In the heyday of counterinsurgency, the United States military's Human Terrain Teams were a bold idea.
Adam Silverman was part of the human terrain teams that saw a cadre of social scientists embedded within the military fighting the counter-insurgency.
Now the project is recruiting social scientists around the country to join five-person "human terrain" teams that would go to Iraq and Afghanistan with combat brigades and serve as cultural advisers on six-to-nine-month tours.
On unfamiliar terrain, teams must form their strategy on the run, orienting themselves, looking for the best routes from one place to another and efficiently timing their breaks for food and rest.
The Army has gone so far as to embed credentialed social scientists with front-line troops in "Human Terrain Teams" that engage in "rapid ethnographic assessment" — conducting interviews and administering surveys, learning about land disputes, social networks and how to "operationalize" the Pashtun tribal code.
A16 CIRCUITS G1-8 A Robotic Road Trip In a contest to develop a robotic vehicle that can drive itself for hundreds of miles across rugged terrain, teams will compete next March in the Grand Challenge, sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, an arm of the Defense Department.
Anthropologists have been especially outspoken about the Pentagon's Human Terrain Teams, a two-year-old program that pairs anthropologists and other social scientists with combat units in Afghanistan and Iraq, and in which Mr. Bhatia was participating at the time of his death.
"Anthropologists cannot properly function within human terrain teams," says Jim Peacock, one of the authors.
"Human terrain teams in the field cannot in any reasonable sense of the word be carrying out anthropological field work," Robert Albro, chair of the panel that produced the report, said at a press conference this morning.
In 2006, the Army created the gender-neutral Human Terrain Teams (HTTs), composed of groups of American social scientists that helped the military understand the foreign cultures and customs they were dealing with overseas.
