I concur with Michael Mosser that bridge-building between academic and military policy communities should be an important priority. I also agree that this is a challenging task. But my sense of why this is both important and challenging differs from Mosser's in some key respects. Despite qualifications along the way, Mosser's account suggests that academia has a particular responsibility to make itself legible and available to military policy makers, but not the other way around. As he explains, his topic grew from a project concerned about “whether the academy is asking militarily interesting questions.” And he proceeds by thinking about how academic scholarship might be “more tightly integrated” with the doings of military policy and planning. Undertaking bridge-building by firstly asking how the US academy can be more effectively leveraged to support national security goals sets up a largely one-sided and unilateral engagement, where the burden is primarily on academia to explain itself to the military policy community, and probably to do so within a frame of reference sensible to the policy crowd but not necessarily vice-versa. This sets up, in short, a scenario making it less likely for policy makers to listen to what academics might be saying, particularly whenever this appears to complicate established agendas. From my point of view, the best mutual outcomes flow from a more balanced dialogue. This includes policy makers taking academic frames at least as seriously when talking with them, so that greater clarity can be reached about how, and under what circumstances, scholarship might contribute to policy concerns, but also when academic contributions might be inappropriate, irrelevant, or even impossible.
Unlike Mosser, I also suggest that, however imperfectly, diverse forms of military-academic engagement have been almost a permanent fixture in higher education since at least World War II. The current landscape of higher education in the US has over time been fundamentally shaped by military policy and concerns. One example is “area studies,” a Cold War effort of academic institution-building, funded by security-driven priorities of the government's Foreign Area and Language Program. In fact the geopolitics of US security institutions have been historically “constitutive of the conceptual apparatus used by social scientists to analyze and apprehend the world.”Footnote 1 This includes the very concept of “area,” with its assumption about expertise as a regional fact. As I will discuss, contemporary military policy—as counterinsurgency doctrine—has also engaged in what—in the spirit of philosopher Nelson Goodman—we might call “world making.” It has introduced yet other conceptual frames like “cultural” and “human terrain,” which likewise become invitations to further academic elaboration in the service of military policy. We should be thinking more about the implications of such invitations.
I find Mosser's Kuhnian invocation of the academic-policy divide in the terms of puzzle-solving and problem-solving helpful, for it implicitly draws attention to the fact of different practices of knowledge production across communities. My comments here will focus on the epistemological challenge of constructive dialogue between academic and military policy communities, given some basic differences about the purposes of knowledge production. I suggest that, when pursuing this dialogue, before we even get to asking the question often first on policy makers' lips—“knowledge for what?”—we have to face up to the real and prior challenge of “knowledge as what.” As a case of military knowledge production, I will focus on some implications for social scientists of the creation of counterinsurgency doctrine and the ways it sought to incorporate insights from sociocultural anthropology.
At the same time I do not find Mosser's elaboration of the “gap” to be particularly valuable. His distinction between academia/theory and policy/practice is muddled, and it vastly and unhelpfully generalizes on the wrong side of the complexity. Academics are hardly credibly described as “pure” theoreticians “walled off from the rest of the world” in their ivory towers puzzling over esoteric “thought experiments” while the compelling problems of the world pass them by.Footnote 2 At least for the case of anthropology, with which I am most familiar, the discipline has been broadly engaged for some time in what is often called “public anthropology,” with an emphasis on activist, advocacy, and policy investments in topics of critical public importance and in conversations beyond disciplinary boundaries.Footnote 3 This includes regular public engagement with military policy.Footnote 4 Further, knowledge production is itself an active form of practice. In facing up to the challenges Mosser poses, we would be better off recognizing a plurality of distinct disciplinary dialogues, and their institutional, historical and epistemic entailments.
Anthropology and the COIN Manual
If “doctrine” represents one prominent distillation of military policy into practice, doctrinal formulations also set in motion a particular approach to the meeting of mission objectives. Of course, doctrine is not a blueprint, literally enacted, but instead interpreted, and adapted to circumstance and need. As Marine Major General James Mattis has put it, “doctrine is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”Footnote 5 And yet, the current commander of joint forces in Afghanistan, David Petraeus, has recently referred to the Army's doctrinal manuals as the “repositories of our big ideas.”Footnote 6 Doctrine enacts a conceptual framing—in Erving Goffman's terms, as a schema for interpretation. It instantiates a military world of ideas, along with experience and practicality, and expresses characteristic values, interests, and orientations, in particular, regarding the significance of knowledge production for the Department of Defense (DoD).Footnote 7 Doctrine is thus one location in the military where concepts have currency, contributing to “how the military thinks about its role in the world.”Footnote 8 As such, it would seem to be one place where academic knowledge production might constructively inform military policy and planning.
A recent, if not uncontroversial, example of this was the relatively rapid formulation of the Army and Marine Corps new Counterinsurgency Manual (FM 3-24). When it was rolled out, FM 3-24 was praised as a triumphant doctrinal expression of the ascendant warrior-intellectual in DoD policy circles.Footnote 9 The process of its production was also touted as a model of cooperation between military policy makers and academics.Footnote 10 Journalist James Fallows, present for some of this work, was apparently moved to describe it as an unprecedented “open transfer of ideas.”Footnote 11 My point here is not to offer a survey of debates about COIN. I want only to draw attention to one corner of that debate relevant to anthropology: debate over the appropriation of the key disciplinary concept of culture into FM 3-24.
The process leading up to the completion of the COIN manual, described by John Nagl in his forward, was not typical of how academic knowledge is generated. FM 3-24 was written collectively, largely anonymously, without direct attribution or peer review, building new concepts into well-established doctrine. If the manual used social scientific concepts, it was not intended to be scholarship, as several involved in its production have emphasized.Footnote 12 It was developed rapidly, in a stepwise process steered by generals Petraeus and Mattis. While it included some select participation of civilian academia, primarily through the auspices of Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights, most participants were either military or at least closely linked to the military (often as ex-military).Footnote 13 The writing process was run out of the Doctrinal Division of the Combined Arms Center at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. Indeed, much of what became an unusually broader debate about the COIN manual was generated only because an earlier draft was publicly leaked.Footnote 14 If unprecedented for the military, this was not the kind of open process a typical academic would likely expect.
This process suggests real challenges to academic scholars. First, anthropological participation amounted to a very few enlisted individuals, already well positioned in relevant networks to represent the discipline to military constituencies. Montgomery McFate, credited with an authorship role for the manual's chapter three, is one such broker. Acutely aware that “field manuals have their own grammar and their own logic,”Footnote 15 in her hands anthropology was selectively, thinly, and instrumentally represented, so as to serve the purposes of doctrine and not the other way around. Absent from the discussion of culture in the COIN manual is any sign of how or when anthropological knowledge might not straightforwardly serve the purpose to which it is set in FM 3-24. Such omissions become likelier when too few monopolize the critical intersections for constructive traffic between the social science and military policy communities.
In such situations brokers can become interested gatekeepers. Mosser characterizes the American Anthropological Association's rejection of the US Army's Human Terrain System program to be a “naked move to assuage its guilt” over its unethical participation in Vietnam-era military programs. This appears to repeat McFate's own and questionably selective representation of anthropology to the military as a discipline paralyzed by its “colonial guilt.”Footnote 16 And yet, as one of its authors, I can attest that the AAA report Mosser cites to this effect clearly stakes out a position of “anti-anti-engagement” with the military. What it does maintain is that indiscriminate engagement is inadvisable, that attention should be given on a piecemeal basis to the multiple emerging initiatives from DoD, that some of these might makes sense while others might not, and that the code of ethics of the AAA should meaningfully inform these choices.Footnote 17 Mosser's account of anthropology is thus little short of caricature.
The doctrinal process was designed to offer a military solution to a military problem in military terms, so it does not surprise that the debate of FM 3-24 between coindinistas and critical anthropologists was not much of one. It was, instead, an indirect encounter between people in different locations and mediated by print. It amounted to an awkward non-dialogue between two epistemic communities, inadequately distinguished through talismanic differences of “doctrine” and “scholarship,” investing “politics” with different meaning, and with tellingly different convictions about the sources, significance, and uses of culture. These differences are neither superficial nor constructively glossed.
To be clear, I am not criticizing this process per se, so much as observing the sort of process it was. The counterinsurgency (COIN) field manual was in fact fairly revolutionary, as doctrine goes. It was not particularly revolutionary, however, as scholarship goes. In fact, it could be said to be problematic “as scholarship.” Military policy makers might give more attention to how the doctrinal process—commonsensical from their point of view—can be troublesome and even illegitimate for social scientists not already routinely engaged in such work. An unintentional outcome of this process has been that “anthropology”—as a kind of social science expertise—circulates in DoD as represented only by a very few and often in ways at odds with the discipline's own self-representation. Such a one-sided shaping of “prevailing wisdom about what anthropology is and about what the role of anthropology should be among military and security policy makers”Footnote 18 ill serves the wider, and more variegated, dialogue that might lead to more constructive collaborations and appropriate applications of anthropological knowledge and practice.
Culture Doctrine and Its Critics
One other way in which anthropology has been engaging—if indirectly—the concerns of military policy makers is by offering trenchant critiques of the culture concept as it is a part of new DoD policy.Footnote 19 What is notable, however, is that these critiques—while sometimes vituperative—are rarely received in military policy circles as constructive. Instead, they are too often dismissed as politically-motivated attacks from the far academic Left. This is partly because such critiques are often voiced in academic ways for academics using idioms military policy makers find beside the point and even alienating. But, while there often is a political subtext to such critiques, nevertheless they offer insight about the anthropological limits of culture-as-doctrine and should be taken seriously.
Such constructive dialogue is challenging even when some parts of the social science and military policy communities are in fact talking directly to one another about concerns they ostensibly share, but about which they might not agree. Despite the fact that in military terms the COIN manual is revolutionary for its “cultural turn,” the culture concept it advances has received a quizzical reception, to say the least, from many anthropologists not directly involved in its production, who do not recognize themselves or find any significant sign of current anthropological knowledge production between its covers. A more variegated and multi-stranded account of the discipline's contemporary discussion of the culture concept was, after all, not the goal. Rather, the goal was to introduce “culture” into the doctrinal process only as relevant to and legible for counterinsurgency, as a new “military definition of reality,”Footnote 20 in the prescient words of C. Wright Mills.
For their part, anthropological critics have argued that the COIN manual relies on an inadequate, undertheorized, and anachronistic concept of culture imported whole cloth from the mid- to late-twentieth century: a conception of culture as a “web of meaning,” composed of “beliefs, values, customs, behaviors, and artifacts,” that corresponds to a particular social group as a whole, that is shared in the same way by its members, and which functions for them as an “operational code,” and as the “lens through which” they perceive the world.Footnote 21 From a broad disciplinary point of view, this concept of culture is too static, coherent, bounded, and one-dimensional.
This conceptualization does not register a more contemporary anthropological account of culture as historically constituted, multiply interpreted, unevenly distributed across societies, and contested. It also tends toward counterproductive “othering” practices by drawing sharp differences between “their” culture and “ours,” and so constructing cultural difference as a problem to be negotiated and overcome for mission success. David Price has offered a comparable critique of the recently leaked U.S. Army's Special Forces Advisor Guide, which he identifies as expressing the commonsense of the post-World War II “culture and personality” era,Footnote 22 with its accompanying assumptions that all cultures have “identifiable personality traits” and a central core of “basic values,” subject to standard comparative measurement to be charted on a scale. In such situations, anthropologists are placed in a bind. They are being invited to engage military practitioners, even as the military's lack of attention to contemporary disciplinary approaches establishes an almost impassable historical divide.
This is part of the difficulty with describing, as Mosser does here, the potential disconnects between “scholars and practitioners”—to use his distinction—in terms of an evident gap. The spatialization of gap-talk, as it opens up between the puzzle-solvers and the problem-solvers, turns this divide into a permanent feature of the knowledge-scape to be traversed. But in fact this is an unstable and transitory gap that is subject to sometimes rapid change as the historical ground shifts around it. And, depending on the discipline, this gap is not likely to look the same. The initial call issued by the Minerva Initiative, to take one example, encouraged researchers interested in participating in the Iraqi Perspectives Project, which analyzes a large quantity of Iraqi government records removed from Iraqi ministries to the US in the course of the invasion and occupation. Researchers would ostensibly generate valuable insight about the inner workings of the Saddam Hussein regime.
Such a removal of documents as a result of war is historically unremarkable. But the Iraqi Perspectives Project has perhaps unexpectedly become controversial. It has been condemned as looting, with its contents now described as a “heritage” of the Iraqi people. It has become the subject of a call for repatriation of the records.Footnote 23 Rising objections to the project have been enabled by the recent global proliferation of the heritage concept—currently being actively enshrined in international law as inalienable—in a way actively changing the significance of the contents of the Iraqi Perspectives Project, which are now forcefully described as national Iraqi cultural heritage and property. This, in turn, changes the historical ground of what is potentially researchable and how, influencing whether a researcher might choose to work on this project.
Knowledge and the Terrain
Particularly for the Marine Corps,Footnote 24 successfully navigating the “cultural terrain” has become a critical ingredient for the success of COIN. This raises the question of the military efficacy of culture as a source of knowledge. As a concept, cultural terrain was formally leveraged into the Marine Corps beginning in 2004, as the result of work by its Cultural Awareness Working Group and others, which explained that “culture is simply another element of terrain.” The Working Group suggested the term be introduced since “terrain” is already a well-established concept “familiar to all military personnel,” and so, “cultural terrain is a term that can be used to ease the incorporation of cultural awareness into training, planning, and operations.”Footnote 25 Again, the culture concept is here introduced with a narrow purpose to meet specific military needs based on previously established doctrinal expectations, and in ways appropriate for the Marines.
But the term cultural terrain signifies more than just the introduction of a new lexicon. It incorporates the culture concept into the Marine's knowledge space in ways significantly determining what culture is for. “Culture” has now been incorporated into terrain analysis, officially defined as “a feature of the terrain that has been constructed by man.” As is explained, “included are such items as roads, buildings, and canals; boundary lines; and, in a broad sense, all names and legends on a map.”Footnote 26 It is hard to miss that here culture has become a cartographic asset, with attention directed to culture as a feature of the landscape and as a spatial arrangement to be surveyed. Culture is significant as it is integrated into a topographic “complex whole,” even as anthropological holism is largely a conceptual orientation of the past.Footnote 27 To reliably read the cultural terrain, behavior needs to stay fixed. People become a spatial array of points and cultural meanings are inscribed in physical places and structures. Marines in theater are supported with a variety of map-like tools to help them read the cultural terrain, such as cultural smart cards.
Of course, individual Marines are unlikely to treat culture in such a relentlessly cartographic way. Nevertheless, mapping does not simply represent the world. It actively produces it. As a feature of the terrain, culture is now particularly available to geospatial technologies dedicated to mapping three-dimensional object space, terrain visualization, GIS integration, and other interoperable data management tools.Footnote 28 This makes sense, too, if you want to leverage “every soldier as a sensor” to better enable the availability of the human or cultural terrain knowledge-base across the battle space. Human Terrain Teams, often supporting Marine units, are now being trained to use the MAP-HT/TIGR Tactical Ground Reporting System while on patrol, a map-centric application helping to collect cultural facts more efficiently. The cultural terrain, as doctrine, is hard to distinguish from the goal of the information control of the battle space. It makes perfect sense for Marines that the efficacy of their culture doctrine is to better equip them to read their environment. As a terrain feature, “culture” is also subject to technical enhancement to provide a more panoptic view of it.
Yet technically-enhanced map making, as a form of knowledge production, does not much resemble how most anthropologists talk about the scene of their work, which has been described as a “dialogic ground.” In the ethnographic mode, knowledge is not generated through a one-way reading process but is instead co-produced. “Cultures are continuously produced, reproduced, and revised in dialogues.”Footnote 29 Dialogue, in this sense, is at once a means of knowledge production but also a reciprocal form of social and ethical engagement in problematic tension with the instrumentalizing conceptions of knowledge prized by the military. It is not apparent, given their different purposes, that these two epistemic imperatives are even compatible. A more robust conversation between the military policy community and social scientists, then, has to take seriously not just disjunctions of institutional process and historical context, and the ways these complicate both problems and solutions. It must also attend, more fundamentally, to the potential limits, possibilities, and purposive efficacy of knowledge production as a collaborative project. This involves much more than simply bridging an imagined academic-policy divide, which is precisely why such a broader dialogue needs to be had.
