Introduction: Military Cultural Capacity after Afghanistan

DOI: 10.1057/9781137409423.0001 v

Contents

Acknowledgements vii

Notes on Contributors ix

1 Introduction: Military Cultural Capacity after Afghanistan 1

Robert Albro and Bill Ivey

2 Cautionary Tales from the US Department of Defense’s Pursuit of Cultural Expertise 15

Kerry B. Fosher

3 Changing Culture with Culture at the US Naval Academy 30

Clementine Fujimura

4 Cultural Education and Training: The Era of COIN 42

Rochelle Davis

5 Humanitarian-Military Collaboration: Social and Cultural Aspects of Interoperability 57

Robert A. Rubinstein

6 The Unsolved Issues of Protection and Recovery of Cultural Heritage in Times of Conflict 73

Lynn H. Nicholas

7 Beyond the 1954 Hague Convention 83 Patty Gerstenblith

Copyrighted material – 9781137409416

DOI: 10.1057/9781137409423.0001

Contents

8 Introducing Cultural Heritage Management to the US Military 100

Laurie W. Rush

9 A Journalist’s Reflections on the Military Cultural Turn 112 Steve Coll

Index 123

DOI: 10.1057/9781137409423.0004 1

1Introduction: Military Cultural Capacity after AfghanistanRobert Albro and Bill Ivey

Abstract: This introduction offers a brief overview of the context for the US military’s efforts to build its cultural capacity over the previous decade. It goes on to highlight three modalities represented across the volume’s chapters for addressing the question of military cultural awareness: the institutionalization of military cultural education and training, and of cultural heritage management and protection, but also assessments of prevailing models and lessons learned in the pursuit of this capacity. The introduction also identifies different perspectives represented in this volume with respect to these developments. As discussed across the chapters, it gives particular attention to the challenges for expertise and the several conceptions of culture as a dimension of: military culture, culture training, counterinsurgency, humanitarian cooperation, and technology-driven problem-solving respectively.

Albro, Robert and Bill Ivey, eds. Cultural Awareness in the Military: Developments and Implications for Future Humanitarian Cooperation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137409423.0004.

2 Robert Albro and Bill Ivey

DOI: 10.1057/9781137409423.0004

That the purposes, methods, and organization of the US military have changed dramatically since the Cold War is now taken largely for granted. New demands have forced the military to embrace a range of activities once assigned to other agencies with an international footprint, or to assume entirely new roles generated by technology, natural disas-ters, and the unprecedented character of 21st century combat. Nowhere have these changes been more evident than in efforts by the military over the past decade to increase its cultural understanding and to incorporate cultural knowledge into its operations in multiple ways.1 To date, when the “cultural turn” of the US military has been noted, it is most often as part of the many arguments over the merits or failures of culture-centric counterinsurgency.2 However, the post-Afghanistan humanitarian impli-cations of the military’s attention to culture, set in a broader inter-agency context, have as yet been given little attention.

Culture and security

Some of the more important drivers of the military’s cultural turn can be outlined in brief. In the broadest terms, over the previous decade, post-Cold War and post-9/11 realities have been interpreted by the US policy community through “clash of civilizations”3 frameworks, which essentially understand conflicts in cultural terms, and for which soft power becomes a crucial tool. For the military, this framework refocused basic objec-tives toward the conduct of asymmetric warfare, that is, unconventional conflicts among non-state actors frequently representative of culturally distinct populations. Particularly in response to the military exigen-cies of Afghanistan and Iraq during the mid-2000s, counter insurgency doctrine – requiring significant awareness of and sustained engagement with non-combatant cultural communities – emerged as the answer. These missions, in turn, spurred efforts to rapidly erase the military’s perceived “cultural knowledge gap” by building up a cultural capacity.

Concurrently, as the shape of the US military’s global footprint has moved away from preparing for the next large conventional conflict, its logistical capabilities have been deployed as both a first responder and global backstop addressing diverse humanitarian disasters, ranging from the 2004 Banda Aceh tsunami or the 2010 Haiti earthquake to the 2014 West African Ebola epidemic. Now asked to operate as a humanitarian agency, the military must frequently

3Introduction

DOI: 10.1057/9781137409423.0004

coordinate with such diverse civilian and NGO actors as the United Nations Development Programme, USAID, the US Department of State, and other development, refugee, and human rights organizations, including such unlikely counterparts as the Smithsonian Institution.

The lines separating military uses of culture in counterinsurgency and in humanitarian relief are blurred. Many humanitarian activities were deployed as counterinsurgency tactics in Iraq and Afghanistan (often in the form of civil-military cooperation on provincial reconstruction teams or civil affairs teams). Such efforts are recognized within military doctrine as “operations other than war” (MOOTW) or as “stability, security, transition and reconstruction operations” (SSTR). They are complex, combining work in development, diplomacy, peacekeeping, human rights, governance, and reconciliation, among other activi-ties, demanding an in-depth appreciation of pertinent “socio-cultural dynamics.”

Over the past decade, the “clash of civilizations” frame, shaping policy at the highest levels, has stimulated and justified a range of strategic and tactical practices within the US military. On the one hand, chapter 8 of the 2006 US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual presents culture as a key component of the “operational environment,” defining culture as “a system that members of a society use to cope with their world and with one another.”4 In this sense, cultural knowledge is under-stood to be a warfighting strategy to exert influence over the context of a conflict by controlling “human terrain.” In contrast, humanitarian relief expresses the softest of “soft power,” providing disaster services in settings frequently managed by non-military relief agencies. For the near post-war future, as current conflicts wind down and no major war looms, military capabilities will most likely be utilized as first responders in a variety of smaller-scale humanitarian missions. But the tension built into the military’s approach between the uses of culture for warfighting and the relevance of culture for the effective negotiation of typically complex humanitarian missions, remains a potential challenge.

The chapters in this volume engage key issues within this broad, and still evolving, spectrum of military engagement with culture. Each was first presented in December, 2011, in a day-long conference dedicated to “accounting for culture in the military,”5 hosted by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and organized by the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise & Public Policy. It was the last in an ongoing series of meetings on cultural policy topics held in Washington DC between 2003

DOI: 10.1057/9781137409423.0004

and 2012, as part of the Curb Center’s Arts Industries Policy Forum. This forum was designed to “to address culturally significant public policy issues” and to help build a networked critical mass of policy and decision-makers in the nation’s capital. This greater appreciation for the relevance of culture as a component of public policy is essential in a nation that lacks the centralizing influence of a cultural ministry or a department of cultural affairs.6

The overarching goal of the Arts Industries Policy Forum – the development of an informal policy cohort to compensate for the absence of a US Department of Cultural Affairs – provides a backdrop for the exploration of culture in the military in this volume. Today, the United States divides cultural policy tasks up among a host of local, state and national agencies, which frequently don’t cooperate well. Inevitably, this diffuse context deemphasizes the role of culture in both domestic and international policy making and, in the words of anthropologist Renato Rosaldo, helps to perpetuate a national self-identity of Americans as a “people without culture.”7 Given this reality, cultural policy can be a hard sell.

Nevertheless, whether the problem is ethnicity and national identity in the Ukraine crisis, China’s soft power ambitions, sectarian violence in Syria and Iraq, heritage destruction in Mali, or the global piracy of copyright-protected cultural goods and services like music and film, culture – routinely neglected in the US – is an increasingly critical piece of the international affairs puzzle.8 The manner in which significant cultural questions are identified and negotiated in the course of US government engagements with the rest of the world promises to be an important determinant of the success or failure of these efforts. But, unfortunately, at present the question of culture is also the dimension of foreign policy which the US government understands the least.

To begin to address this problem, the Arts Industries Policy Forum sought to draw regular attention to multiple ways in which culture matters for policy in the US. Of necessity, this included the question of national security. As early as 2008, the Curb Center had elaborated a report on “cultural diplomacy and the national interest,”9 in which it encouraged a reassessment of the ways the concept of culture was assumed to be relevant to the work of diplomacy. In the course of its recommendations, the report drew attention to the challenges that US foreign policy decision-makers have had in recognizing and embracing the full extent of the range and diversity of the ways that culture informs

5Introduction

DOI: 10.1057/9781137409423.0004

diplomacy. While addressing diplomacy, this report anticipated a basic difficulty raised by several chapters in this volume. Stated simply, in seeking to improve the military’s cultural capacity there is not a single fix, model, framework, concept, form of training, or technology that can adequately encompass the various – sometimes not altogether compat-ible – ways that culture might matter for different parts of the military and military purposes. Nor is there one particular mechanism by which cultural knowledge can be incorporated into military doctrine or prac-tice, be taught, or become the subject of specific training interventions.

So engagement with the challenges posed by cultural questions has been a largely piecemeal process for the military; an undertaking driven by particular professional approaches among different varieties of “culture experts,” needs assessments by different military services,10 and also changing circumstances on the ground. Unsurprisingly, for profes-sionals in other cultural fields or parallel universes – like the several fields of humanitarian intervention – the military’s cultural turn has been something of which they have only general awareness. In fact, one purpose of the 2011 conference was to initiate a dialogue between military leaders and professionals in these other domains. These non- military interested parties included government staff, members of the Arts Industries Policy Forum engaged in arts funding, intellectual property, and trade negotiation, as well as forum members whose work touched on military matters. Also included were humanitarian professionals dedicated to disaster response, human rights, sustainable development, public diplomacy, peacekeeping, and other types of humanitarian inter-vention that often involves cooperation with military counterparts.

Humanitarian missions and cultural diplomacy

To date, military developments in culture-based humanitarian relief have been largely siloed within the US Department of Defense. However, enthusiasm for inter-agency efforts to better share and coordinate cultural expertise across and beyond government is gaining momentum.11 This effort is spurred, in large part, by a growing realization that the question of culture is central to US security interests, and that the relationship of culture to security is not simply a military one. At the same time, future humanitarian action will likely involve regular collaboration with mili-tary counterparts.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137409423.0004

Cultural property protection, for example, represents a form of military engagement beyond the traditional military role. As explored in Nicholas’s chapter, since the end of WWII, there has been growing interest globally in preserving and protecting cultural heritage, includ-ing monuments and historic sites, and religious shrines, but also such intangible traditions as folksongs, myths, and legends. One effect of this ongoing push for international normative policies and processes governing the conduct of persons, communities, and states with respect to heritage has been to frame “cultural heritage” as a scarce and valuable local or national resource, as a well-defined potential subject of state action, as one basis for international trade, and as an increasing source of international conflict. Tracking this trend, some historians have referred to the contemporary onset of “heritage crusades,” which can lead to “heritage wars.”12 In other words, as Nicholas makes clear, attitudes about cultural heritage have changed over time, and international actors increasingly seek legal redress, or take violent steps, in relation to new and prevailing conceptions of heritage – as something rivalrous, non-renewable, specific in time and place, and exclusively owned by people, communities, or nations.

Not coincidentally, the potential destruction of cultural heritage has now become a major preoccupation, not only for particular communi-ties and nation-states, but also for the US military. Recent history is replete with multiple examples of the destruction of heritage sites or objects in active conflict zones, destruction that itself leads to conflict. A short list would include the 2001 demolition of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan, the 2003 looting of the Baghdad Museum, the devastation of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the destruction of Timbuktu’s sacred tombs during the conflict in Mali, and ongoing heritage loss as part of the conflict in Syria. Heritage destruction, looting, and the illegal antiq-uities trade form one front in these heritage wars;13 conflicting ownership claims, definitions of heritage as intellectual property, and demands for the repatriation of displaced artifacts, constitute another.

Given the ways that heritage has of late become a strategic target of war-making,14 it should be no surprise that international organizations, as well as agencies of the US and other governments, have begun to consider the vulnerabilities of heritage in conflict zones as an important feature of cultural security. For the US military, this new reality has led to a largely unprecedented set of remarkable collaborations with an array of civilian archaeologists, museum curators, art conservators, and arts and

7Introduction

DOI: 10.1057/9781137409423.0004

culture organizations, as part of the military’s growing awareness of the ways mismanagement, neglect, or lack of protection provided heritage resources can actively generate conflict.

The set of chapters by Nicholas, Gerstenblith and Rush, taken together, tell this story. Nicholas provides historical context for the dangers of “spoliation” in conflict zones, detailing changing attitudes about, and the gradually-emerging military appreciation for, the importance of heritage protection. Gerstenblith outlines the development of multilateral legal frameworks for state responsibility, focusing in particular on the 1954 Hague Convention, only recently ratified by the US. Rush addresses these questions with respect to the immediate context of the conflict in Afghanistan, making a case for the ways in which responsible manage-ment and protection of cultural heritage can function, in her words, as a “force multiplier.” Rush, in particular, draws attention to the ways that heritage protection by militaries can effectively function as cultural diplomacy. Military efforts to develop more responsible approaches to heritage protection also have clear parallels in the work of international development and human rights professionals, but as yet there has been little to no conversation among stakeholders involved in this work.

When considering the relationship between heritage, security, and humanitarian response, therefore, a model for future coordinated efforts might look more like the Smithsonian-led Haiti Cultural Recovery Project, for which military logistical support was one element within a multi-stakeholder US-Haiti collaboration led by cultural curators and conservators collaborating to rescue, stabilize and conserve Haiti’s cultural patrimony in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake.15 Such a recovery program reveals problems and opportunities to develop essential new ways of communicating and working. For example, paral-lel universes of cultural professionals can benefit from a better grasp of the frames of reference their military counterparts use when seeking to address complex and demanding cultural questions, while at the same time the military can learn about the challenges and difficulties encountered by professionals from the social sciences and elsewhere as they worked with military counterparts to introduce increased cultural awareness.

But, as Robert Rubinstein observes, military-civilian cooperation in humanitarian missions can become fraught, with positions of “neutral-ity” staked-out by humanitarian peacekeepers or first responders frequently in conflict with the more-transactional military efforts to

DOI: 10.1057/9781137409423.0004

“win hearts and minds.” Historically, in fact, non-governmental humani-tarian organizations have aspired to keep militaries at arm’s length, have avoided working with militaries, viewed them with suspicion, and have sought to define clear rules of engagement with militaries to insure that their missions are not compromised by the presence of armies and their objects in conflict zones.16 In fact, this ambivalence (and sometime hostility) expressed by humanitarian NGOs about cooperation with the military frequently arises from the instrumental purposes articulated by the military injunction to “win hearts and minds.” As Rubinstein points out, such priorities all too readily link the application of cultural knowl-edge to forms of “imperial policing,” where, as Davis and Coll emphasize, the goals of manipulation and population control are all too apparent. In the case of future diplomatic and humanitarian efforts, to be an effective partner, the military will have to reframe its culturally-informed coop-eration in less coercive and more collaborative ways.

Expertise and culture SMEs

This book is organized around three broad concerns, with each charac-terized by different challenges for military cultural awareness: cultural education and training, cultural heritage resource management, and lessons learned. The US military establishment is complex and extensive, encompassing an entire Professional Military Education System that is internal to the Department of Defense. This system extends beyond the four service academies, educating undergraduates and graduates, and employing full-time faculty in structures comparable to the US civilian system of higher education. In addition, unlike the civilian system, PME institutions also provide training, including pre-deployment training and mid-career professional development. More recently, such training has included greater emphasis upon language, area studies, and culture. Although the emphasis may differ, at such institutions as the Naval Academy, the Marine Corps’ Center for Advanced Operational Culture Learning, Air Force Culture and Language Center, the Army’s Training and Doctrinal Command, and the Naval Post-Graduate School, cultural skills and the goal of “cross-cultural competence” are today greater priorities.

From the vantage point of a long-time faculty member, Clementine Fujimura describes the effort to integrate culture more fully into the

9Introduction

DOI: 10.1057/9781137409423.0004

curriculum of the Naval Academy. To be successful, Fujimura suggests, this effort must account for – and in some cases overcome – the Naval Academy’s own “military culture.” Rochelle Davis’ chapter, meanwhile, can be read in dialogue with Fujimura’s. Davis evaluates the relative effec-tiveness of pre-deployment culture training programs by foregrounding the views of trainees – US soldiers – and of Iraqis, on the receiving end of such training, and concludes the training is deeply flawed. For Davis, pre-deployment efforts are at once inadequate in depth while promoting a conception of cross-cultural communication that takes for granted the conditions and context of military occupation, a point reinforced by Steve Coll’s concluding commentary. As Davis argues, the prevailing facts of occupation simply overshadow and trivialize efforts to meet local expectations in terms of cultural etiquette. By highlighting the contrast between university-style attention to the subject of culture with “quick-and-dirty” pre-deployment cultural training, Davis and Fujimura point to the often competing priorities in play in efforts to translate academic cultural knowledge into practice.

This volume extends the work of the Arts Industries Policy Forum in the area of national security by bringing together a range of voices among professionals – including sociocultural anthropologists, archae-ologists, historians, legal scholars and journalists – who possess intimate, long-term experience with the US military’s various efforts to make itself more culturally aware and adept. In 2014, this conversation is taking place at a critical juncture, as the US prepares to leave Afghanistan, as military budgets anticipate peacetime austerity, when arguments that a cultural capacity should not be part of military missions continue to be made, and when there exists no guarantee that cultural lessons learned during the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts will be substantively preserved as an important part of military preparation and planning.17

Therefore, an important rationale for the Wilson Center meeting in 2011 was to assemble distinct professional networks: networks that have worked to address cultural challenges with and for the military, but so far have had limited opportunity to interact across disciplinary lines. In particular, we wanted to connect archaeologists working on cultural heritage protection with sociocultural anthropologists engaged in cultural education and analysis. As Laurie Rush notes in her chapter, such a conversation is long overdue. And, as a recurring theme across the chapters of this volume, among these professional groups there are notable differences in expertise and training, including differing

DOI: 10.1057/9781137409423.0004

appreciation for the relevance or meaning of culture as a subject and resource for problem-solving.

Kerry Fosher highlights problems created by military expectations regarding “expertise” (and its sources), given the diversity of available culture experts, each with very different assumptions and approaches to the process of inculcating cultural knowledge. Fosher identifies three attitudes characteristic of the military’s effort to become more cultur-ally adept – “break glass”, “integration,” and “science and technology.” All three reference, directly or indirectly, assumptions and confusions surrounding the category of “subject matter expert” (or SME), as a catch-all way military institutions classify professionals in relation to expertise, including, of course, culture experts. One problem with the concept of SME’s is that it tends to flatten out or even eliminate important disci-plinary distinctions and other sources of professional identity – distinc-tions which produce different conclusions about what “culture” is, what it means, and how the military should take account of it. Identification as a SME risks collapsing these important disciplinary differences, but also regional specializations, experts in different forms of cultural content, and “culture generalist” experts; differences all-too-easily glossed by military counterparts.

For Fosher and other contributors, differences between archaeologists and sociocultural anthropologists are not inconsequential. Similarly, academic perspectives are markedly different than the objectives of non-academic practitioners, just as the character and value of education is different from training. However, the promise of a technological fix (note Fujimura’s observation that the Naval Academy is first and foremost an “engineering school”) is often persuasive in a military context already predisposed to pursue such solutions.

Fosher is clear that military consumers of expertise do not always harbor realistic ideas about what their academic counterparts can actu-ally bring to the table. They might view academics as like consultants, who will always come when called, or they might fail to draw key distinc-tions among specific kinds of culture SME’s, at times treating anyone with any sort of cultural credential as if a virtual cultural encyclopedia. Managing expectations, it is clear, is a necessity of any such relationship. Along the culture front, academic-military relationships have been remarkably tense around the military’s most recent call to academia for help.18 Because cultural experts, in and out of the academy, frequently seek to represent the perspective of militarily-engaged societies or adopt

11Introduction

DOI: 10.1057/9781137409423.0004

an advocacy approach, the cultural field represents a particular and often-challenging type of civil-military relationship.

Military culture and the culture concept

How we define “success” in building cultural awareness across the mili-tary is another theme that cuts through this volume. Success is frequently associated with gains in what can be termed “depth.” For example, Fujimura is impatient with a “check the box” approach to culture-learning, while at the same time, and similarly, Rubinstein contrasts inadequate “traveler’s advice” models with what he calls “deep culture.” But pursuit of a greater depth of cultural knowledge through training or education cannot take place in a vacuum. As these chapters show, learning happens in specific ways and in multiple institutional contexts, taking characteristic form as doctrine (as within the COIN manual) or curriculum reform at the Naval Academy. A commitment to cultural learning can also encompass different goals, such as “adaptability” for rank-and-file soldiers or winning civilian “hearts and minds.” And, the pursuit selectively tends to appropriate particular conceptions of culture, depending on the specific service in question and its associated priorities, as with the Marine penchant for viewing human communities as part of the “terrain” and wanting to translate cultural information into “maps.”19 These framing concepts are, themselves, expressions of local military knowledge (and the unique features of military culture, a subject unto itself), and such perspectives are not immediately translatable across military-civilian frontiers.

For example, the shift toward frameworks focused on increasing “cultural competence,” as part of an effort to enhance military cultural education and training, encompasses a very different set of concerns than those surrounding the protection of largely-tangible “cultural heritage” – built structures in conflict zones. The general notion of “competence” – a social scientific concept with a pedigree in sociolinguistics and social psychology – entered the military’s training and education lexicon by way of business school curricula dedicated to intercultural communication, a marketplace context in which culture is treated as a “technical obstacle”20 to be managed, a variable to be measured, and a decontextualized static set of core values to be mastered. Readily available and adaptable for the purposes of counterinsurgency, this conception contrasts notably with

DOI: 10.1057/9781137409423.0004

that of tangible “cultural heritage,” as multiple chapters of this volume make clear. Something other than an “obstacle” – cultural heritage is a specific artifact memorialized in international law, an artifact increas-ingly linked to concepts of “property.”21 Experts in “culture-as-context” and “culture as product” navigate different frontiers of disciplinary orientation, practitioner expectations, institutional context, competing lexicons, and emergent history. If these efforts share an encompassing commitment to making the case for better cultural policy as part of US military missions, exactly how to understand, articulate, and implement this objective will require sustained engagement across these parallel universes of expertise.

This volume, and the conference from which it was derived, constitute a snapshot of a rapidly-evolving regime of policy and practice. Even as the context changes, many questions remain: will interest in the military application of cultural knowledge wane as counterinsurgency conflicts fade; can academic experts in culture resolve their apprehensions about a military determined to employ cultural understanding to exert control and authority; can quick-and-dirty military training produce useful outcomes when it addresses recruits who enter service with little or no cultural knowledge; can culture be sustained as a military value in a soci-ety and with a government that do not, in a general sense, see culture as a subject of policy? Finally, as global enthusiasm for Enlightenment values fade, and as ancient tribal and religious conflicts come to the fore, can the US military deny that cultural knowledge, understanding and even empathy are central to its mission? We hope this volume will illuminate these questions and hint at solutions. But more importantly, we hope that each chapter offers an invitation to further thought, research, and conversation about the role of culture in global affairs.

Geran Pilon, Juliana, editor (2009). 1 Cultural Intelligence for Winning the Peace. Washington, DC: The Institute of World Politics Press.Nagl, John (2005). 2 Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.Huntington, Samuel (2011). 3 The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster.US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual 4 (2007). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. This manual was updated in 2014, and COIN is

13Introduction

DOI: 10.1057/9781137409423.0004

now not nearly as influential as previously as a doctrinal framework for the US military.Further details about this conference are available here: 5 http://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/accounting-for-culture-the-military-implications-for-future-humanitarian-cooperation. Meeting participants whose presentations are not included in the present volume include: Brian Selmeski, Martin Short, Fred Hiebert, and Carter Malkasian.A description of the Arts Industry Policy Forum can be found here: 6 http://www.vanderbilt.edu/curbcenter/?project=arts-industry-policy-forum-project.Rosaldo, Renato (1989). 7 Culture & Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.This edited volume is part of a more encompassing and ongoing effort to 8 expand appreciation for what falls under the rubric of “cultural policy,” intended to move the focus beyond narrowly circumscribed considerations of “arts and culture” to include questions of security, diplomacy, humanitarian response, the creative economy and more. A brief discussion of this reframing can be found here: http://robertalbro.com/2011/11/a-cultural-policy-listening-project-long-overdue/.Ivey, Bill. (2008) 9 Cultural Diplomacy and The National Interest: In Search of a 21st Century Perspective. Arts Industries Policy Forum. The Curb Center at Vanderbilt University.An example of the service-specific nature of the military effort to cultural 10 capacity-build is the particular approach developed by the Marine Corps, many elements of which can be found here: Salmoni, Barak A. and Paula Holmes-Eber (2008). Operational Culture for the Warfighter: Principles and Applications. Quantico, VA: Marine Corps University Press.A recent example of this effort was a May 2014 meeting organized by the US 11 Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, titled “Wars, Disasters, and Cultural Heritage Preservation: The Role of Arts and Culture in National Security,” which convened representatives from the Department of State, the Smithsonian, USAID, and others. Details of this meeting can be found here: http://www.state.gov/pdcommission/meetings/227584.htm.Lowenthal, David (1998). 12 The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Rothfield, Lawrence (2009). 13 The Rape of Mesopotamia: Behind the Looting of the Iraq Museum. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.At the time of the writing of this introduction, international concern over 14 the destruction of heritage as part of the conflict in Syria is deepening, while in Iraq fighters with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) have destroyed several heritage sites, including the reputed tomb of the prophet Jonah in Mosul, as part of its occupation.Kurin, Richard. (2011) 15 Saving Haiti’s Heritage: Cultural Recovery after the Earthquake. Washington, DC: The Smithsonian Institution.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137409423.0004

In 2005 the United States Institute of Peace facilitated dialogue between 16 humanitarian NGOs and DoD for the purpose of establishing such guidelines, which are summarized here: http://www.usip.org/sites/default/files/guidelines_handout.pdf.Some of these concerns about a possibly dim future for culture programs 17 within the US Department of Defense are addressed here: Sands, Robert (2014) “Finding a Common Thread: Implications for the Future of Culture and Language Programs in Support of National Security” The Journal of Culture, Language and International Security 1 (1): 3–20.For a sense of the often very large differences in perspective on this question, 18 compare: González, Roberto J. (2010). Militarizing Culture: Essays on the Warfare State. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press; and National Research Council (2011). Sociocultural Data to Accomplish Department of Defense Missions. Washington, DC: National Academies Press.Albro, Robert (2010). “Writing Culture Doctrine: Public Anthropology, 19 Military Policy, and World Making.” Perspectives on Politics 8 (4): 1087–1093. For a more detailed discussion of the Marine Corps’ specific approach to building cultural awareness, see: Holmes-Eber, Paula (2014). Culture in Conflict: Irregular Warfare, Cultural Policy, and the Marine Corps. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Briedenbach, Joana and Pál Nyíri (2009). 20 Seeing Culture Everywhere: from Genocide to Consumer Habits. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.Brown, Michael (2003). 21 Who Owns Native Culture? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137409423.0013 123

1954 Hague Convention, 7, 83application to non-state

actors, 93Blue Shield movement, 84criminal sanctions, 87definition of cultural

property in, 84first use, 103in the context of WWII, 84military officer training, 89responsibilities of an

occupying power, 87safeguarding, 94status of movable objects,

95US obligations under, 94US ratification of, 77, 84, 88

1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, 92

1972 World Heritage Convention, 92

9/11, 2

academic knowledge, 10Afghanistan, 2, 7, 43, 113

child mortality rate, 117civilian perceptions of war,

113cultural heritage protection,

106culture mapping, 108

Helmand Province, 104inside and outside the wire,

115Kandahar, 113, 118local police forces, 118military occupation, 115riding in MRAPs, 114Soviet occupation, 113, 116Taliban, 115, 118

AFRICOM, 121Albro, Robert, 1American Anthropological

Association (AAA), 47anthropologists, 9, 16, 17

and different models for culture, 61

and ethnography, 102and national security, 17definition of culture, 61of the Arab world, 43

anti-piracy, 120Apter, Michael, 64Archaeological Institute of

America (AIA), 88, 103archaeological stewardship, 101archaeologists, 9

and educating military leaders, 106

as anthropologists and classicists, 102

Armyand the “monument men”,

81language and culture

training, 51

124 Index

DOI: 10.1057/9781137409423.0013

Arts Industries Policy Forum, 4, 9Asia, 120asymmetric warfare, 2, 91, 96, 103

Babylon, 105Balkan Wars, 86, 91, 93Blue Shield Movement, 94

and national committees, 88assisting the military, 89International Committee of the

Blue Shield, 87box checking

Department of Defense, 32Naval Academy, 31

civil-military relationship, 11clash of civilizations, 2, 3COIN

and control of human terrain, 116as an effort to control, 116control of guerrilla forces, 117culture learning, 116humanitarian features of, 116humanitarian mechanisms of

control, 117intellectual history of, 115

Cold War, 2Coll, Steve, 8, 112Combatant Command Cultural

Heritage Action Group, 107counterinsurgency doctrine, 2, 43, 52,

121as inconsistent on the ground, 119Counterinsurgency Field Manual,

3, 44definition of culture, 3humanitarian response, 3internal contradictions of, 118national character studies approach,

45nation-building, 44role of USAID, 116US military power, 45

counterinsurgency training, 46cross-cultural capability, 25cross-cultural communication, 102

cross-cultural competence, 8, 11, 31, 33, 34, 38

cultural differences, 67cultural diplomacy and DOD, 4, 5, 32cultural education, 31, 33, 35cultural heritage, 6, 12

as patrimony of all humanity, 77as physical monuments and

movable works of art, 74changing definitions of, 75

Cultural Heritage by Archaeology and Military Panel, 107

cultural heritage management, 100cultural heritage protection

and destruction of Sufi shrines, 92and internal conflicts, 92and strategic planning, 74and training, 82as a dimension of diplomacy, 76during conflict, 73

cultural immersion at the Naval Academy, 36

spoliation, 7cultural knowledge

and manipulation, 8between the military and civilians,

115for winning hearts and minds, 65

cultural learningbox checking, 31complexity and depth, 40institutionalization, 31

cultural miscommunication and DOD, 32

cultural models and stereotyping, 67cultural policy, 4cultural property

and protection of, 84failure to identify and respect, 103protection during armed conflict,

84safeguarding and respect for, 84tangible and intangible aspects, 86

cultural property managementand lessons learned, 109regulatory environment, 108

125Index

DOI: 10.1057/9781137409423.0013

cultural property protectionand military necessity, 86and moveable cultural objects, 86and working with civilian

counterparts, 86importance for mission success, 104institutionalization of expertise, 95in WWII, 6, 110no strike lists, 85proportionality, 87skepticism about US efforts, 106

cultural scaffolding, 32cultural training, 48

and education, 42and materials, 46for humanitarian operations, 47training materials and COIN, 43and materials, 46

cultural understandingin the military, 2to improve peacekeeping missions,

59culture

archaic notions of, 23anthropological theories of, 24cultural policy, 4curriculum, 8databases, 24how it affects military and

humanitarian cooperation, 58security, 5

culture concept, 34and security, 2and US military strategy, 43at the Naval Academy, 36definition of at the Naval Academy,

40definition as part of COIN, 45

culture experts, 8, 10, 12, 17military, 5WWII, 89

culture SMEs , 8culture training

and cultural property protection, 102

and education, 43

and language training, 50and materials, 17for humanitarian operations, 17lack of assessment, 51training materials and COINuse of computer simulations, 48

Curb Center, 3

Davis, Rochelle, 8, 42dugong case in Japan, 90

expertise, 17, 107academic, 19and its lack for cultural heritage

protection, 82and museum conservators, 89capacity to protect cultural

property, 86computational modeling, 23confusion about, 21cultural analysis, 22cultural expertise, 25databases, 20elasticity, 20limits of, 20of installation archaeologists, 101social science, 16

Foreign Area Officers (FAOs), 49Fort Drum, 103Fosher, Kerry, 10, 15Fujimura, Clementine, 8, 11, 30Fukushima disaster, 120

Gerstenblith, Patty, 7, 83Gonzalez, Roberto, 16Government Accountability Office, 50

Haiti Cultural Recovery Project, 7, 89

hearts and minds, 8, 54Afghanistan, 48COIN, 44counterinsurgency doctrine, 64doctrinal conceptions of, 65

Heibert, Fred, 107

126 Index

DOI: 10.1057/9781137409423.0013

heritageconflict zones, 6destruction of, 6

higher education, 8the Holocaust

as differentiated from national spoliation, 78

outstanding claims, 79human terrain, 11, 47, 107

and culture, 3human terrain teams, 20humanitarian missions

and the military, 2culture, 2culture programs, 17cultural diplomacy, 5NGOs, 8peacekeepers, 7

humanitarian actionprinciples of, 64problem of hearts and minds, 65

humanitarian crisis, 60humanitarian capacity-building, 121

inter-agency, 2, 5international affairs and culture, 4international law and culture, 12interoperability, 57, 120

and standardization, 66and technology, 66breakdown in, 60and understanding organizational

culture, 69, 71horizontal and vertical forms of, 59

Iraq, 2and archaeology, 103

Iraqi civiliansculture training vs. respect, 53perceptions of military culture

training, 43perceptions of US as occupiers, 52responses to US culture training, 52

Ivey, Bill, 1

journalismAfghanistan, 113

embedded, 113

Kane, Susan, 90Khalili, Laleh, 54

language training, 47and culture learning, 34Naval Academy, 40

Libya, 90, 108looting

and its propaganda effects, 76commercial side of, 80of Baghdad museum, 81, 85,

88, 106Language, Regional Expertise and

Culture (LREC), 34, 37, 38Lucas, George, 16

Mali, 92Marine Corps, 17, 101

culture concept, 17culture training, 47deployments in Afghanistan, 50language and culture training, 51professional development, 22

military archaeologists, 101military cultural education and

training, 11military culture, 9, 11, 33, 34

culture training, 49Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, 38recognition of LGBT community,

38military doctrine, 120

and cultural knowledge, 5operations other than war, 3

military planningguidelines for acts of

spoliation, 74impacts on cultural heritage, 89neglect of tangible works of

art, 74military uses of culture

humanitarian response, 3military-civilian cooperation

cultural heritage protection, 81

127Index

DOI: 10.1057/9781137409423.0013

military-humanitarian cooperationat the strategic, operational and

tactical levels, 65scripted forms of, 68

Mitchell, Timothy, 53Monte Cassino, 105Mosque at Samarra, 105moveable works of art, 80multilateral peacekeeping, 58

Napoleonic Era, 75, 77National Historic Preservation Act,

101national patrimony

and private claimants, 78development of the concept of, 75

Naval Academy (USNA), 9, 30, 39Nazi Germany and partimony, 75Nicholas, Lynn, 6, 7, 73Nigeria, 121no strike lists, 108

peacekeeping missions, 58policy decision-makers, 4pre-deployment cultural training, 50pre-deployment training, 59

Afghanistan, 17and culture shock, 47language proficiency, 21

Price, David, 16, 45public policy and culture, 4

Queen Christina of Sweden, 75

repatriationafter war, 77after WWII, 77as opposed to restitution, 78as politicized, 79in diplomacy and as propaganda, 77

restitution and provenance, 80rites of passage, 33

liminal phase, 36Naval Academy, 31, 36

Rubinstein, Robert, 7, 11, 57Rush, Laurie, 7, 9, 100

science and technology, 22cultural analysis capability, 24

security, meanings of, 60Selmeski, Brian, 49Shakespeare’s Henry V, 74situational awareness, 31, 68social scientists, 19, 26

and anthropology’s four fields, 102and archaeologists, 102and the US military, 31, 107

soft power, 2, 4as humanitarian response, 3in military operations, 3

Somalia, 60, 66spoliation, 74, 75Sterlingville, 104subject matter experts (SMEs)

and culture, 10differentiation among, 25networks of, 20break glass, 18

Surge, 117Syria

Aleppo’s Great Mosque, 91and the Hague Convention, 92armed conflict in, 91destruction of cultural heritage in,

tangible cultural heritage, 76training

academic knowledge, 9cultural knowledge, 12culture, 9

training and education, 108anthropology in, 31building organizational capacity, 21cultural, 33cultural simulations and games, 23

Travelers adviceand ethnocentrism, 64as a cultural model, 62basic etiquette, 62cultural styles, 62describing cultural differences, 67

Turner, Victor, 37

128 Index

DOI: 10.1057/9781137409423.0013

UN Peacekeepers, 58UNESCO, 90US Department of Defense (DOD),

5, 15and archaeological expertise, 109and Archaeological Institute of

America, 107cultural resource stewardship

program, 101negative publicity, 106personnel training and education

in, 21Professional Military Education

System (PME system), 8service guidance, 51working with Blue Shield, 90

US militaryadoption of cultural turn, 53and civilian NGOs, 2and heritage protection, 7and humanitarian cooperation, 57

and humanitarian disasters, 2cultural capacity, 2, 5cultural understanding, 2culture and humanitarian

response, xfuture of humanitarian

intervention, 120humanitarian professionals and, 7new roles of, 2role in world politics, 52

Vietnam era, 24, 26Vietnam War, 16

warfighting and cultural knowledge, 3Washington Principles

and museum guidelines, 79and provenance, 79

Wegener, Corine, 88Wiesbaden Manifesto, 74World War II, 76

Introduction: Military Cultural Capacity after Afghanistan

Documents

Transcript of Introduction: Military Cultural Capacity after Afghanistan

Afghanistan 2015- Anno 0?

table of contents - UNFPA Afghanistan |

US Military and Policy Objectives in Afghanistan

Provincial analysis of Bamyan, Afghanistan

PRO - Afghanistan Digital Collections

ISIS MILITARY STRATEGY

UNDP Kundoz - Afghanistan

Afghanistan – The War for Perception

AFGHANISTAN - Financial Times

THE TALIBAN & AFGHANISTAN - Jurnal UNISSULA

Shear capacity

Naval & Military Press

GAZETTEER OF AFGfIANISTAN - Afghanistan Digital ...

Afghanistan Reconstruction - National Security Archive

cosanta. - Military Archives

COUNTRY PROGRAMME DOCUMENT AFGHANISTAN

The State of Afghanistan

Military Inc- Inside Pakistan's Military Economy - SU LMS

Iraq/Afghanistan Theater Business Clearance

GAZETTEER OF AFGHANISTAN