Cultural Awareness in the Military

Developments and Implications for Future Humanitarian Cooperation

R. Albro, B. Ivey, R. Albro, B. Ivey

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137409423
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique militaire

Featuring chapters from social scientists directly engaged with the process, this volume offers a concise introduction to the U.S. military's effort to account for culture and increase its cultural capacity over the last decade. Contributors to this work consider some of the key challenges, lessons learned, and the limits of such efforts.

1

Introduction: Military Cultural Capacity after Afghanistan

Robert Albro and Bill Ivey

Abstract: This introduction offers a brief overview of the context for the US military’s efforts to build its cultural capacity over the previous decade. It goes on to highlight three modalities represented across the volume’s chapters for addressing the question of military cultural awareness: the institutionalization of military cultural education and training, and of cultural heritage management and protection, but also assessments of prevailing models and lessons learned in the pursuit of this capacity. The introduction also identifies different perspectives represented in this volume with respect to these developments. As discussed across the chapters, it gives particular attention to the challenges for expertise and the several conceptions of culture as a dimension of: military culture, culture training, counterinsurgency, humanitarian cooperation, and technology-driven problem-solving respectively.

Albro, Robert and Bill Ivey, eds. Cultural Awareness in the Military: Developments and Implications for Future Humanitarian Cooperation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137409423.0004.

That the purposes, methods, and organization of the US military have changed dramatically since the Cold War is now taken largely for granted. New demands have forced the military to embrace a range of activities once assigned to other agencies with an international footprint, or to assume entirely new roles generated by technology, natural disasters, and the unprecedented character of 21st century combat. Nowhere have these changes been more evident than in efforts by the military over the past decade to increase its cultural understanding and to incorporate cultural knowledge into its operations in multiple ways.¹ To date, when the “cultural turn” of the US military has been noted, it is most often as part of the many arguments over the merits or failures of culture-centric counterinsurgency.² However, the post-Afghanistan humanitarian implications of the military’s attention to culture, set in a broader inter-agency context, have as yet been given little attention.

Culture and security

Some of the more important drivers of the military’s cultural turn can be outlined in brief. In the broadest terms, over the previous decade, post-Cold War and post-9/11 realities have been interpreted by the US policy community through “clash of civilizations”³ frameworks, which essentially understand conflicts in cultural terms, and for which soft power becomes a crucial tool. For the military, this framework refocused basic objectives toward the conduct of asymmetric warfare, that is, unconventional conflicts among non-state actors frequently representative of culturally distinct populations. Particularly in response to the military exigencies of Afghanistan and Iraq during the mid-2000s, counterinsurgency doctrine – requiring significant awareness of and sustained engagement with non-combatant cultural communities – emerged as the answer. These missions, in turn, spurred efforts to rapidly erase the military’s perceived “cultural knowledge gap” by building up a cultural capacity.

Concurrently, as the shape of the US military’s global footprint has moved away from preparing for the next large conventional conflict, its logistical capabilities have been deployed as both a first responder and global backstop addressing diverse humanitarian disasters, ranging from the 2004 Banda Aceh tsunami or the 2010 Haiti earthquake to the 2014 West African Ebola epidemic. Now asked to operate as a humanitarian agency, the military must frequently coordinate with such diverse civilian and NGO actors as the United Nations Development Programme, USAID, the US Department of State, and other development, refugee, and human rights organizations, including such unlikely counterparts as the Smithsonian Institution.

The lines separating military uses of culture in counterinsurgency and in humanitarian relief are blurred. Many humanitarian activities were deployed as counterinsurgency tactics in Iraq and Afghanistan (often in the form of civil-military cooperation on provincial reconstruction teams or civil affairs teams). Such efforts are recognized within military doctrine as “operations other than war” (MOOTW) or as “stability, security, transition and reconstruction operations” (SSTR). They are complex, combining work in development, diplomacy, peacekeeping, human rights, governance, and reconciliation, among other activities, demanding an in-depth appreciation of pertinent “socio-cultural dynamics.”

Over the past decade, the “clash of civilizations” frame, shaping policy at the highest levels, has stimulated and justified a range of strategic and tactical practices within the US military. On the one hand, chapter 8 of the 2006 US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual presents culture as a key component of the “operational environment,” defining culture as “a system that members of a society use to cope with their world and with one another.”⁴ In this sense, cultural knowledge is understood to be a warfighting strategy to exert influence over the context of a conflict by controlling “human terrain.” In contrast, humanitarian relief expresses the softest of “soft power,” providing disaster services in settings frequently managed by non-military relief agencies. For the near post-war future, as current conflicts wind down and no major war looms, military capabilities will most likely be utilized as first responders in a variety of smaller-scale humanitarian missions. But the tension built into the military’s approach between the uses of culture for warfighting and the relevance of culture for the effective negotiation of typically complex humanitarian missions, remains a potential challenge.

The chapters in this volume engage key issues within this broad, and still evolving, spectrum of military engagement with culture. Each was first presented in December, 2011, in a day-long conference dedicated to “accounting for culture in the military,”⁵ hosted by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and organized by the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise & Public Policy. It was the last in an ongoing series of meetings on cultural policy topics held in Washington DC between 2003 and 2012, as part of the Curb Center’s Arts Industries Policy Forum. This forum was designed to “to address culturally significant public policy issues” and to help build a networked critical mass of policy and decision-makers in the nation’s capital. This greater appreciation for the relevance of culture as a component of public policy is essential in a nation that lacks the centralizing influence of a cultural ministry or a department of cultural affairs.⁶

The overarching goal of the Arts Industries Policy Forum – the development of an informal policy cohort to compensate for the absence of a US Department of Cultural Affairs – provides a backdrop for the exploration of culture in the military in this volume. Today, the United States divides cultural policy tasks up among a host of local, state and national agencies, which frequently don’t cooperate well. Inevitably, this diffuse context deemphasizes the role of culture in both domestic and international policy making and, in the words of anthropologist Renato Rosaldo, helps to perpetuate a national self-identity of Americans as a “people without culture.”⁷ Given this reality, cultural policy can be a hard sell.

Nevertheless, whether the problem is ethnicity and national identity in the Ukraine crisis, China’s soft power ambitions, sectarian violence in Syria and Iraq, heritage destruction in Mali, or the global piracy of copyright-protected cultural goods and services like music and film, culture – routinely neglected in the US – is an increasingly critical piece of the international affairs puzzle.⁸ The manner in which significant cultural questions are identified and negotiated in the course of US government engagements with the rest of the world promises to be an important determinant of the success or failure of these efforts. But, unfortunately, at present the question of culture is also the dimension of foreign policy which the US government understands the least.

To begin to address this problem, the Arts Industries Policy Forum sought to draw regular attention to multiple ways in which culture matters for policy in the US. Of necessity, this included the question of national security. As early as 2008, the Curb Center had elaborated a report on “cultural diplomacy and the national interest,”⁹ in which it encouraged a reassessment of the ways the concept of culture was assumed to be relevant to the work of diplomacy. In the course of its recommendations, the report drew attention to the challenges that US foreign policy decision-makers have had in recognizing and embracing the full extent of the range and diversity of the ways that culture informs diplomacy. While addressing diplomacy, this report anticipated a basic difficulty raised by several chapters in this volume. Stated simply, in seeking to improve the military’s cultural capacity there is not a single fix, model, framework, concept, form of training, or technology that can adequately encompass the various – sometimes not altogether compatible – ways that culture might matter for different parts of the military and military purposes. Nor is there one particular mechanism by which cultural knowledge can be incorporated into military doctrine or practice, be taught, or become the subject of specific training interventions.

So engagement with the challenges posed by cultural questions has been a largely piecemeal process for the military; an undertaking driven by particular professional approaches among different varieties of “culture experts,” needs assessments by different military services,¹⁰ and also changing circumstances on the ground. Unsurprisingly, for professionals in other cultural fields or parallel universes – like the several fields of humanitarian intervention – the military’s cultural turn has been something of which they have only general awareness. In fact, one purpose of the 2011 conference was to initiate a dialogue between military leaders and professionals in these other domains. These non-military interested parties included government staff, members of the Arts Industries Policy Forum engaged in arts funding, intellectual property, and trade negotiation, as well as forum members whose work touched on military matters. Also included were humanitarian professionals dedicated to disaster response, human rights, sustainable development, public diplomacy, peacekeeping, and other types of humanitarian intervention that often involves cooperation with military counterparts.

Humanitarian missions and cultural diplomacy

To date, military developments in culture-based humanitarian relief have been largely siloed within the US Department of Defense. However, enthusiasm for inter-agency efforts to better share and coordinate cultural expertise across and beyond government is gaining momentum.¹¹ This effort is spurred, in large part, by a growing realization that the question of culture is central to US security interests, and that the relationship of culture to security is not simply a military one. At the same time, future humanitarian action will likely involve regular collaboration with military counterparts.

Cultural property protection, for example, represents a form of military engagement beyond the traditional military role. As explored in Nicholas’s chapter, since the end of WWII, there has been growing interest globally in preserving and protecting cultural heritage, including monuments and historic sites, and religious shrines, but also such intangible traditions as folksongs, myths, and legends. One effect of this ongoing push for international normative policies and processes governing the conduct of persons, communities, and states with respect to heritage has been to frame “cultural heritage” as a scarce and valuable local or national resource, as a well-defined potential subject of state action, as one basis for international trade, and as an increasing source of international conflict. Tracking this trend, some historians have referred to the contemporary onset of “heritage crusades,” which can lead to “heritage wars.”¹² In other words, as Nicholas makes clear, attitudes about cultural heritage have changed over time, and international actors increasingly seek legal redress, or take violent steps, in relation to new and prevailing conceptions of heritage – as something rivalrous, non-renewable, specific in time and place, and exclusively owned by people, communities, or nations.

Not coincidentally, the potential destruction of cultural heritage has now become a major preoccupation, not only for particular communities and nation-states, but also for the US military. Recent history is replete with multiple examples of the destruction of heritage sites or objects in active conflict zones, destruction that itself leads to conflict. A short list would include the 2001 demolition of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan, the 2003 looting of the Baghdad Museum, the devastation of the 2...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction: Military Cultural Capacity after Afghanistan
• 2  Cautionary Tales from the US Department of Defenses Pursuit of Cultural Expertise
• 3  Changing Culture with Culture at the US Naval Academy
• 4  Cultural Education and Training: The Era of COIN
• 5  Humanitarian-Military Collaboration: Social and Cultural Aspects of Interoperability
• 6  The Unsolved Issues of Protection and Recovery of Cultural Heritage in Times of Conflict
• 7  Beyond the 1954 Hague Convention
• 8  Introducing Cultural Heritage Management to the US Military
• 9  A Journalists Reflections on the Military Cultural Turn
• Index