One man’s odyssey from campus to combat

Iraq's human landscape
In December 2005, the Pentagon sent Col. Steve Fondacaro a new and unlikely tool — a heavy-duty laptop on which experts had attempted to map Iraq's human landscape.

Fondacaro was the commander in Iraq for the military's Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization — a bid to fight deadly insurgent bombings with new types of intelligence and tactics. And this new computer was the work of a former Rand Corp. anthropologist named Montgomery McFate who argued that war against hidden insurgents demanded an understanding of local cultures.

The Pentagon dispatched the laptop to Diyala Province, where a brigade combat team from Fort Carson, Colo.'s Fourth Infantry Division, confronted a rising Sunni insurgency. But Fondacaro quickly rejected it, concluding that the computer alone was essentially worthless.

Sending in the laptop was "like handing the brigade commander a whole library full of books. He needs answers. He doesn't need books," said Fondacaro. "It was just a tool. ... Only humans can solve this human problem."

The Pentagon was arriving at much the same conclusion.

Teams mirrored a shift in thinking
In 2006, the military ordered a new test, assembling five teams pairing military specialists with civilian social scientists and deploying them to Iraq and Afghanistan. The Human Terrain teams would work like anthropologists, interviewing tribal leaders and villagers in war zones to decipher the tensions, fears and needs that might build support for enemy fighters.

The program — which has so far deployed 27 teams — mirrored a shift in military thinking, reinforced by two prolonged wars.

Fondacaro, who retired from the Army in 2006, was recruited to lead the program, trying to win the skeptical hearts and minds of academics and military leaders.

Fondacaro says McFate warned him in advance to prepare for a different kind of battle.

"Get ready," he recalls her telling him. "You're trying to bring together the Hatfields and the McCoys."

Long-held suspicions
The Defense Department's interest in social science renewed long-held suspicions among academics. Those misgivings date back to at least World War I and revelations that the Office of Naval Intelligence recruited four U.S. archaeologists as spies to aid in its search for covert German submarine bases.

The divisions deepened with the U.S. involvement in Vietnam and elsewhere in southeast Asia, as it became clear the U.S. military had combed through the writings of anthropologists, without their knowledge, for insights it might use to counter insurgents.

When the Central Intelligence Agency began advertising job openings in the American Anthropology Association's newsletter in 2005, it dialed up the skepticism.

"Now is arguably the most dangerous and critical moment in history," AAA President Alan Goodman, told members at the group's annual convention the following fall. "If anthropology is to collectively figure out its role in building a more just world, it needs to act fast."

Mike Bhatia walked straight into that debate. In July 2006, he returned to Brown's red brick campus above downtown Providence, assigned as a visiting scholar to an office on the third floor of the Watson Institute. That fall, Bhatia's research partners asked him to attend an Air Force University conference examining the military's newfound interest in the social sciences.

Talk at the conference, in a hotel near Alabama's Maxwell-Gunter Air Force Base, made clear the military's interest in culture was "coming to a tipping point," said Tracy St. Benoit, an anthropologist who had already signed on with what would become the Human Terrain project.

MORE FROM EDUCATION

Education Section Front

No more fidgety kids? Teachers ditching chairs   One man’s odyssey from campus to combat   Teachers pair up for Wednesday space shot Students post videos of brawls online Students challenge school's gay club ruling Hispanic enrollment in schools, colleges rising ‘Tidal wave’ of homeless students hits schools Community colleges squeezed from both sides Education Section Front   Add Education headlines to your news reader: