Historicus

Conferences, Conferences, Conferences

Chris — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 21:39:00 GMT

I'll be presenting my first ever conference papers during the Spring semester, and rather than be content with just one excursion into the world of professional historians, I'm presenting four times between now and Memorial Day. No easing into things for me.

First up is the Phi Alpha Theta biennial conference in January, where I'm presenting a paper on honor, chivalry, and the Vietnam War. in March I present two papers on the South's attitudes toward George Armstrong Custer - at the 2nd University of Alabama Graduate Conference on Power & Struggle I'll be discussing how Southerners used Custer in conjunction with the Election of 1876 to end Reconstruction, while at the 2010 Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery Conference at CSU-Pueblo I'll talk about Custer's changing image among Southerners from the beginning of the Civil War through his death in 1876. To cap of the semester, I'm jumping into the deep end of the pool, and presenting at the Society for Military History's Annual Meeting at VMI, where I'm presenting a paper about Masculinity in the Vietnam War.

All of this presenting brings up a question: the SISSI Conference publishes a conference proceedings. Does that count as a publication credit? I would hate to stick it on my cv as one, only to look like an idiot for doing so.

I'm Back

Chris — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:39:00 GMT

After an unintentionally long hiatus I am finally back to blogging. There are no real explanations other than life getting in the way - the press of teaching, taking classes, writing, and moving my lovely wife to her law school really distracted me from anything not mission critical.

With the holiday season come new resolutions - an early one being to get this place back up and running. Over the next week I'll be updating links and adding new content while juggling things like grading for my online classes, putting up the Christmas tree, and putting the final touches on a conference paper before sending it off to the panel chair/commentator.

The American Airpower Mess

Chris — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Last week David Axe reported that the U.S. Navy finally did something that USAF needed to do years ago - leased four Super Tocano light attack planes to support Special Operations. The Super Tocanos can't operate off carriers, but at least the Navy understand that flexible air to ground capability is a must in the modern threat environment. This fits with the normal Navy and Marine Corps approach to aviation - it's a necessary tool used to address multiple problems. To be effective you need multiple types of aircraft, not just super expensive fighters and bombers. This is why the Navy is getting the P-8, the EA-18G, and the F-35 on top of their other airframes, at a a time USAF is focused on the F-22 and F-35 to the exclusion of almost everything else, even the necessary support aircraft like tankers.

The Tocanos are designed for close air support, a role USAF always seems to want to get rid of in favor of the more glamorous air superiority and strategic bombing roles (still not shown effective in any war). Before Operation Desert Storm (and even afterward), USAF wanted to scrap the most effect aircraft of the 21st century battlefield - the A-10 Thunderbolt II (Warthog). While the A-10 is getting a much needed upgrade program, the Air Force seems to think that armed drones firing missiles is the way to handle close air support and reconnaissance. The two dirty little secrets here is that use of drones to attack insurgents invariably seem to kill innocent civilians or violate borders, simultaneously recruiting more insurgents and antagonizing the populations of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and that more than 30% of the $4.5 million drones crashed. That means that while they can hit targets, they are counterproductive and not as cheap as claimed.

Capt. Mark Mullins, the naval officer running the program seems to understand the issues:

"It's not about flying in from 1,000 miles away, dropping some thousand-pound bombs and leaving. It's about working with [the ground force], doing the intelligence preparation of the battlespace, doing a [communication] relay, close air support, eyes on target and if there's squirters leaving the target, keeping up with them and tracking them down and doing [bomb damage assessment] at the end."

Mullins was careful to say that the Navy is working with the Air Force and Marine Corps on the new program to test the Tocanos for combat use, but the message is clear. The Air Force dropped the ball on close air support, and continues to do so. While I won't dispute the need to procure advanced weapons to face future threats, or the need to proceed rationally in developing and deploying new (to us) weapon systems, the fact of the matter is that USAF doesn't want this role, and is as slow to address it as it was to deal with the reality of tactical air combat in the 1950s and 1960s (see Korea and Vietnam) when it wanted to focus on supersonic fighters armed with missiles designed to attack bombers.

If, as Jimmy Wu reported in 2006, the Key West agreement is truly dead, maybe the Air Force should relinquish its hold on close air support and tactical transport so that the services that rely on those aspects of airpower (Army/Marines) can get on with business. Give the Army and Marines the A-10s and allow them to deploy more of their own fixed wing assets to handle counterinsurgency and close air support, and be done with it.

Successful Conference

Chris — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 15:36:00 GMT

Two weeks ago the Graduate History Association here at UA hosted it's first conference for graduate students. Other than a few small issues - the remote didn't advance slides during Matthew Connelly's keynote, the university's tech folks rolled out a radical new update to the PCs we were using for conference presentations over night on Friday, which had me and Kerry Cohen scrambling to figure out how to get things running again. Despite these snags, things went pretty smoothly.

Since I was responsible for setting up the technology side of the keynote, I missed all of the sessions on Friday. Other issues ensured that I only made it to one panel - featuring the esteemed Chris Bray and Jennifer Phillips of UAB - on Saturday. Chris presented an interesting look at state and non-state militarism in early America and Jennifer discussed the use of rape as a tool of genocide. My contribution was tech support for Jennifer's presentation, and what seems a truly incomprehensible (and probably unfair) query about rape as part of war in different eras and geographies - if the contention is that rape is a deliberate policy of government in Sudan, how do you prove that, when it happens in all wars? How do you separate the motivations of the janjaweed from those of Charlie Company at My Lai?

We hope to build on this conference to host an enduring conference series. More on that later.

Conference Program Online

Chris — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 21:55:00 GMT

The complete conference program for the University of Alabama Graduate Student History Conference on Power and Struggle is now online both as a web page and a pdf file. While setting it up, I just happened to notice that Chris Bray of historiblogography and Cliopatria is scheduled to talk about settler paramilitaries in Early America. I hope that I can catch his panel in between tech support requests.

Support MS Softserve

Chris — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 15:06:00 GMT

Normally, the causes I promote here are related to Veterans or active duty troops. Today, I have something a bit different to request everyone's help with MS Softserve.

MS Softserve is a 501(c)(3) that works to educate people with MS about how to live with their disease. Like anything else, MS is not a monolithic, static condition that affects all people equally. The goal of MS Softserve is to provide MS sufferers with the information they need in a safe environment that allows them to access resources in ways that work for them. There are between 250,000 and 350,000 people with Multiple Sclerosis in the United States, so by supporting MS Softserve, you have a chance to help a large group of people who really deserve our help. I have both friends and family with MS, so this is as important to me as the veterans (more friends and family) causes I also support.

You can get more information about MS Softserve on Facebook or at the MS Softserve website. You can also watch the video below:

I'll be back to normal posting after I finish the current batch of exam grading.

Afghanistan, Counterinsurgency, and Learning Organizations

Chris — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 18:59:00 GMT

LTC John Nagl's Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife deals in large part with the United States Army as a learning organization during the Vietnam War, and compares it to the British Army's performance in Malaya. His contention that in order to successfully wage war, particularly when fighting insurgencies, military organizations need to learn from their experiences. In his estimation, during and after the Vietnam War the U.S. Army became a learning organization. I saw the types of behavior in the limited training I received as an Army ROTC cadet back in 1990-92 - after action briefings, training scenarios, lessons learned, etc... were a big part of what we did. You would think that with this background and the difficulties faced in both Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army would be pushing the concepts of learning through experience even more.

Unfortunately, as Abu Muqawama (aka Andrew Exum) points to Tom Ricks' new series of articles at Foreign Policy's website about the experiences of part of the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Wanat and Elizabeth Rubin's New York Times February, 2008 story about Battle Company's problems in the Korengal River Valley to show that this may not be the case. The official investigation of the 173rd's problems at Wanat seem to bear out this interpretation. While Abu Muqawama saw a parallel with Bernard Fall's Street Without Joy, which I'm still working through, I see parallels not only with the French efforts to build small-heavily defended outposts throughout Vietnam during the First Indochina War and the siege of Dien Bien Phu, as illustrated by Fall's Hell in a Very Small Place.

The troops at Wanat particularly seem to fit the bill. Like the legionnaires at Dien Bien Phu, the platoon (Second Platoon, Chosen Company, 503rd Infantry regiment) at Wanat did not get anything like the amount of materiel needed to build proper fortifications, reducing the height of the barriers so that they could be filled with earth by hand. Second Platoon also didn't have adequate water available to them onsite, lacked observation posts, and didn't have dedicated surveillance or air support. One explanation is that th effort was part of an effort to do counterinsurgency "on the cheap" by using too few troops to provide security and then not providing enough support in case things went bad.

It seems obvious that lessons learned from Vietnam and Iraq, or even elsewhere in Afghanistan would limit both these types of situations and the instinct to sweep issues under the rug so that good men would not die in vain, but go read the investigation comments and see what you think. Maybe the folks in the 173rd are learning from the incident, but what about the rest of the Army? When and how do this get disseminated to them?

A positive note does appear in this article in The Weekly Standard, which points to efforts to repeat the success of "The Awakening" that was the key to the success of the Surge in Iraq (don't kid yourselves, 20,000 more troops was not enough on its own, a combination of factors was required). The obvious question is whether an Awakening type of phenomenon is even possible in Afghanistan, which presents a radically different problem that that found in Iraq. Can the United States and NATO find charismatic local leaders who are willing to stop the violence and support the Karzai government, which has limited legitimacy to begin with? If Western military forces pull back and avoid conflict or even visibility that could antagonize people, does that really fix the problem, or actually worsen it? These are all things that people more familiar with Afghanistan than I am are going to have to answer.

Regardless, the Army and the DoD need to get back to the hard hitting lessons learned process that the National Training Center was famed for, and start looking at Afghanistan with a critical eye so that mistakes are avoided in the future. This can only be good for both the troops and the Afghanis.

Battle of Palmetto Ranch Diorama to be Rebuilt

Chris — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 17:22:00 GMT

It looks like the ordeal is over for the Highland High School students who donated an impressive diorama of the Battle of Palmetto Ranch to the Texas Military Forces Museum at Camp Mabry. Director of the museum at the Army National Guard post in Austin, Jeff Hunt, decreed the diorama inaccurate, and destroyed large portions of the work without discussing perceived problems with the students or their adviser, Glenn Frakes. Rather than acting responsibly to further the education of the students involved and to fix the diorama, Hunt first claimed that the piece was dismantled, and would be used in smaller exhibits. Later, Hunt fell back on his authority as curator of the museum to destroy the work or change it as he saw fit.

Most of the students involved in the original project have graduated, but Frakes and a new group of Gilbert, Arizona students, will build a replacement diorama of the battle for Forth Worth's Texas Civil War Museum, which is donating $25,000 for the project. I hope that this outcome will help some of the students who became victims of the debacle with the TMFM at Camp Mabry regain their enthusiasm for history, and that the opportunity to make things right will promote it in the group that builds to new diorama. it is obviously too late to hope that Jeff Hunt will face any sort of official censure from either the National Guard or the State of Texas.

Predator Drones for Counter-Terror = Bad Idea

Chris — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 21:56:00 GMT

Repeat after me - using aircraft to fire missiles at suspected terrorists and insurgents is counterproductive to success. Using unmanned aircraft for same is worse. Giving armed unmanned aircraft to the CIA with looser rules of engagement is just stupid. This time Predator drones firing missiles over Afghanistan got some of the people they were shooting at in Waziristan. Unfortunately, they also got a whole pile of innocent civilians, too.

We have to start asking ourselves when we cross the threshold from enhancing security by removing dangerous people from the field of play, and reduce security by actively recruiting for the enemy. Is it any surprise Pakistanis are pissed that we are still shooting people in their country without declaring war? Especially after Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari told his people that they would stop in the Obama administration. If we get less cooperation from Pakistan in the horribly misnamed "War on Terror" due to these actions, how doe that makes us safer, or Afghanistan more secure and stable?

How is it that we've still not learned this lesson? Killing innocent civilians with artillery and airpower, forcing their survivors into the hands of the opposition, is a problem facing the United States since the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) was doing it in the early 1960s. John Paul Vann railed against it until he died while working on CORDS in that country. This is not new, and it undoes any claims by USAF that airpower has a legitimate and useful softpower component. When you kill innocent people from the air in a spectacular and highly visible fashion, it doesn't really matter how many schools you build, how much medicine you deliver, or how many cross-cultural ties you create.

Afghan Girls Return to School

Chris — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 18:12:00 GMT

Almost all of the girls that were victims of a November Taliban acid attack are back at school this week. This is a move that takes great courage on the part of the girls and their parents, the teachers, and government officials, and provides some hope for Afghanistan's future. The question that remains is whether the Afghan authorities, local Afghans, and NATO forces can provide enough security to schools and hospitals that more schools can open, and stay open. Education, an improved economy, and physical security are three of the key ingredients for lasting stability in the country, which also needs other basic infrastructure.

Smart and Bored in School

Chris — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 17:28:00 GMT

In what is no big surprised to anyone with two brain cells to rub together, Ron Matus of the St. Pete Times found that the top 10% of kids in Florida schools are bored stiff because No Child Left Behind focuses only on the bottom rung of school achievement. While Matus actually spoke to some of those students at a science competition at Thurgood Marshall Fundamental Middle School, the Fordham Institute has been studying the effects of NCLB since 2002. It's 2007 report found that NCLB improved test scores for kids at the bottom levels of academic achievement, it ignores the huge swath of kids in the middle, and those at the top might as well not exist.

No, shit. Really? This is a surprise to anyone?

The idea behind NCLB is to improve standardized test scores in a narrow set of skills for students that did not have those skills. Since schools are heavily penalized by State and Federal governments if test scores don't go up, they have little choice other than to teach to the bottom to pull up the scores. This penalizes the kids in the middle rungs, who need more than just the basics. The kids on top? They've always been bored, always needed to be self-motivated, and almost always ignored by their schools. Trust me, I know.

While I wasn't in that top 10% Matus is talking about (smart and bored, not self-motivated), going to school was boring as hell due to low expectations in many arenas. Multiple choice history tests based on nothing more than reading the text book? Five paragraph essays based on Young Goodman Brown or The Little Prince? A biology class in which we spent more time doing biologically-oriented word find work sheets than doing biology or even listening to class lectures. Mindless repetition of math problems in Algebra II? Hell, math is not my strong suit, but I was fine on tests. I just hated the boredom brought on by thirty Algebra problems each night.

My point is this, and it is obscured by the table of statistics from the College Board that Matus included with his article - where the system was failing the kids at the bottom of the academic achievement ladder, it is now failing everyone else. The college-bound folks in the middle aren't learning the critical thinking and note-taking skills they need to succeed at the next level, and they aren't learning to find information on their own. They are used to getting everything spoon-fed to them and getting praise for average work. The kids at the top have to be extraordinarily disciplined to continue learning and succeed. We have to find a way to reform this nonsense we call primary and secondary education so that all kids get the education they need and deserve.

Otherwise they end up like one of my junior high friends who was ridiculously bright, but received not parent or teacher guidance and motivation. He decided that boredom was best relieved with homemade explosives and lost three fingers. No college for Larry, just a dead-end retail job at an electronics store.

We can't afford more Larrys.

Bring Back the Bronco

Chris — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 18:26:00 GMT

David Axe at War is Boring (formerly of Wired's Danger Room) reports that Boeing wants to bring back the venerable OV-10, which is still in service in other nations (and were based at Wheeler AFB when I lived in Hawaii), for COIN work. Boeing wants to enhance the old birds with modern sensors and self-defense systems. The Broncos have a definite cool factor that some newer aircraft proposed for the COIN mission lack - a Texan II or a Brasilia won't be landing on the deck of the same carriers a Harrier can operate from.

If you can do this inexpensively and quickly, it's an option we should pursue. It makes more sense than re-purposing training aircraft, and I'm not a fan of drones for anything other than recon missions (something armed and hackable, yeah, that makes a whole lot of sense). I'm wondering, though, if we sold off all the old OV-10s in the inventory, or if we could retrieve some out of the boneyard for use (satellite photos of the boneyard at Davis-Monthan AFB show a few of them). Could you reasonably add more modern avionics to the old airframes on the cheap?

USMC OV-10D aircraft in the boneyard. Image courtesy of the OV-10 Bronco Association.

Using Paula Loyd as a Weapon in Debate

Chris — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 16:55:00 GMT

Paula Loyd's death as a result of burns sustained when serving as a member of a Human Terrain Team in Afghanistan is creating a virtual firestorm of reaction from both the left and right of the political spectrum. The comment threads at Michael Yon's website, and at Wired's Danger Room show some disturbing and ignorant condemnations of Islam as singularly vile and barbaric. Both the threads at Danger Room and this comment at Max Forte's Open Anthropology show a disregard for the lives and efforts of people to stabilize Afghanistan, calling it "imperialism".

While I like debate on the issues, I find the tone a bit disturbing, as the raw emotion prevents any reasoned discussion. Max, an ardent critic of both HTS and social scientist's involvement with the military, used the occasion and the comments at Danger Room to advance his thesis that American activities in Afghanistan as imperialism, even when they go beyond the role of actual combat, and a way to look at what he calls the "American culture of war and fear". Although I don't agree with all of his criticisms of HTS, Max has a valid point in using this circumstance to get at some of these issues.

However, I do have some issues with the presentation and Open Anthropology on this occasion. Max's portrayal of Loyd's position seems designed to support his interpretation:

Attached to a military unit, and the fact that she was a low ranking army officer, seems to vanish as some translate her into a “noncombatant” akin to a nurse, doctor, or priest. As expected, for some her image has morphed into one of a saint, even a Joan of Arc.

While she was attached to a military unit, and in the company of soldiers and civilians in various roles, Ms. Loyd was not an Army officer. Unless I've missed something, she was a former U.S. Army Reserve Staff Sgt who deployed to Bosnia, a former civilian employee of the State Department, and a former employee of the United Nations. While in Afghanistan she was a contractor for BAE Systems, which runs the HTS pilot for the DoD. So she was a civilian, not a member of the United States military. She did place herself in harm's way, both for pay and to further what she apparently saw as the greater good for both Americans and Afghans, but this should lead her to expect the threat of bombs and bullets, not of being doused in gasoline and set alight for the crime of asking about fuel prices. This type of attack is not one generally used by and against combatants, but against women and girls that step outside the rigidly defined roles created by an ultra-conservative subset of Afghan society.

Part of the issue with Max's analysis is that he is operating from the assumption that the U.S. mission in Afghanistan is inherently imperial in the manner of 19th century imperial efforts. In this mode combatants, Provincial Reconstruction Teams, and NGOs that cooperate with U.S. or NATO forces become part of the imperial mission, and Ms. Loyd becomes a tool in the mythology and ideology of that mission. As may already be obvious, I tend to disagree with this interpretation of the war in Afghanistan (though Iraq is a different story). In Afghanistan we have a failed state that is the result of a civil war and the 1979 Soviet invasion, and our own failure to help rebuild and stabilize Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal. Current operations are the result of the Taliban's willingness to allow terrorist organizations to operate from Afghan soil in conducting attacks against the United States, and an understanding that developing stability in Afghanistan is in the American interest. While this could lead to an imperial venture, it does not of necessity have to do so. I'm not sure that the link between reconstruction and stabilization and combat operations is automatically imperial in nature.

New UA Graduate Conference on Power and Struggle Website

Chris — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 16:41:00 GMT

We have a new website for the conference, with information about the keynote speaker, travel and accommodations, parking, etc... We also have a new presence on Facebook.

Inside the Danger Zone

Chris — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 16:10:00 GMT

My former Sam Houston State classmate Harold Wise has a new Youtube video up to promote his book Inside the Danger Zone. If you are interested in the attack on the USS Cole and the United States' quasi-war in the Persian Gulf during the 1990's, please go check out both the video and the book.

Paula Loyd, Requiescat in pace

Chris — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 20:48:00 GMT

Paula Loyd, the Army social scientist attacked in southern Afghanistan last November, recently succumbed to her wounds. Please join me in expressing my condolences to her family and friends. Despite the criticism leveled at the hiring of seemingly unqualified personnel to staff for HTS, Ms. Loyd was an expert on Afghanistan after working for the State Department in the area, and popular in the village he was attacked in. She is a model for the type of Army civilian we need more of, and her memory should serve to encourage those who wish to serve without being in the military.

Correction: updated 10 January 2009 to correct the spelling of Ms. Loyd's name from "Lloyd" ot "Loyd".

Tetris Helps PTSD Patients

Chris — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 01:47:00 GMT

As if there wasn't already plenty of good reason to help out the folks at Games for Soldiers, here's a new one: evidently, playing Tetris helps lessen the effects of PTSD by interfering with the way memory is created. Since it does take a lot of focus to play, I can sort of see that. Regardless, Tetris players had fewer flashbacks. Researchers hope that this might lead to real progress in treatment for PTSD sufferers.

Remember, whether you're for or against the wars of the past seven years, we all have a responsibility to those who are wounded mentally or physically in the service of our country, and those who still serve.

This is a Good Gig

Chris — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 22:03:00 GMT

I realized yesterday, that as along as you have funding, life as a grad student, is actually a pretty nice one. I've done this a couple of times now, and I have to say I really enjoy it. Despite the lack of cash for most us, this is a comfortable life.

Consider:

My job is to read and write, and occasionally lead a discussion or give a lecture. I love to read. Hell, I live to read. This has been true since I learned to read back in the first grade, thirty years ago. Writing is no chore, and despite a small amount of stage fright, lectures and discussions aren't bad. I find that my love of talking about history is greater than my fear of audiences.
A fairly open schedule. Sure I have to show up for classes (taken and taught), and turn in assignments on time, but preparation and writing I get to do on my schedule. Want to handle it 8-5 like a corporate job? Do it that way. Work best at 3 am? Go for it. The criteria is getting the work done, and doing it passably well.
Easy dress code. The criteria is to look better than my students, which means clean clothes and a nice polo or Oxford shirt with cargo pants. It isn't as good as wearing cargo shorts and Aloha shirts at my last job in the corporate world, but I don't feel the need to wear a jacket and tie like some of my cohorts. I'm older than they are, so I don't need to advertise that I'm in charge.

So if you can handle living without some creature comforts this is a great way of life. I wouldn't want to do it forever, though.

Viagra, Counterinsurgency, and the Human Terrain

Chris — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 20:54:00 GMT

Joby Warrick at the Washington Post broke an interesting story the day after Christmas - the CIA found an interesting way to woo tribal chiefs in Afghanistan using American pharmaceuticals. We're not talk psychedelic drugs, truth serum, or any kind of brain washing injections that give us total control. Instead, the CIA offered something a bit more subtle. It gave instant virility in pill form. That's right, the CIA gave Afghanistan Viagra.

This is just one example of how the CIA is working to gain the trust of Afghans, with the result that they get information about insurgents, supply lines. Instant erections are not the only tool in the CIA arsenal - dental work, surgery, school supplies, tools, even school buildings are all part of the kit, and have been since at least the Vietnam War. The thing is that these items can only be employed effectively by individuals and agencies that have a detailed understanding of the individuals they deal with and the culture they are working in - the Human Terrain in modern parlance. In many ways this is the same things as the "hearts and minds" approach much derided when it was employed in Southeast Asia.

The thing is, you have to speak the language, develop relationships, and spend a lot of time to learn what the Human Terrain is and figure out how to use it to combat insurgents, guerrillas, or terrorists. That's just common sense. The question, then is why we are so bad at it, and why it took six years to get to the point where we receive reports that the defense establishment is using these tools? How do we enhance and sustain the capability to do so?

This is where programs like Project Minerva and the flawed Human Terrain System come in, as do the human intelligence efforts of the CIA and other intelligence arms. Spy satellites and signals intelligence can't do this for us. The question is how to get social scientists and area experts to help with these efforts in a way that doesn't conflict with their professional ethics. If that isn't possible, does the DoD then need to develop its own folks for these tasks, and is that even possible? Does being part of the Big Green Machine prevent someone from developing the mindset required to effectively develop a nuanced understanding of other cultures?

Confiscating Toy Guns in Iraq

Chris — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 01:32:00 GMT

Back on Christmas Eve, Nathan Hodge posted a story at Danger Room about American soldiers confiscating toy guns and replacing them with another toy on anti-weapon sweeps in Sadr City. The basic idea is to reduce the chances that a soldier will not recognize a toy weapon as a toy, thus reducing the chances that they might accidentally kill an innocent child. Even with appropriate apologies and compensation, those incidents make it more difficult to build ties in communities and stabilize Iraq. It also leaves the soldier with the realization that the kid he just killed didn't even have a gun.

This is one of those programs that takes careful thinking to develop and implement - you have to know the neighborhoods you operate in, the people that live in them, and also not be focused primarily on the kinetic aspects of war. You need personnel and units with the right cultural and linguistic training, time to get to know the local populace, and to get out of your vehicles. The guidelines in the Army's COIN Field Manual and new Stability Operations Field Manual are a good place to start. It also helps if you have social scientists helping out your teams figure out how to try these programs in a culturally effective manner - just confiscating the toys won't work, you need to offer something in exchange, and explain why you want to do it. Otherwise, you're stealing toys from kids, and alienating everyone.

This doesn't mean you need Human Terrain Teams as currently constituted, but that the Army does need people with this type of orientation. The people acting as experts should speak the local language and understand local customs and mores, and could be either military or civilian. This is an operational function, not a specifically research function. Could these social science focused troops learn things and try to publish them, but that shouldn't be their focus. The focus should be on stabilizing the areas they work in, safeguarding lives, and generally assisting in the operations of the units they are attached to. I think this represents the fault line between the AAA and the anthropologists working in the Human Terrain System now - what is the function of a DoD social scientist to do research, or to support a mission?