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Gerhard: We're here with Prof. Montgomery McFate.
You hold the Minerva Chair at the Naval War College here in Rochester.
Montgomery: Rhode Island.
Gerhard: Rhode Island—sorry.
Montgomery: It's okay.
Gerhard: We've come here to talk about a big issue, I guess, a contemporary issue of anthropology
and war, or anthropology in the military. Before we get there, I'd like you to just
take us on a little journey of your life and perhaps just tell us: how did you get to anthropology?
What made you choose an anthropology PhD or get into that field?
Montgomery: That's a big question. I think the short answer is that my parents were sort
of beatniks and we lived on a houseboat. My mother was a sculptor, and she was very much
influenced, as many artists were in the 1960s, by the artwork of Polynesia, which had been
really popularized by Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. So in a sense we always had these giant Polynesian
sculptures in our house, and I think anthropology was sort of a natural outgrowth of that cultural
moment.
Gerhard: Can you tell us a little bit: what was your graduate work on?
Montgomery: I wrote a dissertation about British counterinsurgency in Northern Ireland. Actually,
at the time I was doing that, a lot of faculty and students in my department said, "You know,
anthropologists---we don't really study war. You'd be better off in political science."
That annoyed me a little bit because I thought, "Well, really, what is a war except a social
construct? Why is war excluded from what we are allowed to study?” It's as much a product
of human culture as table manners or *** practices or death rituals. I think there
is a place in anthropology for the study of war or the study of conflict.
Gerhard: There is—going back - Pierre Clastres - sort of classics of study of warfare, maybe
tribal warfare or small-scale warfare. Do you think there's a difference then between
those sorts of studies and what we now consider to be war, these sort of large-scale…?
Montgomery: Yes, I think when you look at the classic studies of war, a lot of them
are—there's quite a big body on the archaeological record. Then there's the literature in anthropology
that concerns human origins, what—is there a biological determinism involved with violent
behavior or something like that? Then there are small-scale studies that look at warfare
in New Guinea. There are actually not that many studies on war per se, especially how
wars are fought. That is something that anthropologists tend to exclude from their realm of study.
Gerhard: You think that's because of access in terms of—participant observation in a
war is really difficult, I guess, unless you're part of one of the sides or…
Montgomery: Yes. Well, I think that that really began to change. I think there was a political
aversion to studying war that was a product of the Vietnam era. Then I think when we're
starting to talk about the ethnographies of the late '80s and early '90s and into the
2000s that you see a lot more focus on this. Allen Feldman’s book about Northern Ireland,
for example, is a fantastic piece of writing about warfare. There are some other very nice
things that have been written about different conflicts in Africa. I think it's become
more common—a more common thing to study, anyway.
Gerhard: Maybe let's go to the issue at hand, the Human Terrain System. If you could just
tell us a little bit about your involvement in it, and what it is, and then maybe we can
backtrack and look at anthropology's relationship to war and the military over the last 100
years, I guess.
Montgomery: Okay. Tall order. That's a lot of ground to cover. The Human Terrain System
really started in—I think we started thinking about it in about 2003, 2004, recognizing
that the US government and the US military were making bad policy decisions, bad strategic
decisions, and bad tactical decisions because they didn't understand the first thing about
Iraqi society or Afghan society.
Recognizing that there was a gap, the question was: how do you address the problem? How do
you ameliorate the situation because when soldiers don't understand that these people
are flying black flags because they’re Shia—the black flag is not a sign that they are the
enemy and you should kill them now—that tends to escalate violence. When soldiers
are put into a situation where they don't have the right information, their first impulse
is going to be to go for the weapon. We saw that again and again and again and thought this
is—I mean, we're not there to take over the country of Iraq. We're there to support
this new government that we've helped to create, and we want the Iraqis to run it for themselves,
and we're going to fight the insurgency to the degree that we can.
If you're fighting in that environment, it's not your goal to create more harm or more
casualties, especially among the civilian population. The goal is actually to reduce
the level of violence so that the government can function, so that the economy can function,
so that NGOs can come in, so that the UN can come back into the country.
That was the kind of macro realization of what we thought the problem was, especially
this was happening with brigades in combat. That seemed to be the right level. A bunch
of us had this idea that these brigade commanders and their staffs, they didn't have the right
type of information that they needed. Nothing in the US government was designed to give
them that. The intelligence community, primarily military intelligence, does lethal targeting.
These brigade commanders didn't know—didn't need to know more about who to kill. They
needed to know: how does the society work; how does this local economy work; why are
these people so concerned about orange groves? This kind of almost simple things, but if
you're on a forward-operating base and you are concerned with force protection and you
never get out of MRAP, you don't have the opportunity to even talk to people to find
out.
Gerhard: What's an MRAP?
Montgomery: It's a mine-resistant military vehicle. Initially, we thought we would do
all of this with a laptop. That was the Pentagon solution. We're just going to create this
giant database of everything known about Iraq. I think, me and my other colleague Andrea
Jackson were totally skeptical about that as a solution for anything.
Gerhard: Were you working for the government or the military at this point?
Montgomery: I was working for the Navy at the time. Originally, it was a little project
on the joint staff. We basically—she and I were like, "No, this is not going to work.
You need to have somebody on the ground to advise the commander because if you're just
giving him more information in a laptop, he's going to use it to prop open the door or he's
going to sit on it or whatever. It's not going to work."
We went through it anyway. It turned out—in fact, we tried it out in Iraq and got the
same answer, which is this is totally useless for us. We actually—what we need is somebody
to conduct research on the ground and come back and tell us about it so that we can make
better decisions about how we spend our money, the people with whom we're creating connections.
We don't know who the sheiks are. This guy says he's a sheik. That guy says he's a sheik.
How do you know who the sheik is? It’s sort of almost…
Gerhard: And why is it important to know who the sheik is?
Montgomery: Exactly. We spent a lot of time thinking about how do you—this had never
been done before, so we had to think about how do you configure a team, what echelon
do you put them at? Do you put them with platoons or companies or brigades? What kind of skills
do you need on that team? You need somebody to conduct the research. You need somebody
to manage the research. You need somebody to be the leader, who can translate back and
forth with the military. We identified all these sort of functions that we thought were
important.
Then after that, it was a question of getting somebody to tell us that they wanted this
from downrange, and we did. The 82nd Airborne in Khost, Afghanistan basically sent word
back to the Pentagon that they wanted to try this. We started it as an experiment. We thought
that we would have one team for one year on the ground in Afghanistan and then three—or
four more teams for another two years, and then we could learn about how to do this.
Basically by the time we had one team on the ground in Afghanistan, we had gotten a requirement
from Iraq to put—and then from CENTCOM itself to put a human train team on every brigade
in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Gerhard: How many brigades were there?
Montgomery: At that time it was 26, and then it went up to 31. We didn't have time to run
the experiment. It was just like full speed ahead. That's the brief history of it.
Gerhard: Can you just give us a little idea of what it entails? What is—some people
call them embedded anthropologists, but they were social scientists more broadly, weren't
they?
Montgomery: What were they doing?
Gerhard: What were they doing? What are they doing? It's still ongoing.
Montgomery: Yes, the program is still going. I left in 2010 after my son was born. I couldn't
be flying around in Black Hawks anymore breastfeeding. You can't do that. The program is still going
on. It's smaller now because obviously troops have gone out of Iraq. There are still teams
in Afghanistan, but there's going to be a drawdown there as well.
What the teams are doing basically is—I have to point this out, that every brigade
is unique. It is a unique organization. It’s configured differently. It has different leadership.
It has a different personality. A striker brigade is different from an airborne. They're
different from the Marines. Recognizing that and recognizing that Basra is a lot different
from Kabul, so you've got…
Gerhard: Is that the first thing then that an embedded social scientist has to get their
head around in terms of finding out what the culture is of that brigade?
Montgomery: Yes. You have to find a way to work inside the military's framework, to speak
the language that they speak, and to make them feel that you're not foreign or threatening
to them. There's some prejudice there against wooly-headed hippies, which is often what
they think anthropologists are.
Recognizing that there is unique culture for the military unit; there is a unique culture
about the place, and then the people living in that place are all different. The Yazidi
are very different from the Zadran are very different from urban people in Baghdad, and
so the research environment is quite different.
Then there's also the question of the security environment within the research environment.
If you're in a very non-permissive place or you're with a brigade that thinks that the
answer to insurgency is firepower, you, as a human train team, are going to have limited
possibility for impact.
Then in addition, there's also the qualifications of the people on the team. If you have somebody
who is social scientist on that team and they're accustomed to doing quantitative research
and surveys—in certain places you can do survey work like Baghdad, certain parts of
Baghdad. We had people doing surveys in other parts of—especially rural areas, surveys
are very difficult. In some places, you can do participant observation because you can
stay out for a long time and you can make repeated visits. In other places you just
can't.
Gerhard: In terms of this research, what happens with it? Can it be published?
Montgomery: Yes.
Gerhard: Is it's freely available, or is it…
Montgomery: Well, right now you're starting to see a lot of publications from people who've
served on teams. AnnaMaria Cardinalli's book is coming out. Katherine (Kate) Blue Carrolll has
a book coming out. Nick Krohley's book is coming out, and that'll be published later
this year. That's on the Mehdi Army.
People definitely use their research as the bases of things that they later wrote. There
are a whole lot of peer-reviewed articles that have been in journals. People don't all
the time advertise how they did that research but a lot of them were with HTS.
In terms of the research they were conducting—I mean, I'll give you a couple of different
examples. We had one team that was in—they were in Iraq, and I'm not going to say too
much about the place, but the social scientist, he was going out with these platoons and talking
to all these local people. He started asking them, "What do you really need? What is important
to you when it comes to security? What are your security concerns? Are you afraid of
the government? Are you afraid of the police? Are you afraid of this group of insurgents
that we know are operating in this area?” Everybody said, "No, no, that's not the problem.
The real problem is wild pigs."
He was like, "Well, really? Wild pigs, huh, that's your major security concern?” Everyone—lots
of people were saying, "Oh, my gosh. These feral pigs—they're really dangerous because
they're huge. They are as big as that bush and they attack our livestock, and they sometimes
attack children. It's a real problem. We have this pig explosion.”
He was like, "Really? I can't believe this is true, but, okay, I'm going to go back and
report it." He went back and reported it to the brigade staff. The staff went to the commander
and they said, "These people are really concerned about these pigs." He's like, "Okay, we're
going to do like pig patrol, and we're going to take out all these pigs. These people say
pigs are a concern, so we're going to just wipe out the pigs.” They did. They actually—the
brigade went out there and went on a pig hunt and had a huge barbecue and invited all these
locals to the barbecue on the base, which was, I mean, hilarious, right, but that's
a good outcome from the research.
Gerhard: Pork for Muslims?
Montgomery: Well, you know, they don't—they're not all Muslims. In that area, there were
a lot of Christians, too.
Gerhard: All right.
Montgomery: The soldiers liked it. Then another example from Afghanistan—actually, we have
a book coming out. It's an edited book with, I think, seven or eight chapters by social
scientists who served on teams, talking about their research, how they did it, what was
important, their methodology, their doubts, a lot of personal stories in there.
Ted Callahan was with this army unit. They believed that this forested region north of
their forward-operating base was being utilized by insurgents. They were basically shooting
unobserved ammunition into that forested area. Ted was talking to all these local people,
who were from a tribe called the Zadran, and he was asking them, “What's going on in
your life? How is the new government—how are you dealing with it? What is the economy
like here,” just sort of basic questions.
They all said, "Well, we really hate these army dudes here because they are shooting
into our forest." He was like, "Well, what are you doing in the forest?" They said, "Well,
our main source of economic—our main economic resource is pine nuts. We go into the forest
and we gather up these pinecones. We take out the pine nuts, and that's how we get money.”
Pinecones are a critical, absolutely a critical part, of the economy in this part of Afghanistan.
The brigade had no idea. They thought these people were insurgents. They didn't realize
that those guys in the forest are collecting pine nuts.
Ted went back and he told them. "Well, this is what's going on." They were like, "Okay.”
“I guess we should stop shooting at them. I guess we should start figuring out a way
to export more pine nuts." That's what they did.
You get good outcomes like that. Sometimes you get no outcome. Sometimes you get counterproductive
results.
Gerhard: I guess one other thing I'd like to ask you is about what you think the main
mission or role of anthropology is, because in a way with the Human Terrain System, there's
clearly a desire for a positive outcome, and one of the questions is is that positive outcome
primarily for the people we work with as anthropologists and/or in this case for the people you work
for, which is the military.
Montgomery: I don't know. The role of anthropology—it's a big question. I think it really depends
on what you think anthropology is. Is anthropology a methodology? Is it a body of knowledge?
Is it a science?
Gerhard: What is it for you?
Montgomery: Is it a political platform?
Gerhard: What definition of anthropology do you use?
Montgomery: The way in which you answer the question is going to determine, to some degree,
what you think the role of anthropology is. My view, to answer your question, I think
anthropology is a science. It is the study of man. It should be objective. The researcher
should, to the great greatest degree possible, be detached from the object of study and capable
of reporting what they are seeing in a way that sheds some light on how people live their
lives, the human condition.
Since the 1960s, there's been a view that anthropology is not a science, first of all.
That it is in fact the kind of activism that it's—the proper role for anthropologists is to protect their informants. It's been,
since the 1960s, very much of a political viewpoint rather than a science. Of course,
AAA is now saying it's in their long-range plan. You can read about it on the Internet
that they're going to remove the word science from their description of what it is that
they do, which to me is of great concern because if anthropology is not a science, then it
should just be taught as creative writing because that's all it is.
Gerhard: I guess, well, the debate is about: is it a humanities or—activism, I guess,
goes that step further, doesn't it, because you can—within the humanities, you can still
write about people. Activism is you take an active part in their protection or activism
on their part, I guess.
To get back to the Human Terrain System, where does the loyalty of the researcher then lie?
It lies with the people you write for?
Montgomery: It's very complicated because—that's a big question: who's the client? For a lot
of anthropologists, there was no doubt that the military was the client. They saw what
they were doing as basically research for a client, especially people who had come to
the program from a business-type background, and we had quite a few of those, or people
who came from a kind of applied background, already had that viewpoint.
We also had a lot of people who saw or felt that their main responsibility was for the
people out there: the Iraqis and the Afghans. They saw their role more as an interlocutor
with the military, between the military and the local community.
People framed what they were doing in different ways. We, as program management, didn’t
try to enforce any particular view. Our goal was just to have people understand that there
were security concerns on the ground, and that any time you're moving around with the
military, you're under their control and you need to be wary of what's going on around
you and you need to follow directions. If they say get back in Humvee, you get back
in the Humvee. You don't create a security problem for the military unit you're operating
with.
Then also the other obligation that we felt that was important to talk about is that if
you, as an anthropologist, become aware of an impending attack, you hear from somebody
that this attack is going to occur, you have to report that because it's your responsibility
to keep the people that you are talking to, the Afghans and Iraqis, safe. It's also your
responsibility to keep your military partners safe. You have to have a balance with those
two things.
Gerhard: What do you think the key asset of anthropology has been in terms of the Human
Terrain System or in general working with the military?
Montgomery: I mean, I think what makes anthropology interesting and valuable both in a kind of
operational military way and also from a broader strategic or policy perspective is that anthropologists,
unlike political scientists, especially people who do international relations, are not focused
on the state. They're focused on the local conditions of the people who live in a particular
place. It's a different kind of perspective. It's from a view from the ground up instead
of a view from the top down.
That's an important thing for the US government to understand, especially if you're going
to intervene in somebody else's country and you're going to destroy their political system—i.e.
by taking out the evil dictator Saddam Hussein—and you want to rebuild that government and rebuild
that country, well, you probably should recognize that there's a difference between the Iraqi
government and the Iraqi people.
When you're talking about the Iraqi people, that's very complicated from an ethno-sectarian
point of view, from a tribal point of view, from geographic point of view. People in Iraq
don't think about Baghdad as the center. This is a whole society that's based on the local.
Afghanistan is pretty much the same way. There's a great suspicion of the center, and there's
a great suspicion of the state. If it's your policy to come in and start the government
again, don't start with general elections from Baghdad. Start with rebuilding from the
provinces.
I think that that's the kind of viewpoint that anthropologists have, unlike political
scientists who come in and say, "Okay, well, there's the government of Iraq." I think that
view got us into trouble in terms of our national security policy in the first place.
Gerhard: You think there's room for anthropology in the future in terms of providing that sort
of expertise to military and government?
Montgomery: Well, it's my hope. I mean, over the five years that I worked with the Human
Terrain System, we deployed close to 700 people. Out of those 700 people, maybe 100 were anthropologists,
probably not even that many but…
Gerhard: The majority—what background did they have?
Montgomery: Well, when we say 700 people, so that includes the military people on the
team; the cultural analysts, a lot of whom where Iraqi or Afghan nationals…
Gerhard: Translators and…
Montgomery: …the research managers and the military personnel. That's a lot of people,
but my hope is that someday one of those anthropologists will have the credibility and the resourcefulness
and the connections to actually be in a position to make policy. That's my sincere hope. It's
not going to be me, but I think what HTS did is it gave a group of people a very rare opportunity
to see how the military operated and to work with them very closely.
If you're talking about political circles in Washington DC or people who are on the
National Security Council, the greatest credibility that you can have in that world is that you
were downrange.
Gerhard: What do you say to people—the anthropologists who have done work within the military? I'm
thinking of Winslow with the Canadian military, for instance, who have done research projects
but as independent researchers; whereas the HTS is embedded within military command within—you're
working for the military in terms of those allegiances we just talked about, I guess.
Montgomery: Interesting question, actually, to me because we already talked a little bit
about allegiances and who are responsible for it. Talking about Donna Winslow who has
now—she died a couple of years ago. She was a personal friend of mine, and she actually
worked for HTS for a while. Also, she worked for Army TRADOC.
The problem she had with the study that she did about the Canadian paratroopers in Somalia
is that she could see that there was a tremendous problem with the military culture going on
in parachute regiments. She was very concerned about that because it was detrimental to the
mission, but because she was outside of the system, because she'd been hired as someone
external to come in and look at it, her great frustration was that she was not able to influence
them to change their culture.
In fact, the military looked at her as if she were the enemy because she was outside
making suggestions about what they should and shouldn't do. When you're outside, you're
kind of the enemy, but if you're inside and you're saying, "Look, really, these people
are not bad people. They just flash black flags because they are Shia," the military's
going to be a lot more amenable to what you're saying and the advice that you're giving.
That's what we always try to train teams and inform them about before they went out—is
that you have to convince the military of your value. They're going to look at you,
and they're not going to see the value. You have to convince them. You have to show that
you have utility, and then they'll trust you, and then you can advise them.
Gerhard: I guess that's the two sides of the coin, isn't it, this inside and outside, which
is a perennial anthropological issue actually. We're the sort of the always the boundary
walkers between the inside and outside wherever we work. If you're inside the military, you
can affect change within the military, but perhaps not the society that you're working
within; whereas if you're working with a particular society but you're outside the military in
a warlike situation, you can't affect change within the military again. It's that trade-off,
I guess, or that issue or problem.
Montgomery: Well, I think it depends on what your goal is. If your goal is to actually
change the military—I mean, I think to a great degree, we did that. HTS did that. We
opened the door for social science research. I mean, the program, it's written into doctrine.
It's in the Army POM. It's going to be a permanent feature of the world of defense.
The question is—the big debate inside the DOD and the Pentagon is: what is sociocultural
knowledge? Who is responsible for it? Is it a kind of intelligence? Is it something different
from that? Who should be doing it? Should it be soldiers doing it? Should it be outsiders,
these crazy social scientists, doing it? What exactly do social scientists bring to the
table? That's an ongoing debate that hasn't been answered.
Gerhard: Okay. Well, thank you very much, Montgomery.
Montgomery: You’re welcome.
Gerhard: That was really interesting. I think we're going to leave it at this because it's
been over half-an-hour already.