.Army Anthropologist's Controversial Culture Clash
Seven years ago, Montgomery McFate was sitting in a bar in Washington, DC, trying to figure out what to do with her life. She was an unemployed, overeducated Army wife with advanced degrees in anthropology and law from Harvard and Yale — and few career prospects. University jobs were out. Her former colleagues in academia didn't care much for her focus on warfare, especially insurgencies. The military didn't seem like fertile ground, either: The Pentagon hadn’t shown an interest in social science since the Vietnam era, when public outrage erupted over the use of anthropological research to target enemies.
McFate worried that this self-imposed cultural boycott would come back to haunt the Department of Defense. She wrote on a cocktail napkin: "How do I make anthropology relevant to the military?" Turns out, all it took to get it done was a coup within the American military; near-losses in a pair of wars; and McFate enduring mountains of criticism, and oceans of guilt, for helping to broker the reintroduction between the social sciences and the Pentagon.
Traditionally, the military has relied almost solely on so-called hard sciences, like nuclear physics and chemistry. But as a simple regime-change operation in Iraq descended into a baffling counterinsurgency, it became clear that you can have the most advanced sensors, the toughest armor, the most precise GPS-guided munitions, but without any insight into the civilian population — or at least some sense of how they’ll react to your moves — your war effort is sunk.
By 2004, McFate had made her way into the national security establishment as a researcher at Rand. McFate’s ideas (shared by a growing number in the military) caught the attention of the science adviser to the joint chiefs of staff. She then codified them in a pair of articles in Military Review outlining a rationale and strategy for integrating the social sciences into national defense. Today she is the senior social science adviser for the Human Terrain System, a $130 million Army program that embeds political science, anthropology and economics specialists with combat units in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Defense Department recently launched a separate, $20 million project to fund social science research. Commanders who once spoke only in terms of objectives seized and enemies killed now talk about the necessity of understanding the "human terrain." Even Defense Secretary Gates now says you "cannot kill or capture our way to victory" in the fight against terror. "What you’re trying to do is understand the people’s interests," McFate says. "Because whoever is more effective at meeting the interests of the population will be able to influence it."
McFate wasn't an obvious choice to advise the U.S. military. Raised by an artist mother on a converted barge on San Francisco Bay, she was anti-Iraq invasion and pro-Democrat, during the Dubya ascendancy. She also has a deeply mischievous streak. Until recently, she kept a tongue-in-cheek blog devoted to "studly guys in uniform slinging rifles" who "make me want to bite my fist!!!!" -- not standard Pentagon fare. Neither is McFate's Betty Boop haircut, alternately died raven-black or strawberry blonde. Or her background as a one-time go-go- dancer. But McFate -- whose father served in the Marines, and whose husband is a former paratrooper and private military contractor -- also holds a deep admiration for national security types (and not just their abs). Meanwhile, "we’re doing what we can to rescue the fashion catastrophe that is Washington," she says.
Her initial attempt at military social science wasn't all that successful. She put together a database of ethnographic and cultural details for field commanders. The reaction of retired Colonel Steve Fondacaro, then stationed in Baghdad: "I threw that shit out of there.... The last thing these guys needed was another gizmo.... They needed a person, someone with knowledge of the society. An angel on their shoulder."
McFate returned with a revised plan. Army would embed humanities types into fighting brigades. These so-called Human Terrain Teams wouldn't necessarily be experts on Iraq or Afghanistan. But they would have enough training to study the local communities and advise the commander about what they found. A single unit in Afghanistan was selected to test the concept. Fondacaro became McFate's main ally, and the the program's chief. He and a number of other retired Army officers now run the Human Terrain System out of Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas.
Not long ago, the Human Terrain Program would have been a little too kumbaya for an Army more accustomed to shooting enemies than schmoozing sheiks. So would McFate's contention that "in a counterinsurgency, your level of success is inversely proportional to the amount of lethal force that you expend."
But by 2006, with the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns unraveling, the attitude was shifting. McFate was invited to help rewrite the Army's manual on counterinsurgency. It counseled officers to apply all of the tools at their disposal: not only bullets and bombs, but economic development, propaganda and political deal making. The Pentagon steadily increased the number of teams, and the program is slated to eventually comprise nearly 700 people -- all serving as guides to Iraq and Afghanistan's cultural, political and tribal landscapes.
Early teams provided basic cross-cultural interpretation. They dispensed advice on what gift to give an Iraqi sheik (a nice new gun, perhaps) or whether to accept his initial offer of lamb (yes) or whether to worry about blood-smeared cars nearby (strangely, no –- it's part of a blessing ritual). They suggested ways to handle police chiefs who turned a blind eye to their underlings moonlighting for extremist militias. (Skip direct confrontations and shame the bosses instead: Show how the officers were disrespecting their bosses by double dipping.)
Eventually the specialists began to suggest ways to sway the local population's support away from insurgents and militias and toward the U.S.-backed government. That didn't mean some squishy, hearts-and-minds campaign. It meant diving into Iraq's kaleidoscopic power politics. In Baghdad's notorious Sadr City slum, U.S. commanders were trying to win over the neighborhood's power players with lucrative construction contracts.
But when the Human Terrain Team began charting the area's political structure, it discovered that favored partners like the Qaim M'Khan, the so-called neighborhood mayor, wielded little influence. The real power at the time was the Office of the Martyr Sadr, the social and political wing of the Shi'ite militia. A deputy chief in the District Council, Hassan Hussein Shammah appeared to be able to serve as a conduit to the militiamen.
Yet many within the military remain skeptical. They're all for using social science, they say; it is Human Terrain's execution that worries them. How valuable is it, really, to send out anthropologists into cultures they may not know so well? Didn't McFate once tell the San Francisco Chronicle that "half-baked knowledge is sometimes worse than none at all?" (Imagine if a bunch of Afghans hit the malls and the NASCAR tracks for six months, and proclaimed themselves experts on America.) And why has BAE Systems, the defense contractor responsible for recruiting Human Terrain specialists, brought in so many that weren't ready, mentally or physically, for the rigors of the war zone? Recruits have been booted for being too fat, or too old. Researchers have been hired who have never even visited -– much less studied –- the areas in which they're supposed to serve as experts. Social scientists have been thrown off of their teams, and even sent home early from Iraq.
Meanwhile, McFate herself has drawn fire from others in her field who say she's more spy than scholar. Revelations that nearly a decade ago she worked for her mother-in-law, who allegedly infiltrated left-wing groups on behalf of their opponents, have fed the outrage. (McFate says she researched broad policy topics and that her mother-in-law — from whom she has been estranged for many years — never disclosed her clientele.)
At least one social science PhD from Princeton counts himself as satisfied with the program, however: General David Petraeus. "The Human Terrain Teams have evolved into important elements in our operations in Iraq," he says. "The concept is still relatively new, and the contributions of the teams obviously vary based on the quality of the teams' members. But a good team -- and there are many -- is invaluable.”
And it might be the start of something bigger. As Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments president Andrew Krepinevich recently told Congress, the growing emphasis on social science suggests shifts in how the military does everything from training (less artillery, more Urdu and Pashto) to gathering intelligence (fewer embassy parties, more hanging out with regular folks). And an increasing array of global challenges — a rising China, a soon-to-be-nuclear-armed Iran, a resurgent Russia — makes understanding other cultures more critical than ever.
"We can't have effective strategy without cultural knowledge," McFate says. "If you look at the problems we’ve had — in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and Somalia — they've been based on flawed assumptions about who those people are." If the president is going to make better decisions, he needs better insight into how other cultures work, she adds. Who knows? Maybe we can figure out "how to engage Iran to get the outcome we want without going to war."
There's a downside to bringing these noncombatants into conflict zones, however. In June 2007, a rocket-propelled grenade attack knocked the doors off of Fondacaro's Humvee, and reduced his computer and clothes to cinders. In February 2008, McFate and other Human Terrain teammates were visiting a Baghdad base when sirens went off: mortars incoming. The specialists squeezed into a cramped, overheated bunker. Fourtee' mortars struck the building, each closer than the last. Flakes of concrete fell from the bunker’s ceiling. McFate, for the first time in her military tenure, began to think that all-too-typical battlefield thought: "How do I feel about dying?" She escaped unharmed.
Three months later, Michael Bhatia, an Oxford-trained Human Terrain political scientist working in eastern Afghanistan, wasn't so fortunate. He was killed, along with two soldiers, by a roadside explosive. Less than two months later, a bomb detonated in Sadr City's District Council building an apparent hit on Hassan Hussein Shammah, the Americans' new partner. Social scientist Nicole Suveges was inside. She and 11 others died instantly.
A few weeks have passed since Suveges' death, and McFate and I sit on her balcony, sweating in Washington's mid-July cauldron and sharing American Spirits. Did she imagine that the program she hatched -- this reluctant, long-delayed combination of social science and counterinsurgency -- would be so dangerous? McFate exhales. "Yeah," she croaks.
And now she feels the weight of what she helped to bring about. "I didn't realize that I felt guilty," she says. "Then it hit me -- really hard." Her eyes fill with tears; mascara smears her cheek. "You do feel responsible for the program, and for all the people in the program. And when you have something that's so deep and so emotional, you just, you have to keep going. There’s a mission that has to be accomplished. And the mission is very critical. And so it's hard to find time you know, personal time to grieve. So I apologize for my weeping." She gathers herself. Takes a breath.
McFate is getting ready to visit an influential former general's home in Virginia. Then it's off to Afghanistan. The war there has taken a turn for a worse. Maybe there's something the social scientists can do to help.
Wired
McFate worried that this self-imposed cultural boycott would come back to haunt the Department of Defense. She wrote on a cocktail napkin: "How do I make anthropology relevant to the military?" Turns out, all it took to get it done was a coup within the American military; near-losses in a pair of wars; and McFate enduring mountains of criticism, and oceans of guilt, for helping to broker the reintroduction between the social sciences and the Pentagon.
Traditionally, the military has relied almost solely on so-called hard sciences, like nuclear physics and chemistry. But as a simple regime-change operation in Iraq descended into a baffling counterinsurgency, it became clear that you can have the most advanced sensors, the toughest armor, the most precise GPS-guided munitions, but without any insight into the civilian population — or at least some sense of how they’ll react to your moves — your war effort is sunk.
By 2004, McFate had made her way into the national security establishment as a researcher at Rand. McFate’s ideas (shared by a growing number in the military) caught the attention of the science adviser to the joint chiefs of staff. She then codified them in a pair of articles in Military Review outlining a rationale and strategy for integrating the social sciences into national defense. Today she is the senior social science adviser for the Human Terrain System, a $130 million Army program that embeds political science, anthropology and economics specialists with combat units in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Defense Department recently launched a separate, $20 million project to fund social science research. Commanders who once spoke only in terms of objectives seized and enemies killed now talk about the necessity of understanding the "human terrain." Even Defense Secretary Gates now says you "cannot kill or capture our way to victory" in the fight against terror. "What you’re trying to do is understand the people’s interests," McFate says. "Because whoever is more effective at meeting the interests of the population will be able to influence it."
McFate wasn't an obvious choice to advise the U.S. military. Raised by an artist mother on a converted barge on San Francisco Bay, she was anti-Iraq invasion and pro-Democrat, during the Dubya ascendancy. She also has a deeply mischievous streak. Until recently, she kept a tongue-in-cheek blog devoted to "studly guys in uniform slinging rifles" who "make me want to bite my fist!!!!" -- not standard Pentagon fare. Neither is McFate's Betty Boop haircut, alternately died raven-black or strawberry blonde. Or her background as a one-time go-go- dancer. But McFate -- whose father served in the Marines, and whose husband is a former paratrooper and private military contractor -- also holds a deep admiration for national security types (and not just their abs). Meanwhile, "we’re doing what we can to rescue the fashion catastrophe that is Washington," she says.
Her initial attempt at military social science wasn't all that successful. She put together a database of ethnographic and cultural details for field commanders. The reaction of retired Colonel Steve Fondacaro, then stationed in Baghdad: "I threw that shit out of there.... The last thing these guys needed was another gizmo.... They needed a person, someone with knowledge of the society. An angel on their shoulder."
McFate returned with a revised plan. Army would embed humanities types into fighting brigades. These so-called Human Terrain Teams wouldn't necessarily be experts on Iraq or Afghanistan. But they would have enough training to study the local communities and advise the commander about what they found. A single unit in Afghanistan was selected to test the concept. Fondacaro became McFate's main ally, and the the program's chief. He and a number of other retired Army officers now run the Human Terrain System out of Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas.
Not long ago, the Human Terrain Program would have been a little too kumbaya for an Army more accustomed to shooting enemies than schmoozing sheiks. So would McFate's contention that "in a counterinsurgency, your level of success is inversely proportional to the amount of lethal force that you expend."
But by 2006, with the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns unraveling, the attitude was shifting. McFate was invited to help rewrite the Army's manual on counterinsurgency. It counseled officers to apply all of the tools at their disposal: not only bullets and bombs, but economic development, propaganda and political deal making. The Pentagon steadily increased the number of teams, and the program is slated to eventually comprise nearly 700 people -- all serving as guides to Iraq and Afghanistan's cultural, political and tribal landscapes.
Early teams provided basic cross-cultural interpretation. They dispensed advice on what gift to give an Iraqi sheik (a nice new gun, perhaps) or whether to accept his initial offer of lamb (yes) or whether to worry about blood-smeared cars nearby (strangely, no –- it's part of a blessing ritual). They suggested ways to handle police chiefs who turned a blind eye to their underlings moonlighting for extremist militias. (Skip direct confrontations and shame the bosses instead: Show how the officers were disrespecting their bosses by double dipping.)
Eventually the specialists began to suggest ways to sway the local population's support away from insurgents and militias and toward the U.S.-backed government. That didn't mean some squishy, hearts-and-minds campaign. It meant diving into Iraq's kaleidoscopic power politics. In Baghdad's notorious Sadr City slum, U.S. commanders were trying to win over the neighborhood's power players with lucrative construction contracts.
But when the Human Terrain Team began charting the area's political structure, it discovered that favored partners like the Qaim M'Khan, the so-called neighborhood mayor, wielded little influence. The real power at the time was the Office of the Martyr Sadr, the social and political wing of the Shi'ite militia. A deputy chief in the District Council, Hassan Hussein Shammah appeared to be able to serve as a conduit to the militiamen.
Yet many within the military remain skeptical. They're all for using social science, they say; it is Human Terrain's execution that worries them. How valuable is it, really, to send out anthropologists into cultures they may not know so well? Didn't McFate once tell the San Francisco Chronicle that "half-baked knowledge is sometimes worse than none at all?" (Imagine if a bunch of Afghans hit the malls and the NASCAR tracks for six months, and proclaimed themselves experts on America.) And why has BAE Systems, the defense contractor responsible for recruiting Human Terrain specialists, brought in so many that weren't ready, mentally or physically, for the rigors of the war zone? Recruits have been booted for being too fat, or too old. Researchers have been hired who have never even visited -– much less studied –- the areas in which they're supposed to serve as experts. Social scientists have been thrown off of their teams, and even sent home early from Iraq.
Meanwhile, McFate herself has drawn fire from others in her field who say she's more spy than scholar. Revelations that nearly a decade ago she worked for her mother-in-law, who allegedly infiltrated left-wing groups on behalf of their opponents, have fed the outrage. (McFate says she researched broad policy topics and that her mother-in-law — from whom she has been estranged for many years — never disclosed her clientele.)
At least one social science PhD from Princeton counts himself as satisfied with the program, however: General David Petraeus. "The Human Terrain Teams have evolved into important elements in our operations in Iraq," he says. "The concept is still relatively new, and the contributions of the teams obviously vary based on the quality of the teams' members. But a good team -- and there are many -- is invaluable.”
And it might be the start of something bigger. As Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments president Andrew Krepinevich recently told Congress, the growing emphasis on social science suggests shifts in how the military does everything from training (less artillery, more Urdu and Pashto) to gathering intelligence (fewer embassy parties, more hanging out with regular folks). And an increasing array of global challenges — a rising China, a soon-to-be-nuclear-armed Iran, a resurgent Russia — makes understanding other cultures more critical than ever.
"We can't have effective strategy without cultural knowledge," McFate says. "If you look at the problems we’ve had — in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and Somalia — they've been based on flawed assumptions about who those people are." If the president is going to make better decisions, he needs better insight into how other cultures work, she adds. Who knows? Maybe we can figure out "how to engage Iran to get the outcome we want without going to war."
There's a downside to bringing these noncombatants into conflict zones, however. In June 2007, a rocket-propelled grenade attack knocked the doors off of Fondacaro's Humvee, and reduced his computer and clothes to cinders. In February 2008, McFate and other Human Terrain teammates were visiting a Baghdad base when sirens went off: mortars incoming. The specialists squeezed into a cramped, overheated bunker. Fourtee' mortars struck the building, each closer than the last. Flakes of concrete fell from the bunker’s ceiling. McFate, for the first time in her military tenure, began to think that all-too-typical battlefield thought: "How do I feel about dying?" She escaped unharmed.
Three months later, Michael Bhatia, an Oxford-trained Human Terrain political scientist working in eastern Afghanistan, wasn't so fortunate. He was killed, along with two soldiers, by a roadside explosive. Less than two months later, a bomb detonated in Sadr City's District Council building an apparent hit on Hassan Hussein Shammah, the Americans' new partner. Social scientist Nicole Suveges was inside. She and 11 others died instantly.
A few weeks have passed since Suveges' death, and McFate and I sit on her balcony, sweating in Washington's mid-July cauldron and sharing American Spirits. Did she imagine that the program she hatched -- this reluctant, long-delayed combination of social science and counterinsurgency -- would be so dangerous? McFate exhales. "Yeah," she croaks.
And now she feels the weight of what she helped to bring about. "I didn't realize that I felt guilty," she says. "Then it hit me -- really hard." Her eyes fill with tears; mascara smears her cheek. "You do feel responsible for the program, and for all the people in the program. And when you have something that's so deep and so emotional, you just, you have to keep going. There’s a mission that has to be accomplished. And the mission is very critical. And so it's hard to find time you know, personal time to grieve. So I apologize for my weeping." She gathers herself. Takes a breath.
McFate is getting ready to visit an influential former general's home in Virginia. Then it's off to Afghanistan. The war there has taken a turn for a worse. Maybe there's something the social scientists can do to help.
Wired
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