HTS attempted to embed anthropologists and other social scientists from academia within US military units roaming the human terrain of Iraq and Afghanistan. The thinking was that qualified social scientists would be able to interpret cultural practices, develop network/relationship diagrams and provide US military commanders with data that would subsequently be used by those commanders to understand the strength/weaknesses of the populace they were trying to conquer. In short, if a US commander determined that anything the HTS produced was useful, that data would find its way into the Kill Chain. From the beginning HTS was an intelligence support program funded through US Army intelligence line items. The program caused more controversy than usable work product and some measure of wealth for BAE Systems (UK) and CGI (Canada). $700 million was poured into the HTS trough for contractors and their employees. US Army Civil Affairs should have received the tasking.
Investigations during the 2008-2011 timeframe showed again and again that–with few bright spots– HTS was poorly managed from the highest levels of US Army TRADOC down to Human Terrain Teams in the field. Those reports from the US Army 101st Airborne, Center for Naval Analyses, and internal US Army documents can be found at Dr. Max Forte’s Zero Anthropology website. No other US Army program during the long decade of wars in Iraq/Afghanistan provided more tragedy and comedy than the US Army’s HTS. At least 12 Americans were KIA or wounded (soldiers providing support to the HTS mission) during the life of the disheveled program. Consider: there was a hostage situation; individuals were hired without adequate criminal background checks; a former HTS member sits in a prison in Iran (he was seen by other HTS personnel in a predominantly Iranian refugee camp); sexual harassment was common; charges of racism were leveled; millions of dollars of computer equipment went missing; hours listed on time cards did not match hours actually worked; a murder and suicide took place; two of the academics killed –so lionized by the US media—were warned about going beyond the wire on their fateful days; another academic that was killed ignored her training; rumors of prostitution rings and rapes were common though never reported; and the senior program manager and social scientist were alleged to have taken junkets and to have been in a relationship that could have been detrimental to the morale of the program.
Harvard and Princeton: Send in the Clowns
If this $700 million dollar program is the norm in the wartime US military contracting world then it’s no wonder that the USA continues to fall short of comprehensive victory. It should be remembered that HTS was primarily the creation of two Harvard affiliates: Dr. Montgomery McFate and Dr. David Petraeus. They pushed a feel-good counter insurgency doctrine without understanding that COIN, in the end, is a blade-to-blade exercise. Americans do not have the stomach for long term, ugly warfare. And as Colonel Gian Gentile points out in his book Wrong Turn, COIN doctrine for Iraq and Afghanistan–based on the British experience in Malaya–was doomed to fail as the circumstances in Malaya were entirely different. And Ann Jones in her book They Were Soldiers notes that COIN doctrine (that sees soldiers constantly patrolling by foot) was nearly insane in Afghanistan as the country is one of the most heavily mined landscapes on the planet in which farmers and children still lose life and limb to mines used by the USSR and the USA.
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