System failure: anthropologists on the battlefield
System failure: anthropologists on the battlefield
Military Intelligence
Tom Vanden Brook @tvandenbrook, USA TODAY 2:01 p.m. EDT August 11, 2013
The Human Terrain System, the military's controversial effort to enhance understanding the cultures where troops are deployed, takes another hit on the op-ed pages of The New York Times Sunday.
Journalist Vanessa Gezari writes that the program, in which the military has sent civilian social scientists to battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan, has noble aims but misses its targets badly.
"The Human Terrain System sought to bring a degree of anthropological and interpretive acumen to a military that badly needed it," she writes. "But it came too late, alienated too many anthropologists and was thrown together too quickly and sloppily to achieve many of its goals in Afghanistan. Taxpayers have spent more than $600 million on the deeply flawed program; it has occasionally benefited soldiers, but its slipshod construction and murky aims have also put Afghans and Americans at risk."
USA TODAY found many of the same issues in its investigation of the program in February. Internal Army investigations of the program, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, showed a program shot through with racism, sexism and fraud.
More:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/nation/2013/08/11/human-terrain-system-afghanistan-war-anthropologists/2640297/