Anthropology shoots at military program for GI Jones to track cultures in combat zones

At a recent social event at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., an anthropology student told Prof. Hugh Gusterson he had been recruited for an overseas post with fabulous pay—a whopping $300,000 per year.

The student had been offered the opportunity to become a 21st Century Indiana Jones. He would be a GI Jones embedded with troops in Afghanistan, a hired hand to uncover cultural information to fight a new kind of war

Gusterson said the student wasn’t seeking the prof’s advice about joining the Human Terrain System program, which sends anthropologists and other social scientists into combat zones to gather information for U.S. Army and Marine Corps commanders at the brigade level. Human terrain teams include military personnel, linguists, area studies specialists and civilian social scientists.

The offer had to be tempting in hard economic times in a field in which many are still scratching for work years after finishing their degrees.

“He just wanted to let me know he had declined the offer,” said the anthropologist, who helped form the Network of Concerned Anthropologists.

The Network, along with the 11,000-member America Anthropological Association, have been battling with HTS since 2007 when the AAA Executive Board first warned about the ethical concerns relating to the program. In the latest skirmish, in early December, the AAA at its annual meeting adopted a report, written by several Network members along with several anthropologists with military and security ties, condemning the HTS program.

AAA organized its Ad Hoc Commission on Anthropology’s Engagement with the Security and Intelligence Communities (CEAUSSIC), in 2006 to look at the military and security agency’s growing interesting in using anthropologists’ skills to uncover information on what makes the cultures in which the United States was fighting tick.

AAA began studying the issues involved in this use of anthropology when the Central Intelligence Agency began running ads to hire anthropologists.

Concern increased in 2007 when AAA became aware of the military’s effort to organize teams with anthropologists and other social scientists to study the “human terrain” to dig up data with interviews with local informants and to conduct polls to learn about the people America was fighting. These civilian scholars originally were hired as civilian contractors, but now fall under a special government service grade.

They may be civilians but they operate in combat zones in U.S. military uniforms packing rifles, along with their clipboards to take notes

The military already has spent over $100 million on HTS and is on the brink of spending $300 million more as it spreads the approach to other commands around the world, with Africa receiving new attention. The U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee is planning hearings on the program next year before HTS transitions from experimental status to a mainstream military program.

Montgomery McFate, a Yale-trained doctorate-level anthropologist and an HTS consultant, helped envision HTS for the Department of Defense. She said in an e-mail that any interview had to be approved by the U.S. Army, which runs the program. But the Army was not forthcoming.

But McFate spelled out the mission in her writings. In Military Review in 2005, she explained that senior leadership in the military had been calling for “cultural knowledge of the adversary.” She noted: “(T)raditional methods of war-fighting have proven inadequate in Iraq and Afghanistan. U.S. technology, training and doctrine designed to counter the Soviet threat are not designed for low-intensity counterinsurgency operations where civilians mingle freely with combatants in complex urban terrain.”

The anthropologist said that the enemy’s organizational structure is “not military, but tribal.” This is the sort of war, with its “civilian surge,” President Obama and his generals will be fighting in the years ahead in Afghanistan.

“The cultural knowledge gap has a simple cause—the almost total absence of anthropology within the national-security establishment,” McFate noted.

Visionaries such as McFate started to call up anthropologists to do the fieldwork of interviewing the locals, just as anthropologists Margaret MeadMargaret Mead did in Samoa and Stanley Ann DunhamAnn Dunham did on the island of Java. (Dunham, who died from ovarian cancer in 1995, was the mother of Barack Obama.)

A few anthropologists have signed on for HTS.

Gusterson said: “Despite the high pay and despite the terrible job market for anthropologists, they have managed to recruit almost no anthropologists.

I think it says something that the human terrain team program has only managed to recruit six people with anthropology PhDs. At the risk of sounding snotty here, the people they’ve recruited are not very good anthropologists.”

Still, HTS’s efforts have not sat well with anthropology.

Robert Albro, chairman of CEAUSSIC, said HTS does not meet AAA’s Code of Ethics. He said anthropologists who participate in HTS teams would find it impossible to follow this code, which, like medicine, calls on its professionals to first “do no harm” and calls for informed consent so that subjects know about the possible consequences of speaking with the anthropologist. For example, a local leader who spoke might be killed for speaking to a human rights team.

Anthropologists also worry that the enemy might be targeted based on the social science research.

An HTS anthropologist told the Dallas Morning News that she had no reservations about putting an informant at risk if it would save lives of U.S. military personnel.

Albro said that’s understandable. “Rather than do no harm, they’ll say, ‘How about do a little good.’ And the difficulties with this have to do with what we do with social scientists. So, people have said things like I understand the ethics issues. I am assiduous with my own data. I understand we need to maintain the integrity of the data. I don’t let other people see it. I destroy sensitive information once it’s been collected. All that kind of stuff, right? But they’ll say, ‘If I come to obtain information that has life or death consequences for the people that I work with, which is to say, my unit or U.S. military, I’m going to share it. Of course I’m going to share it.’

“And the response to that has to be, ‘Well, of course I understand your response. And I think most of us when faced with that sort of moral dilemma might respond the same way.’ We’d rather see our friends live and our enemies die or we’d rather if we had a Sophie’s Choice, we’d choose the people we knew better or the people that we’re working with or the people with whom we most agree. But social scientists shouldn’t be having these choices. That’s not the way data collection works. When you’re engaged in a long-term research project with counterparts, you are engaged in a social relationship with those people to whom you have certain responsibilities and one of those basic responsibilities is that you don’t make them either intentionally or unintentionally more vulnerable in some way than they are.”

Traditionally, anthropology didn’t work this way. The field was once known as “handmaiden of colonialism,” working intimately with the powers that be.

Albro said, “Sticking to recent history, many American anthropologists worked very, very actively with the military during World War II. They worked for the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA) in other capacities and generally there wasn’t a whole lot of concern about that. I think that’s largely because of the nature of World War II, which is to say the ‘the good war,’ and also because of the circumstances of what social sciences were at that time.”

The best-known anthropologists were in the movies. Indiana Jones and his father Henry Jones were archaeologists, a branch of anthropology that studies ancient civilizations, who had skirmishes with their Nazi counterparts as they went after the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant. The elder Jones noted: “The quest for the grail is not archaeology, it's a race against evil. If it is captured by the Nazis the armies of darkness will march all over the face of the earth. Do you understand me?”

But attitudes have changed in the field.

Gusterson noted: “In World War II, some anthropologists helped run the internment camps for Japanese Americans. That is now seen as an embarrassment.”

Anthropologists long have debated whether they should in effect become spies for the government.

The Vietnam War changed the anthro game. “Vietnam triggered notorious instances of the uses and abuses of social science. A civilian operations-type program essentially targeted the Viet Cong for assassination, but it was organized under a rubric of kind of civilian-military collaboration,” said Albro, referring to the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS) program. Project Phoenix, a CORDS program, used anthro-like data to target more than 26,000 suspected Viet Cong.

In 1971, AAA adopted its first Code of Ethics. The latest report draws a line in the sand, declaring HTS a program that can’t work and anthropologists who join it as unethical.

Anthropology, in contrast with medicine, law or engineering, is not a licensed profession. Physicians who act unethically can be disciplined, even lose their licenses. Not so anthropologists.

Albro, a professor at the School of International Service at American University in Washington, D.C., said AAA doesn’t follow this sanctioning model, but instead an educational model to teach practitioners about ethical behavior. “There’s no way that the AAA can force you to stop, so it’s really more about the effort to define what it is that would be the appropriate role and relationship of anthropologists specifically and social scientists generally.”

HTS work has proved lethal to three embedded anthropologists. In their obituary for Michael Bhatia, a highly regarded anthropologist who died in an explosion in 2008 in Afghanistan en route to helping negotiate an inter-tribal dispute, McFate and Steve Fondacaro, program director, said: ”During the course of his seven-month tour, Michael’s work saved the lives of both US soldiers and Afghan civilians. His former brigade commander, Col. Marty Schweitzer testified before Congress on 24 April that the Human Terrain Team of which Michael was a member helped the brigade reduce its lethal operations by 60 to 70%, increase the number of districts supporting the Afghan government from 15 to 83, and reduce Afghan civilian deaths from over 70 during the previous brigade's tour to 11 during the 4-82’s tour.” Critics dispute these estimates.

But Albro said that the HTS program is critically flawed: “When you show up in a community with a group of armed men who are dressed as you are and you are armed yourself and you are clearly in association with an occupying force, again setting aside any of the political views that we might have about whether this is important or necessary to do, and then you’re going to be asking people about questions about their relationship to other people or whatever kinds of information that you’re hoping to get, the idea that those people will be giving you answers that are either a) credible or b) freely offered, is nuts.”

The military doesn’t have much to say publicly at this point about the AAA report as the Armed Services Committee is readying its first formal assessment of the program in closed hearings. Greg Mueller, public affairs officer, U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, Fort Monroe, Va., said, “The United States Army has no comment about the recent AAA report. The AAA is entitled to express its opinion.”

Albro said some anthropologists who trained in the Vietnam era have “knee-jerk reactions” against working with the military and security agencies. But he said anthropologists could help educate the military and government agencies about local cultures without being unethical and embedding with HTS.

The AAA board maintains, “Anthropology can legitimately and effectively help guide U.S. policy to serve the humane causes of global peace and social justice.”

Meanwhile, what are young unemployed anthropologists going do in the face of overproduction of PhDs and (outside the military) diminishing demand, especially in academia? According to AAA, 503 Americans received doctorates in anthropology in 2009, followed by 1,236 receiving master’s degrees and 8,561 receiving bachelor’s in anthropology.

Albro said, “We should understand that people, PhD anthropologists, are going to work for this (HTS) program. This program has been able to leverage in many ways, a sense of desperate times, desperate measures. ‘Hey, I’ll work/we’ll work for food type of thing.’ I mean the pay is pretty good.”