The Human Terrain System of the US Military - Essay Example

The human terrain system of the U.S military The Human Terrain system of the United s is a US program that recruits, trains and deploys military officers in the country. It deals with both military and civilian Human Terrain teams.These two teams research bout the local population and providesawareness to the military that helps in decision making.The teams rely on the research conducted by the Human Terrain system to provide secondary sites. Each that support analysis, storageand retrieval of social cultural information (Millett 25). In the first four years of its existence, the Human Terrain system was efficient in addressing the requirements of the marine units down range.Although the deployment of the military units was received positively. It was controversial with certain aspects of the defense intelligence community and with some academics.Due to the controversy that surrounded the Human Terrain system, substantial media coverage was generated and this led to a vigorous discussion about the application of social sciences to the national security issues. It wasnot until a story about the Human Terrain system was published in the New York Times in the year 2007 that the programme was heard of (Millett 31-36). The Human Terrain System started quietly with no budget but with just a set of PowerPoint slides.Within a period of four years, the Human Terrain System had accomplished the following:Implemented the idea of the Human Terrain System to an existing and organized institution.Expanded the Human Terrain system from a five team concept to a thirty team program. Developed the Human Terrain system form a concept with no resources to a 150 million yearly. Expanded the Human Terrain system form a small group to a big organization (Millett 84). It developed the MAP_HT toolkit from a nonfunctioning prototype to a real system that is usedAfghanistan and Iraq. It designed, developed and implemented a training program that deploys the military.All this developments were done quickly by just a team of skeleton staff. During the initial four years, Montgomery mc fate was the senior social scientist and Steve Fondacaro was the program manager. Both of them left in the year 2010. They left Human Terrain system in a position to explore the relationship between social science and military intelligence.The human terrain system came into existence during the time when the department of forces was adapting to the challenges posed by the wars inAfghanistan and Iraq. The wars proved that the government approach was just an idea and not a reality. The decision to invade Iraq was not supported by sufficient research or understanding of the political, economic or social context. When the major combat of war came to an end in May 2003, the consequences of mediocre planning and implementation of post war stability came into light. The failure of the state and the agencies to effectively engage in nation building due to the security environment and regulatoryhindrances, this responsibility automatically fell on the military (Millett 79) The result of this was that the military started assuming many of the functions of the department of state and began performing many activities that were not in their jurisdiction. They began doing things like setting up local banks, deworming sheep and mediating between tribal disputes over. In addition to those duties the military also had to deal with counterinsurgency operations that posed unique challenges to them.To effectively fight such, the military has to combat operations, reduce support for the insurgents within the population and increase support for the legitimate host government.. Since field marshal temper coined the phrase during theMalayanemergency, hearts and minds has been used to describe a central task of coin, hence engaging the local population so as to win their trust and negate the negate their support for insurgentorganizations. The most important step in civilian engagement is to determine the legitimate power holders in the community and go through them while addressing the interests and concerns they present. The problem in Iraq and to a lesser extent in Afghanistan was that most of them claimed to be tribalists while in the real sense the number of top leaders was less than a dozen and they didn’t have tribal lineage. This dishonors the real tribal leader hence creating potential problems or enemies.Because the US was seeking to simply a problem they perceived as a social disorder, renamed the problem as the opposing blue and red forces and reverted to its traditional comfort zone (Millett 112). These cultural conflicts led to some escalation of force or unnecessary volence.an example of such a conflict due to culture is whereby in the western European tradition, a white flag means surrender. Many marines assumed that a black-flag the opposite of surrender, as a result many Shia who traditionally fly black flags were misunderstood and ended up being perceived as the enemy. Conversely understanding the local culture led to the escalation of violenceandrestraintin the use of force.A special officer was quoted saying that if they had understood the local culture, especially the celebratory role of gunfire, more than one wedding ceremony would have been spared from fires conducted in self-defense against perceived threats.He goes on say that the knowledge enabled them to retract the fangs on several occasions.The issues arising from the negative consequences of cultural knowledge concerned the small group that created the Human Terrain System. Their hope was that the social cultural knowledge would enable the military to take local perspectives and interests into accounts in their planning and execution of missions. Maybe naively they believed that social cultural understanding restrains violence rather than enables it. The human Terrain System was born out of a predecessor project that was called cultural preparation of the environment (CPE). In December 2004, Hriar Cabaran at the joint chief of staff’s asked Montgomery to assist with a short-term pilot project, under thesponsorship of the joint improvised explosive device to collect and organize cultural information in support of army brigades in Iraq. Software developer’s military personnel with recent experience in in Iraq and a variety of social scientists contributed to the CPE. The CPE used Diyala province for the proof of concept, in part because prior research had been done for the Iraq training programme. The main aim of the CPE was to provide commander on the ground with a tool that would allow them to understand operationally relevant aspects of local culture.The CPE may also assist commanders in making decisions about how to apply the appropriate level of force. In the 2005 fall CPE model was field-tested in Iraq. Because the IED had supported the project, it was sensible to field it in Iraq. Colonel Steve Fondarco was the officer in charge and was responsible for evaluating the counter capabilities.He identified three main problems first, the brigade staff were overloaded with machines that they had no time to learn hence the CPE was likely to become an expensive foot nest. Secondly, the military personnel did not have enough baseline knowledge to enable them to validate the information to come up with conclusions needed.Third, militaryneeded to have social scientists on their staffwhocould do research and come up with findings that would make sense to the population (Millett 50). Despite the feedback,the Human Terrain System beganlookingfor permanenthome for the project in summer. The joint IED force, which later became Joint IED Defeat organization, could not run programs like CPE on a permanent basis; Dr Cayaban encouraged the team to reach out to other us government entities that cold the CPE as an enduring capability (Travis 45). The Human terrain system met with the state department Humanitarian information, Army civil war affairs and psychological operations and, Marine corps intelligence activity. This resulted in the weekly video teleconferences that were held at pentagon and a variety of organizationsexpressed interest since the army foreign military studies offices institutional mission were in line with the CPE objective they reached out to their mother organization for intelligence to verify its interest. TRADOC DCSINT form a committee for the cultural operations research which later became the foundation for the Human TerrainSystem.Toward the endof 2005,the 10th mountain division submitted an operational needs statement to the Army which articulates a joint target operational needs statement in April 2007.Combined joint task force signed a JUONS later that month, creating a requirement for easy at brigade and divisional level in Iraq and Afghanistan. Thesedocuments are h one that created the Human Terrain system and established the minimum requirement for teams at the brigade and divisional level (Millett 123). The JUONS and USCENTOCM are classified and hence cannot be discussed.The unclassified Iraq JUONS offers a unique insight into these issues that senior military personnel in Iraq thought were critical. Realizing that the Human Terrain Systems exist at all command echelons, theIraq JUONS observed that the detailed knowledge of host populations is critical in areas where US forces are being increased to conduct counters urgency and stability operations in Iraq (Travis 114). This greatly disadvantages the commander’s situational awareness and creates greater risks for forces. The Iraq JUONS established the objectives of the Human Terrain System to improve operational decisions and chances for mission success through increased understanding of Iraq citizens. The Iraq JUONS also said that they hoped the Human Terrain system could help decrease both coalition force and local nationalities and avoid loss of life unnecessarily. The JUONS only brought the Human terrain system into existence but did not provide any funding.so as to meet the requirements of the JUONS the Human Terrain system had to collect funds together from a variety of sources.In 2006, the ONS was used bythe army as the basis for a proposal to 20 million dollar project. The first Human Terrain system was deployed in the February of 2007 to support the brigade combat team of the 82ndairborne division at forward operating base in host Afghanistan (Travis 99. ) Because the Human Terrain System was just an experiment, they asked the commander to determine where the HTT should be located. They came up with the idea to put them in the in the Intelligence office which was turned out to be a bad move because it resulted I the over classification of research, reducedability to interact with the rest of the staff and threatened to draw the HTT into kinetic targeting, an activity that was outside the scope. The first HTT to be deployed was armed with the intelligence office as a result of natural tendency in the military organizing to lump functions together.The HTTs deals with information which is like intelligence and therefore they should be part of intelligence’. Works Cited Millett, Allan. For the common defense: A military history of the United States from 1607 to 2012 (3rd ed.). New York, NY: The Free Press, 2012. Print. Travis, Andrew. Military Discipline. New York. The Aaron Travis Publications, 2012. Print. Read More