The Human Terrain System is under critique again, and this time not from the AAA, but from a pro-military Congressman who finds that the program was rife with waste, fraud, and abuse. As the Army Times reports, Congressman Duncan Hunter reports “It’s shocking that this program, with its controversy and highly questionable need, could be extended.” Apparently Human Terrain contractors burned through $726 million in the name of providing actionable social science to the military.…
Category: Military
Troping the Enemy: Culture, Metaphor Programs, and Notional Publics of National Security
By Robert Albro
American University
The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) – established in 2006 in the spirit of the Pentagon’s DARPA to sponsor research for groundbreaking technologies to support an “overwhelming intelligence advantage over future adversaries” – is a little-known US agency that social and behavioral scientists (especially sociocultural anthropologists) should pay more attention to. This is because IARPA is notably social scientific in orientation and has been developing concepts in specific ways for use by the intelligence community (IC) that US anthropology in particular is significantly historically responsible for introducing to the social sciences, if in different ways, most obviously: culture, its coherence and the extent of cultural consensus, its relationship to society and to human agency.…
When do IEDs quit being IEDs? Why are we still treating insurgent munitions as folk arts?
I started as a university student, I was studying folklore and material culture, and IED’s certainly qualify as material culture that has the potential to tell you something beyond basic forensics. In this entry I am looking at IEDs using the language of business, innovation and ___________ ? The idea is to see what insights can be gained from thinking about IEDs outside of the military language.
We still read about IED’s in the popular media as if they are a folk art or the equal of some kind of primitive booby-trap.…