Anthropology and Counterinsurgency: The Strange Story of Their Curious Relationship
2005; The MIT Press; Volume: 85; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0026-4148
Autores Tópico(s)Military History and Strategy
ResumoSOMETHING MYSTERIOUS is going on inside U.S. Department of Defense (DOD). Over past 2 years, senior leaders have been calling for something unusual and unexpected--cultural of adversary. In July 2004, retired Major General Robert H. Scales, Jr., wrote article for Naval War College's Proceedings magazine that opposed commonly held view within U.S. military that success in war is best achieved by overwhelming technological advantage. Scales argues that type of conflict we are now witnessing in Iraq requires an exceptional ability to understand people, their culture, and their motivation. (1) In October 2004, Arthur Cebrowski, Director of Office of Force Transformation, concluded that knowledge of one's enemy and his culture and society may be more important than of his order of battle. (2) In November 2004, Office of Naval Research and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) sponsored Adversary Cultural Knowledge and National Security Conference, first major DOD conference on social sciences since 1962. Why has cultural suddenly become such imperative? Primarily because traditional methods of warfighting have proven inadequate in Iraq and Afghanistan. U.S. technology, training, and doctrine designed to counter Soviet threat are not designed for low-intensity counterinsurgency operations where civilians mingle freely with combatants in complex urban terrain. The major combat operations that toppled Saddam Hussein's regime were relatively simple because they required U.S. military to do what it does best--conduct maneuver warfare in flat terrain using overwhelming firepower with air support. However, since end of hot phase of war, coalition forces have been fighting a complex war against enemy they do not understand. The insurgents' organizational structure is not military, but tribal. Their tactics are not conventional, but asymmetrical. Their weapons are not tanks and fighter planes, but improvised explosive devices (IEDs). They do not abide by Geneva Conventions, nor do they appear to have any informal rules of engagement. Countering insurgency in Iraq requires cultural and social of adversary. Yet, none of elements of U.S. national power--diplomatic, military, intelligence, or economic--explicitly take adversary culture into account in formation or execution of policy. This cultural gap has a simple cause--the almost total absence of anthropology within national-security establishment. Once called the handmaiden of colonialism, anthropology has had a long, fruitful relationship with various elements of national power, which ended suddenly following Vietnam War. The strange story of anthropology's birth as a warfighting discipline, and its sudden plunge into abyss of postmodernism, is intertwined with U.S. failure in Vietnam. The curious and conspicuous lack of anthropology in national-security arena since Vietnam War has had grave consequences for countering insurgency in Iraq, particularly because political policy and military operations based on partial and incomplete cultural are often worse than none at all. A Lack of Cultural Awareness In a conflict between symmetric adversaries, where both are evenly matched and using similar technology, understanding adversary's culture is largely irrelevant. The Cold War, for all its complexity, pitted two powers of European heritage against each other. In a counterinsurgency operation against a non-Western adversary, however, culture matters. U.S. Department of Army Field Manual (FM) (interim) 3-07.22, Counterinsurgency Operations, defines insurgency as organized movement aimed at overthrow of a constituted government through use of subversion and armed conflict. It is a protracted politico-military struggle designed to weaken government control and legitimacy while increasing insurgent control. …
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