My unpublished article on HTS

Last month, I wrote an article that was intended for a certain online publication (which shall remain nameless). It was turned down, sadly, so I've decided to post it here. It's not well-written, but doing the research allowed me to familiarize myself with the controversy surrounding the Human Terrain System (on a related note, check out this book review by an NDU colleague).

Here it is:

A Congressman Is Waging War Against the Army’s Human Terrain Teams

Since its launch in 2006, the U.S. Army's Human Terrain System (HTS) has been the subject of considerable online controversy.

The program was created to further the goals of the U.S. military’s then-new population-centric counterinsurgency campaign plan as outlined in FM3-24. HTS sought to embed military personnel and civilian social scientists within military units—usually at the Brigade level—in order to provide vital sociocultural understanding within the area of operations. Without adequate sociocultural understanding of Afghanistan and Iraq, unit commanders were less likely to wage an effective counterinsurgency campaign through the support of the local population. The teams of embedded advisors comprising the Human Terrain Teams (HTTs) would collect information on local cultures, tribal structures, and economics that could be used to brief Brigade commanders and their staffs, or uploaded into databases. (In Iraq, one HTT determined that restoring marshes in southern Iraq—previously decimated under Saddam Hussein’s regime—was vital to restoring the local economy and reducing arms smuggling to insurgents.)

But HTS has faced attacks from a variety of critics, some of whom have gone so far as to compare the program to the F-35 and label it one of the most “insanely wasteful projects the Pentagon is spending your money on.” The American Anthropological Association (AAA) has long opposed HTS on the grounds that it violates the AAA Code of Ethics because “information provided by HTS anthropologists could be used to make decisions about identifying and selecting specific populations as targets of U.S. military operations”; the AAA recently re-affirmed this stance. U.S. Army Colonel Gian Gentile, a prominent critic of the military’s embrace of population-centric counterinsurgency, has claimed that the effectiveness of the HTTs was “dubious at best” (though his claims have their own critics). Blogger John Stanton has written about HTS since 2007 and leveled numerous criticisms against the program; for instance, that “Hamas’ IT Tops Human Terrain System IT in Internet Capability, Savvy”.

In recent months, during Congressional debates over allocations for the 2014 National Defense Authorization Act, the program was again targeted by Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA), who called upon Congress to shut down the entire program in a December 2013 letter to the House Armed Services Committee. Pointing out that the Army already halved funding in 2013, Rep. Hunter argues that “the overall cost and failures of HTS indicate that the program be considered for termination.”

In his letter, Rep. Hunter cited a litany of allegations that led the Army to conduct its own investigation of HTS in 2010: Sub-standard work, inflated time sheets, incompetent supervisors, racism, sexism, and—guaranteed to resonate in the current political climate—the employment of CGI Federal (of Healthcare.gov infamy) as the main federal contractor behind the program. (Hunter neglects to mention that most of the aforementioned problems originated when BAE Systems held the program contract.) Even more recently, Rep. Hunter has complained that the total cost of the program, $726 million since 2007, remains unjustifiable in the current fiscal climate. He also has also expressed skepticism that the problems with HTS have been adequately addressed.

At the moment, the Army continues to defend the program. In a letter to Rep. Hunter in March 2013, Secretary of the Army John M. McHugh called the expertise provided by the HTTs “critical to military planning and operations.” McHugh has re-itereated this stance  again in recent months, claiming that 95 percent of commanders and staff members in Afghanistan “assessed HTS information as actionable and useful for decision-making.” However, it is not yet clear that the controversy over HTS will ever go away completely, given the negative media coverage and Rep. Hunter’s campaign against the program.

However, an alternative perspective of HTS has emerged in the past year. At the National Defense University in Washington, DC, a team of researchers led by Dr. Christopher J. Lamb has conducted the most in-depth assessment to date about HTS in Afghanistan. Their conclusions were published in a book, Human Terrain Teams: An Organizational Innovation for Sociocultural Knowledge in Irregular Warfare, and a July 2013 article for Joint Force Quarterly. Using data from over 100 interviews, the team’s findings and recommendations paint a more complete, though hardly uncritical, picture of what the HTS has accomplished and its future value to ground forces:

·         Human Terrain Teams had to overcome numerous organizational limitations to perform well, but were able to meet, and even exceed, the expectations of commanders who did not fully appreciate the optimal role the teams could play in an integrated counterinsurgency campaign.

·         In fact, the large majority of field commanders thought HTTs were effective. This finding also echoes previous studies by researchers at West Point, the Center for Naval Analyses, and the Institute for Defense Analyses.

·         Throughout its history, the U.S. military has regularly had to develop sociocultural expertise at great cost after the initiation of conflict, and often too late to ensure success.  Eliminating HTS now because it experienced growing pains would be repeating a mistake rather than learning from history.

·         The program will likely perform better under the management of the Army’s Special Operations Command rather than the Training and Doctrine Command, which is not properly suited to support HTS. Dr. Lamb also made this argument in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee in July 2012.

At a time when the Pentagon is facing enormous pressure to cut wasteful spending, it is understandable that the axe has swung in the direction of controversial programs that have come under public scrutiny. However, research suggests that Congress’ decision on the future of HTS must consider a more nuanced perspective than that currently represented in the public debate.