The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice (6 page)

That year, Maxie McFarland, a retired Army colonel and deputy chief of staff for intelligence at the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, published an article calling for more cultural training for soldiers. Even by the low standards of military prose, his appeal was written robotically, as if culture and the people who shape and inhabit it were not human but mechanized. Cultural knowledge had taken a long time to register as important in an Army made up of engineers and systems thinkers, in part because it had seemed incomprehensibly vague, impossible to master.
In McFarland’s prose, it became a solid thing with hard edges, a tool of military art like a shovel or a gun.

McFarland had worked on the counter-IED task force with Fondacaro and Votel. At the Training and Doctrine Command, his oversight included the Foreign Military Studies Office, the Army think tank that
had tried for so long to help the service better understand its enemies. McFarland heard about the ethnographic database project, Cultural Preparation of the Environment, and asked Kipp to look into it, so Kipp sent Lester Grau, the Soviet historian, to one of the regular project briefings, which were attended via video teleconference by a growing number of people in the defense establishment. ‘This dog won’t hunt,’ Kipp remembers Grau telling him. Grau’s concerns mirrored Fondacaro’s. Cultural Preparation of the Environment would also require soldiers to collect and record reams of data, which they had no time to do.

Nevertheless,
Kipp saw enough potential in the project to want to keep track of it. He asked a young Foreign Military Studies Office staffer named Don Smith to sit in on the regular video teleconferences.
Smith was an ambitious, fast-talking Army reserve captain with a background in management consulting. After graduating from the Citadel and deploying to Iraq with the 101st Airborne Division during Desert Storm, he had left the Army for business school, but the September 11 attacks had brought him back. Smith told Kipp that while Cultural Preparation of the Environment was far from perfect, elements could be taken from it and put together to build a working cultural knowledge program. Smith would become the Human Terrain System’s first program manager. He told me that
he came up with the idea for the program at his kitchen table, and he wasn’t the only one with a catchy creation story. McFate talked about scribbling the concept on a cocktail napkin at a bar with her husband. Fondacaro claimed that he was the one who had pushed to send civilian social scientists into the field with soldiers.

McFate had written about the Army’s need for a social science entity that could be sent to the battlefield alongside soldiers, but the Foreign Military Studies Office was already exploring similar possibilities.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the office had developed or contributed to two undertakings that foreshadowed the Human Terrain System. Both projects were fascinating and largely unknown outside the
small circle of military people, academics, and intelligence types who took part in them.

The first was the World Basic Information Library, a government-friendly database of open-source information to which Army reservists, including some with academic backgrounds, contributed research. The Library got its start in the 1990s, when some in the Foreign Military Studies Office and elsewhere realized that the nonmilitary skills of reservists could be used to vastly increase the military’s store of open-source intelligence. The project wasn’t designed for the battlefield; instead, it would rely on reservists at their kitchen tables to create a database about remote parts of the world in which the government and military increasingly operated. The reservists would dig up interesting unclassified documents and archive them. Many of these documents were so-called gray literature—public information that isn’t widely available, like scientific journal articles or the annual reports sent to shareholders. They might include street maps or detailed analyses of a foreign city’s transport infrastructure. Subjects of interest to the Library ranged from anthropology and culture to economics, politics, drug trafficking, and technology.

After the September 11 attacks, a retired Army lieutenant colonel at the Foreign Military Studies Office recruited some dozen reservists who had been contributing to the Library to join an “open source intelligence team” supporting homeland defense. The team included people who spoke three or four foreign languages, amateur pilots, a journalist, and a guy who lived and worked on the Mexican border. The group became so successful that some in the Army wanted to expand it, but the idea never got off the ground, in part because the demands of two wars soon drained the supply of qualified reservists.
A few years later, when the Foreign Military Studies Office’s Soviet expert Lester Grau went on a fact-finding trip to Iraq, a female Arabic-speaking Air Force reservist from the Library served as his translator. Grau was initially
taken aback to be traveling to Iraq with a young woman; in a heavily male-dominated society, he thought she would get in his way. But the reservist proved a great asset, especially in speaking with Iraqi women. When they returned, Grau and his traveling companion worked with a team of Arabic-speaking analysts at the Foreign Military Studies Office on a paper for the Center for Army Lessons Learned. Another reservist from the Library network was a medical officer who would serve on the first-ever Human Terrain Team in Afghanistan.

Since 2005, the Foreign Military Studies Office had also been funding the Bowman Expeditions, a grand undertaking that proposed to send professional geographers and graduate students from the United States to study every country in the world, at an annual cost of $125 million. Named for the geographer Isaiah Bowman, who had advised President Woodrow Wilson during World War I,
the project was the brainchild of Jerome E. Dobson, a University of Kansas geography professor and head of the American Geographical Society, who had worked twenty-six years at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
Dobson viewed geography as a key source of intelligence that the U.S. government and military had been ignoring for decades. During World War II, a third of America’s academic geographers had been summoned to serve in government agencies that were essential to war-related work, principally the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to today’s CIA. Now the United States was a superpower “crippled by abysmal ignorance of its vast global domain,” Dobson wrote. “Ignorance of foreign places and people guides U.S. policies toward them and their policies toward us.”
In 2006, Dobson and other members of the American Geographical Society met for nearly two hours with General David Petraeus at Fort Leavenworth. Petraeus had long “recognized the need for better understanding of cultural landscapes,” Dobson wrote after the meeting. “At the conclusion of our visit, he said he had a new appreciation for geography
as a source of such understanding.”
With the Bowman Expeditions, Dobson sought to restore geography to the influential position in U.S. policy making that it had occupied in the early part of the twentieth century, before the discipline fell out of favor and the Vietnam War opened a schism between academia and the U.S. military and intelligence communities.

By 2006,
Don Smith had met with then–Colonel John W. “Mick” Nicholson, who commanded a brigade of the 10th Mountain Division, and pitched the idea of embedding a team of cultural analysts in his unit. Nicholson, whose brigade was headed to eastern Afghanistan, made the first official request for a Human Terrain Team, known in military speak as an Operational Needs Statement.
That summer, Smith and others at the Foreign Military Studies Office were recruiting reservists to staff a prototype field team. They were also looking for money: tens of millions of dollars to cover start-up costs.

That fall, the men of the Foreign Military Studies Office publicly described the components of a potential “human terrain team” in greater detail than anyone had before. The proposed five-member teams would include “experienced cultural advisors familiar with the area in which the commanders will be operating” and a “qualified cultural anthropologist or sociologist competent with Geographic Imaging Software and fluent enough in the local language to perform field research.” The program would put special emphasis on finding social scientists who had lived, studied, or taught in the region to which they would be deployed. Each team would also include a research manager with a “military background in tactical intelligence” who would “integrate the human terrain research plan with the unit intelligence collection effort”; and a “human terrain analyst,” also with a military intelligence background, who was a “trained debriefer.”

The idea of installing a team of cultural experts in a military unit resonated within an Army that was doing some serious soul-searching.
In the years when the Human Terrain System was being developed, Petraeus, then a three-star general who had led the 101st Airborne Division in Mosul and supervised the training of Iraqi security forces, was stationed at Fort Leavenworth, where he ran the Combined Arms Center.
Petraeus saw the move from commanding a division in Iraq to the prairies of Kansas as a disappointment and a potential career setback. It turned out to be anything but.
Between 2005, when he arrived at Leavenworth, and 2007, when he took command of American forces in Iraq, Petraeus oversaw the drafting of the Army’s first revision of counterinsurgency doctrine in more than twenty years. For an organization accustomed to shock and awe, the
U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual
was counterintuitive in the extreme.
It argued that in this new, old kind of war, political advances were far more important than military victories.
“Sometimes, the more force is used, the less effective it is,” the manual advised. “Sometimes, doing nothing is the best reaction. . . . Some of the best weapons for counterinsurgents do not shoot. . . . Tactical success guarantees nothing.”
The manual brought together military intellectuals and civilian academics like Harvard’s Sarah Sewall, who called it a “radical” document that inverted decades of conventional military emphasis on force protection by suggesting that soldiers and marines had to assume greater risks to succeed in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. “In this context, killing the civilian is no longer just collateral damage,” Sewall wrote in the manual’s introduction. “The costs of killing noncombatants finally register on the ledger.”

The manual was a barn burner. Released online in December 2006, it was downloaded more than 1.5 million times.
It laid out a plan for winning over Iraqis and Afghans, but by speaking in humble, measured tones, it also sought to marshal the support of America’s powerful intellectual elite, the journalists, academics, social scientists, and think tankers whose backing would be necessary to the success of any
long-running and politically costly campaign.
This would turn out to be a winning strategy, and the counterinsurgency set would use it repeatedly in the years to come. The manual’s wildly positive reception in the press signaled a desire, particularly among American liberals, to walk back from the Bush administration’s aggressive wartime rhetoric and to quiet lingering misgivings over the conflict in Iraq and, to a lesser degree, the war in Afghanistan. For while many Americans agreed that Islamic militants deserved whatever pain the U.S. military might inflict on them, the growing global perception of the United States as an arrogant occupier rankled. Americans saw themselves, or wanted to see themselves, differently: as a nation sacrificing young lives and billions of dollars to defend its ideals and better the world. Counterinsurgency had reemerged in part because the military had realized that American arrogance, real and imagined, was fueling uprisings.
What the manual downplayed was that counterinsurgency wasn’t a bloodless way of war. It meant winning over those who were susceptible to being won over and removing America’s most determined enemies from the battlefield. And for the strategy to work, every piece of it had to be executed well. Bad cultural knowledge would lead to bad intelligence. Bad intelligence could mean detaining or killing the wrong people. Pretty soon, the Army would be back where it started.

The field manual, known in Army speak as FM 3-24, was a committee effort.
Montgomery McFate’s articles on adversary cultural knowledge and the use of anthropology in war had drawn the attention of prominent military thinkers, and she was tapped to cowrite a section on cultural knowledge in counterinsurgency. At first, her contribution was to be marginal, a brief appendix. But at a meeting with the manual’s authors, Petraeus declared that the section on culture should be moved to the heart of the manual. He considered cultural knowledge an obvious and central intelligence requirement for counterinsurgency.
“If you don’t get it about this stuff, you don’t get it about counterinsurgency,”
he would tell me later. “Not understanding the human terrain has the same effect on your operations that not understanding the physical terrain has on conventional military operations. If you don’t really appreciate the physical terrain and its impact on your operations, you don’t succeed. If you don’t understand the human terrain in the conduct of population-centric counterinsurgency operations, you don’t succeed.”
McFate’s contribution to the manual turned out to be substantial: sixteen pages at the heart of the chapter on intelligence.

The University of Chicago Press published the field manual in 2007. That February, the first-ever Human Terrain Team arrived in Khost, a green and prosperous province along the Afghan-Pakistani border with
an active local insurgency led by Jalaluddin Haqqani, a onetime CIA favorite and hardened war veteran from the days of the anti-Soviet resistance, who was now giving the Americans hell. That first team had come together in a rush. In 2006,
Smith left the Human Terrain System and Fondacaro, back from Iraq and retired from the Army, took over as program manager. He secured $20 million from the counter-IED task force to build five experimental Human Terrain Teams, and recruited some of the first field team members, who joined at least two others brought in earlier by Smith and his colleagues. Nicholson’s brigade, which had originally requested a team, was on its way back to the States, but
Fondacaro’s old friend Votel had moved into a command position with the 82nd Airborne Division, which was sending a brigade to Khost. The first Human Terrain Team joined them.