FM 3-24 and Religious Literacy in American Military Operations in the Middle East
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In August 2021, the Taliban’s success in Afghanistan shocked American citizens and foreign policy analysts. Many counterinsurgency experts sought to explain this phenomenon by focusing on tactical and strategic military failures; however, such explanations often neglected to investigate the religious literacy of American troops engaged in counterinsurgency operations in the Middle East. By considering the treatment of religious literacy in General David Petraeus’s landmark field manual, FM 3-24, a startling degree of religious illiteracy is revealed within counterinsurgency operational protocols. While a historically and culturally focused “civilizational approach” is often proposed by foreign policy analysts as a potential solution to the problem of religious illiteracy in counterinsurgency operations, this approach also falls short of addressing the complex realities that confront American “liberators,” whom locals often perceive to be foreign invaders. This article therefore addresses the disconnect between American military strategy, foreign policy, and the tactical realities encountered by military personnel stationed in the Middle East. Resultantly, this article argues that improved mandatory religious literacy training for American troops is critical not only for conducting successful operations in the Middle East but also for ending, rather than reinvigorating, conflicts abroad.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".