The Army's new TRADOC Culture Center

Military Review, Nov-Dec, 2006 by Remi Hajjar

AN IMPORTANT PART of the ongoing transformation of the U.S. Army involves its cultural awareness (CA) campaign, which seeks to enhance Soldiers' abilities to understand and leverage cultural factors. If the early conflicts of the War on Terrorism foreshadow the future, then the need to understand foreign cultures takes on an unprecedented level of significance. Contemporary analyses increasingly identify foreign populations as centers of gravity (COGs), a fact that underscores the necessity of the CA initiative. (1) One important development in the promotion of cultural awareness in the U.S. Army is the emergence of the new U.S. Army Training and Doctrine (TRADOC) Culture Center, located at the U.S. Army Intelligence Center (USAIC) at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. (2)

The Culture Center opened its doors on 1 February 2006, although it began providing significant CA training and support to the Army well before then. The Center's main purpose is to support CA development and training and to disseminate relevant cultural training, knowledge, and products across the Army and, potentially, across the Department of Defense (DOD). (3)

The Center's vision includes cross-cultural training, education, research, collaboration among military and civilian scholars, and physical and virtual organizational features. As the Center matures, it anticipates influencing the rise of new culture centers across the Army, military, and DOD. Its concept of how to leverage cultural knowledge to enhance military operations includes four levels of understanding a particular culture that range from instruction for baseline Soldiers at the lowest level to key military decisionmakers at the highest. (4) The Center's preliminary charter mandates--Developing Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian cultural products (with heavy emphasis on the Middle East).

* Developing, refining, and assessing training standards.

* Producing proficient trainers to teach culture.

* Expanding ongoing cyberspace initiatives, including building a digital library and a cultural website to support the "Military Intelligence (MI) University."

* Building partnerships with military and civilian institutions that contribute to the Center.

The Center's Structure

The Center has five sections: a front office or headquarters, a Cultural Training and Education Branch, a language lab, a Partnering Branch, and a Cross-Cultural Applied Research and Dissemination Branch. (5) (See figure 1)

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

The front office supervises all aspects of the Center's missions and functions, to include overseeing critical training missions, developing and cultivating beneficial professional relationships, formulating grant proposals, and determining requirements and associated research assignments for relevant present and future country and area studies.

The Center falls under the 111th MI Brigade of the USAIC. TRADOC and the Combined Arms Center (CAC) at Fort Leavenworth are at the apex of the Center's chain of command.

The Cultural Training and Education Branch (CTEB) develops and provides cultural products to all customers, including USAIC schools, other TRADOC schools, Army units, and DOD and national agencies, among others. Its main mission is to coordinate and conduct training with CA trainers and developers for its customers. CTEB also manages trainers, contractors, and instructors for classroom support; develops and exports distance-learning products; develops and helps construct lesson plans; and coordinates the exchange of cultural knowledge and training products with its partners, such as the Defense Language Institute (DLI), the University of Foreign Military and Culture Studies (also known as Red Team University), and other institutions.

The language laboratory, a part of USAIC before the Culture Center was developed, is one of the branches of the new Center. It is tasked with--* Providing language sustainment training opportunities for cadre and students.

* Serving as a repository for foreign language literature.

* Administering relevant language exams (such as the Defense Language Proficiency Test).

* Sponsoring video-teleconferencing that supports language training.

* Maintaining close ties with DLI.

* Providing the rest of the Culture Center team with language-oriented insight.

The Partnering Branch develops collaborative relationships with various military, governmental, academic, and civilian agencies to formulate grants and further the Center's purpose, mission, and vision. The branch seeks to build a synergistic team that simultaneously enhances the Center and benefits professional allies. For example, it aims to build alliances with foreign students attending USAIC schools in order to draw on their expertise and insight to better the Culture Center. Several organizations are Culture Center partners, among them TRADOC, CAC, DLI, the Army Research Lab, and other components of the U.S. Army; organizations from the other services; the America, Britain, Canada, and Australia (ABCA) program; and a handful of major universities such as New Mexico State, Columbia, and Brigham Young. The list goes on. Partnering Branch continues to expand its professional associations and relationships to provide the Center with cultural awareness products and opportunities based on cutting-edge research, knowledge, and ideas.