The Seven Deadly Sins of the Human Terrain System: An Insider’s Perspective
The Human Terrain System (HTS) – a U.S. Army program aimed at helping U.S. and allied military forces understand the people around them in Iraq and Afghanistan – is dead. And anthropologists are dancing ritualistically around its corpse.
The idea behind HTS was simple and promising: embed social scientists with military units and give them the resources to unearth operationally relevant socio-cultural data and findings. Its founders, Dr. Montgomery McFate, an anthropologist by training, and former Army officer Steve Fondacaro stood the program up and served as its leaders and missionaries for its first few years of existence. At the height of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan most ground-holding brigades and special operations units had Human Terrain Teams (HTTs) supported by Human Terrain Analysis Teams (HTATs) at the division level.
So what went wrong?
Read the rest at FPRI’s Geopoliticus.
Ryan Evans is the editor-in-chief of War on the Rocks. He worked as a Human Terrain Team social scientist in 2010 and 2011 in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province.
Image Credit: Ryan Evans, Lashkari Bazaar.
LongTabSigO 
FormerMarine and HTS Social Scientist 
Good article, great insights, and necessarily strong viewpoints! Concur with these points for the most part.
There were monumental leadership failures in this program and those in charge were uninterested in any kind of constructive criticism from the (former) military side. I attempted to enter the program as a Research Manager in 2009 and was hung up in the gov hiring buffoonery.
The training environment, such as it was, provided an interesting dynamic and I got a lot out of such close contact with a variety of pure academics, adventure academics (not a slight, but an observation), and the other personalities that were in my cohort. Made some friendships that I’ve retained to this day. But the training program itself was a joke, ineptly run, and even the military portion was amateur hour.
HTS was a totally missed opportunity that suffered from the kind of neglect that should have gotten senior officers fired. Im no “COINdinesta” (I loathe the term frankly) but this was an excellent opportunity to develop insights that lead to effective intelligence. (To me, THAT would be the selling point.)
I will disagree (gently) with a couple of points in the piece:
BAE (the contractor I went thru) is too experienced a defense company to be given a pass. They left a lot of good people hanging because they did not ask the right questions or settled for non-answer answers. They were running a mill and their conduct here was not nearly their best efforts.
The AAA also shares some blame here. They were never going to support this under any circumstances and their efforts put an already inept leadership on the defensive. They did little to enhance the potential opportunities for academics in working with the military, nor did they seize the opportunity to do a bit of “anthropology” on a society they know so little about – the US Military.
At the end of the day, HTS was an aircraft that was built mid-flight. There was no test and revision period, and that hurt the overall program. So there were obviously going to be problems. But the conversation concerning the program needs to move past the failures, and quoting congress in 2009. HTS existed (as we knew it (because it was rebranded not killed)until the end of FY 2014 and received overwhelmingly positive marks from congress and the military up until its funding was cut and TRADOC rebranded it. Furthermore, the need for an HTS-like organizaiton still exists across the military. Rep. Duncan Hunter actually voted for an HTS initiative in sub-committee. After developing a better understanding of the program he became a proponent of it.
There is also a 4th kind of member that you did not mention, the combat veteeran who recognized the need for the program through previous deployments, and believed that it played a necessary role in saving lives.
HTS was never an anthropological program, or even a cultural advising mechanism. When operating correctly, an HTT was meant to challenge commander’s and staff’s cognitive biases, enhance critical thinking, and provide a lense into the operating environment.
I appreciate the author writing up his views and opinions, but articles like this one pop up every few years. Instead of people lamenting over the issues of HTS, the conversation should transition to “how can we do it better.” The Army still needs the benefit that HTS provided. Instead of discussing only the mistakes, the greater community of people who care should discuss how to do it better moving forward.