U.S. program to embed social scientists in combat brigades - including the handbook for download
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This 122 page handbook presents the US military's controversial anthropology based counterinsurgency techniques, called the "Human Terrain System" program.
Recent deaths (in May and June 2008) and maiming of Human Terrain Team members have led to questions in the US media regarding the training of Human Terrain Teams (HTT).
According to the handbook, HTTs are 5-9 person intelligence teams made up of servering military, contractors and "academicians" featuring anthropologists and other social scientists embedded with combat brigades.. The teams are designed to assist a commander's irregular warfare operations by using anthropological and intelligence techniques to exploit cultural, political and family relationships in a region.
Many details regarding the program are unknown. Uncritical reports in the New York Times, the Washington Post, U.S. News & World Report, and CNN have portrayed HTS as a life-saving initiative that is establishing a kinder, gentler U.S. military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, although there is no verifiable data that human terrain teams have saved a single life—American, Afghan, Iraqi, or otherwise. Such reports have all the trappings of a no-holds-barred Pentagon public relations campaign.
The international press has been far less sympathetic. For example, a November 2 editorial in Mexico's daily newspaper La Jornada responded to HTS by noting, "The grotesque cultural mask of counterinsurgent anthropology does not change the brutal nature of an imperialist occupation." Such reactions are perhaps not surprising, given the history of U.S. social scientists' participation in Project Camelot, the ill-fated Pentagon research program designed to employ social scientists for counterinsurgency research in Latin America.
