Anthropologists in the SecurityScape

Ethics, Practice, and Professional Identity

Robert Albro, George Marcus, Laura A McNamara, Monica Schoch-Spana, Robert Albro, George Marcus, Laura A McNamara, Monica Schoch-Spana

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781611320138
• eBook ISBN: 9781315434797
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

As the military and intelligence communities re-tool for the 21st century, the long and contentious debate about the role of social scientists in national security environments is dividing the disciplines with renewed passion. Yet, research shows that most scholars have a weak understanding of what today's security institutions actually are and what working in them entails. This book provides an essential new foundation for the debate, with fine-grained accounts of the complex and varied work of cultural, physical, and linguistic anthropologists and archaeologists doing security-related work in governmental and military organizations, the private sector, and NGOs. In candid and provocative dialogues, leading anthropologists interrogate the dilemmas of ethics in practice and professional identity. Anthropologists in the SecurityScape is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand or influence the relationship between anthropology and security in the twenty-first century.

1 The Winds of Politics, Change, and Social Science Transformation in a Military Research Institution

Rebecca Goolsby

DOI: 10.4324/9781315434810-2

One of the most important goals of the American Anthropological Associations (AAA) Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology with the U.S. Security and Intelligence Communities (CEAUSSIC) activity was to provide the AAA Executive Board and membership with a richer and more detailed understanding of what it means to “practice” anthropology in the context of military-funded research and development. This was how we came into contact with Rebecca Goolsby, a cultural anthropologist who manages a major social science research program for the Office of Naval Research (ONR). While searching for literature related to the intersection of national security, social science, and research ethics, we came across an article in which Goolsby quite frankly assessed the major ethical challenges of defense funding for social science research (Goolsby 2005). Given her position at ONR, we found this quite intriguing, and asked Goolsby if she would be willing to be interviewed about her work at ONR for the CEAUSSIC report. That interview led to a subsequent phone call, in which Albro and McNamara asked Goolsby to submit an autoethnographic essay for this volume.

Goolsby's essay appears first in the volume because she provides such a detailed overview of the Department of Defense (DoD) research-and-development landscape. Moreover, her story illuminates the complex positions and relationships that exist among researchers and their funding sponsors. Goolsby is a program officer, a position of some significance in the military science and technology community (and analogous to the role of program officer at the National Science Foundation). In this role, Goolsby advocates that ONR invests resources into social science research, negotiates programmatic goals, then issues calls for proposals, awards project funds, and oversees the research projects that her program supports.

Of particular interest is her program's emphasis on computational social modeling and simulation as a research approach for social science in military domains. This is important because, as several contributions to this volume indicate, so many social science projects in the securityscape involve some element of computational modeling and simulation. This is an interdisciplinary methodology that is probably unfamiliar to many anthropologists, even those with more quantitative backgrounds. In contrast, Goolsby has a background in computer science, and her methodological toolkit includes social network analysis, a quantitative methodology more familiar to sociologists than cultural anthropologists. Coupled with her training in ethnological theory and method, and ONR's orientation to mathematical and physical sciences, it is perhaps not surprising that Goolsby has successfully developed and maintained a 10-year counterterrorism social science research program that includes a strong emphasis on computational methodologies. These days, Goolsby is known for advocating the value of social network analysis and social media to facilitate interagency coordination and situational awareness during natural disasters, a problem of significant concern to the Navy given its role in responding to earthquakes and tsunamis.

Prior to joining ONR in 2000, Goolsby taught at universities on the west coast. She received her doctorate in cultural anthropology at the University of Washington in Seattle (1992). Her dissertation research was conducted under a Fulbright award and concentrated on gender, class, and ethnicity and the differential impact of social change and modernization in Northeastern Thailand.

I came to the Office of Naval Research (ONR) in August of 2000 with the original intention of helping to manage programs in organizational culture and social change, including computational modeling projects. By October, the U.S.S. Cole disaster—a particularly naval event—had struck, a situation in which I immediately saw that social science could have an important impact. But where do military research projects come from?

An aircraft carrier takes a great deal of forethought to slow down, let alone turn. So, too, do the huge bureaucratic levers of change at the Department of Defense. When I came to my boss, the great Willard S. Vaughan, with the proposal that we start a research program addressing counterterror, he patiently explained the budgetary planning process—how it takes years to get new programs into the budget, the steadying hand of Congressional oversight committees, and how the problem of counterterror was not “in ONR's lane.” Counterterrorism, he explained, was the responsibility of the State Department. There would not be any possibility of funding such a program without years of patient effort, even with the tragedy of the U.S.S. Cole. However, because Dr. Vaughan thought there might be some potential as a training exercise—and he could see the need, despite the enormous obstacles—he gave me permission and even encouragement to develop a rationale for such a program. This would include developing an argument for “naval need,” “naval impact,” and objectives and technologies to be developed, with the caveat that, although it would be good practice for me to learn about program development, funding issues and policy challenges would be insurmountable. For him, it was a modest bet on a long shot that the Navy would be interested in such a program within the calendar year, something like a three-dollar bet on a hundred-to-one shot. I needed to learn the ropes and this was as good an exercise as any, and the bet itself was modest—a few hours of my time a week doing something I found interesting.

Military research funding agencies have different histories, mandates, and “customers” for their science and technology products. ONR is the oldest agency and has a wide variety of research projects from basic to highly advanced; “highly advanced” means research ready to move from the lab into the Fleet, for use by military operators. Funding is coded by Congress as Budgeting Activity (BA) 1, 2, 3 (formerly “6.1, 6.2, 6.3,” etc.), with BA 1 representing the most basic research and BA 2 representing applied research. These codes are derived from their funding lines in the military's research budget. The Office of the Secretary of Defense is in charge of military research funds, through The Office of the Assistant Secretary for Defense (Research & Engineering), also known as ASD (R&E). Congress provides funds to research funding offices like ONR and to the DoD laboratories, such as the Naval Research Lab, and to a variety of other research projects and programs. ONR is given BA 1, BA 2, and BA 3 funds, whereas the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), a “sister” organization, has only BA 1 funds. Research funding agencies have different cultures (reflecting the services they serve) and different perspectives on what makes for a “good” research project.

Essentially, I learned that in this project I would be chasing a rabbit down a hole, much like Alice in Wonderland—a learning exercise, but this did not deter me. Computational social science was on the new side to me, though I did, coincidentally, have a computer science as well as an anthropology background. The terrorism project was something I could research “on the side” during my down time in program management (which I was also learning).

I began to build a case. I reviewed the history of Al Qaeda and similar groups in Southeast Asia, my old stomping grounds. The embassy bombings in Africa, the problems in South and Central Asia, and the opinions of scholars of terrorism pointed to a disturbing trend with explosive potential. The world was changing. Discontent and frustration, not unlike what I’d found in my research in Thailand, were beginning to find voice in violent discourses and acts against the United States as well as against other nation-state authorities. On September 11, 2001, a little less than a year later, Dr. Vaughan's longshot bet was, unfortunately, less of a longshot than he, or most anyone, had figured, even me.

What made this program possible were several things: first, a culture that valued inquiry and basic research and that encouraged exploration of issues just over the horizon; second, my difference was highly valued (ONR as an institution has a history of tackling new and even heretical thinking and of coming at a problem from a new direction; letting someone have ownership of that direction was part of the culture); third, my education, background, training, and experience enabled me rapidly to prepare and develop a strong foundational understanding of the technological, historical, and sociological bits and pieces of Islamism and its direction; and fourth, the devastating power of the situation itself revealed the enormous gap of knowledge about the world, about non-Western cultures, and the social changes afoot in the world affecting America's position, status, and security. The ability to see the problem coming was not so much visionary as it was a natural outcome of being placed where I was, looking at the problems of the military in international situations at a time when a number of high-placed and brilliant people were beginning to put their finger on the issues. Dr. Vaughan hired me to address his growing intuition about problems that would require social science training. I walked into the living room and easily located the elephant. The U.S.S. Cole incident was the bellwether for 9/11, but no one appreciated this at the time.

Of course, after 9/11, no one cared much about the background of the problem (unless it was to find the “root causes” and dig them out); the scramble was on to do something. My job was to put together a practical, relevant, ethical, and affordable program of research that would yield information analysis tools as quickly as possible, founded on the best scientific foundation available. All over the Department of Defense, meetings were convened, workshops were held, and every kind of idea in the world was explored. Social science had a weak but secure place in the form of terrorism experts, from academics to working intelligence analysts in any of the “three-letter” (Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI], Central Intelligence Agency [CIA], Defense Intelligence Agency [DIA], etc.) agencies, who were in high demand. However, psychology was better represented in the funding agencies, since virtually all social science except psychology had been shut down in military research when the National Science Foundation took on these responsibilities. The computer models being pursued by the military were mostly based on psychological or social-psychological foundations. The exception was the team organization-modeling program that had been nurtured in my department at ONR in the 1990s, which had a multidisciplinary approach that included mathematical sociology and social network analysis as part of its disciplinary base.

By February of2002, I had a plan. Based on ONR's prior work in social network modeling, I proposed to “cleave” off a new specialized program in social network analysis, with a special focus on the computational modeling of terrorist organizations. I put together the plan in a language that the military could understand—PowerPoint—with a list of objectives and a plan to fund research that would lead to social network tools for better intelligence analysis. My refined plan was presented together with a number of proposed counterterrorist programs of research in June of 2002. It was given the go-ahead several weeks later.

It is difficult to recall the changes that I underwent as a scholar and as an anthropologist in those first five years. I learned the term “warfighter” and began to use it in everyday language. I shunned the word “occupation” because it made the military uncomfortable (at best), I grew tall and I grew small to try to understand the viewpoints of people caught in a variety of roles and contradictions in the frantic rush to “solve” the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan. I was surprised (given my West Coast, “Birkenstock” roots) to find myself inspired by many military officers with a deep concern for the Iraqi and Afghan peoples. Finding brilliant minds was easy, and finding deeply committed and ethical officers was a matter of just looking for them; the preconceptions I had of military culture being one shade of green fell away rapidly.

The diversity of military culture(s) is astonishing. The Department of the Navy alone has many clans: blue-water (surface), air, and submariners, Marines, and SEALs, each with their rituals and traditions, distinct world-views, and dispositions. The different training academies have differing perspectives and understanding of their role of the military. And each class is shaped by the political world in distinctive ways, so that people ask about what class so-and-so was in, so as to understand that person better. Pentagon culture is bewilderingly diverse, one huge building housing a wide variety of differing opinions, perspectives, and experiences that somehow must be hammered together in committees to create a solid, unassailable foundation for going forward. From my vantage point, I would not say there are doves and hawks; nothing is that simple anymore. Military officers in my experience tended to lack education in the social sciences prior to 9/11. The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan made a significant impact on that. Further, General Petraeus's doctorate in political science certainly has given him a deep appreciation of social factors, and this has no doubt also spurred more interest in social science by young military officers as the ranks of young people who think of themselves as “soldier-scholars” has swelled.

Talking to social scientists and military officers and intelligence analysts involved multiple frames of reference and mutually unintelligible vocabularies. In the early days (2002–2005), getting people together was always fraught with the potential for misunderstanding and missed engagements. Some of the social scientists feared I was there to help the military with targeting, whereas the military—who knew all about targeting, thank you very much—wanted to know what else was important to know for “winning” and getting home as soon as possible. Thoughtful people (both military and scientist) struggled to understand the “native's point of view” in both the science as presented and the discussion that followed about how that science might be applied.

I funded the first workshop for social network analysis in 2002 at the National Academy of Sciences; a great deal of progress in developing shared frameworks of understanding was made through this and subsequent workshops. The first five years were particularly important in beginning to teach the military about social science—and social scientists, in turn, about the wide variety of needs and interests of the military in the products of their work—which was less and less about targeting as time went on. As the military began to have a deeper understanding of social science, their demands changed, and their questions changed. Military research programs, developed and run by psychologists and engineers, grew in size and sophistication. The AFOSR is particularly to be commended for its commitment to basic research in computational modeling in social science.

It has not all been easy or pleasant. I have had to stand up, on occasion, in workshops, meetings, and committees to explain research ethics and point out why this or that program would not or could not be done according to federal laws. Oh, nothing evil or vile, just misguided or lacking in education that the people involved could not be expected to have. Simple issues such as having to divulge that one's funding source is a military funding institution, even if you are collecting data on the Internet, had to be reviewed carefully. The problematic nature of deception research—and the question of whether it is a good idea at all—and other controversial issues had to be brought to the surface, and the full panoply of “why this or that is a bad idea” had to be laid out. My experience went something like this: I would get up, tell the bad news, then listen to the 45 seconds of silence as people mulled this over. Finally, someone, typically a psychologist, would clear his throat and point out that I was correct. Everyone would sigh dramatically, and then incorporate that new fact point into the emerging program. Program officers and research managers now are subjected to rigorous ethics training. If one is very fortunate, one gets a good mentor like Dr. Vaughan for a boss. No one means to give you bad advice or to provide you with a limited view. But a limited view of the Department of Defense behemoth is the only view that anyone ever has. I learned to keep asking questions and reevaluating the situation. The Department of Defense is not only immense, it is always moving. Working at ONR under Dr. Vaughan, I was kept fairly busy with my own small “patch” of funding and did not look far afield for new programs, aside from sitting on boards, reading proposals, and consulting with other agencies who were leaping on the bandwagon of social network analysis and computational modeling. I consulted everywhere and frequently recruited other social scientists to serve on boards, research studies, and committees. In 2006, I was asked to help with a program at the Army's Foreign Military Scholarship Office (FMSO) by being its anthropology lead, aiding to develop it as a small military test project. It was called the “Human Terrain System,” and it involved training military officers and soldiers in civil affairs to improve their collection of social and cultural data for a new information tool called Map-Human Terrain. It was a short-lived relationship, full of confusion. In the three months while it existed, I worked feverishly to develop workshops and get together people to provide training and information tools. Then, without any warning, the Army collapsed the activity, and a new activity with the same name leaped forward that was related to intelligence activities (not civil affairs) funded by the Joint Capability Technical Demonstration line of funding. Further, it would hire anthropologists to go out and collect field material, rather than train soldiers. The Human Terrain System project I worked on was not the Human Terrain System project that would go on to fame and funding.

At the time, I refused the offer to become part of their new collective. In its prior incarnation, FMSO, the agency in charge, had a very supportive leadership that understood the ethical and practical issues very well. The program management of the new Human Terrain Teams did not share that understanding as well and changed many aspects to secure funding. The new program was promoted as a means to provide better advice to combatant commanders, rather than assistance to civil affairs. Putting professional social scientists in the field was not seen as problematic. This disturbed me because in the past the military had experienced ethical flaps in social science-related research, as long ago as Project Camelot and as recently as Total Information Assurance. Today, the ONR has in place a Human Research Protections Unit, and other research units of the military have similar boards and policies. But Human Terrain was an Army activity outside of those units; there were no external ethical review boards and no academic advisory panels to provide guidance and boundaries, only the general oversight of the Joint Capability Technical Demonstration. FMSO had originally planned such boards and panels. I am convinced that if the original Human Terrain Team vision had gone forward, it would have been a stronger scientific effort. Though there would still have been significant ethical struggles, they would have been different struggles.

After 10 years, I still feel as if I have only just arrived. I am beginning to see how funding agencies can transform science. I still publish. I still do a modest amount of (mainly library) research. But most of all, I am privileged to propose programs for meaningful social science research to benefit scientists and universities—and science itself. My research and engagement in social science allow me to transpose the military's needs and problems into the problem space of the sciences. Because I am a subject matter expert in anthropology and computational social science, I know the edges of the disciplines, the gaps: we need better ethnographic inputs into models, social science models of disaster with better biophysical connections to the realistic world of non-Western cultures, to understand how cell phones affect people's patterns of mutual assistance in times of hardship, and a dozen other topics, from illicit networks to humanitarian assistance collaboration.

The Vision Thing: What's Ahead for Social Science and the Military?

There is still no real career ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The Winds of Politics, Change, and Social Science Transformation in a Military Research Institution
• 2 Identity Management in the Federal Government: How an Andean Archaeologist Became a Social Scientist
• 3 Public Anthropology and Multitrack Dialoguing in the Securityscape
• 4 Blurring the Boundaries between Anthropology and Intelligence Analysis
• 5 Intelligence Work: The Mundane World of High-Consequence Analysis
• 6 Interdisciplinary Research in the National Laboratories
• 7 Standing at the Crossroads of Anthropology, Public Health, and National Security
• 8 Culture in/Culture of the United States Naval Academy
• 9 Teaching Culture at Marine Corps University
• 10 Protecting the Past to Secure the Future: An Archaeologist Working for the Army
• 11 Staying Safe: Aid Work and Security in Afghanistan
• 12 On the Ethics of Graduated Disclosure in Contexts of War
• 13 Ethical Considerations from the Study of Peacekeeping
• 14 Hazardous Field Operations: Romanian-American Joint Humanitarian Training
• 15 Retaining Intellectual Integrity: Introducing Anthropology to the National Security Community
• 16 How Critical Should Critical Thinking Be? Teaching Soldiers in Wartime
• Conclusion “Be All That You Can Be…”: The Anthropological Vocation in the Securityscape
• Index
• About the Editors