The Crisis of Cultural Intelligence

The Anthropology of Civil–Military Operations

David Hyndman, Scott Flower

• Editorial: WSPC
• ISBN:
  9789813273658
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Cultural & Social Anthropology

Military and civilian organizations in the past have attempted to understand culture and the cultural environment of conflict zones through anthropology. While there is a small and growing number of studies examining the use of anthropology for counter

CHAPTER 1

Cultural Research in ABCA Armies Civil–Military Operations

Introduction

Civil and military organisations have typically attempted to understand the contemporary cultural environment of conflict zones through drawing on the expertise of anthropologists. There are only a small number of studies that examine current uses of anthropology (as a discipline) for civil–military purposes. The publication of the Counterinsurgency Manual (2006, 2014) galvanised debate over anthropology and the security state. More recently, anthropologists have addressed the increasing convergence and cooperation between civil/humanitarian and military organisations, and the role of anthropology and anthropologists across the gamut of military and humanitarian emergencies and interventions, such as: Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency (Kelly et al., 2010), The New Imperialism: Militarism, Humanism and Occupation (Forte, 2011), Dangerous Liaisons (McNamara and Rubenstein, 2011), Anthropologists in the Securityscape (Albro et al., 2012), Peacekeeping under Fire (Rubenstein, 2008), Humanitarians in Hostile Territory (Van Arsdale and Smith, 2010), and Contemporary States of Emergency: The Politics of Military and Humanitarian Interventions (Fassin and Pandolfi, 2010).

Within the discipline of anthropology itself, proponents of the debate initially focussed on America’s efforts to ‘militarise’ and ‘weaponise’ the discipline through the Human Terrain System (HTS), such as: Weaponizing Anthropology (Price, 2011), and American Counterinsurgency: Human Science and Human Terrain (Gonzalez, 2009). Within the ABCA Armies, Kirke (2005) has studied anthropology from inside the British Army culture and has taken an ethnographic approach to understanding authenticity (Kirke, 2009). Kirke (2010) has also argued that social psychology is more informative than culture for understanding cohesion in the British Army. Elsewhere in the ABCA Armies, Fosher (2013) has considered the practice of anthropology within the American Army.

Civil–Military Armed Conflict, Disaster Management, and Interventionism

The guiding principle of civil–military management is to strengthen a culture of multi-agency collaboration. Advancing multi-agency, whole of government coordination enhances civil–military capabilities for armed conflict and disaster management. Armed conflict between states has diminished since World War II, while intrastate armed conflict has increased. There are fewer challenges inherent in disasters than in responding to armed conflict. Host governments make early requests for assistance following a disaster, but less so for armed conflicts. Civil–military armed conflict prevention and peacemaking is ideally followed by peacekeeping and peacebuilding. Defence predominates in the armed conflict phase, with multi-agency, whole of government coordination occurring in the post-ceasefire and peace phases. Civil–military operations are rarely undertaken unilaterally and include host states, multinational coalitions, and UN missions. The culture of civil–military multiagency collaboration enhances the management of armed conflicts and disasters (Asia Pacific Civil–Military Centre of Excellence, 2010).

The vogue for thick descriptions and blurred genres in postmodern anthropology acted to depoliticise knowledge, and to shut and block out the clamour of voices from nations on the outside asking for their claims about empire, domination, and armed conflict to be considered (Said, 2001). As military campaigns shifted away from war between states to civil–military occupations of regions identified as “tribal” and “Indigenous”, the ABCA Armies sought anthropological knowledge to understand the shifting characteristics of enemies and inform engagement with such adversaries (Price, 2011: 3).

Internationalised intrastate armed conflicts and disasters in the early 21st century have become embedded in the same global logic of interventionism, which is based on the temporality of emergency and the conflation of military and humanitarian operations used to justify a state of exception (Fassin and Pandolfi, 2010). The urgency of the situation and the danger to victims from war and disaster justify the exception of intervention. The principle of intrastate internationalised intervention constitutes an important political innovation of the early 21st century, namely a break with the doctrine of sovereignty. Following World War II, the UN Charter was based on the principle of “sovereign equality” of its members (Article 2-1) and proscribed intervention “in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state” (Article 2-7). Decolonisation established the sovereignty of colonised peoples and their right to self-determination in conflict with the sovereignty of colonising states. Military and humanitarian actors structurally placed themselves under the same state of exception. Humanitarianising interventions naturalise conflicts, as if military operations did not originate in the defence of the interests of the state conducting them. Military resources of the interveners are much greater than those of the belligerents located in nation-against-state conflicts. Contemporary counterinsurgency operations and civil–military interventions in natural and human emergencies is still the law of the strongest. Given the need to ensure the imbalance between the actors involved, it has been the ABCA Armies, sometimes with NATO militaries of Western European countries, which have intervened in regions where economic and strategic issues have been at stake. However enveloped in humanitarian morality, interventions often involve a degree of coercion reflective of the existing power inequalities between interveners and intervenees (Fassin and Pandolfi, 2010).

ABCA: The Alliance of Anglo-Saxon Armies

“Men are not tied to one another by papers and seals. They are led to associate by resemblances, by conformities, by sympathies. Nothing is so strong a tie of amity between nations as correspondence in laws, customs, manners and habits of life. They have more than force of treaties in themselves. They are obligations from the heart.”

(Edmund Burke, 1796: 155)

Overlooked in the recent quest for ‘cultural intelligence’ have been the efforts of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ settler colonial states to develop military capabilities to better understand culture and cultural factors of violence and conflict behaviour using anthropology and recruiting anthropologists. Interest in how cultural intelligence can be collected and used has increased in the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ settler colonial states, through formalised arrangements such as the America, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (ABCA) Armies.

There is a growing awareness among ABCA Armies of the need to better understand the social and cultural environments (referred to as the ‘Human Terrain’) of potential and current conflict zones and areas of operations. A result of this evolving awareness is the trend among ABCA Armies to recruit and embed cultural and social anthropologists to work alongside military units. Global ethnographic surveillance is on the military agenda (Ferguson, 2012). ABCA Armies are reaching for the tools to culturally understand and manage transnational geopolitics of nation-against-state wars and intrastate internationalised armed conflicts as scenes of civil–military interventions and counterinsurgency where their strategic interests are at stake.

ABCA is little known to the public, and has been referred to as “the alliance you never heard of” (Betz, 2008: 1). ABCA grew out of the close cooperation among Anglo-Saxon allies during World War II, and evolved through the Korean War and the American war in Vietnam. ABCA represents the alliance of five armies, not based on a treaty, but on the Basic Standardisation Agreement between America, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. ABCA originated in 1947, and included America, Britain, and Canada endeavouring to improve standardisation; with Australia joining in 1963, and New Zealand in 2006. Following the events of September 11 and conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and especially since 2004, the relationships between ABCA armies have been significantly renewed and refocused on interoperability; defined as “the ability of Alliance Forces...to train, exercise and operate effectively together in the execution of assigned missions and tasks” (ABCA, 2012). ABCA is also “about interoperability of the spirit and mind — the realm of esprit de corps” (Maginnis, 2005: 4).

Members perceive ABCA as an exclusive club based on military culture, common language, and common history, expressed as “an alliance of those actually doing the fighting and the dying” (Betz, 2008: 3). Members conceive of ABCA as an alliance that works because it is founded on the ability to communicate and trust, and rely on each other’s judgement. Despite their significant geographic dispersal, it is the ABCA armies’ common shared cultural affinities that bind the group. A shared Anglo-Saxon history and heritage, common-law legal system, and similar institutions of political and bureaucratic governance provides the foundational bond that unites the ABCA armies in interstate and intrastate armed conflict, stabilisation and peacekeeping operations (Durrell-Young, 2003).

ABCA Armies have shared hardships and victories, and have undergone transformation for combat interoperability that places them at the cutting-edge of force projection in the 21st century (Maginnis, 2005). ABCA is able to conduct joint and combined operations as a result of deliberate efforts to pursue high levels of war-fighting interoperability. The “intimate Anglo-Saxon connection appears to have been the needed basis for enduring well into the post-cold-war era” (Betz, 2008: 3). ABCA is more than just a mechanism for sharing technology and new capabilities; the group shares intellectual foundations, which enable the “free exchange of new ideas, concepts, and supporting data at almost all levels (strategic to tactical) that makes the relationship a powerful force in the diffusion of military innovation ideas about the nature of future warfare” (Durrell-Young, 2003: 95).

ABCA represents an exceptionally unique military relationship that has become stronger over time, despite differences between each country’s perceptions of threat. Conflict in the 21st century is conceptualised variously as the problematic era of hybrid warfare, complex insurgency, and war among the people; as well as the emergence of the transnational, asymmetrical, and non-state actor enemies that requires land forces like ABCA to prevail (Betz, 2008: 3). Political military operations are force multipliers to fight and win, and ABCA incorporates lessons from ongoing combat and operational missions.

ABCA Armies are deployed to parts of the world very different from their own, the local language is rarely spoken or studied in their home country, and the culture is very different. Culture, defined as “the set of opinions, beliefs, values and customs that form the identity of a society” (ABCA, 2010: 1), and building trust are taken seriously by the ABCA Armies. The ABCA Armies are aware that other cultures have a perception of them and they are aware of not imposing their own culture. The implications of cultural issues for ABCA include (ABCA, 2010: 2):

• Self-awareness of culture shock;

• Cultural sensitivity for heeding local customs and developing trusting relationships between ABCA and Indigenous forces; and

• Opportunity to understand the Human Terrain.

Human Terrain System: ABCA Armies Operational and Tactical Tool of Counterinsurgency

The Human Terrain System (HTS) experimental counterinsurgency programme was created by the American Army between 2005 and 2006 for deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan. Controversially, in 2006, HTS began to ‘embed’ anthropologists and other social scientists with combat brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan, where they helped gather intelligence, referred to as gathering ‘research’, to improve knowledge of the local culture (Sluka, 2010). HTS offered a ‘kinder and gentler’ counterinsurgency designed to gain public support for two unpopular wars, but initially equivocated whether accumulated databases might be used to target suspected Iraqi or Afghan insurgents for abduction or assassination (Gonzales, 2008). The military had failed with predominately kinetic tactics, and Montgomery McFate was available at the right time to sell the military a cultural-centric counterinsurgency remedy (Sluka, 2010). It became increasingly popular in the American military to consider social, ethnographic, cultural, economic, and political elements in gathering intelligence, where force operated in order to turn around a failed occupation.

McFate called for human terrain focussed on social scientists with strong connections to the services and combatant command (McFate and Jackson, 2005). Anthropology was boldly declared to be the academic discipline “invented to support warfighting in the tribal zone” (McFate, 2005: 43). Major General Robert Scales noted the colonial British Army had immersed officers in the cultures of the Empire and endorsed the imperialist culture-centric approach for human terrain, which included postgraduate studies in human behaviour and cultural anthropology (Scales, 2004).

Human terrain contrasts with geophysical terrain in conventional state-versus-state warfare. In the 21st century, combatants fought population-centric wars for the control of people (Killen, 2007), and people in human terrain became geographical space to be conquered and human beings as territory to be captured (Gonzales, 2008). In recognition of the controversial terminology, the American Dialect Society named ‘Human Terrain Team’ the most euphemistic phrase of the year in 2007 (Sluka, 2010).

The HTS program became known as ‘a CORDS for the 21st century’ (Kipp et al., 2006). In Vietnam, the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS) program was made operational in 1968. CORDS became one component of the counterinsurgency strategy, with the infamous Phoenix program as the other component. Intelligence was gathered to target tens of thousands of Vietnamese for ‘neutralisation’ (Valentine, 1990). CORDS were presented as a humanitarian project for winning hearts and minds, while Phoenix remained as the secret paramilitary arm. Wolf and Jorgenson (1971: 33) recalled a Thailand specialist’s observation that “the old formula for successful counterinsurgency used to be 10 troops for every guerrilla…now the formula is 10 anthropologists for each guerrilla”. For the decades since the Vietnam War, anthropologists have considered involvement in counterinsurgency as ethically ‘taboo’ (Sluka, 2010).

Montgomery McFate advocated anthropology as fundamentally one of applied state control, compared with Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1995) who supported “The Primacy of the Ethical”, and called for the anthropology of resistance, critical reflection, and human liberation.

In the last two decades, American military forces have begun tasking anthropologists to conduct ethnographic research that informs military commander’s contextual understanding of the ‘Human Terrain’ of the ‘battle-space’. More controversially, this anthropological ‘research’ is sometimes utilised as a stream of intelligence to support targeting and, as a result, has been challenged ethically to do no harm, be transparent, and be based on voluntary informed consent (Gonzales, 2009). In 2007, the AAA formally opposed the HTS and denounced it as ‘an unaccept...

Índice

• Cover page
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Chapter 1: Cultural Research in ABCA Armies Civil–Military Operations
• Chapter 2: 19th Century Evolutionary Anthropology as Colonial Intelligence
• Chapter 3: Early 20th Century Ethnography as Colonial Instrument for Government Planning
• Chapter 4: Militarized Anthropological Intelligence in the Second World War
• Chapter 5: The Cold War and the Demise of Colonial Empire
• Chapter 6: Socio-political Status of Anthropology and Indigenous Resistance
• Chapter 7: Civil–Military Intervention in Armed Conflict Among the People
• Chapter 8: Cultural Intelligence in the ABCA Armies
• Chapter 9: Case Studies
• Chapter 10: Conclusion
• References
• Index
• About the Authors