The US government has been known in the past to tap esoteric academic expertise in the service of counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency programs. Such appears to have been the idea of the Human Terrain Systems (HTS) program, in which anthropologists, ethnographers and other social scientists were embedded with combat brigades in Afghanistan and elsewhere to help troops understand and win the hearts and minds of local populations, thereby, in theory, reducing violence.
Whatever role they may play in foreign policy, it's curious
to hear of such a counter-insurgency
program being exercised for potential "wargaming" scenarios in the United
States, as John Allison, an anthropologist involved with HTS, describes to
Counterpunch writer David Price.
Counterpunch reports
John's last day of HTS training was the first day of MARDEX, a military role playing exercise designated as "Weston Resolve." For the exercise, the class was presented with a training scenario in which the fictional nation of "Lakeland" was located in an area to the northeast of Kansas City was the focus of operations. John wrote that,
"In the PowerPoint slide presentation laying out the background for the "operations", the Wargame role-playing is represented by staff as merging into the real world drug, crime, and environmental "contention" within the community. The whole mission is represented as bringing a military state control of the local population which has recently elected a local government that is a "permissive" (supportive) environment for US Army activities after the previous local government had withdrawn from the US as a sovereign society. Now the US military is taking over the area to reestablish public security."
The class was then told that the mission they were training to support was one in which the military was establishing order in a setting where environmentalist-separatists had taken over. John explained that in this hypothetical training scenario,
"IATAN, a coal-fired power plant on the Missouri side of the river is one of the main military foci due to "contention within the community" over the environmental pollution it is causing. Sierra Club and other, more radical groups have been active in this area: ELF is one such radical group. Even though there is an elected government and rule of law in Lakeland, there are some 'insurgents' who are opportunistic.' That is why the US Army has moved into this area that has broken away from US control.
Staff Assignment to the several Human Terrain Teams that make up the class of the November Cycle were issued as follows: 1. 'Find out more details on the criminal activity.' 2. Find out the best conduits to pass 'information'(PsyOps and InfoOps) to the local population. 3. HTT is assigned to produce a 'Research Plan' to understand the situation at the IATAN power plant - people's concerns, desires, etc., and identify those who were 'problem-solvers' and those who were 'problem-causers,' and the rest of the population whom would be the target of the information operations to move their Center of Gravity toward that set of viewpoints and values which was the 'desired end-state' of the military's strategy.
As I thought about what was being done in this activity, and the way it adapted COIN strategy for Afghanistan/Iraq to be applied by the US military in situations in the USA where the local population was seen from the military perspective as threatening the established balance of power and influence, and challenging law and order, I began to think back on stories that circulated among the ant-war movement in the 1960s-70s, about concentration camps being developed just for imprisoning such protestors an "problem-causers". And I wondered who would be working on the Human Terrain Teams to enable the US military's actions against unruly segments of their own countrymen; perhaps Afghan and Iraqi anthropologists who had specialized in US ethnography?"
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