Human Terrain System – more money, and an academic shift?
22 May 2008
SecDef Gates gets it, and the US House of Representatives does too. The 2009 Defence Authorization Bill
authorizes $90.6 million to continue to fund Human Terrain Teams to meet CENTCOM’s requirement for 26 teams in Iraq and Afghanistan [via Ares]
And the Society for Applied Anthropology has approved this motion regarding the HTS (via AAA News):
“The board of the SFAA expresses grave concerns about the potential harmful use of social science knowledge and skills in the HTS project. The SFAA believes that social scientists can be helpful to the military by offering training, analysis, and evaluation so long as these activities are compatible with this organization’s code of ethics.”
The vote on this motion was:
Yes: 13
No: 0
Abstain: 0
2 Comments
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Good news. I’ve always considered this to be a very valuable program. While social scientists objections should be heard and addressed, I never felt like they had a very strong argument against participating.
I agree. There’s been a certain ivory tower element to the whole debate. Whilst I don’t believe the AAA is totally on board yet, I hope it’s only a matter of time. Looked at from another angle, you’d think anthropologists would jump at the chance to observe societies at war, be they Pashtun, ISAF or the US Marines.