Guest Post: Duncan Hunter and Human Terrain System by Turner

February 14th, 2016 by zen

It gets worse…not only did the dam fail; when locals began to engage the governor about his plan to deal with the dam (this BTW is a small win, as most farmers a month prior saw no benefit from the government) the governor had no capacity to change anything.  This in effect confirmed for many locals that the governor had no ability to help them and therefore,  the Taliban would remain the dominant force in the region.  Ultimately, the ADT had closed the books on the region and meanwhile security further eroded.  Our efforts to create capacity resulted in us undermining the fledgling power of the governor.  Within a few months of my leaving the region, a district once considered to be a model of stability, had three service members assassinated by their Afghan partners.

Without an HTS asset, we never learn these lessons.  This is one of dozens of tales I was able to illustrate as an HTS operator.  Of course, since Reps Duncan and Thompson can’t be bothered with the ground truth – its all fraud waste and abuse, isn’t it?

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Posted in 21st century, Afghanistan, anthropology, COIN, cultural intelligence, culture, defense, expertise, guest post, Human Terrain System, ideas, insurgency, intellectuals, islamic world, military, military contractor, military training & education, national security, organizations, politics, Questions, social science, state department, state failure | 9 comments

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  1. Charles Cameron:

    February 14th, 2016 at 6:16 pm

    Thanks, Zen — an important guest post, this.

  2. larrydunbar:

    February 15th, 2016 at 4:16 am

    When BushII went to war he basically took his MBA, opened the US treasury to corporations and told them to fix it. So now they are.

    *
    So in that context, it is not that the Human Terrain System is a failure, and the effort put into it just. The story is in the transition operations. Maybe in transition, the corporations have chosen a brand and that brand is the Tali-brand.

    *
    Not much need for a Human Terrain System, by any name, if the Taliban is going to run everything in Afghanistan, ahead of the IS.

    *
    And the money saved is not only going into corporate coffers, via the MICC, but towards buying a few good men like Duncan Hunter.

    *
    I mean it looks to me like that is the way things are going, but I could be wrong. Russia is giving intelligence to the Taliban in the Taliban’s effort to stop ISIS, and maybe the US would like to get in on the deal by supplying them expeditionary weapons as well, at least before the Russians do. As I remember one Afghan soldier saying in a piece not too many years ago, “We were all once the Taliban.”

  3. carl:

    February 15th, 2016 at 6:34 am

    Mr. Turner:
    .
    I have two questions. First, what happened to the “smart book” you helped prepare for the unit that followed the 82nd? Is it available now if only for purposes of historical interest, or is it someplace in SIPRland, lost forever?
    .
    Regarding the dam, long ago very many U.S. Army officers seemed to be able to perform the HTS function themselves. Lt. Johnston and Capt. Pershing in the Philippines and very many others on the plains knew all about the people they worked with. Now it seems they can’t or the system is structured such that they are not permitted to. Do you agree with that and is it possible to ever get back to where were 100 years ago?
    .
    The dam story was great, filled with lessons that should have been learned but probably never will be.

  4. Nathaniel T. Lauterbach:

    February 15th, 2016 at 11:20 am

    Larry-
    .
    You are aware that the HTS’s heyday was at the end of the Bush presidency and the beginning of the Obama presidency, right? I guess the current POTUS gets a pass. Otherwise it’s BDS all the way down. The current POTUS only fights good wars, right?
    .
    There’s a word for people who won’t change their mind and also refuse the change the subject.
    .
    And since you’re impugning the MICC these days, please recall that Duncan Hunter is part of that MICC. Even so, Congressmen tend not to look highly on seeing that unauthorized appropriations being spent.
    .
    I will agree a bit that so much depends on the transition from one unit to another. I’ve RIPed on 7 occasions (never to the Taliban, though)–you can do your best to pass on the information that you have, but if the receiving unit doesn’t want to hear it, there’s not much that can be done. It’s tough. And it’s a friction unique to long campaigns. Yet another reason to not fight wars of long duration.

  5. Pete Turner:

    February 15th, 2016 at 4:28 pm

    Carl, The books are on a server somewhere, but behind a SIPR wall. The next unit killed the books and no follow on unit ever revived them….but likely did make their own.

    I’ve seen a LOT of units RIP/TOA. The reality is this. None of the units arrived trained to fight this fight. None of the units accomplished what they thought…If units did this stuff well a 100 years ago, that capability is lost. The only way to get these types of conflicts right is to leverage people like me who have ground truth and can externally measure…and report to a commander. We won’t do that…

    Frankly, we are bad, as an organization (Dep of State or Dep of Defense)in these conflicts that we should simply avoid them and accept that we are not willing to develop the capacity to help.

  6. larrydunbar:

    February 15th, 2016 at 5:25 pm

    “You are aware that the HTS’s heyday was at the end of the Bush presidency and the beginning of the Obama presidency, right? I guess the current POTUS gets a pass.”

    *

    I wasn’t trying to be time specific, nor judge Bush. It just seemed to me that Bush was being himself, a MBA graduate, who tried to run the country like he did his baseball team. I am not sure exactly how he ran his team, but it sounded to me like he got a lot of corporate help.

    *
    As I tried (and failed) not to be judgemental, no one gets a pass, because they don’t need one from me. To me, Obama has carried over much of the same strategy Bush started with, but has been concentrating on the drone war, while keeping troop levels at a low enough number that Congress will still support. The trouble with strategy is that, like it was said of opera, “it’s not over until the fat lady sings”. I think that lady has sung about all she is going to, through these two administrations.

    *
    Most likely it’s the covert stuff that is going on over there, trying to keep the whole area from a literal meltdown, that is running this and the next administration’s strategy.

    *
    As I contemplate it now, my thinking was more along the lines that the HTS was like a dragon eating its own tail, and is now suffering the same fate.

    *

    I mean if corporations are going to turn Afghanistan over to the Taliban (if they could and why they would), Where did they get their information that something like that would work, and considering the amount of money needed for a HTS, why would they keep spending to keep it alive?

    *
    I am thinking, in the first part, the HTS beast told them, and second they wouldn’t.

  7. George:

    February 17th, 2016 at 6:12 pm

    Thanks Pete and Mark.

    I’m not in your line of work and was not there, so I’m struggling to understand the context. Did the U.S. train and equip warriors and then give them a quasi-nation-building mission without clear goals, insights, methods, tools and training? Then, after becoming aware of the inherent difficultyion, deploy social scientists to adapt on-the-fly to support an ill-defined military mission without effective integration into existing military systems? If so, what could not go wrong?

    Nation-building should be a job for the U.S. State Department, when we choose to do it. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) monitors, prepares and, when necessary, destroys aggressors. Nation-building is not the same as holding terrain taken during combat, building fortifications or repurposing logistics systems. Believing so seems to be a fallacy reinforced by U.S. victories and reconstruction successes following previous world wars.

    If what the U.S. set out to do in Iraq and Afghanistan was similar to what we did in Germany and Japan after 1945, we went about that work without communicating intent, building popular support or having effective strategy and tactics. We then left DoD to hold the bag.

    Alternatively, if what HTS supported was primarily a Foreign Internal Defense (FID) mission with partners who were difficult to identify, communicate with or who played for two or more teams, I believe we had special forces that specialize in, among other things, building effective relationships with locals.

    We really need to decide next time whether or not to rebuild a nation. If we decide to go forward with that, we need to deliberately create, train and equip a force to accomplish a deliberate, preferably popular, mission. If HTS was about knowing the human terrain for combat purposes, we should employ the great capability we’ve already created for that and stop confusing military missions with nation-building.

  8. david ronfeldt:

    February 17th, 2016 at 7:09 pm

    an illuminating post. shows patterns that keep plaguing our performance. many thanks.

  9. Dylan:

    March 12th, 2016 at 2:23 pm

    Disgusting ideas. All youre doing is enhancing the kill chain. No words change that fundamental reality.