"Soft" Counterinsurgency: Human Terrain Teams and US Military Strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan

Human Terrain Teams and US Military Strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan

Paul Joseph

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781349487486, 9781137404800
• eBook ISBN: 9781137401878
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Social Sciences

"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.

1

Program

Abstract: This chapter outlines the history of the Human Terrain System (HTS) program and the military strategy that lay behind it. It also discusses the ethical concerns raised by the American Anthropological Association including the need to protect human subjects, the blurred line between “information” and “intelligence,” and the difficulties of carrying out research in the midst of combat zones. The chapter reviews the danger of participating in the program, which includes three fatalities of human terrain team (HTT) personnel. It describes concerns that have been raised about competency levels, including the self-interest of the original contractor, the limited skills level of many recruited to HTS, curriculum and training, time constraints on producing quality research, the impact of rotation policy, the tendency for information to remain in distinct “silos,” and the quality of the interpreters.

Keywords: Afghanistan; American Anthropological Association; counterinsurgency; human terrain teams; Internal Review Boards; Iraq; military strategy; research ethics; subcontractors

Joseph, Paul. “Soft” Counterinsurgency: Human Terrain Teams and US Military Strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137401878.0005.

There’s no IRB on a FOB.

A human terrain analyst explaining why ethical criteria that normally govern research cannot be applied in combat areas

Human terrain teams are embedded in brigades consisting of approximately 3,500 soldiers, although they may be temporarily assigned to smaller battalions or even smaller companies. When the first teams were introduced their size was quite small, at times consisting of only two individuals. Teams could also be split between two or more brigades. This made for idiosyncratic reporting structures. A few teams were also embedded with international forces including the British, Canadians, Germans, and Poles. While the focus remains at the brigade level, HTATs, or human terrain analysis teams, operate at the division and corps levels. Once deployed, teams could also access additional information from Research Reachback Centers (RRCs) located in Newport News, VA for Iraq, and at the Leavenworth, KS training headquarters for Afghanistan.

HTTs contain four functional roles. The team leader, almost always a former military officer, is responsible for communication and coordination with commanders, largely because their experience has enabled them to present potential projects and distill results into a form more easily digested by the brigade’s possibly skeptical and certainly time-pressured leader. The research manager coordinates activities within the team. Social scientists conceive and organize the research, while analysts or regional specialists are supposed to speak the local language and be familiar with the culture and history. That was not always the case and many teams required interpreters as well.

The need for both a social scientist and a human terrain analyst is significant. The usual expectation for social science research carried out in other countries is for the theory, methodology, knowledge of the local area, and language skills to be vested in one individual. Generally, a minimum of a year, and possibly two, is considered necessary to become fluent, sufficiently aware to read the culture in at least a roughly accurate manner, and establish the networks required to win trust and gain access to the local population. Only then does the researcher feel sufficiently confident to carry out meaningful fieldwork. Some findings may be acquired earlier but time is necessary to build familiarity.

In HTS, the typical time for deployment is 9–11 months, usually with no prior experience. Given the uncertain security, freedom of movement among the local population can be significantly curtailed. The program has had difficulty in recruiting Ph.D. level social scientists with relevant local knowledge. As of April 2009, only six of the 49 Ph.D.s hired by HTS were anthropologists and their area specialties were not necessarily the Middle East or the Afghanistan/Pakistan area (Lamb et al. 2013a: 55). As a result, the research/theory function and knowledge of the local population, which is not nearly what can be expected from a true area specialist, became divided across two individuals.

The first organizational period of HTS was considered experimental, a “proof of concept,” that was carried out by BAE Systems, a private contractor. The first team deployed in Khost, Afghanistan in early 2007, with five more immediately afterward, all in Iraq. Khost was considered excellent, received favorable publicity both within and outside of the military, and became something of a poster child used to support the expansion and institutionalization of the program. The record in Iraq was not nearly as good. Two of the five teams imploded, due in part to intense interpersonal conflicts.

In 2009, HTS moved away from its experimental phase, and succeeded in becoming part of the regular Army budget with an annual allotment exceeding $160 million. As part of this transition, HTS personnel moved away from contractor status and became government employees with civil service pay scales. The size peaked in 2011 with 30 deployed teams. The size of the individual teams became larger, at times reaching two social scientists and another two regional specialists, with a total of between five and nine. The training program, earlier derided as poor or nonexistent, was modified significantly. For example, toward the end of their training, HTT candidates now spent at least a month at Ft. Polk, LA where they learned field skills and familiarized themselves with the maneuvers performed by regular military units. In an effort to improve language skills, the cultural immersion experience, at the University of Kansas for Iraq-bound candidates, and the University of Omaha for those headed to Afghanistan, was lengthened. Despite these efforts, the program struggled to meet the key learning outcome of the new curriculum: “creating specific skills to cope with contexts that cannot be imagined.” Some of the other key challenges that accompanied the rapid growth of HTS are reviewed later in this chapter.

In 2007, the American Dialect Society (ADS) honored HTS, naming “Human Terrain Team” the most euphemistic phrase of the year. The ADS was not the only organization to express its appreciation. The advantages of acquiring sociocultural information became increasingly recognized within the military and among civilian security experts who had been looking for answers to the challenges the military faced in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many of the early reviews of HTS were positive. Then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates claimed that the HTS program “is leading to alternative thinking—coming up with job-training programs for widows, or inviting local power brokers to bless a mosque restored with coalition funds. These kinds of actions are key to long-term success, but they are not always intuitive in a military establishment that has long put a premium on firepower and technology” (McFate and Fondacaro 2011: 79). The first director and head social scientist found that, “During the first 4 years of its existence, HTS was surprisingly successful in addressing the requirements of Army and Marine units downrange” (ibid: 80). The congressional testimony of COL Martin Schweitzer, the first brigade commander to have an HTT assigned to his staff, was also pivotal. For Schweitzer: “My headquarters is uniquely qualified to focus on the enemy as the Center of Gravity. However, today the people are the Center of Gravity—not the enemy; and BCT Headquarters require enablers to optimize their effectiveness. One of these enablers is HTS.” In Congressional testimony that has been quoted widely, Schweitzer claimed that by “using HTT capabilities, we reduced kinetic operations by 60–70% and because the enemy is hiding ‘among the people,’ we must understand the culture to win” (2008). A team from West Point visited HTTs in Iraq and reported favorably on what they found (Jebb et al. 2008). The “value-added” from HTS included critical family, political, and tribal networking charts, as well as the promise of providing greater continuity of knowledge as brigades rotated in and out of specific areas. A special issue of the Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin, largely devoted to HTS, contained mostly positive assessments of the program (2011). Finally, by invoking a universally approved reference point, those justifying the program to a set of military leaders normally inclined against the use of social science, described and defended HTS as a “force multiplier.”

I will return to the organizational challenges faced by HTS but will discuss first the strategic background of the new program.

Background: overwhelming force versus counterinsurgency

British colonial forces had cultural advisers who lived and worked in key areas for many years at a time and helped them to manage the empire. Historically, the US was generally less sure on how to utilize social information. Still, during World War II, the War Department enlisted anthropology on its behalf (Price 2008), and, in Project Camelot, the Pentagon turned toward all of the social sciences for ideas on how to undercut social movements in South America that challenged their favored elites (McFate 2005; Horowitz 1967). But the real interest in finding new forms of influence besides lethal force came when wars of attrition, grinding down the enemy so that they could no longer resist, were simply not working. The inability of the military to dictate terms led to several responses: Some called for still more force hoping that there would be a threshold where greater killing would finally get the job done. This might be expressed in the Vietnam-era slogan “Grab them by the balls, and their hearts and minds will follow.” Others recognized constraints on the use of force, many stemming from the public sensibilities that limited the number that the country was willing to accept. In an effort to find a better way, they suggested strategic revisions that moved in the direction of population centric warfare and the doctrine of counterinsurgency—the “military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological, and civic actions taken by a government to defeat insurgency” (Counterinsurgency Field Manual 2007).

The Vietnam War brought the tensions between the limitations of conventional force and the need for counterinsurgency to a head. In the early 1960s, Gerald Hickey, an anthropologist employed by the RAND Corporation, engaged in a study of rural resistance, later published as Village in Vietnam, that explored how government authority against the National Liberation Front (NLF) might be promoted by reorganizing the Strategic Hamlet Program. That heavy-handed effort, run by the anti-communist government in Saigon, was ridden with corruption and other forms of abuse. In an attempt to limit the influence of revolutionary forces, whose size, ironically, was augmented by the program designed to counter it, Hickey called for a closer connection between economic activity that would improve the social conditions of the peasantry, and physical security. His recommendations were largely ignored by military leaders still wedded to conventional force and coercive techniques to force the peasants to support anti-communist politicians in Saigon. Hickey tried to promote his reformist, but still very pro-Washington, program. But when briefing Marine General Victor Krulak, the general pounded his fist on his desk and said, “We are going to make the peasants do what is necessary for strategic hamlets to succeed!” (McFate 2005: 34). Hickey then noted that peasants have many methods of passive and active resistance, and large levels of force are often counterproductive.

Disapproving the results of the study, the Pentagon pressured RAND to change the findings. RAND refused, but none of Hickey’s proposals were followed and the Strategic Hamlet Program failed miserably. It is tempting to see Hickey, and his call for a comprehensive, carrot-and-stick approach to security, as a precursor of HTS, and General Krulak as the embodiment of conventional military thinking that continues to exist today. But both camps fail to address a fundamental question: Why were the peasants aligned with the NLF in the first place? Krulak’s war of attrition might be able to kill without producing a victory. How would Hickey’s reforms have worked against the depth of endemic corruption, landlord exploitation, and poor governance that lay at the core of the Saigon regime? The question holds for counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan as well. “Kinetics,” the use or threatened use of violence, might not work as well as intended. But could an occupying force generate social reforms so effective that they erased the fact that they came from an occupying force in the first place? These proposed reforms represented a “softer,” less-violent way of attempting to secure social control. But to work they still had to command legitimacy, or approval from a population that had already concluded that the US-supported government did not operate in their interests. Meanwhile, President Johnson sent more than a half million soldiers to South Vietnam and began to bomb both South and North at a scale equivalent to World War II.

In Vietnam, the limitations of conventional force against a large-scale, popular revolutionary movement never went away. In the midst of the 1968 Tet Offensive, a US military officer, following an intense artillery barrage against a town controlled by the NLF famously proclaimed that it was “necessary to bomb the village in order to save it.” The Orwellian statement stood for the futility of US strategy that relied on killing and physical destruction but not on gaining popular support. Shortly after the war ended, another US officer told a leader of the victorious Vietnamese, “You know, you were never able to defeat us on the battlefield.” “Very true,” came the reply. “But also quite irrelevant.”

Eventually, a counterinsurgency strategy was introduced in Vietnam. It was called the “Phoenix Program,” designed and run by the Central Intelligence Agency in collaboration with the South Vietnam government, and focused on the destruction of the National Liberation Front’s political infrastructure. NLF suspects were captured, and often tortured. Information so gained was given to military intelligence and used to target other possible collaborators with the revolutionary movement. Eventually as many as 50,000 were killed with a good proportion victimized by private vendettas, such as between rival landowners, rather than political persuasion. Phoenix was emphatically a “hard” counterinsurgency program. In postwar reflections, US political and military leaders vowed that they would not repeat the same mistakes. But in those reflections, different camps drew opposite conclusions.

One direction was represented by Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger, and later, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of Defense, Colin Powell. They called for a more careful, discriminating approach before committing soldiers to battle. Military force did not need to be rethought along the lines of counterinsurgency but its use should be limited and its scale disproportionate: “overwhelming force” was the term often used. But the conditions that had to be met before initiating war actually imparted a form of cautious conservatism that restricted the actual use of force. Weinberger had no taste for extended conflicts, such as Vietnam, that could whittle away public support. And he could not see the need for the Army or Marines to become involved in nation-building, or why soldiers should rethink their training so they might better coordinate with NGOs. The military was there to fight and win wars against other states, to serve national interests rather than humanitarian purposes, and it would use massive force if it did so. Weinberger and Powell also spoke of “force protection” and the need for “exit strategies.” They recognized that the public had no desire for the large casualties experienced during Vietnam, and they preferred to shape operations in a way that reduced the chances of significant loss of life – at least to the US. Any commitment of force overseas needed to be coupled with a strategy of how it would be withdrawn. The rhetoric surrounding the need for “overwhelming force” sounded ominous, and the distaste for any effort to finesse the military by adding quasi-civilian functions was certainly orthodox. Yet the need for quick, decisive victories, followed by quick, complete withdrawals, actually established a relatively high bar for the commitment of troops where there was any prospect of prolonged fighting. Weinberger and Powell did build a strong post-Vietnam military; they also expressed a strong post-Vietnam caution of actually using that military in battle.

Other proponents of US power were not pleased by this line of thinking. President Reagan’s Secretary of State George Schultz, and those who would eventually coalesce into a group of neo-conservatives who exercised considerable influence on the George W. Bush administration, thought that the requirement for overwhelming force and a clear exit strategy were too confining. The military was a needed instrument of US power and the post-Cold War environment was not different. Even force protection came in for criticism. True, the public would no longer stomach Vietnam-era losses numbering in the tens of thousands. But in their opinion, the US public would accept some casualties, particularly if they seemed to be in the name of defending the nation against terrorism or weapons of mass destruction. In 2001, public support for entering Afghanistan and overthrowing the Taliban was strong—at least initially. The intervention in Iraq two years later was also supported—again, initially. Under prodding from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, President Bush’s generals tried to do it on the cheap, with significantly fewer soldiers than called for by the Army’s more cautious establishment. In 2003 and 2004, no one in either the White House or the Pentagon was calling for nation-building, counterinsurgency, or developing greater influence via a robust civil-based strategy.

But in both Afghanistan and Iraq, winning turned out to be elusive. Each country became “like Vietnam” in the sense that victories on the battl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Program
• 2  Battle Space
• 3  Success
• 4  Violence
• 5  Occupation
• References and Source Material
• Index