Human Terrain's 'Catch-22' (Updated)

The debate over the Pentagon's efforts to work with social scientists continues. Yesterday, we laid out the response of Defense Department officials supporting the program, includingcomments from Defense Secretary Gates. Today, it's worth highlighting one of the main issues raised by the critics, particularly two former members of a Human Terrain Team, Zenia Helbig and Matthew Tompkins. In a letter to the Project on Government Oversight, they provide acomprehensive account of their experiences, but the snippet that really stuck out for me is this:

"Program Management personnel are caught in a Catch-22 where they cannot hold BAE accountable for their failure to deliver on the terms of the contract without their evaluations of BAE being turned on the program by HTS's vocal chorus of critics."

This is an interesting statement, because it reflects a truism of many controversial defense programs, ranging from the V-22 to missile defense. However, with the Human Terrain System, it's even more perplexing, because unlike an F-22, any "milestones" to judge success are going to be subjective at best, or artificially created at worst (and yes, I'm aware of the reports of the 60 percent drop in kinetic force, and that's wonderful, but how one would scientifically and objectively correlate this to human terrain teams is difficult to understand). For example, unlike a weapons system, the director of operational test and evaluation can't really review the Human Terrain System. But maybe he/she should (it's amusing to contemplate how the military would develop a traditional requirements document for the Human Terrain System)? This is really the tricky part of the Pentagon getting involved in social science work, which is not to say they should or shouldn't be involved in it.

[Image: Defense Department]

Update:

Derek Gregory, a professor of geography at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, has the following response to Montgomery McFate's letter, which we posted in full yesterday:

*I read Montgomery McFate's response with interest. *

But it is not only contentious - it's also contradictory.

She claims that Afghanistan and Iraq have been closed to research "for decades" but then implies that this doesn't much matter because the role of social science is not to provide the "cultural awareness" she has identified as its crucial contribution in her previous arguments about HTS -- an awareness that flows directly from cultural specificity -- but "analytical frameworks and research methodologies" founded on the assumption that "the dynamics of human behavior exhibit certain universal features."

I've always found her sense of both the humanities and the social sciences astonishingly narrow and doctrinaire (anthropology as the discipline invented to support" warfighting in the tribal zone", for example), but here she simply fails to understand that much of the most interesting (and intellectually powerful) work across the borders of the humanities and the social sciences is directed towards the careful, patient elucidation of concrete situations through concepts that are themselves changed in the course of the research. It's not about devising "frameworks" and "methodologies" to clean up a messy world, though I can see why such a project might appeal to the Department of Defense.

What McFate resurrects is a shop-worn distinction between understanding the particular and analyzing the universal: she once insisted on social science supplying the former (knowledge of "adversary cultures") and now, obliged to concede that most of the social scientists recruited by the Pentagon understand neither the area in which they are deployed nor the language in which they are immersed, claims that it supplies the latter.

No wonder Newsweek was puzzled. Given what she says about its editors, I hope that in the future she might be held to a higher standard of intellectual inquiry.