Table Of ContentSOCIAL SCIENCE GOES TO WAR
MONTGOMERY MCFATE
JANICE H. LAURENCE
(Editors)
Social Science
Goes to War
The Human Terrain System
in Iraq and Afghanistan
A
A
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McFate, Montgomery and Laurence, Janice H
Social Science Goes to War
The Human Terrain System in Iraq and Afghanistan
ISBN 978-0-19-021672-6
CONTENTS
Foreword General (Ret) David H. Petraeus vii
1. I ntroduction: Unveiling the Human Terrain System
Montgomery McFate and Janice H. Laurence 1
2. Mind the Gap: Bridging the Military/Academic Divide
Montgomery McFate 45
3. An Anthropologist at War in Afghanistan Ted Callahan 91
4. What Do You Bring to the Fight? A Year in Iraq as an
Embedded Social Scientist Katherine Blue Carroll 119
5. Playing Spades in Al Anbar: A Female Social Scientist
Among Marines and Special Forces Jennifer A. Clark 141
6. The Four Pillars of Integration: How to Make Social Science
Work in a War Zone Kathleen Reedy 167
7. Investing in Uncertainty: Applying Social Science to Military
Operations James Dorough-Lewis Jr. 187
8. Allied Civilian Enablers and the Helmand Surge
Leslie Adrienne Payne 213
9. Assessing the Human Terrain Teams: No White Hats or
Black Hats, Please Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban
and George R. Lucas Jr. 237
10. T angi Valley: The Limitations of Applied Anthropology in
Afghanistan Brian G. Brereton 265
v
CONTENTS
11. The Human Terrain System: Some Lessons Learned and
the Way Forward Janice H. Laurence 291
Appendix: Interview Questions for HTS Personnel 317
Notes 319
Index 365
vi
FOREWORD
General (Ret) David H. Petraeus
General (Ret) David H. Petraeus is Chairman of the KKR Global
Institute. Prior to joining KKR, General Petraeus served over thirty-
seven years in the U.S. military, including command of coalition forces
in Iraq, command of US Central Command, and command of coalition
forces in Afghanistan. Following his service in the military, General
Petraeus served as the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
General Petraeus graduated with distinction from the US Military
Academy and subsequently earned MPA and Ph.D. degrees in interna-
tional relations from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School
of Public and International Affairs. General Petraeus has received
numerous US military, State Department, NATO, and United Nations
medals and awards, and he has been decorated by thirteen foreign
countries. He also serves as a Visiting Professor of Public Policy at
CUNY’s Macaulay Honors College, as a Senior Fellow at Harvard
University’s Belfer Center, and as Judge Widney Professor at the
University of Southern California. General Petraeus is a member of the
advisory board of Team Rubicon and a number of other veterans’
organizations.
***
Counterinsurgency operations are sometimes described as “armed
social work.” This description is meant to convey that counterinsur-
gency campaigns require more than just the tasks associated with
offensive and defensive operations—that counterinsurgency campaigns
have to include a host of so-called “stability operations” tasks as well.
vii
FOREWORD
The term “armed social work” thus highlights that, in addition to
lethal force to combat the enemy, a counterinsurgency campaign has
to include a variety of activities beyond those of vital conventional mil-
itary operations that seek to clear areas of insurgents and then to hold
them. The additional tasks range from assisting with the development
of military and police forces and the re-establishment of critical gov-
ernmental institutions, to helping restore basic services, rebuild dam-
aged infrastructure, and restore (or build) various components of the
rule of law. Additionally, and very importantly, all of these endeavors
have to be undertaken in a manner that reflects a granular understand-
ing of the local cultures, religions, customs, laws, and social organiz-
ing principles and structures if the overall effort is to succeed in the
long run. Indeed, outside approaches should not be imposed on a for-
eign society; rather, sustainable change has to emerge from the efforts
of the nation itself in line with the unique conditions of the local area.
As T.E. Lawrence famously cautioned in his Twenty Seven Articles in
1917, “Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better [they]
do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are
to help them, not to win it for them.”
Carrying out “armed social work” in a foreign country thus neces-
sitates considerable knowledge of that country and its culture, tradi-
tions, laws, and practices. Indeed, such knowledge can be decisive in a
counterinsurgency. Unfortunately, this critical lesson has been forgot-
ten from time-to-time, and it has cost intervention forces dearly in cer-
tain cases. As I noted while still in uniform, for example, American
military elements were not nearly as well prepared as we should have
been at the beginning of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for the situ-
ations that we faced. In fact, at the outset of both those campaigns we
lacked the detailed, granular understanding of the countries we were
invading. Our forces were, moreover, primarily organized, trained and
equipped for major combat operations rather than for a mix of those
operations plus the myriad additional tasks essential to the conduct of
a counterinsurgency campaign. Beyond that, as I also noted while in
uniform, it took us years just to get the inputs right in both Afghanistan
and Iraq—that is, to get the “big ideas” (the strategy) right, to commu-
nicate the big ideas effectively throughout our forces, to establish the
organizational elements and architecture needed to properly implement
the big ideas together with our coalition and host nation partners, and
to deploy the military and civilian resources required to conduct the
resulting comprehensive civil-military campaign.1
viii
