Human Terrain System: Operationally Relevant Social Science Research in Iraq and Afghanistan

CONCLUSIONS

INTRODUCTION

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.1

Evans was part of a U.S. Army program whose field component had commenced 4 years earlier. On February 7, 2007, a five-person military-civilian Human Terrain Team (HTT) embedded with the U.S. Army 4th Brigade Combat Team (BCT), 82nd Airborne Division, at Forward Operating Base (FOB) Salerno in Khost province, Afghanistan. Designated AF1, this experiment in hybridized civil-military relations was the first embedded team in the Human Terrain System (HTS), an ambitious proof-of-concept program managed by the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC).

The team’s mission was to provide BCT—approximately 3,000 personnel—commanders:

with operationally relevant, sociocultural data, information, knowledge and understanding, and the embedded expertise to integrate that understanding into the commander’s planning and decision-making process.2

This embedded expertise was borne in part from an identified need to fuse focused social science scholarship to military instruments in Iraq and Afghanistan so as to wage more effective population-centered counterinsurgency (COIN) campaigns in and among the population.3 Teams were to be geographically located, to develop understanding of a particular area in order to preserve and share sociocultural knowledge across unit rotations.4

The requirement for an HTS was not straightforward, however. Some levels of sociocultural capability already existed with the BCTs, including, for example, Civil Affairs teams and tactical Psychological Operations detachments. Civil Affairs teams were configured as a project management function to assess, repair, or build infrastructure, and evaluate agricultural practices per requirements. They were therefore an evaluation and monitoring asset that, while in theory was grounded in sociocultural analysis of the area of operations to prioritize requirements and efficacy, in practice was largely assessment conducted at a more abstract level. In part, this refracted analysis may explain the poor return on the substantial funds invested in development projects and tangentially why more detailed research is required in the future.5 Conversely, Psychological Operations teams worked at a tactical level, delivering messages to the population but did not gather information in a concerted manner to influence BCT thinking, planning, or action. It was therefore the development of Courses of Action (COAs) beyond their own element which would create a higher level of sociocultural capability than that provided by existing functions.6

HTS promised a different and therefore unique sociocultural capability. The teams would conduct granular social science research among the civilian population and report directly to the brigade staff. Thus they were plugged in to the highest levels of planning on the ground with the ability to influence all aspects of the brigade based on their findings. As a former HTT member observed, while other brigade elements directly engage the people on a continual basis focusing on development projects and influencing the local population, the HTT’s unique contribution was in understanding the people.7 In Iraq and Afghanistan, in complex COIN campaigns, understanding the people required fluent language skills, robust knowledge of research methods, and field experience. Such skills, meaning that the team could influence BCT staff products in the provision of sociocultural research, required social science expertise identified as only available in the U.S. civilian reservoir.

As the Afghanistan campaign drew down in early-2014, plans to transition the program to a postwar capability took shape. The HTS program was transitioned on September 30, 2014, into the residual organization at TRADOC called the Global Cultural Knowledge Network. The network is composed of a commissioned officer, three social scientists, a geospatial specialist, and a knowledge manager.8 Quoted in The New York Times in 2015, an intelligence officer at the command noted that the remaining organization was a nucleus capable of rapid expansion if required, but that TRADOC lacked the administrative and support infrastructure to embed social scientists in the future.9 Thus the fall of 2014 brought to a close one of the most ambitious and compelling social science experiments conducted by the U.S. military, and its character and content deserves investigation.

In this book, I examine this fusion of civilian expertise and military operations in the HTS. I investigate the HTS, initially from a review of secondary sources and then from interviews, Freedom of Information Act request material, and program documents, in order to understand the contribution of social science research to brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan. I answer the broad question: Why did the U.S. Army embed social scientists in Iraq and Afghanistan? The initial hypothesis is that HTS was created in response to, and facilitated by, a technological crisis in the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). This hypothesis, in part, supports the view which sees the program as part of the COIN turn which stressed understanding culture as a necessary element of overall victory in Iraq and Afghanistan. In that definition, overall victory would be defined as popular endorsement of government efforts and loss of support for the insurgent elements. But I argue also that it was the impoverished understanding of the societal network behind the IEDs which facilitated the introduction of the program. Existing notions of the program as a creation of the COIN turn in military thinking curtails an important understanding of the way in which technological crises bring forth myriad urgent solutions in a febrile atmosphere in the U.S. military enterprise.

The hypothesis is tested in three steps. First, I examine the technological crisis which befell U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan as attempts were made to mitigate the effects of the IED and the creation of the HTS from that perfect storm. Second, I examine the evolution of the program as it consolidated feedback from embedded and returning social scientists, affording insight into the character of the program. Third, and forming the core of the analysis, I assess experiences of former program social scientists that embedded with military units in Iraq or Afghanistan, principally through interviews. Interviewing social scientists who have deployed on HTTs in Iraq or Afghanistan across a significant time period lends substantial understanding of why social scientists were embedded in combat brigades. As former HTT social scientist Marcus Griffin has noted, a combat brigade is nothing more than an information-consuming machine and thus having a social scientist on their staff helps them make sense of all the information coming at them.10 I therefore investigate the information required by the brigade and the ability of the social scientists to deliver products based on that requirement, thus I contribute to the emerging corpus of scholarship detailing the program and the experiences of social scientists in HTTs.11 A limitation of the work is that it does not interview whole teams, which would provide valuable feedback of social scientist research. It was team leaders, for example, that were the military bridge between the team and the brigade staff and would have added insight into the operational relevance of the research conducted.

Embedding civilians to practice academic skill sets in order to influence military thinking, planning, and action in combat zones led to disproportionate scrutiny of the program. The historically brittle synthesis between academia and the military ensured that the HTS captured and maintained media interest. The program was at once a compelling and divisive endeavor, and it crystallized sustained opposition from a number of anthropologists within the academy whose primary fear was the appropriation of their principled expertise for military purposes. In their reading, information gathered on the population could be used by the brigade to target insurgent networks with lethal effect, placing the population in harm as a result of the embedded team activities. This was an anathema to the academic anthropologists. It was also a debate conducted from irreconcilable platforms. As the first HTS program manager notes, The standard they gave HTS to meet was to show that nothing produced by HTS could ever be used by anyone to target individuals. Most major works of anthropology in the past and present cannot meet that standard.12 Examining the program is therefore a further opportunity to investigate the sociocultural dimension of military operations through the lens of ethics. Despite its relatively small size in the U.S. Department of the Army in terms of both personnel and budget, the importance of the HTS as a subject of study is marked. As a 2008 West Point study on the program notes:

It is important to revisit this study in the changing military context as the Army continues to learn how best to conduct operations that will not only help secure the country, but also help shape the conditions that will promote state capacity and legitimacy.13

At a more abstract level, the book informs debate concerning the investigation, distillation, and retention of scholarship in its myriad forms beyond the university, speaking to the way in which military agents seek to extract, collate, and apply academic methods of inquiry and accumulate knowledge. It is the author’s intention that the analysis resonate beyond the permeable boundaries of the academy; social science is the study of social structure to inform society, a point which can often be obfuscated in the rush for scholarly profundity.

Operational Planning.

Conflicting and superficial accounts from both media and scholars have complicated attempts to understand the character of the HTS. The problem has been exacerbated by the story of the program being so compelling to the extent that, paraphrasing Mark Twain, truth has never stood in the way of telling it. As an American Anthropological Association assessment indicates of the program’s early years, existing journalistic accounts

provide multiple and often contrasting points of view on what HTS is basically about, how it works, and its implications for anthropology and for the new counter-insurgency doctrine.14

The program, as noted by a professor of ethics and a professor of anthropology in an edited volume on the program, was hardly immune from a variety of legitimate and justifiable concerns, but they further argue that the HTS was placed by anthropologists within a historical narrative of anthropology’s fraught engagement with the military, pre-empting any impartial assessment of its legitimacy or effectiveness.15 In order to proceed from this uncertain platform, I first consolidate and examine existing literature on the program in a review chapter. In the second chapter, I assess the dimensions of the military’s engagement with anthropology, for which the HTS served as a specific site for sustained debate. The third chapter examines the sense of crisis in military operations in Iraq which allowed the controversial program to cohere and evolve. The fourth chapter assesses elements within the training cycle of relevance to understanding the role of the social scientist in Iraq and Afghanistan. The fifth chapter investigates the experiences of social scientists when embedded, and the sixth chapter follows on from these experiences, observing limitations in social science research in contested spaces. In conclusion, I highlight the limiting factors of social science research in such insecure environments as Iraq and Afghanistan, and suggest possibilities for future applications of the program.

This analysis requires a broad framework for conceptualizing the levels of violence in Iraq and Afghanistan where the social science research took place. I follow the approach of political scientist Stathis N. Kalyvas in modelling areas of violence in intrastate wars. Usefully, Kalyvas has shown the complexity of the situation on the ground, which harbors deep, often fluid mixtures of identities and actions:

Civil wars are not binary conflicts, but complex and ambiguous processes that foster the ‘joint’ action of local and supralocal actors, civilians, and armies, whose alliance results in violence that aggregates, yet still reflects, their diverse goals.16

Instructive in the need for detailed research at the very granular level, war generates new local cleavages because power shifts at the local level upset delicate arrangements.17 In theory, then, the unique social situation encountered by each brigade in their Area of Responsibility, and its inevitable change over time, meant that there was a requirement for a permanent element on staff, assessing this sociocultural element of the terrain.

Beneath that nuanced conceptualization of intrastate conflict, where behavior, beliefs, preferences, and even identities can be altered, Kalyvas models the intensity of structured violence between actors.18 Irregular war fought between the incumbent and insurgent is split into five zones, where the first and fifth zones are conceptualized as total sovereign and insurgent control, respectively, but hegemonic, though incomplete control in Zone 2 and Zone 4 leads to high levels of selective, discriminate violence against adversaries.19 The third zone, depicted as where opposed forces are present in similar arrangements, contains less selective violence.

Beyond those areas where actors exercise complete or equal control, there are contested spaces characterized by selective violence. It is in these contested spaces where insecurity is relatively high, and military forces are specifically and systematically targeted. In reference to Iraq and Afghanistan, it is in those contested spaces where there is the least security for coalition forces and insurgents exercise hegemonic control, the physical danger and methodological difficulties inherent in social science research modes are the greatest. At the time of this writing, a proposal for a 12-person proof-of-concept HTT in the U.S. Pacific Command (PACOM) was awaiting authorization by the U.S. Congress.20 Program management of the HTS visited PACOM in late-2008 to explore possibilities for the combatant command, with the theoretical recommendation for an 11-person team.21 Based on the Kalyvas model, this team would probably conduct research in areas of complete or hegemonic control by incumbents where insurgent violence is negligible. Therefore, ascertaining why the HTS should evolve into this social science asset conducting research in less contested, more secure spaces is a contribution of this book.

Methods.

From its physical origins within the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO) landscape, the HTS evolved into a U.S. Army program which, by Fiscal Year 2012, commanded a budget of U.S.$135 million; a more than six-fold increase on its original U.S.$20.4 million funding in 2006.22 The program expanded despite journalistic and academic criticism, congressional inquiry, and a budget freeze, demonstrating merit in the Army’s use of nonorganic additions to augment social science research in its ranks. Previous academic assessments of the program, however, have suffered because the program has been entrenched in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite the plausibility of considerable engagement with the program and possible release of unclassified documents, there nevertheless has been a paucity of information regarding the program. The last HTT departed Iraq in 2011, and in 2014, the last teams departed Afghanistan. As a consequence, there are now many HTT social scientists departing the program such that there is a reasonable expectation of balanced assessments of team-level experiences and insights gleaned from interviews.

This research process is inductive, a method that has been used in previous examination of the program.23 I generate research which lends itself to observations and findings in order to make comment on existing theory. Deconstructing the research question into sequential steps creates a clear framework for progression. Within the research, interviews are semi-structured such that, in accordance with existing social science guidelines, topics are pre-specified and listed on an interview protocol, but they can be reworded as needed and are covered by the interviewer in any sequence or order.24 Interviews have been chosen as a technique because they provide in-depth information and high interpretive validity. Moreover, interviews historically have a high response rate and can be used both for exploratory aspects of the thesis and confirmatory aspects. Interview questions have been formulated using rules for designing interview questions drawn from prevailing social research frameworks methods.25

To develop a holistic assessment of the program, I move beyond previous examinations that focused exclusively on current or former members of the program. I interview a spectrum of stakeholders, draw from a pool including academia—principally the chair of the American Anthropological Association’s commission investigating the program—a moderating voice on the commission—professional military anthropologists, and, serving staff within TRADOC Intelligence Staff G-2. In addition, to gain insight from the perspective of the contractor, I interview the HTS program director for the BAE Systems contract, 200809, and use contracting material not previously in the public domain to augment the study. These interviews are valuable in placing the program within the larger trajectory of the U.S. Army’s engagement with the social sciences for the purposes of informing operational planning. This is important because the program represents a rare opportunity for the academic community to investigate why this social science expertise became integrated into tactical planning.

Parameters of the Study.

This book is a narrow analysis insofar as it is an assessment of why the U.S. Army came to use social scientists on the front line of conflict. This precise investigation removes from the investigation larger issues such as the differing approaches to cultural warfighting developed by the U.S. Army and the U.S. Marine Corps (USMC). The USMC, for example, due to its original expeditionary nature, has had protracted experience fighting small wars in the past; hence the publishing of the Small Wars Manual and development of the Combined Action Program in Vietnam, although that small wars mentality appears elided in its current trajectory toward a heavy amphibious force. In contrast to the Army, however, the USMC incorporated culture and language into its operations by establishing the Center for Advanced Operational Culture Learning, a culture and language training center. The HTS was funded by the DoD and the Army, but support to the USMC, however, was a requirement of the program. The HTS was directed to support all BCTs and USMC regional command teams (RTCs) in theater.

Sample and Research Pool.

There are more than 20 interviews with people who have worked on or with the HTS or critiqued it in a professional capacity. These interviews range from approximately 30 to 120 minutes in length and include social scientists that have been embedded in Iraq or Afghanistan, or in both countries. To develop a broad cross-sectional representation of the program, I interviewed the first Program Manager, the first Director of the Social Science Directorate, and the subsequent Acting Director of the Social Science Directorate, social scientists that embedded in Iraq between 2008 and 2009 and in Afghanistan between 2008 and 2012. I interviewed other members of the HTS management, including members of the Program Development Team, Operational Planning Team, and Training Directorate. The majority of interviews were conducted in Virginia, Rhode Island, Maryland, and Washington, DC, in 2013. I have at least one interview with former members from all levels of field HTS teams, HTTs, Human Terrain Analysis Teams, and Theater Coordination Elements (TCEs). Social scientists that were interviewed have embedded with a range of military units; U.S. Army Combat Brigades, USMC Regimental Brigades, British, Polish, and Danish units, and other smaller units such as those comprised of U.S. Special Operations Forces, and in both Iraq and Afghanistan, that supported a range of activities, including but not limited to Village Stability Operations in Afghanistan. In order to gain a holistic analysis of the range of social sciences represented in the field, and not limit the analysis to those trained anthropologists, I interviewed former HTT social scientists who have undergraduate or postgraduate degrees in political science, geography, theology, archaeology, international relations, war studies, and anthropology. This crosssection of intellectual origins is an important methodological element: Limiting the study to one area of the social science spectrum would present skewed qualitative data. Participation is marked in all instances by in-depth, semi-structured, qualitative interviews by telephone or in person, and thematic coding is used for interview transcript analysis. One characteristic of the cross-sectional interview design is that it is applicable when there is interest in capturing a snapshot of thematic interests for the given population for which data is being collated. At the same time, data can be collated on individual characteristics, to enhance analysis. Therefore, it is useful for deductive research methodologies of the type adopted for this analysis.

I consider that the former program personnel interviewed were afforded enough temporal and professional distance to evaluate critically the spectrum of their experiences, from recruitment, training, and pre-deployment, to embedded research and expertise retention after their return to the United States. All former HTT social scientists interviewed offer enough criticism to suggest sufficient detachment from the program to lend the necessary objectivity for validity in their observations. Moreover, when analyzed as a corpus, the close thematic correlation of their experiences strongly suggests legitimacy.

It is the interviews with social scientists that have departed the program that form the core of this thesis. Unencumbered by any residue of responsibility and having been embedded for at least 9 months, these men and women are eloquent, articulate, and thoughtful about the nature of their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. Echoing Paul Joseph of Tufts University, in his 2014 study that included interviews from teams in Afghanistan, it is best practice to let the social scientists’ experiences remain whole in the text wherever possible.26 Moreover, their competencies show that many of them earned distinguished records of service, meaning that they are best placed to answer why they were embedded in combat brigades. Interviewing social scientists that embedded across different time periods affords the opportunity to draw out common themes experienced by embedded team members, across different periods of time, and in cases where experiences may be idiosyncratic to countries, regions, or even towns of cities. Conflict is, after all, about change over time, about the drawing and redrawing of boundaries, both geographical and human, and about growth and decay.

To prevent missed differences or similarities between female and male perspectives, of the nine former HTS social scientists interviewed, three are female, a statistically significant 33 percent of the sample. Interviewing both genders allows examination of any differences or similarities between the sexes regarding recruitment, training, integration into the military unit, and interaction with the host population and relationships with indigenous translators. Particularly in Afghan society, female social scientists would have greater access to women in the country, and thus the experiences of these social scientists is important in any attempt to understand the role, if any, of gender in attempts by military units to interact and understand local populations.

Assistance and engagement from TRADOC G-2 differentiates this book from other recent volumes of note. Any holistic study of the HTS requires input from the parent organization of the program. Previous studies’ difficulty in engagement is a consequence of the politicization of the program, criticism from the academic community, and media portrayals. The effect, as Christopher Lamb et al. note, is that:

Requests for assistance with external studies of HTS are routinely turned down. TRADOC also avoids publicity and help from interested outside parties. It provided minimal cooperation for the CNA [Center for Naval Analyses, 2010] report, and none at all for this and other studies it did not commission.27

Engagement from the TRADOC Intelligence Staff is therefore important, but there are limitations. The G-2 now differs in personnel from the staff that existed in the early years of the HTS, and the emphasis is on institutional training as opposed to support of field units.To strengthen the research design, I introduce a control group into the study of the HTS, a technique which has been utilized before to important effect: Cindy Jebb et al. conducted interviews with combat commanders in Iraq that did not have HTTs in their units in order to include a control group in their investigation of HTT effectiveness.28 To differentiate from that control group, I interview at least one individual that has worked with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the U.S. Department of State, familiar with HTT products, to ask why these civilian entities did not create their own embedded teams. Thus, in asking why the U.S. Army chose to embed civilian social scientists in combat brigades, I also ask explicitly why USAID and the U.S. Department of State did not choose to embed social scientists, despite the professional gap between USAID and the Department of State, and that of civilian social scientists being less pronounced and thus easier to navigate than the military and the social scientists.

This book does not examine the views of commanders of units in which teams embedded. Myriad studies in the public domain have been conducted that include interviews with commanders, for example, Jebb et al. and Lamb et al. Moreover, it has been argued persuasively that commanders are less critical of HTT performance than are team members.29 Ultimately, it is enough to say that many commanders interviewed assessed the embedded teams as being useful.30 Sample sizes for commanders have varied (nine for instance, in the case of the Lamb et al., a study that also included 19 commanders from the Institute for Defense Analyses study, by far the largest group), and this book would not improve on these sample sizes nor enjoy similar levels of access to high-level military commanders. Moreover, because the program was supported by officials such as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and General David Petraeus, there is inevitably a political dimension to consider in responses from senior commanders, which would color any utilization of their responses.

Finally, the character of this book is shaped with specific intent to generate a work which scholars can utilize as a platform for future avenues of study. The longitudinal and latitudinal dimensions of HTS extend far beyond the program itself, meriting myriad opportunities for deep, objective examination. It is probable that, in the immediate future, a social science capability will be produced as a long-range planning asset of the U.S. Army, informing the strategic direction of planning by identifying at-risk societies where insurgencies may develop. From that mission, I envisage that small teams of expert social scientists will conduct research in regions of burgeoning interest to the U.S. Army for 12 to 24 months before returning to staff to write detailed products of utility to the combatant commands. This analysis, in part, then answers why that transformation may occur.

ENDNOTES INTRODUCTION

Forrecentidentificationofthisrequirement,seeRaymondOdierno,JamesF.Amos,andWilliamH.McRaven,StrategicLandpower: WinningtheClashofWills, FortLeavenworth,KS:

U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), 2013.

NathanFinney,TheHumanTerrainTeamHandbook,Fort

Leavenworth, KS: TRADOC, 2008, p. 35.

JacobKippetal.,TheHumanTerrainSystem:ACORDSforthe21stCentury,MilitaryReview, Vol. 85, No. 5, 2006,pp. 8-15.

MontgomeryMcFateandJaniceH.Laurence,Introduction:UnveilingtheHumanTerrain System,inMontgomeryMcFateandJaniceH.Laurence,eds.,SocialScienceGoestoWar:TheHumanTerrainSysteminIraqandAfghanistan,London,UK:Hurst, p. 11.

See,forexample,SharonBehn,USWatchdogSlams AfghanistanAidWaste,Voiceof America, August12,2013.

TheHumanTerrainSystemprogrammanagementvisitedU.S.ArmyCivilAffairsandPsychologicalOperationsCommandmultipletimestotryandbuildapartnership,withoutsuccess.SteveFondacaro,personalcommunicationwithauthor,September 15, 2015.JonathanD.Thompson,HumanTerrainTeamOperationsinEastBaghdad,MilitaryReview,Vol.90,No.4,2010,p.77.

JustinDoubleday,ControversialArmySocial-ScienceProgramMorphsInto‘Reach-Back’Office,InsidetheArmy,Vol.27,No.