An organizational solution for DOD's cultural knowledge needs

Military Review, July-August, 2005 by Montgomery McFate, Andrea Jackson

OVER THE PAST few years, the need for cultural and social knowledge has been increasingly recognized within the armed services and legislative branch. While much of this knowledge is available inside and outside the government, there is no systematic way to access or coordinate information from these sources. We can mitigate this gap quickly and effectively by developing a specialized organization within the Department of Defense (DOD) to produce, collect, and centralize cultural knowledge, which will have utility for policy development and military operations.

Know Your Enemy

Recently, policymakers, combatant commanders, Soldiers, and Marines have been calling for cultural knowledge of the adversary. In July 2004, Proceedings published retired Major General Robert Scales' article "Culture-Centric Warfare," which expresses his view that the conflict in Iraq requires "an exceptional ability to understand people, their culture, and their motivation." (1) Similarly, the 2005 "Defense Language Transformation Roadmap" notes that "[l]anguage skill and regional expertise are not valued as Defense core competencies yet they are as important as critical weapon systems." (2)

Although a number of institutions within the military community design and run programs with a cultural knowledge component, the programs are dispersed, underfunded, or not easily accessible to military commanders and policymakers from all agencies and services. (3) The result is widespread confusion about how to gain access to needed information and resources and a subsequent reliance on informal means of gaining information, such as discussions with taxi drivers about public opinion in their country of origin.

The Defense Science Board's (DSB's) 2004 "Summer Study on Transition to and from Hostilities" contains a number of recommendations for collecting, compiling, and sustaining cultural knowledge and notes that this requires an attention span far longer than the short-term focus common among today's collectors and users of information. The DSB suggests the creation of a National Center for Contingency Support, to be organized as a federally funded research and development corporation, which would have country and functional expertise to support contingency planning and joint interagency task forces. The DSB also suggests that regional combatant commanders (RCC) establish offices for regional expertise outreach to support country and regional planning and operations. The proposed RCC offices would maintain close working relations with country teams, regional centers, U.S. and foreign academia, think tanks, and so on. (4)

Pressing Concerns

Although the DSB's suggestions are excellent, they do not adequately address a number of needs within the defense community. Creating an organization solely dedicated to contingency task force support would not serve the ongoing needs of policymakers and Office of the Secretary of Defense permanent staffs who also require cultural and social information. Decentralized offices located at the RCC level will lead to a duplication of resources and effort, and a combination of contingency support and expertise dispersed at the RCC level would not address--

* Ethnographic field research.

* Cultural training.

* Advisers.

* Programmatic applications.

* Analytic studies. Ethnographic field research. While some foreign area expertise exists within the military community, many of these cultural-knowledge resources are inadequate. Over the past 40 years, social science research has not been a priority within the defense science and technology research portfolio. As a result, individual researchers have selected their own areas of study, often based on intellectual whims and the vagaries of philanthropic funding. Thus, academic research is often not available for specific areas of interest, such as Al Anbar or Diyala provinces in Iraq, or research used to support the military is often outdated. For example, Task Force 121 used British 19th-century northwest-frontier anthropology to prepare for Afghanistan. Also, using intelligence assets to collect this type of information is not sufficient, since they lack the requisite training and skills. Furthermore, the objective of the intelligence-collection process often concerns targeting and orders of battle as opposed to understanding a complex social system.

Cultural training. Currently, cultural training within the military is generally not operationally relevant. For cultural training to have any value, Soldiers and Marines must be able to employ it in the field with living human beings. For example, while many cultural-training programs note that Iraqis value honor, this knowledge is useless unless soldiers know how to confer it, on whom, and when. Much so-called cultural-awareness training is not specific or local in focus and is often conducted on a train-the-trainer basis. The consequence of a lack of training (or inadequate training) is a misunderstanding that can complicate operations.