The Best‐Laid Schemes: Postcolonialism, Military Social Science, and the Making of US Counterinsurgency Doctrine, 1947–2009

When the US Army and Marine Corps published the Counterinsurgency Field Manual 3–24 (FM 3–24) in December 2006, Baghdad was burning. For years, while Coalition officials were nested in the Green Zone, scrupulously overseeing a privatization bonanza of the Iraqi oil industry and public sector, a powerful insurgency and civil war was taking root in western and southern Iraq, fuelled by growing popular resistance to the US occupation (Chandrasekaran 2007; Klein 2008). Throughout 2004 and 2005, US officials within the Coalition Provisional Authority and Defense Department were left scratching their heads at the unwelcoming animus of Iraqis who never quite greeted the “freedom loving” Coalition occupiers with the rose-filled streets promised to American audiences. Quickly running out of options to stem the spiralling violence, a group of self-described “soldier-scholars” in the USA convened to revive the dead spirit of counterinsurgency doctrine, which had long been repressed in military circles since its failure in the Vietnam era. The rapprochement with counterinsurgency was designed by its advocates to address an area where Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon had proven utterly inept: the pacification and governance of an occupied Iraqi population. The governance of occupied populations—which has a dubious track record, and yet is still seen as a basic requirement for any country wishing to play the imperial superpower abroad—was famously a secondary concern in Iraq for the post-invasion planners of the Defense Department and Pentagon. By promising victorious warfare on the cheap, with minimal costs and casualties, Rumsfeld's Pentagon had oriented its resources towards the experimental excesses of the so-called “revolution in military affairs” (RMA). A veritable growth industry in its own right, with fantastic visions of dexterous ground forces, insurmountable air-war and surveillance capacity, and high-technology combat systems dutifully manned by privatized bands of lansquenets, along with a few thousand techie mil-nerds diligently plotting death over the Long War on their computer screens, the forces within the Pentagon and Defense Department saw little reason to spend time on questions of governance in Iraq. In their minds, Iraq was predicted to be a “quick and easy” stop along the journey to winning the “War on Terror”—a remarkable and deadly fantasy for the victims of such hubris (Gordon and Trainor 2006; Ricks 2006). While the public face of the RMA industry produced wonderfully colorful exegeses and techno-pornographic images of US dominance through the sci-fi weaponry of Future Combat Systems, a more tangible and darker reality was taking shape on the ground in Iraq (and Afghanistan). A wholesale distribution of death was underway: over 100,000 civilian deaths from Coalition and insurgent forces, a destabilizing refugee exodus, the destructive urbicide of Fallujah, terrorizing night raids on Iraqi homes, walled-off neighborhoods, long lines for gasoline, and a ubiquitous network of checkpoints and roadblocks intermingled with the violent everyday vagaries of the “counter-city” of Baghdad (Graham 2010; Gregory 2008; cf Foucault 1975:205). American officials exacerbated the conflict by superimposing a vulgar Orientalist framework on Iraqis—framing the insurgency as a “timeless” internal conflict between Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish tribes—in order to explain away the rise in turbulent violence. With regard to this ethnically defined Orientalist framework, Nir Rosen has written: Iraqis were adapting to the American view of Iraq as a collection of sects and trying to fit into the political system the Americans were building around that idea. [Outside] observers disregard the fact that the American presence actively created many of these problems and “read history backward” in an attempt to minimize the American role in Iraq (2010:21). The botched invasion was giving rise to a reckless occupation and brutal insurgency. It was around this time in late 2004 that a group of soldiers and officers on the ground in Iraq and at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas began to revisit and retool the principles of counterinsurgency. Engaging in a superficially low form of history—a search for historical analogies to the chaos in Iraq—these “soldier scholars” mined lessons from the Algerian War (1954–1962) and the Malayan Emergency (1948–1960) to glean techniques for pacification that could be readily employed in Baghdad and Anbar Province. After reviving the apocryphal image of T.E. Lawrence, and poring through the writings of David Galula, Roger Tinquier, and Sir Robert Thompson,1 the group of soldiers hosted an unprecedented series of collaborations between officers and soldiers, policymakers, academics and journalists, combining “history” with “field experience” to produce, after a series of widely circulated drafts, the final version of the FM 3–24 in late 2006. Emulating what had become the new institutional modus operandi emanating from the Pentagon during those years (that is, personal anecdote and the rehearsal of “fact”, masquerading as analysis), counterinsurgency advocates quickly dubbed their doctrine “the graduate level of warfare”. The reception of the Counterinsurgency Manual in the media was nothing less than extraordinary. Deemed the “author and force” behind the manual, General David Petreaus instantly became a star in policy circles, celebrated for both his political prowess and deft use of PowerPoint. Following an intense public relations blitz with Petreaus as the face, the manual became perhaps the most widely read document ever produced by the US military, and certainly the most influential. Published with academic credentials by the University of Chicago Press, the manual was praised by establishment think-tanks and academics for its “humane” and “culture-friendly” approach to war. Indeed, its “humane” image was the doctrine's primary appeal. No longer would the “shoot and torture first, ask questions later” attitude exhorted by Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney be the primary recourse of soldiers. Rather, the strategy was oriented towards “winning the hearts and minds” of occupied populations with development projects and accountable governing structures. Academics, humanitarians and commentators alike fawned over the strategy, with its emphasis on respecting “cultural difference”, and extolling such precepts as: “sometimes, the more force is used, the less effective it is” (FM 3–24:I-150). As is well known, and notwithstanding the overwhelming evidence to the contrary (cf Agnew et al 2008; Gregory 2008; Rosen 2010), General Petreaus and “his” counterinsurgency doctrine have been credited with staving off a full-blown civil war in Iraq, via the success of “the surge” in 2007. Under Obama, the doctrine was implemented in Afghanistan in the late summer and fall of 2009, with little tactical success, but, to be sure, with many dead civilians and razed villages scattered throughout the countryside. Despite the force of the public relations rhetoric around “hearts and minds”, development and governance, my dissertation interrogates what one could call the more practical “technical register” by which the US military conducts counterinsurgency. The essence of counterinsurgency is really about two outcomes: population control and killing insurgents. “Protecting the population” is central to counterinsurgency doctrine, operationally resulting in the blurring of civilian and combat spaces. This blurring is justified as inevitable by counterinsurgency advocates, since warfare now happens “amongst the people” (Smith 2005; cf Kilcullen 2008). Christian Parenti offers a useful summation of the doctrine in practice: Counterinsurgency targets—pace Foucault—the “capillary” level of social relations. It ruptures and tears (but rarely remakes) the intimate social relations among people, their ability to cooperate, and the lived texture of solidarity—in other words, the bonds that comprise society. Conventional warfare seeks to control territory and destroy the opposing military. Counterinsurgency seeks to control society. It is thus “population centric” (2011:23). As a theory of internal warfare and working within the sinews of society, practitioners of counterinsurgency have devised a whole compendium of techniques designed specifically to separate a loosely defined “friendly” population from “the enemy” (Anderson 2010). On the one hand, the US military has coupled familiar traditional technologies of rule (eg taking a census, training police and “local defense forces”, establishing a network of informants, developing a penal apparatus, etc) with more recent technical innovations in biometrics, drone use, and database management, in order to quantify and track Iraq and Afghan populations.2 On the other hand, in a bid to become more “culturally versed” in wars that dovetail closely with processes of capitalist globalization, the US military has taken controversial steps towards integrating social scientists into counterinsurgency operations; for example, in the development of the Human Terrain System (HTS). The HTS—a territorialized interpretation of “human geography” in its most vulgar terms—serves a threefold purpose: to gather “cultural intelligence” for commanders; to provide a supporting role for disrupting connections between local insurgencies and transnational terrorist networks; and to present a “human face” to civilians caught in the web of combat operations. Aside from Human Terrain Teams, social scientists support counterinsurgency campaigns in other fundamental ways, from developing statistical algorithms that predict insurgent activity to increased reliance on geo-spatial intelligence. My dissertation interrogates this integration of social science into late-modern warfare, particularly by tracing the historical association between social science and counterinsurgency doctrine. In many ways, it is an old story. Violence, bodies, spaces and numbers have been intertwined ever since the practice of war was inaugurated as a military science during the Enlightenment. Nevertheless, what my research contributes is an analysis of the operational and methodological support social sciences have given to the US military in counterinsurgency operations from the Cold War to the present. In the eyes of the military, what social science promises, either in the form of statistical analysis, behavioral psychology or in the use of Human Terrain Teams, is the potential to predict insurgent or revolutionary activity and attacks—what Derek Gregory (2010) has called a desire for “an event ontology” and Ben Anderson (2010) identifies as capturing “anticipatory action”. My dissertation research traces the genealogy of this “god trick” of prediction in warfare; what I call the “taming of chance” in battlespace (cf Hacking 1990). The arc of the dissertation begins with the story of the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS) and Strategic Hamlet programs in Vietnam. Vietnam was famously dubbed “the social scientists’ war” by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and for good reason.3 CORDS built upon theoretical models developed in political science, sociology, and statistics to create the first computer program aimed at predicting insurgent activity. Using Strategic Hamlet household survey data gathered by observers “in the field”, CORDS generated reams of statistical data that military statisticians used to model potential Viet Cong attacks, producing an algorithm of space on which to intervene. I then move on in my dissertation to analyze how “population” simultaneously became the condition and consequence (ie the “referent object” at the center of the counterinsurgency knowledge/power matrix) within the hamlet-protection program in Vietnam. Heavily policed and “secured” populations, in the eyes of the US military, minimized the chances of insurgent surprises; that is, intelligence and data preempted attacks. Thus, I argue, the focus on “population centers” in Vietnamese counterinsurgency constituted a major transformation in US military doctrine, away from the “territorial” approach intended to hold physical terrain around cities or villages popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to a critical precursor of contemporary thinking that regards battlespace as a geo-morphology of “networked space”. Indeed, to tweak James Scott's (1999) formulation, to see like a twenty-first century military is to see like a network. This is due, I propose, to a tactical shift away from (merely) securing territory to securing and winning populations (cf Ansorge 2010).4 This Vietnam era research is based on over two years of archival research at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, and the Special Operations Research Office archive at American University in Washington, DC. After tracing a genealogy of potential insurgent activity within a population to techniques developed during the Vietnam War, I move on to the present, and examine the development of the HTS. Of particular importance is how Human Terrain social scientists contribute to knowledge production of populations that are critical to counterinsurgency campaigns. After a discussion of how the HTS originated, I analyze the methods by which Human Terrain Teams approach, “embed”, and extract information from occupied populations. Finally, through field research at military bases in Indiana, California, and Kansas, I examine how civilians and military personnel are trained to conduct counterinsurgency operations. The Orient is staged and performed in constructed “Arab Towns” at military bases across the USA. In a deconstruction of military “experience”, I analyze how personnel are taught to operate “amongst the population” and earn their “trust” in these simulated “Arab towns”. It is at this “capillary” and affective level of the simulation that one gets to the grist of the ideological presuppositions within counterinsurgency doctrine and military social science. It is truly an honor to be awarded the 2011–2012 Antipode Graduate Student Scholarship. The scholarship will allow me to conduct additional field research in Fort Irwin, California, and at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. It also allows me to contribute, in my fullest capacity, to the mission of the journal: to advance radical geographical scholarship. In an era of seemingly perpetual crisis—be it war, ecology, or political economy—radical scholarship that carries the delightful burden inherent to Marx's Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach is needed more urgently now than ever. This is a small contribution in that effort. I would like to thank Lauren Martin, Derek Gregory, Jim Glassman, Trevor Barnes, Anna Secor, and Stuart Elden for all their help and invaluable comments along the way to the dissertation.

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