🙂

I think the jokes show the rich textures of critical engagement, thought, and disaffection which have always been part of people in the military’s own experience of the utility of “military intelligence.” Which is to say, it is a commentary on the usefulness of “Intel,” military knowledge about what’s going on on the ground.

I draw your attention to the first and last sentences of your passage above, from which I drew a substantial part of my interpretation of your interpretation of this joke. I’d also ask you to read the levity back into my comments.

Thanks! Keep up the great blogging!

Suppose we now have our Grant? Suppose the Iraqi people want our help for another few years until they can help themselves?

Then what?

Wouldn’t a self governing Iraq be a great thing amidst all those ME kingdoms and dictatorships? Why wouldn’t honorable anthros work towards such a goal?

Why would any lovers of humanity want to be the Copperheads of this war?

(This would dovetail nicely with the old argument that Al Qaeda itself is best understood as a PR firm dedicated to brand destruction of Western-modern-occidentalist-secular-infidelity).

What I claim in this blog entry is that

1) the military has incredible logistical capacities to project power abroad (but not omnipotence). Part of this capacity comes from am amazing amount of intelligence (but not omniscience). I’ll leave the details of Peanut’s grandfather’s socialization to role in the military to Peanut’s own imagination, but obviously our prosecution of the war in the Pacific is evidence in support of, rather than in opposition to, my claim.

2) Many people in the military are active thinkers — intellectuals, even — who are widely read and thoughtful about what they do. When attempting to understand their motivation to hire anthropologists, I argued, we should take into account the possibility that they may actually be interested in learning something from them.

I hope it’s clear now that I do not hold the position that Peanut claims.

I think we also agree — and in the course of this discussion we have gotten clearer about how and why we agree. I don’t think casting debate in terms of a ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ PR argument has the drawbacks that you claim, however. You could certainly hold that military officers believe anthropology to be useful PR and that enlisted men believe it to be efficacious. In fact I think the value of trying to fit one’s position into the ideal type that I articulated is that it also prompts us to complete the equation and ask if planner think it is efficacious and soldiers ‘on the ground’ think it is PR.

I do, however, think you have pointed out one thing about my argument — that these ideal types of arguments can be deployed in multiple contexts to clarify our judgments of different actors. That is not something I thought of, but I do think it moves the conversation along — which is really the goal. I don’t want to fetishize this forms of enquiry if its not useful.

1) I have no idea if anyone has ever held a ‘strong’ version of the PR argument. Nowhere in my blog entry do I claim that _anyone_ holds it. I merely lay it out as one sort of claim that one could make about the war. The purpose of the post was to provide an analysis of the logic and coherence of certain kinds of claims that could be made.

2) If you honestly think I once was close to Schweder’s position and am now distancing myself from it because of Sahlins’s post, then you are deeply, deeply confused not only about what I believe, but my personal relationship with these two authors.

Clearly, it would be a mistake to believe that “Tracy” appeared in the NYT because of radical American freedom of the press. Clearly the decision to publicize HTS in this way was at least partially determined (or permitted) by (some part of) the military.

Similarly, the HTS manual’s publication as a very tasty-looking book/commodity (it looks like something one would buy in Urban Outfitters, does it not?) might suggest that this document addresses the American public, a public that includes the ‘grunt’ and the potential recruit.In addressing this public, it would not be surprising if part of the message (intended or otherwise) is “we’ve got smart people fixing this mess.” (A message perhaps intended as much for the young people in uniform who are growing more and more skeptical, too) It is also hard to argue that this is not the message being presented to American public in various press-conferences and the unavoidable talking points and press-releases.

More troubling, the combination of Urban Outfitters packaging and University of Chicago stamp of intellectualness seems to target this book to (among other demographics) a very specific set of readers: young war supporters with a dose of intellectual snobbism. That is, it might speak volumes to potential future McFates: “come and join the smart, “zen like,” NewSmallWars(tm) gang.”

This is not to say that there might not be some serious social scientific thinking at some point in the chain of command. In fact, arguing that a PR function is at play is an assertion that there IS some serious social science (or at least marketing, but what’s the real difference anymore?) thinking going on at some level. There would have to be, and it would be some pretty smart thinking, too.

However, what I and perhaps others find dubious is the idea that serious social science thinking and research is being applied by HTS workers in such a way that it provides useful information to the average soldier on the ground.

Sadly, this Counterinsurgency Manual shows all the signs of being rapidly produced as a branding device and tool of PR. It is, as Price points out, not very representative of new, or innovative, or area-specific scholarship. It seems to have been rapidly tossed together. It also, as I pointed out, shows some textual evidence of being substantially lifted not from the “greats,” but from fairly random websites in which the “greats” are “embedded.”

Any military document that is available to the general public (and thus, to ‘the terrorists’ as well) should be understood to have been made public INTENTIONALLY, unless proven to have been leaked. This is especially important in the current climate of classification. Or, better, the climate of strategic declassification, a la Valerie Plume.

2) so-called lack of respect for service men and women
Rex, I must call you out on your calling me out. I hate to do that, but I kind of must, seeing as what you’ve said would really bother my grandfather, among other people.

To recall a WWII Army doctor’s reflections on the war in the Pacific–no matter how scathing they might be–and to quote him, is hardly disrespectful of the individual people in the military. Doing so in no way involves treating “the natives” like they are dumb. MASH wasn’t about how the individual soldiers were stupid or worthy of scorn, either.

The phrase “Military intelligence: contradiction in terms,” much like the acronym “FUBAR” (F*^ked Up Beyond Recognition) come from the speech–and the experience–of American military personnel during wartime. I heard the first, over and over, as a commentary on how the war in the Pacific was run. That is, it’s a critique from within the system.

Please, let’s not continue to support the idea that showing any criticism of military policy or even the results of military policy means that one does not “support the troops.” It’s an old chestnut, and it’s always been a rotten one. It stank worst after Vietnam.

More than that, we should categorically reject the idea that criticizing highly paid outside contractors is a sign of lack of support for the individual young men and women who signed on to defend their country, to get the benefits of the GI Bill, or because they felt it was the right thing to do, for whatever other reason. As Strong points out, Griffin himself says he is involved in HTS (in part) because it’s a “great funding opportunity.” Recruiters for HTS like to point out that they can arrange adjuncting positions for HTS at DC area universities. Such HTS workers are (to use what must be the best phrase I have ever coined) truly “professors of fortune.” (Royalties negotiable)

The US Government could be spending its $300k+ per head per year to train area specialists the way they used to (and still do, actually), in the various linguistics/translation training schools. This would provide the added benefit of providing people who can talk to people on the ground. The casualization of this labor takes military-benefits bearing jobs from kids who would otherwise have them, and who might do them better, frankly. Instead of sending kids to school, they buy pre-made PhDs. And, if they hire them through contract agencies, they buy ready-made temps. The readymades they have bought don’t seem to be keeping quality very high, from what I can see.

But let us treat the actants symmetrically. The military recruits anthropologists. Do anthropologists also recruit the military? Whose interests are being translated into the other’s? Who’s zoomin’ who? McFate & Co are creating lucrative markets for anthropological product. Is the military only creating PR for itself? Is McFate not also concerned with her own PR? Is this too cynical? Let me quote on the the HTS’s most public participants, “Dr. Griffin”:http://marcusgriffin.com/blog/2007/10/:

bq. Currently thoughts are mostly about the HTS program and its doctrine in relationship to anthropologists objections to participation. I tend to view the loud objections to be politically motivated: a fight over the nature of anthropology in the next decade or two. For three decades, research monies for field research have become more and more scarce. This is certainly true of federal funding. For example, since the Agta enjoyed Michael Jackson’s music so much in the early 1990s, I used to daydream of getting a philanthropic grant from him. Research dollars were and remain tight. As a result, many anthropologists spent less time in the field and increasingly turned to what people say and write and less time on what people do. In short, fieldwork became less participatory, less observational, and more focused on rhetoric and the rationales and symbolic meanings people espoused guided their behavior. Anthropology became more and more strongly interpretivist. Which if fine to a degree and I’ve always argued the more perspectives in anthropology the better despite others insisting that my use of post-positivism and critical realism was colonialist.

bq. Today, research with the military opens up a wide vista of field based research opportunity that involves funding and support infrastructure nearly unimaginable twenty years ago. In addition to that, the military is willing to pay base salaries nearly double what universities pay faculty, which removes the self-righteous cloak of poverty for the sake of learning.

Rex, can you find anyone who has ever claimed that the only reason the military is hiring anthropologists is for PR purposes? Who has ever claimed this “strong” argument? Please show us this work?

I just relooked at Price’s piece and there is nothing suggesting this. Price is arguing about the use of the Manual here at home, especially Chicago’s role in republishing it. Instead Price write’s that “The military and intelligence community loves McFate and her programs not because her thinking is innovative — but because, beyond information on specific manners and customs of lands they are occupying, the simplistic views of culture she provides tell them what they already know.” This isn’t a PR argument.

At the same time you are correct to state that I am arguing the military planners are being cynical in their deployment of HTS within Iraq. As I understand your argument, the “Strong PR” view cannot hold both things to be true, and yet the “Weak PR” view also seems incapable of holding both things to be true. It is for this reason that I don’t like the analytical framework, since I think it is simultaneously true that soldiers find HTS useful and like it while the military planners are quite cynical about how they are deploying it.

I think we should also begin to inquire about the scope of HTS. How many anthropologists are involved? How many are in the field? They sell this as just a “trial” so I assume that only a few people are actually doing this. In that case it can’t be having too much of a tactical impact at this point. There are stories of individual soldiers who were effectively running nation-building and “winning hearts and minds” campaigns over fairly large territories. I imagine these individual officers and soldiers had more of an impact than HTS has had, and yet the stories of these soldiers was largely silenced (and their activities frequently shut down) while HTS has been actively promoted.

I agree that it is important not to look at the army as a monolithic entity, since all institutions are complex, contain numerous competing factions, and so forth. At the same time, some entities are more monolithic than others and the Military — which does, after all, have a chain of command — is one which is pretty good at becoming an agentive ‘collective subject.’

It sounds to me like you are making(in the Iraqi case) a ‘strong PR’ argument which is tied to an argument about efficacy — to wit, those in the military who believed anthropology is efficacious have always been peripheral, but they are now being used by those in charge as part of a larger PR strategy. Your third paragraph seems to suggest that you believe that military planners involved in Iraq do not believe that anthropology is efficacious in any sense other than PR.

I really do think that phrasing things this way ‘adds value’ to our ongoing conversation. It allows us to separate issues of PR, efficacy, personal ethical commitment, and the definition of professional identity as an ‘anthropologist’, all of which appeared in your earlier posting. Separating them allows us to consider each of them in turn, which I think is important because they all deserve to be talked about. For instance, I think your question about what gets to be called ‘anthropology’ runs through a lot of our discussion on plagiarism (is it wrong for McFate to do it) and IRB (do applied anthropologists have to get through one) and deserves its own discussion.