I agree that HTS won’t work “on the ground,” and indeed there is no real evidence that it has produced any meaningful changes — violence has skyrocketed on all sides, U.S. forward operating bases have been overrun, and deadly air strikes continue. Beyond that, HTS adopts functionalist anthropology, suited for describing situations of order in states of social equilibrium, which are notoriously inadequate for describing situations of upheaval, war, rapid change, and chaos. They think that using anthropology is getting the customs and tribal relations right, in the worst possible context for trying to get such static snapshots. They want a fix on local cultures, that are themselves not fixed. If they used any anthropology seriously, and understood it, they would not be joining the occupation forces to begin with.

I don’t think we can stop HTS, or even impede it, given as you say that it is a failure from the moment of its very conception. What we are doing though is to unmask it, so that institutions of learning are not perverted and mislead into this kind of junk as if it were some wave of the future.

You are also right, that apart from occasional protests, and this online stuff, we as citizens are not doing what we need to do to force our so-called “representative” democratic governments to obey our wishes. Most polls across Europe and North America say that most of us think it was the wrong idea to invade, and that we have to get out now.

The only problem with not paying taxes is that some of us have taxes deducted at the source, by the employer, so we have little leeway it seems.

Secondly, none of this is necessary without the war and occupation. So the war and occupation must end? How? Stop paying your taxes if you live in the U.S., U.K., or any other country with troops in other people’s homelands. All talk is cheap. Just bankrupt the beast.

You may say that not paying taxes will land you in jail…..Well, that is a possible consequence. Integrity has a price. The Iraqis and Afghans are in jail, fully enabled by American taxpayer dollars….

Caise D
Amman, Jordan
American expatriate and tax refuser

So we are adopting the COIN tactics that the Spanish and Portuguese used against Napoleon?

USMC CAP program from the 1960′s in Vietnam should be the model for COIN.

I am very Conflicted at all times!

A B C D Puppies
D R N O Puppies
S D R
C M P N

You asked if the military had any successful application of counterinsurgency. That is a long and contentious discussion in itself but the answer lies in the history books, not in my opinion.

Here is a list put together by the Marine Warfighting Laboratory Wargaming Division (in itself a scary name:))

http://www.smallwars.quantico.usmc.mil/sw_past.asp

http://www.smallwars.quantico.usmc.mil/sw_today.asp

I have no problem dealing with educated military, questioning academics or those with impressive experience fighting insurgencies that never saw the inside of a school.But if you scan down just a partial list of the conflicts I have been in you would be hard pressed to see some bias or agenda.

John where does your hostility towards me come from? Perhaps I can teach you how to better manage conflict:)).

Max, the convoy was hit after the taliban ambaused and decapitated the drivers. There is real time aircraft video of the civulians swarming around the trucks before the bombs dropped so the call in my opinion was wrong.
I don’t see why I would be the one to talk to the relatives since I didn’t drop the bomb and McChrystal was on the scene to do so.

My only advice is that Stanton clearly shows his ignorance and bias on a site that I thought encouraged intelligent and slightly more informed discourse.

Listen, we just had some, pardon the language, absolute shit from German chancellor Andrea Merkel during the recent electoral campaign in Germany, where she denied the war in Afghanistan…was a war. This was just a week or so after a German colonel called in an American air strike in Kunduz that killed upwards of 150 people, mostly civilians.

Please Robert, go visit their surviving relatives and tell them, “No, you see, this is not war.” They might even agree on some level: it looks like cowardice and pure villainy.

http://www.militaryindustrialcomplex.com/contract_detail.asp?contract_id=10549

Principle Contractor: Georgia Tech Applied Research Corporation
Date of Issuance: 10/9/2009
Branch of Service: Army

Contract Details:
Georgia Tech Applied Research Corp., Atlanta, Ga., was awarded on Sept. 30, 2009 a $7,820,869 cost-plus-fixed-fee contract for the Human Terrain System Project used to train personnel to deploy on human terrain teams and human terrain analysis teams in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. Work is to be performed Leavenworth, Kan., (65 percent), Atlanta, Ga., (30 percent), and Oyster Point, Va., (5 percent) with an estimated completion date of Aug. 31, 2010. One bid solicited with one bid received. U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Command, Redstone Arsenal, Ala., is the contracting activity (W31P4Q-08-D-0006).

Total Contract Value: $7,820,869

You use phrases like offense and defense like you are some military guy that latched on to American contact football or that you may actually have played and coached it.

I get really tired of Hunter Thompson Lite or even Burroughs of Naked Lunch style. You try too hard.

I wonder, as I always have, about your independence as RYP the Business Man…I do not believe you are Indy for one second.

Me, I’m no one of note. A bunch of people out there trusted me to write their stories and so I did.

I think S. Kubrick would have really liked to have you on board on Strangelove. I have a hard time figuring out your condescending statements. Wait! I know. It’s Timothy Leary on acid wandering the Combat, er ah, Conflict, er, ah War Zones of the planet seeing/experiencing death, destruction, hope , simple acts of kindness, and the wow factor of being there and letting us all know from on high how that feels.

Warfighting is not pleasant, at least as I remember it.

You seem to revel in watching it. I can’t accept that.

“we are at War here with 12,000 plus Americans murdered violently every year”.Is not only silly it ignores a few thousand years of military science (which predates anthro science)and laws that define criminal acts vs wars unless of course Stanton is Charles Bronson and I missed his declaration of war :))

I think you have to respect the military mind if you are to ask for respect for the anthro minds view point. Often they are one and the same. There is a mantra in the military that success is defined by the lack of violence used in resolving conflicts.Soldiers are a deterent to war and terrorism is often an attempt to provoke war or overreaction. Then the wieght and cost of the war effort can often bring victory to the insurgent. So COIN is supposed to be early or late stage intel/military activity to prevent war.We ubwisely find ourselves engaged in all seven stages of conflict..at the same time. .

To define crime as war is unproductive (and vice versa) I view 9/11 as a crime not an act of war Our reaction should have been understated surgical and covert. But 8 years later we are still trying to remember the cause and effect of a few Yemenis and Saudis cultists who created flying IEDs.

We did very different things in very different countries. Even when faced with the same crime perptrated by the same group we can’t agree on a response. Using that hollow phrase “War on (insert problem here) has clearly been shown to be jingoist and hollow. But “conflict” forces parties to define the fault lines and submit planes to “reduce conflict”. So I stand by my opinion that the military is correct in defining the multistaged,timelined, changing complexity of conflct as conflict managemnent not “war”.In addition to using business concepts to manage vilolence, the military is having difficulties in changing their culture and structure. Its hard to impose COIN slash anthro thinking in combat waged by 19 year marines who calls his enemy hajis or worse :)

We need to clearly understand the long term consequences of offense vs defense in conflict. America has been involved in far too many offensive actions which have led to a diminished sense of security and moral justification at home and abroad.Essentially social engineering without the social or engineer part. HTS is the veneer of science, mixed with “metrics”, polls, focus groups and other marketing concepts to see if we are “winning” or losing” then our politicians toss their own toxic marketing mix into the mess.

The current regime expects .easurable results in 18 months in Afghanistan not because of any Afghan agenda but because it provides a glide path into the next US elections.

And John you only need to look at SWAT teams to see cops itching for a “war” but thankfully the law keeps them at bay. :)

Tell the GI with no legs that he has been in a Conflict. Tell the Wife & Children who have lost a Dad/Mom that it was just a little Conflict, not War. In the COIN world, Geospatial Mapped HT databases linked to robotic killing machines will kill with great accuracy. And when they miss, we can blame the program in the machine, not the humans that designed it, programmed it and linked it to other machines in the form of databases.

This is killing and it’s War. Apply it any way you want, we are at War in Iraq and Afghanistan, have military advisors participating in foreign internal defense in Thailand, Nigeria, Cambodia, Mexico, Colombia, et al. In fact, we are at War here with 12,000 plus Americans murdered violently every year.

Andrew Bacevich is absolutely correct in his most recent piece in the Boston Globe. Now I’m off to teach high school seniors in my Military & Diplomacy course. American youth must not be lead to accept perpetual War.

“As the fighting drags on from one year to the next, the engagement of US forces in armed nation-building projects in distant lands will become the new normalcy. Americans of all ages will come to accept war as a perpetual condition, as young Americans already do. That “keeping Americans safe’’ obliges the United States to seek, maintain, and exploit unambiguous military supremacy will become utterly uncontroversial…This is a pivotal moment in US history. Americans owe it to themselves to be clear about what is at issue. That issue relates only tangentially relates to Al Qaeda, the Taliban, or the well-being of the Afghan people. The real question is whether “change’’ remains possible.

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/10/11/afghanistan___the_proxy_war/

Thanks for all you do Max. There is always good discussion here.