of anthropology. It draws on a variety of cases including complicity in "human zoos", Malinowski’s diaries, and the Human Terrain System to explore how anthropological controversies act as a driving force for change, how they offer a window into the history of and research practice in the discipline, and how they might frame wider debates such as those around reflexivity, cultural relativism, and the politics of representation. The volume provokes discussion about research ethics and practice with tangible examples where gray areas are brought into sharp relief. The controversies examined in the book all involve moral or practical ambiguities that offer an opportunity for students to engage with the debate and the dilemmas faced by anthropologists, both in relation to the specific incidents covered and to the problems posed more generally due to the intimate and political implications of ethnographic research.
Download or read book Soft Counterinsurgency Human Terrain Teams and US Military Strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan written by Paul Joseph and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-06-06 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Soft" Counterinsurgency reviews the promises and achievements of Human Terrain Teams, the small groups of social scientists that were eventually embedded in every combat brigade in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Download or read book The Human Terrain System written by Christopher J. Sims and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2015-12-24 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The announcement that the Human Terrain System (HTS) was brought to a close in the fall of 2014 met with a flurry of responses. Commentators assessed the character and content of the social science research program and several identified plausible legacies that it may bequeath U.S. Armed Services. Often the conclusions therein were mixed, hinting instructively at the absence of a strong empirical record of the program. Therefore, this book is a welcomed larger study of the HTS, one of the first investigations to delineate the experiences of former program members, chart the stance of the American Anthropological Association, and gain engagement both from the U.S. Training and Doctrine Command, and a manager from the first primary contractor, BAE Systems. As a scholarly assessment of the complex interplay of these perspectives, the book becomes part of an attempt to find a platform for collaboration and discussion on what has become a profoundly polarizing subject.
Download or read book Militarizing Culture written by Roberto J González and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-06-16 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Militarizing Culture is a rousing critique of the American warfare state by a leading cultural commentator. Roberto J. González reveals troubling trends in the post-9/11 era, as the military industrial complex infiltrates new arenas of cultural life, from economic and educational arenas to family relationships. One of the nation’s foremost critics of the Human Terrain System program, González makes passionate arguments against the engagement of social scientists and the use of anthropological theory and methods in military operations. Despite the pervasive presence of militarism and violence in our society, González insists that warfare is not an inevitable part of human nature, and charts a path toward the decommissioning of culture.
Download or read book Anthropologists in Arms written by George R. Lucas and published by Rowman Altamira. This book was released on 2009-10-15 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthropologists in Arms looks at the moral and ethical debates surrounding the recent development of 'military anthropology'—particularly the practice of embedding anthropologists with combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Lucas traces the troubled history of social scientists collaborating with national military, security, and intelligence organizations and shows how these complex and frequently misunderstood historical concerns contribute to the contemporary moral controversy. He gives special attention to the Human Terrain Systems project developed by the U.S. Army under the direction of General David Petraeus. Although this project has been criticized as unethical by academic anthropologists in the U.S. and the U.K., Lucas shows that the moral status of that program is much more ambiguous than these blanket criticisms would suggest. Anthropologists in Arms concludes with a call for a thorough review of HTS itself, and suggests alternative strategies for providing anthropological knowledge to military forces engaged in irregular warfare—knowledge that might, in turn, help military forces to ameliorate the suffering imposed on noncombatants, while respecting the privacy, security, and human rights of indigenous populations.
Download or read book Ordering Africa written by Helen Tilley and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-01 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African research played a major role in transforming the discipline of anthropology in the twentieth century. Ethnographic studies, in turn, had significant effects on the way imperial powers in Africa approached subject peoples. Ordering Africa provides the first comparative history of these processes. With essays exploring metropolitan research institutes, Africans as ethnographers, the transnational features of knowledge production, and the relationship between anthropology and colonial administration, this volume both consolidates and extends a range of new research questions focusing on the politics of imperial knowledge. Specific chapters examine French West Africa, the Belgian and French Congo, the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, Italian Northeast Africa, Kenya, and Equatorial Africa (Gabon) as well as developments in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland. A major collection of essays that will be welcomed by scholars interested in imperial history and the history of Africa.
Download or read book Zapotec Science written by Roberto J. González and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2003 — Julian Steward Award – Anthropology & Environment Section, American Anthropological Association 2002 — A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book How Zapotec agricultural and dietary theories and practices constitute a valid local science. Zapotec farmers in the northern sierra of Oaxaca, Mexico, are highly successful in providing their families with abundant, nutritious food in an ecologically sustainable fashion, although the premises that guide their agricultural practices would be considered erroneous by the standards of most agronomists and botanists in the United States and Europe. In this book, Roberto González convincingly argues that in fact Zapotec agricultural and dietary theories and practices constitute a valid local science, which has had a reciprocally beneficial relationship with European and United States farming and food systems since the sixteenth century. González bases his analysis upon direct participant observation in the farms and fields of a Zapotec village. By using the ethnographic fieldwork approach, he is able to describe and analyze the rich meanings that campesino families attach to their crops, lands, and animals. González also reviews the history of maize, sugarcane, and coffee cultivation in the Zapotec region to show how campesino farmers have intelligently and scientifically adapted their farming practices to local conditions over the course of centuries. By setting his ethnographic study of the Talea de Castro community within a historical world systems perspective, he also skillfully weighs the local impact of national and global currents ranging from Spanish colonialism to the 1910 Mexican Revolution to NAFTA. At the same time, he shows how, at the turn of the twenty-first century, the sustainable practices of "traditional" subsistence agriculture are beginning to replace the failed, unsustainable techniques of modern industrial farming in some parts of the United States and Europe.
Download or read book Practicing Military Anthropology written by Robert A. Rubinstein and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The relationship between anthropologists and the United States military has commanded a lot of attention, especially in regard to the controversial Human Terrain System (HTS) that embeds anthropologists in military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Conversations at professional meetings, in the pages of disciplinary journals and in books have been heated and frequently harshly polemical with some participants branding military anthropologists as war criminals. In this book, a number of anthropologists who have either worked with the US armed forces or who teach at military service academies reflect on what they do and teach in their military anthropologist personae. Through their personal accounts they show that the practice of military anthropology is much more than HTS and that they are more than mere technicians of the state as critics allege. Revealed here are thoughtful and moving essays that deal with issues of ethics, morality and professional decorum. Whether one agrees with these accounts or not, they do show that the linkage of anthropology with the military is complex and multi-faceted and the importance of frank and open exchanges of ideas for dealing with the relationship of military anthropology to the wider discipline. Essential reading for those considering anthropology as a career, those concerned about the relationship of the academy to the military and for those seeking to fathom transformations in our lives following 9/11 and the ongoing war against terror.
Download or read book US Army s Human Terrain System 2008 2013 written by John Stanton and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Armed with Expertise written by Joy Rohde and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-09 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon launched a controversial counterinsurgency program called the Human Terrain System. The program embedded social scientists within military units to provide commanders with information about the cultures and grievances of local populations. Yet the controversy it inspired was not new. Decades earlier, similar national security concerns brought the Department of Defense and American social scientists together in the search for intellectual weapons that could combat the spread of communism during the Cold War. In Armed with Expertise, Joy Rohde traces the optimistic rise, anguished fall, and surprising rebirth of Cold War–era military-sponsored social research. Seeking expert knowledge that would enable the United States to contain communism, the Pentagon turned to social scientists. Beginning in the 1950s, political scientists, social psychologists, and anthropologists optimistically applied their expertise to military problems, convinced that their work would enhance democracy around the world. As Rohde shows, by the late 1960s, a growing number of scholars and activists condemned Pentagon-funded social scientists as handmaidens of a technocratic warfare state and sought to eliminate military-sponsored research from American intellectual life. But the Pentagon's social research projects had remarkable institutional momentum and intellectual flexibility. Instead of severing their ties to the military, the Pentagon’s experts relocated to a burgeoning network of private consulting agencies and for-profit research offices. Now shielded from public scrutiny, they continued to influence national security affairs. They also diversified their portfolios to include the study of domestic problems, including urban violence and racial conflict. In examining the controversies over Cold War social science, Rohde reveals the persistent militarization of American political and intellectual life, a phenomenon that continues to raise grave questions about the relationship between expert knowledge and American democracy.
