Military Anthropology: Soldiers, Scholars and Subjects at the Margins of Empire 9780190680176

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MILITARY ANTHROPOLOGY

MONTGOMERY McFATE

Military Anthropology Soldiers, Scholars and Subjects at the Margins of Empire

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Montgomery McFate, 2018 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Montgomery McFate Title: Military Anthropology: Soldiers, Scholars and Subjects at the Margins of Empire / Montgomery McFate. Description: Oxford [UK]; New York: Oxford University Press, [2018] ISBN: 9780190680176 (print) ISBN: 9780190934729 (updf) ISBN: 9780190934941 (epub)

The book is dedicated to my son, Vale Danger Vaughn Carlough, without whose surprise arrival I would never have settled down enough to write anything.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements List of Acronyms 1. Introduction: Gerald Hickey and the Dangers Inherent 2. Robert Sutherland Rattray and Indirect Rule 3. Ursula Graham Bower and Military Leadership 4. Gregory Bateson and Information Operations 5. Tom Harrisson and Unconventional Warfare 6. John Useem and Governance Operations 7. Jomo Kenyatta, Louis Leakey and the Counter-Insurgency System 8. Don Marshall and the Strategic Objective 9. Conclusion: David Prescott Barrows and the Military Execution of Foreign Policy Notes Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book was produced with support from the Minerva Program in the U.S. Office of Secretary of Defense. Many thanks are due to Tom Mahnken and Erin Fitzgerald who dedicated time and energy to bringing social science research into the Department of Defense. I would like to thank the many people who helped along the way, including Jonathan Crist, Lynn Tesser and Kim Hardee at U.S. Institute of Peace who provided support during my tenure as a Jennings Randolph Fellow, during which some of the earliest drafts of these chapters were written. Thanks are also due to Conrad Crane of the Army Heritage and Education Center at Carlisle Barracks and Greg Wilcox for helping with access to Don Marshall’s papers. Many people at the U.S. Naval War College provided support and assistance, including Ambassador Mary Anne Peters who encouraged me to audit the Joint Maritime Operations course (and to Professor Chris Gregor, Professor Steve Forand and CAPT Alan Abramson who made the experience very productive). Many people read drafts of various chapters, including Professor Doug Hime, Professor Milan Vego, and Professor Wolff von Heinegg, for which I thank them warmly. Professor Chris Demchak provided constant encouragement and friendship. Georgette Wilson proofread each chapter and tracked down a few stubbornly elusive citations, for which she deserves much credit. I would also like to thank the wonderful librarians at the U.S. Naval War College (especially Jack Miranda) and the awesome administrative professionals (especially Sherri Whitmarsh and Dalton Alexander) who made the process smoother. My deep thanks to the Center for Naval Warfare Studies and Analysis who supported me throughout this research, including Professor Drew Winner, Dean Barney Ruble, Rachael Shaffer and Dean Tom Culora. Most special thanks and gratitude are owed to Professor Pete Dombrowski who provided endless cheap coffee and deep insights.

LIST OF ACRONYMS

AEF ANA AQI ARPA ARVN BG C3CM CA CCIR CENTCOM CIA CIMA CMO CO COMUSMACV CPA DIA DIME DoD DOTMLPF EW FFIR FLN GAO GLOBE GVN HNIR HTS HTTs IJC IO IRCs ISAF JAG JFC JIPOE JMO KAU KCA LTG MACV METT-T MILDEC MISO MO NCA NSC NSPD

American Expeditionary Force Afghan National Army Al Qaeda in Iraq Advanced Research Projects Agency Army of the Republic of Vietnam Brigadier General Command, Control, Communications, Countermeasures Civil Affairs Commanders’ Critical Information Requirements United States Central Command Central Intelligence Agency Coordinated Investigation of Micronesian Anthropology Civil-Military Operations Cyberspace Operations Commander of the United States Military Assistance Command Vietnam Coalition Provisional Authority Defense Intelligence Agency Diplomacy, Information, Military, Economic Department of Defense Doctrine, Organization, Training, Materiel, Leadership, Personnel, Facilities Electronic Warfare Friendly Force Information Requirements Front de Libération Nationale Government Accountability Office Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness Government of South Vietnam Host Nation Information Requirements Human Terrain System Human Terrain Teams ISAF Joint Command Information Operations Information Related Capabilities International Security Assistance Force Judge Advocate General Joint Force Commander Joint Intelligence Preparation of the Operational Environment Joint Maritime Operations Kenya African Union Kikuyu Central Association Lieutenant General Military Assistance Command Vietnam Mission-Enemy-Terrain-Troops-Time Military Deception Military Information Support Operations Morale Operations Network of Concerned Anthropologists National Security Council National Security Presidential Directive

NSS NVA OPMEP ORHA

National Security Strategy North Vietnamese Army Joint Chiefs of Staff Officer Professional Military Education Policy Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance

OSINT OSS PA PF PIR PME PPDs PROVN PSB REC SIGINT SIM SOCOM SORO USNA VC

Open-source Intelligence Office of Strategic Services Public Affairs Popular Forces Priority Intelligence Requirement Professional Military Education Presidential Policy Directives Program for the Pacification and Long-Term Development of Vietnam Pacific Science Board Radio-Electronic Combat Vietnam Signals Intelligence Scientific Investigation of Micronesia Special Operations Command Special Operations Research Office United States Naval Academy Viet Cong

1

INTRODUCTION GERALD HICKEY AND THE DANGERS INHERENT

Where is your data? Give me something I can put in the computer. Don’t give me your poetry.

Robert MacNamara1

In 1964 Gerald Hickey, a military anthropologist working for the U.S. government, visited a Special Forces Camp in the highlands of Vietnam to conduct research for a RAND study. The camp at Nam Dong had been built deep inside Viet Cong territory to provide protection for the surrounding villages. A twelve-man Special Forces Team, A-726 commanded by Capt. Roger Donlon, was tasked with advising and training 311 Vietnamese Civilian Irregular Defense Group militiamen. The camp itself—heavily fortified with sandbag walls, concrete bunker pits, machine gun posts and external wire—was guarded by sixty Nung tribesmen, many of whom had previously served as mercenaries in the French Army. During the afternoon of 4 July 1964 Hickey accompanied the Special Forces soldiers to a local village where they distributed medicine. After dinner that evening, many of the soldiers had an uneasy, ominous feeling that something was about to happen. A Special Forces sergeant asked Hickey if he wanted a weapon, promptly handing him an AR-15 rifle. At 2:26AM, a white phosphorous explosion engulfed the mess hall. “Suddenly the command post was a mass of flames, which were rapidly spreading to other buildings in the heat, smoke, and dust of a firestorm. Mortar rounds landed everywhere, grenades exploded, and gunfire filled the air. In a matter of minutes, the camp had become a battlefield.”2 A huge explosion lifted Hickey off his feet and smashed him against a wall. “For an instant I experienced a strange feeling of detachment as if I were outside watching myself. My whole body ached as I lay on the ground trying to catch my breath.”3 Dusting himself off, Hickey zigzagged across a road and jumped into a trench full of “very tense” Nungs who were firing at the barbed wire perimeter. The Nung leader offered Hickey a cigarette. “You’re a professor,” the Nung leader said in Vietnamese, “what are you doing here?” Hickey replied that he had come to “relax in the mountains,” which provoked a laugh.4 The Viet Cong continued firing mortars into the camp until a U.S. air strike began to pound their positions. Captain Donlon suddenly appeared at the edge of the trench, badly wounded from gunshots and shrapnel in the leg, forearm, shoulder and stomach. “Are you OK?” Donlon asked. “God, Captain,” Hickey answered, “get in the trench, you’re wounded!” Donlon refused, telling Hickey that the inner perimeter was holding but three members of his team were dead. Donlon asked if they had enough ammo, and Hickey replied that they only had part of one clip. “I’ll get you more,” Donlon said, disappearing into the smoke and explosions.5 As dawn broke, the Viet Cong retreated into the jungle. In the morning, as Hickey recalled, the scene before me was worse than any nightmare I could remember. The whole camp was a blackened smoking ruin and ammo was still exploding. There were bodies and pieces of bodies everywhere—on the cluttered parade ground, in the grasses, and on the wires. … The smoky air was heavy with the odor of death and destruction.6

As the wounded were evacuated by helicopter, the Viet Cong continued firing small arms into the camp from their positions in the jungle. But the main battle was over, and the 372 men at Nam Dong had held the camp against a reinforced Viet Cong battalion of 900. For his heroism that night, Captain Roger Donlon was the first man in the Vietnam War to win the Medal of Honor. Hickey went back to Saigon to write his report, “The American Military Advisor and His Foreign Counterpart,”7 which describes many barriers to cross-cultural interaction between the U.S. military and indigenous military units still pertinent today. Hickey’s career tracks almost perfectly with U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Having become interested in Indochina in the early 1950s as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Hickey first visited Vietnam in 1956, shortly after Ngo Dinh Diem became the first President of South Vietnam. Hickey was present in Ban Me Thout in January 1968 at the beginning of the North Vietnamese assaults now known as the Tet offensive. He fought at Nam Dong, which was the basis for a battle scene in the 1968 film The Green Berets. Hickey sailed away from Saigon a few years before the war officially ended in 1975. Hickey’s fundamental insight—just as applicable today as it was during the Vietnam War—was

that war entailed a process of interaction between the military and the people living in the area of operations. To be effective and work as intended, military decisions had to take the society as a whole into account. In Hickey’s words: The American strategy of making military decisions without regard for their impact on South Vietnamese society boded badly for the outcome of the war. American planners and decision-makers in Washington and Saigon failed to understand that the social, political, economic, religious, and military aspects of Vietnamese society were intrinsically interrelated and had to be understood that way. A decision regarding one aspect had to be based on its effect, its impact, on all other aspects. Making military decisions without considering what effects they would have on the society as a whole resulted in ever spreading disruption that weakened social order and structure.8

Hickey repeatedly tried to convey his views and ideas to the U.S. military, arguing for the development of a culturally astute strategy to meet the needs of the people of Vietnam and not just the interests of the government of Vietnam; explaining the means and methods for securing the strategically important area of the central highlands; advocating for a viable ceasefire in accord with Vietnamese concepts of conflict resolution; recommending improved cultural training for military advisors; arguing against forced relocation of Vietnamese peasants and Montagnard tribes to strategic hamlets; and encouraging the government of Vietnam to honor their promises to the ethnic minority groups. Although some of his predictions proved disturbingly accurate in retrospect, most of Hickey’s recommendations went unheeded. His epitaph could very well read: ‘I told you so.’ Hickey struggled to have his views listened to by the U.S. military in part because his perspective and conclusions often challenged the U.S. Army’s view of itself. For example, in 1962 Hickey coauthored a report on strategic hamlets for RAND.9 Strategic hamlets were intended to separate insurgents from the population by resettling civilians into areas that could be secured by the military. Based on previous success in separating the Malay population from Chinese insurgents in Malaya, British advisor Sir Robert Thompson had recommended the program to the Diem government. In these Vietnamese strategic hamlets, peasants were forced to work without compensation and prevented from farming their own land, thereby curtailing their ability to make a living.10 Hickey attempted unsuccessfully to convince the U.S. military that the strategic hamlet program would not work in Vietnam. When Hickey briefed the Commander of United States Military Assistance Command Vietnam (COMUSMACV), Lieutenant General Paul D. Harkins on his research, he explained that the population would not choose sides based on ideology, but rather on the basis of who could offer them “the possibility of a better life”. Hickey’s argument relied on the ability of LTG Harkins to see the world from the Vietnamese point of view—to imagine that the political vision offered by the Viet Cong may actually be preferable to the democratic regime of the Government of South Vietnam. But the general could not step outside of his own cultural framework, believing that “everyone wanted protection from the Viet Cong, so they would welcome the strategic hamlets.”11 Neither the Diem government, nor military officers in Saigon, nor the Department of Defense wanted to hear any critical reports about the strategic hamlet program. LTG Harkins, for example, stated, “I am optimistic, and I am not going to allow my staff to be pessimistic.”12 Meanwhile, Viet Cong were dismantling strategic hamlets and reports from Saigon that attacks on strategic hamlets had declined were contradicted by reports from the field that showed there were no longer any hamlets to attack.13 The story of Gerald Hickey’s life and times in Vietnam resonates with many of the issues the U.S. continues to face in its relationships with foreign governments and civilian populations. Foremost among these issues was a lack of understanding about the rest of the world—a misunderstanding that is often mutual. As Hickey noted, President Diem “was a product of the esoteric Hue ConfucianTaoist mandarin milieu. … There was nothing in this outlook to prepare him to understand American leaders. On the other hand there was certainly nothing in the background of the American leaders that would have prepared them to understand Ngo Dinh Diem.”14 Few attempts were made to understand the population living in the operating environment. Americans imposed their own cultural frames on what they encountered, obsessed with the falling dominoes of Communism rather than the nationalist ambitions of a newly decolonized country. Convinced that the solution in Vietnam was firepower, U.S. forces were equipped and trained for conventional battles, and they prepared the South Vietnamese for the same fight—which never materialized. Even U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine of the 1960s reflected the primacy of “firepower, mobility, and aggressive leadership”.15 Often the tactics and operations undercut the strategic objective of the war itself. Hickey’s story also illuminates the sometimes tense relationship between the military and the academy. Then as now, the military tends to be skeptical of social scientists present in the battlespace. Hickey’s attempt to conduct further research with the Montagnards in 1961 was quashed by a CIA official who reputedly said he “did not want any anthropologists running around asking questions about the montagnards’ [sic] sex practices.”16 Advising the military as an outsider is challenging, and advice often goes unheeded. On the flip side, civilian social scientists are often sceptical of the military and its motives. At the end of the war, Hickey’s alma mater, the University of Chicago, rejected him for even a menial visiting professorship.17 His colleagues in the anthropology department objected to his association with RAND and his work for the government during the Vietnam War. The anti-war sentiment of professional anthropologists was formally

articulated by the American Anthropological Association in 1967 in a Statement on Research and Ethics, which resolved that “except in the event of a declaration of war by the Congress, academic institutions should not undertake activities or accept contracts in anthropology that are not related to their normal functions of teaching, research, and public services.”18 Since work for the U.S. government was generally not considered “public service,” this resolution effectively prevented most anthropologists from participating in government-sponsored work. Anthropologists became “the first, the loudest, and the harshest against their colleagues undertaking work for government agencies that have operational concerns overseas.”19 Virulent ad hominem attacks were launched against anthropologists such as Hickey, who “had committed the unpardonable sin of accepting DoD [Department of Defense] money, through the RAND Corporation, to support his work in Vietnam.”20 His peers questioned Hickey’s Faustian relationship with the government, providing ethnography for political purposes while advocating for the rights of the people he studied. Hickey’s Vietnam story ends as the process of ‘Vietnamization’ began, during which U.S. forces handed responsibility for security to local forces, leaving the conflict unfinished and government and society unstable. Back in the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs of Staff turned away from the messiness of small, irregular wars towards conventional wars that could more easily be won. The doctrine of AirLand Battle was as much a reflection of a real strategic threat as it was a rejection of military failure in Vietnam. In the words of Lieutenant General David Barno, “Refocusing on a major war in Europe offered to heal the painful scars of failed counterinsurgency.”21 At the time of writing, to the relief of many, the wars in the Middle East and Central Asia are slowly winding down (or are being pursued primarily with air power). It is tempting to put these experiences on the shelf and turn away from them, focusing instead on emergent peer competitor threats, just as the Joint Chiefs and the U.S. Army did at the end of the Vietnam War. However, if the U.S. government elects to become engaged in counterinsurgency and irregular warfare again sometime in the future—and given the historical record it is hard to imagine that this will not happen—then acknowledgement and analysis of socio-cultural dynamics between opposing military forces and local civilians will have value. All the firepower, technology, and sophisticated platforms designed for a major combat operation against a conventional threat that cost so much money and took so long to develop proved insufficient given the fight facing soldiers and marines in Iraq and Afghanistan. As General John Abizaid once noted, “What will win the global war on terrorism will be people that can cross the cultural divide. It’s an idea often overlooked by people [who] want to build a new firebase or a new national training center for tanks.”22 The nature of the tasks the military faced in Iraq and Afghanistan—fighting an insurgency and stabilizing a government—required less technical prowess and more information about the people living outside the forward operating bases. The U.S. was unprepared for what it faced and did not have the knowledge it needed. Given the history of small wars (especially the experiences of Somalia and Haiti less than a decade before) and the combined resources of the federal government, it is inexcusable that U.S. military personnel were deployed with no knowledge about the social systems of Iraq and Afghanistan, limited understanding of Islam, and minimal knowledge of the ethno-sectarian composition of these countries. To put it very simply, the next time the U.S. engages in a small war in a foreign country, these mistakes should not be made again.

When culture matters most “Wars are not tactical exercises writ large,” as British military historian Sir Michael Howard once wrote. “They are conflicts of societies, and they can be fully understood only if one understands the nature of the society fighting them. The roots of victory or defeat often have to be sought far from the battlefield, in political, social, or economic factors.”23 In the western military tradition, the belief that society and culture matters in a military context dates back to the fifth century BC when Herodotus wrote about the habits and beliefs of the Persians.24 In the eastern tradition, the imperative dates at least to Sun Tzu, writing around 400 BC. By the end of the U.S. military intervention in Iraq, understanding the people living in the area of operations was talked about as an imperative, rather than something optional. As then-Lieutenant General David Petraeus noted, “We used to just focus on the military terrain. Now we have to focus on the cultural terrain.”25 Under what conditions and in what circumstances is cultural knowledge most important to the military? Despite axiomatic statements regarding its utility, cultural knowledge matters most to the military enterprise when four conditions are met. First, military organizations seem to pay more attention to culture when they engage with an adversary or a civilian population that is ‘culturally distant.’ For example, when the U.S. fought against the Japanese during WWII, the armed forces actively pursued information about the society of the ‘other.’ As Ruth Benedict noted in 1944: Whether the issue was military or diplomatic, whether it was raised by questions of high policy or of leaflets to be dropped behind the Japanese front lines, every insight was important. In the all-out war Japan was fighting we had to know, not just the aims and motives of those in power in Tokyo, not just the long history of Japan, not just economic and military statistics; we had to know what their government could count on from the people. We had to try to understand Japanese habits of thought and emotion and the patterns into which these habits fell. We had to know the sanctions behind these actions and opinions.26

On the other hand, when opponents are culturally and/or socially similar, such as Germany during WWI and WWII, the military establishment appears to focus less on obtaining cultural knowledge of the host nation.27 Second, cultural knowledge becomes more important when the military operates in close contact with either civil society or civil authority in a foreign country. The experience of the U.S. in the 1990s in Somalia and Haiti shows that cultural knowledge matters more for small operations than for big wars. Small operations, especially those that involve the military in the execution of governmental tasks, bring the military into close contact with local civilians and host nation officials. It is in these contexts that understanding values, beliefs, norms, identity, and social organization contribute to the military’s ability to achieve its objectives. This principle is recognized in both U.S. and UK doctrine. According to Joint Publication 2–01.3, Joint Intelligence Preparation of the Operational Environment, “stability operations and IW [irregular warfare] requires a more detailed understanding of the relevant area’s sociocultural factors than is normally the case during traditional war.”28 Third, cultural knowledge matters more when firepower is limited—whether by doctrine, strategy, laws of war or political concerns. Big wars, with their emphasis on firepower, delivery platforms, and technology, do not require much cultural knowledge. Except perhaps at a strategic level, the unique cultural characteristics and social organization of the people living in the area of operations would have had little relevance to the outcome of a war fought between tanks in the Fulda Gap. As anthropologist Kevin Avruch once noted, “Shock and awe makes cultural knowledge irrelevant.”29 Fourth, cultural knowledge matters more when the strategic objective is not primarily military in nature.30 If the objective is the destruction of enemy forces then it hardly matters if populations are decimated, crops are burned, and buildings destroyed. Such was the case in the 1980–1988 conventional war between Iran and Iraq. If, however, the “object beyond war” includes a sociopolitical outcome—a “free, democratic society” in Vietnam or a “stable” society in Iraq, for example —then the host nation society should be taken into account in the development of strategy and the conduct of operations. Too often, military intervention results in neither a defeated, demobilized, disarmed opposing force nor a stable, secure society. The resurgence of the ‘defeated’ Taliban in Afghanistan offers evidence of the former, and the ongoing sectarian violence and rise of the Islamic State in Iraq provides evidence of the latter. If the strategic objective involves anything more than grinding the adversary to dust and bulldozing his society into the ground, then the longterm effect of war on the population should be considered during the planning phase of the war and during operations. Otherwise there is certain danger that operations designed to achieve the “object beyond war” will undercut that objective. In short, socio-cultural knowledge holds utility for the military, especially when conditions such as those detailed above have been met. However, this statement has a caveat. The conceptual frameworks and methodological approaches offered by anthropology have sometimes been treated by the U.S. military as a panacea that will instantaneously provide the cultural knowledge desired by military forces. The tools and methods of anthropology (and of the social sciences in general) are necessary but not sufficient to meet military requirements. As Doug Feith concluded in 2005 regarding the decision to go to war in Iraq: It helps to be deeply knowledgeable about an area, to know the people, to know the language, to know the history, the culture, the literature, but it is not a guarantee that you will have the right strategy or policy as a matter of statecraft for dealing with that area. You see, the great experts in certain areas sometimes get it fundamentally wrong … Expertise is a very good thing, but it is not the same thing as sound judgment regarding strategy and policy.31

Cultural knowledge will not fix a bad policy, but in some cases cultural knowledge may make implementation of foreign policy more effective, expedient or efficient. In the words of S. F. Nadel, an anthropologist who worked in colonial Sudan in the 1930s, cultural knowledge will not prevent disaster, but it may help administrators make “better blunders.”32

Story of the book The conditions listed above that tend to make cultural knowledge most critical to the military— cultural distance, close contact with civil society, limitation on firepower, and an “object beyond war” not just military in scope—were met during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was not surprising that ‘culture’ became (for a brief time) an important concept in the Pentagon. In 2009, the Joint Chiefs of Staff issued guidance to the professional military education (PME) institutions to incorporate culture into their curriculum. Substantially altered while this book was being written, the Joint Chiefs of Staff Officer Professional Military Education Policy (OPMEP) required that newly commissioned officers, for example, “know the operational definition of culture; describe the relevance of regional and cultural knowledge for operational planning; and explain the relationship and importance of knowing one’s own culture and another’s and the impacts on human interactions, behaviors, and mission accomplishment.”33 This guidance from the Joint Chiefs set a high bar, requiring that U.S. military officers understand culture almost as well as novice anthropologists. In 2011, the Provost of the Naval War College asked me to take a look at how and whether Joint Maritime Operations (JMO) was following the

2009 OPMEP guidance. After a trimester in JMO Seminar 15, I came to the conclusion that although many of the students (who were professional military officers at the major and lieutenant colonel rank) alluded frequently to their intercultural experiences down range and the instructors did the best they could to highlight these so-called ‘human terrain’ issues, culture was not systematically incorporated into the curriculum. How could it be? Despite the good intentions of the Joint Chiefs in promulgating such guidance, most faculty members at military education institutions have no particular interest or expertise in culture. Moreover, if the JMO department wanted to include it, there were few if any articles or books to assign on “culture and operational planning” or “culture and information operations.” At that point, I decided that I should shift the focus of my research from the narrow issue I had selected to military anthropology more broadly. The spirit of the Minerva Fellowship that brought me to the Naval War College, after all, was to enrich PME institutions with social science. Because this book was written in part to help military educational institutions meet the Joint Chiefs’ (now moot) guidance, it is structured according to concepts commonly found in officer advanced educational curricula.34 Each chapter covers a topic found in the joint professional military educational curriculum—including information operations, leadership, strategic objectives— and describes how and why the culture and society of the opposing forces and host nation influenced decisions, operations, and outcomes in these domains. Each chapter uses the life and times of an anthropologist who worked directly with the military as a lens to illuminate these concepts. The story of Ursula Graham Bower, for example—the only woman to hold a de facto combat command in the British Army during WWII—introduces and frames a deeper discussion about cross-cultural military leadership in extremis that can be generalized to other times and places. This book is a history, insofar as it explores certain key episodes in the history of military anthropology. But it also leans forward to bring the lessons and intellectual legacies of unique individuals into current discussion and debate within military circles. The cases in the book were selected because the anthropologists’ research interests and life experiences best illuminated the military concepts I wished to explore. Certainly, I could have chosen other anthropologists whose stories would have been equally illustrative: Evans-Pritchard’s command of a band of Bedouin in North Africa during WWII could just as well have been used to discuss cross-cultural military leadership.35 Where I had a choice of anthropologists, therefore, I chose the lesser known figure. While many anthropologists would prefer to obfuscate their discipline’s war legacy,36 I believe writing these individuals back into our history remains an important intellectual endeavor. I crafted the book so that each chapter could stand alone as a case study, so that professional military educational faculty could scatter chapters throughout their syllabi without needing to assign the whole book. Since each chapter can be read without reference to the rest of the book, I did not feel it necessary to organize the chapters in a strict chronology. The Introduction begins with Gerald Hickey in Vietnam, selected because Hickey’s experiences seemed to explicate both the drama of anthropological engagement with the military as well as military engagement with foreign societies. The next chapter, on Indirect Rule, transports the reader to Ghana under British colonial rule (1874–1956). The chapters that follow, on Military Leadership, Information Operations, Unconventional Warfare, Governance Operations, Counterinsurgency and Strategic Objectives, are organized chronologically, covering World War II (1939–45), post-WWII administration and reconstruction (1946–51), the Kenya Emergency (1952–60) and the Vietnam War (1955–75). The Conclusion of the book jumps back in time to the 1918 American intervention in Siberia, where a young lieutenant colonel named David Prescott Barrows struggled to understand the politics of intervention. Barrows, to my knowledge, is the only U.S. Army general to have a PhD in anthropology. As the apotheosis of military anthropology, his story is a good place to end the discussion. The omission of a case from Iraq and Afghanistan was intentional. As most of the chapters in this volume demonstrate, military intervention and the policies enacted in foreign territory often have long term consequences. In the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, not enough time has passed to be able to objectively assess those consequences. Some readers may question why this book discusses neither U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East nor British colonial policy in any great detail. The omission should not be interpreted as advocacy of neo-colonialism or U.S. foreign policy by default. Rather, these issues have been debated and discussed thoroughly in other forums and would only be repetitious here. Other readers will be disappointed that I make no judgments about the ethics or morality of conducting applied anthropology for the military, another topic which has been well-covered in other forums.37 My purpose is not to condemn, nor to articulate a political position, nor to redefine the field of anthropology. The true purpose of this book is to understand how military organizations have used socio-cultural knowledge at the strategic, operational and tactical level in a variety of different conflicts, and how individual anthropologists contributed their knowledge about the human condition to difficult national security problems, so that if socio-cultural knowledge plays an important role in future conflicts some of the pitfalls of the past might be avoided. Because this book was written primarily for a military audience, it rests on the assumption that the military is executing rather than formulating policy. The focus therefore falls on the military component of foreign policy implementation, rather than foreign policy decision making. Moreover, this book does not delve into cultural knowledge as used by non-military elements, such as how the

Department of State might apply this information in a diplomatic situation. It is primarily intended for military audiences and policy makers whose job it is to design, plan and execute these operations, but it is my hope that historians, anthropologists and other social scientists will also find it useful.

Barriers and impediments In a 2012 speech, LTG Charles Cleveland, the commander of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command, opined that: The nature of current conflict is that we are contesting in non-declared combat zones. What DOTMLPF [Doctrine, Organization, Training, Materiel, Leadership, Personnel and Facilities] do you need to fight in those places? In the land domain, the focus has been on tanks and other heavy stuff. Humans have been treated as a lesser case. The problem in Afghanistan and Iraq was that we didn’t have the right kinds of structures and knowledge to deal with the human domain.38

As these comments suggest, even when military organizations recognize the value of understanding opposing forces and host nation societies, they inevitably face impediments when it comes to acquiring, managing, disseminating and utilizing this knowledge at the sharp end of the foreign policy spear. What are conceptual, cultural or practical barriers to successful military operations in societies vastly different to our own? What problems do military organizations encounter over and over again when operating in the “human domain”? This introduction lays out five barriers that appear as major themes in the chapters that follow. The first challenge is that the increasing complexity of war —combined with the increased flow of information about the complexity of war as it is being fought —results in a strong need to simplify reality in order to manage time and tasks. This is the complexity problem. The simplification of reality through heuristics such as models, taxonomies, categories and frames enables the military to execute its kinetic missions but also limits understanding of human beings. This is the epistemology problem. Even when military personnel seek to understand their adversaries and the host nation population, they often discover that the culture of their own organizations creates barriers to understanding. This is the way of war problem. In attempting to use social science downrange, the military encounters another barrier: the models, theories and concepts of how a society actually works do not exist in the required form. This is the social theory problem. Now the real trouble begins—actually implementing U.S. foreign policy at the point of a gun. This is the thorniest problem of all: the military implementation of foreign policy.

The complexity problem In the summer of 2009, General Stanley McChrystal was shown a slide produced by the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff showing the U.S. military’s plan for “Afghanistan Stability/COIN Dynamics— Security.” The slide attempted to capture all of the political, economic, criminal, environmental and military dynamics in Afghanistan, and the interrelationship between them. “When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” said McChrystal.39 McChrystal’s witty comment captures a fundamental truth: war is exceedingly complex, requiring as it does, melding individual human beings with all their emotion, fear, and passion into an organized fighting force; the mastery and employment of lethal and non-lethal technology; the synchronization of logistic and supply chains; and the movement of men and machines across vast distances. All of this (and more) must be done in order to shift the adversary’s will at the same time as the adversary attempts to secure their own victory. Whether fought hundreds of years ago or today, with sticks and clubs or rocket propelled grenades, war has always been a complex human undertaking. The complexity of war is magnified when it is fought in a foreign environment, where soldiers must grapple with adversaries and host nation populations whose language, religion, customs and social organization differ from their own. “We are absolutely newcomers to this environment,” said one young officer deployed in Iraq. “It is so foreign to us. You couldn’t pick a place in the world that would be more foreign to most Americans than Iraq.”40 The ordinary fog and friction of war becomes amplified in a transcultural armed exchange.41 Both war and society can be characterized as complex, adaptive systems, and because every military action has consequences that ripple throughout the society, the intersection of society and war amplifies the complexity of both. Every social shift forces the military to adapt its tactics and operations. LTG Mike Oates, who served three tours in Iraq and commanded more than 25,000 troops in a violent region just south of Baghdad in 2007 and 2008, observed that “Iraq is like a giant Jenga puzzle. Moving one small piece has an effect on it all. We have to be very careful that we don’t exaggerate one person’s view or one set of lessons, because we will miss important things.”42 Wars—especially those fought under a different sky—have not become any less complex over time. What has certainly changed in the past fifty years is the amount of simultaneous information that commanders and soldiers have regarding their own forces, the adversary’s forces, the environment and the population. In 1837, when battlefield intelligence was limited to the reports of scouts and

what could be seen through binoculars, Karl von Clausewitz wrote “war is the realm of uncertainty; three quarters of the factors on which action is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty.”43 The so-called “fog of war” has not lifted over time, despite the vast array of sensors and real time intelligence that characterizes the contemporary battlefield. If anything, the neverending flow of information has resulted in a state of permanent information overload for soldiers and commanders. “The troubling paradox,” as Paul Virilio observed, is “that greater complexity continues to yield ever faster rates of processing and operation.”44 Faster rates of information processing and operation, in turn, leads to greater complexity.45 Because “complex systems are computationally as well as psychologically unmanageable for humans,”46 they must be simplified and controlled to be managed. Regardless of time and place, militaries always seek to simplify, organize, contain or control the complexity of war. The art of war —warfare—is the means by which order is imposed on the chaos of fear, death, violence, and irrationality. Michael Herr’s Dispatches, one of the best books about the Vietnam War, captures this tension: That fall, all that the Mission talked about was control: arms control, information control, resources control, psycho-political control, population control, control of the almost supernatural inflation, control of terrain through the Strategy of Periphery. But when the talk had passed, the only thing left standing up that looked true was your sense of how out of control things really were.47

Control—however elusive—remains a dominant theme in the conceptual framework of contemporary warfare, found in concepts such as “Information Superiority,” “Full Spectrum Dominance,” “Command and Control” and “Precision-Guided Munitions.”48 Control—whether of territory, command and control, or social control—can be achieved through a variety of mechanisms, including technology, force, and conceptual ordering.49 For our purposes here, the most important mechanism by which militaries impose order on the chaos of war is conceptual ordering. Conceptual ordering, like technology, separates signal from noise, indicates what is important and what is irrelevant, and thereby imposes order on the chaos of war. Doctrine exemplifies the military process of conceptual ordering. At the joint level the effort to understand the environment—both physical and ephemeral—is broadly guided by doctrine for Joint Intelligence Preparation of the Operational Environment (JIPOE), which is “the analytical process used by joint intelligence organizations to produce intelligence assessments, estimates, and other intelligence products in support of the Joint Force Commander’s (JFC) decision-making process.” The process involves four major steps: defining the total operational environment; describing the impact of the operational environment; evaluating the adversary; and determining and describing adversary potential courses of action.50 Although the manual cautions that the JIPOE should be “holistic,” these complex issues are frequently reduced to a checklist of characteristics, which might include “population demographics (ethnic groups, ideological factions, religious groups and sects, age distribution, income groups, public health issues),” “political and socioeconomic factors (economic system, political factions), or “psychological characteristics of adversary decision making.”51 Each step of the JIPOE process organizes reality into discrete, manageable elements and thereby directs attention of a commander and his staff towards toward that which is most ‘important.’ But T.S. Eliot wrote in 1934: “Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”52 In sum, in order to constrain the chaos of war, military organizations must seek control—whether territorial control, command and control of forces, or social control. The means of control— technological, conceptual ordering or the use of force—organizes reality, structures experience and separates signal from noise. However, control in a military system should be thought of as an aspiration, a goal, something to be achieved. In reality, control is elusive and difficult to maintain. Like a chimera, the closer it seems the further it recedes. The Do Long Bridge scene in Apocalypse Now reminds us that control is often an illusion in war. As troops fire on a Viet Cong position across the river, Willard asks, “Who’s in command here?” The soldier called Roach answers: “Ain’t you?”

The epistemology problem To manage the complexity of war, the military must exert control over territory, units and people. The most important control mechanism for the purposes of this discussion is conceptual ordering, which refers to the concepts, ideas and frames commonly employed by the military to organize the world into a manageable level of complexity. Conceptual ordering imposes order on the chaos of war, but may also limit perception. This is not just a problem for the military, but for humanity in general. Because constantly increasingly complexity and information overload have become an almost universal condition of humanity, individuals almost everywhere reduce complexity and solve problems through the use of schemas, models, and heuristics. That is, they employ their own knowledge and experience (in the form of educated guesses, trial and error, and common sense) to solve problems.53 Categories, frames and rules of thumb simplify complexity, but they come with a price: the heuristics that enable the military to execute incredibly complex tasks also limit perception—and therefore understanding—of other human beings. This can be referred to as the epistemology problem. The meaning, limitations, and acquisition of knowledge are the subject of an entire branch of

philosophy called epistemology. Questions such as “how do we know?” and “what do we know?” have been the subject of ongoing debate among philosophers since Plato. The sense of the word epistemology, as I am using it here, however, comes from the work of Gregory Bateson (see chapter 4). In Bateson’s view, reality is always distorted by the process of perception (the filters of language, code, habit, culture, and so on). There is no way to actually know anything, since the very processes of perceiving distorts or changes the object of perception. Yet, for Bateson, these filters were not an impediment to knowledge; rather, they were actually a form of knowledge: the neural filtering that signals to a frog’s brain that small dots are flies, and the cultural filtering that predisposes a person to believe or disbelieve in miracles or economic determinism, are both epistemology.54 Even rats in a maze have an epistemology, an internalized theory of knowledge that calibrates their perceptual biases. The biases are our epistemology.55 Accordingly, the conceptual ordering employed by the military is a type of epistemology, a form of knowing, and like all forms of epistemology, it has flaws. In considering the intellectual world of policymakers and military personnel, one could draft a long list of epistemological biases, cognitive shortcuts and intellectual fallacies that have resulted in negative strategic outcomes. Indeed, there is a substantial and growing body of academic literature on the topic of misperception, bias and confusion in international relations. Much of the international relations literature on misperception in international politics concerns how states (or statesmen) fail to understand other states (or other statesmen).56 A smaller body of literature concerns how military organizations (especially in the context of intelligence analysis) misperceive their adversaries.57 Most of the chapters in this volume, however, concern the interaction of military organizations with host nation societies, a subject on which there is relatively little literature.58 Since a comprehensive review is beyond the scope of this chapter, this scholarship breaks roughly into three different areas: sources of misperception, types of misperception, and (less frequently) outcomes of misperception. Misperception literature that focuses primarily on the origins of misunderstanding tends to look at deeply rooted cultural, social and psychological constructs in order to explain downstream policy outcomes.59 Speaking very generally, this literature posits that ideas and concepts in the minds of policymakers and military personnel exert a force on both how and why decisions are made, and on how operations are conducted. One origin of misperception in international security policy is ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism, a term coined by W. G. Sumner in 1906, means the “view of things in which one’s own group is the center of everything, and all others are scaled and rated with reference to it.”60 Ethnocentrism may include strong group identification, a feeling of cultural superiority, or an aversion to people who do not share the same group identity.61 All military organizations may be ethnocentric to differing degrees, since the ability to kill the enemy often depends on perceiving them as less than human. As Ken Booth has argued in Strategy and Ethnocentrism, “ethnocentrism contributes to the ‘vilification of the human’ which makes killing easier.”62 While ethnocentrism may be psychologically beneficial to the military for certain purposes, on the negative side, ethnocentrism may also result in the underestimation of enemy capabilities, or lead to an overestimation of one’s own capabilities. Prior to the kamikaze attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Army War Plans Division affirmed that the Japanese “lack of originality is a national trait.”63 The Japanese, on the other hand, viewed Americans as “undisciplined, unmilitary, and unconcerned with anything except pursuit of the jazzy life,” and expected American soldiers to flee at the first taste of combat.64 Another source of misunderstanding is orientalism, which according to Edward Saïd is “a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident,’” which views Arabs and Muslims as foreign, alien, exotic, and fundamentally ‘Other’ in comparison with the West.65 Western cultural prejudices and archetypes of Arab and Islamic people as irrational, violent, emotional and childlike function as a justification for colonial domination.66 Patrick Porter, in Military Orientalism, expands Said’s thesis to current military conceptualizations of Arab and Islamic societies, offering a criticism of the U.S. military’s western view of “Eastern war.” His main objection is that the U.S. military takes a primordialist view of culture “as an immobile, unified set of ideas and instincts, a natural ‘given’ force created by traditions and collective experiences, where identity is more or less fixed by inherited, socially transmitted factors.”67 This approach to culture, Porter argues, leads to a misunderstanding of opposing forces. In his view, for example, the Taliban should not be conceptualized as a tribal society, operating within the parameters of Pashtunwali, adhering to traditional systems of authority. Rather, the “wartime behavior of Afghans suggests that their culturally-rooted beliefs and taboos are not decisively important;”68 instead they “operate as cultural realists, reinventing their cultural codes as they go.”69 Military orientalism, according to Porter, in representing the ‘Other’ as exotic, strange, and different, prevents accurate understanding of opposing forces.70 The converse intellectual fallacy of orientalism is universalism, the belief that other people are (or want to be) fundamentally just like us. American foreign policy often operates under the “traditional assumption that our primary norms and values are in theory at least valid everywhere.” Thus, for the past sixty years we have been engaged in building an international legal system and developing international institutions that reflect “universally accepted principles” such as civil liberties, democracy and human rights.71 For example, “There was a tendency among promoters of the [2003–2011 Iraq] war,” as Francis Fukuyama observed, “to believe that democracy was a default condition to which societies would revert once liberated from dictators.”72 The tendency towards

universalism in U.S. foreign policy has not changed with Presidential administrations. One need only look at the 2010 National Security Strategy (NSS) for evidence of the assumption that “certain values are universal,” including “an individual’s freedom to speak their mind, assemble without fear, worship as they please, and choose their own leaders; they also include dignity, tolerance, and equality among all people, and the fair and equitable administration of justice.” The NSS, despite much evidence to the contrary,73 states that “these values have been claimed by people of every race, region, and religion.”74 Exporting our political institutions is indeed a lofty goal. However, as Adda Bozeman once noted, “‘democracy’ with its Western connotations of parliamentary or congressional institutions, a multiparty system, elections, constitution law, and bills of rights is basically alien to each of the non-Western realms.” 75 Just as there are many subterranean psycho-social origins of misunderstanding, there are also many specific types of misunderstanding between states, between opposing forces and between militaries and host nation populations.76 What types of misperception are found in a military context? In military circles it is somewhat of a cliché to observe that “generals are always prepared to fight the last war.” Indeed, this type of reasoning by historical analogy is one type of misperception that serves to reduce complexity.77 In Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965, Yuen Foong Khong argues that policy makers employ historical analogies to help them perform diagnostic tasks, including defining the nature of the situation; assessing the stakes; providing prescriptions; evaluating alternatives by predicting success; evaluating moral rightness; and warning about dangers.78 Cognitive shortcuts may save time and reduce the complexity of reality to manageable levels, but they may also lead to false conclusions, inaccurate assumptions, and misguided comparisons.79 Specifically, analogies often lead to incorrect assessments, flawed conclusions and bad policies. Before the war in Iraq, for example, U.S. senior officials began to view Iraq as a new version of Nazi Germany in which Saddam Hussein was Hitler with a bigger moustache.80 The problem with such analogies is that they “allow one to glance over the particulars of Iraqi society and argue about Iraq’s future on the basis of analogies rather than conditions within Iraq itself.”81 Another type of misperception (covered in several chapters of this book) is the frame, a heuristic mechanism for organizing experience and guiding action that affects how we understand the world and how the world understands us. When military forces (or indeed people in general) perceive reality, they build a frame around their picture of the world. That which is inside the frame is considered, posited, evaluated and analyzed. Everything outside the frame is ignored, avoided, disallowed and unconsidered. By framing acts of political violence as “terrorism”, as Michael Bhatia has noted, “this subject becomes known in a manner which may permit certain forms of inquiry and engagement, while forbidding or excluding others.”82 Thus, the ‘terrorist’ frame, instead of clarifying, may actually obscure reality. For example, labeling Hizbullah as a terrorist group hampers understanding of the actual plans, motives, and worldview of the organization.83 In “imagining Hizbullah as the ultimate alien who cannot be known or understood,” the production of actual knowledge about the organization is compromised.84 Frames used in the domain of national security policy such as ‘terrorism,’ ‘communism’ or ‘warlord’ may offer the illusion of an explanation for violence that otherwise appears gruesome, pointless, and inexplicable. But condemnation is not explanation. Such frames actually limit understanding of the “complex local variations, motives, histories and interrelationships” of armed groups.85 For Michael Bhatia, the questions that need to be asked and answered are: “Who are they —those ragtag soldiers in the mountains, enclaves, jungles or urban ghettos? What do they want? What drives them both individually and as a group? And then, why do they hate ‘us’?”86 While Hizbullah may well use terrorism as a tactic, framing them as terrorists hinders accurate understanding of how they function as an organization and therefore prevents development of effective strategy. In summary, military organizations generally seek to reduce the profuse, endless complexity of the battlespace. To do that, they must rely to some degree on heuristics, cognitive shortcuts, and preexisting schemas for sorting the world into orderly categories. The heuristics, although necessary to accomplish complex tasks in a complex environment, may also limit one’s ability to comprehend the environment. We now come to the third barrier: even when military personnel seek to understand their adversaries and the host nation population, they often discover that the culture of their own organizations creates barriers to understanding.

The ‘way of war’ problem One afternoon in Seminar 15 of Joint Maritime Operations at the U.S. Naval War College, the discussion turned to the ability of the U.S. military to conduct counterinsurgency operations, including the structural, organizational, and doctrinal impediments to doing so. One of the students, an Army lieutenant colonel with multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, grew frustrated and began to argue that the problem with U.S. counterinsurgency efforts was not about the size of brigades, rules of engagement, or the lack of training. Rather, he said, “our ‘solve’ is based on our idea of their end state. Our own culture gets in the way of understanding what other people believe is their ‘solve.’” In other words, U.S. forces come into theater with mission objectives and their own pre-

conceived ideas about how to complete those tasks. Rarely, if ever, do U.S. military commanders (whether at the strategic, operational, or tactical level) ask the host nation population: what are your objectives? How best can we achieve them? The reason for the omission of those questions results not from a lack of training, inappropriate force structure, battle rhythm or any number of potential variables, but from military culture itself. The ‘way of war’ problem is the inability of American military personnel to understand the world from the subjective viewpoint of another culture and the corresponding tendency to impose pre-determined solutions on other people. Broadly, what is the U.S. ‘way of war’? In 1973, Russell F. Weigley argued in The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy that since the American Civil War the U.S. military has tended to engage in big wars using heavy firepower and strategies of annihilation in the quest for decisive victory. For the U.S. military “the complete overthrow of the enemy, the destruction of his military power, is the object of war.”87 The U.S. military, according to Weigley, historically utilized a narrow definition of strategy that tended to “give little regard to the nonmilitary consequences of what they were doing” and which “excluded from consideration the purposes for which a battle or war was being fought.”88 The American way of war is characterized by big machines, big guns, big battles and big manpower. As Lieutenant General David Barno has pointed out, in this ‘big war’ paradigm “‘real soldiers’ rode to battle in armored vehicles.”89 While the U.S. certainly has a long military tradition of fighting small wars and insurgencies (which would tend to contradict Weigley’s characterization),90 a way of war (like a social norm) is not necessarily what a nation does, but what it wants to do. As Tom Mahnken has observed, “a nation’s ‘way of war’ is an expression of how the nation’s military wants to fight wars.”91 A way of war is, in that sense, a preference. The U.S. military prefers to fight major combat operations, treating contingency operations and other types of small wars as mere diversions from the main event, or as a limited specialized function of special operations forces. Historically in the U.S., few attempts were made to develop doctrine or capture lessons learned, and knowledge was transmitted orally from veterans to their younger cohort.92 Even at the apex of frontier warfare in the Western territories, “military leaders looked upon Indian warfare as a fleeting irritant” that distracted from the “nineteenth-century orthodoxy as exemplified in the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War, and the Spanish-American War.”93 In the U.S. where the preferred warfighting style is decisive victory using maximum firepower, post-conflict operations such as ‘nation building’ and ‘stability operations’ tend to be viewed with disdain and pushed to the margins. As one military planner observed, “all the A-Team guys wanted to be on Phase III and the B-Team guys were put on Phase IV.” 94 Lethal operations during the high intensity phase of warfighting tend to be overvalued, while small wars (in which socio-cultural knowledge and cross-cultural subjectivity are most critical) tend to be marginalized. As a result, the socio-cultural knowledge and cognitive skills associated with this type of military engagement are not permanent features of training, education, wargaming or doctrine. Evidence for this assertion can be found in the forgotten or misremembered doctrine for counterinsurgency, even as the Taliban began shooting at ISAF forces; in the lack of a single course on military government offered at the war colleges, even as the U.S. established an occupation authority in Iraq; in the focus on mechanized ‘initial entry’ operations at the combat training centers, even when U.S. forces were highly unlikely to roll into a third theater of operations. Lessons that should have been learned about the importance of regional economy, social structure, local political traditions, traditional authority and the importance of religion in operations other than war were mostly ignored.95 In his article “Irregular Enemies and the Essence of Strategy,” Colin S. Gray lists thirteen characteristics of the American way of war, one of which is “culturally-challenged.”96 He notes, “from the Indian Wars on the internal frontier, to Iraq and Afghanistan today, the American way of war has suffered from the self-inflicted damage growing out of a failure to understand the enemy of the day.”97 Naturally, the question arises: why is the American military so “culturally-challenged?” The answer lies partially in pragmatic considerations such as force protection, in which risk to soldiers is reduced as much as possible. Preventing or minimizing casualties is critical for ethical and practical reasons, but one of the by-products of force protection is that it isolates soldiers from the population and may therefore be counterproductive in a counterinsurgency campaign. As one Marine officer explained, “it’s hard to get close to the population if you’re wearing body armor and manning a 0.50 cal.”98 Another plausible explanation of the U.S. military’s “culturally-challenged” way of war is the unit rotation policy, in which brigades are rotated out of theater every 9–12 months, preventing military personnel from developing relationships with local nationals (and preventing local nationals from developing relationships with the unit).99 One could also point to the hindrances created by laws and regulations that prevent the U.S. government from adapting to local conditions and local priorities. For example, as one Navy Judge Advocate General (JAG) noted, “We built a school in the middle of the Sahara with a wheelchair ramp to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act.”100 While pragmatic concerns cannot be entirely discounted as factors for why the U.S. is “culturally challenged” in war, imperatives within the military system itself also offer an explanation. The American military prefers to fight major combat operations and therefore, the system produces officers and troops highly qualified to fight major combat operations. One of the distinguishing features of major combat operations (as opposed to counterinsurgency, stability operations or peace

enforcement) is the mechanization of war. To prepare for conventional mechanized war, military personnel must first and foremost be competent operators of complex weapons systems. Thus, the professional military education system, especially at the pre-commissioning and primary levels, has been designed to produce officers who are not necessarily poets or statesmen, but masters of lethal technology. At the U.S. Naval Academy (USNA), for example, around 65 per cent of the students are science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM) majors, as required by U.S. Navy regulations.101 To keep the ratio at 65 per cent, USNA midshipmen are actively encouraged to major in scientific disciplines. As one Naval Academy faculty member observed: “the Navy thinks that all they need to know is machines; they believe their first job is to keep the water out of the bilges.”102 The U.S. military excels at producing firm, decisive, rule-abiding, technologically competent leaders to meet the imperatives of major combat operations. Irregular warfare, “in which combat is integrated with civil society,” mandates a very different set of skills.103 As noted in the Quadrennial Defense Review Report (2006), for example, “developing broader linguistic capability and cultural understanding is critical to prevail in the long war and to meet 21st century challenges.”104 In the U.S., however, military officers have traditionally not been selected, educated, trained or rewarded for their deep knowledge of other societies or their cross-cultural skills. In general, the U.S. military does not value such skills except at rare moments (such as the mid-2000s) when they suddenly become critical. During the war in Iraq, American policy makers and senior military commanders shared a passionate commitment to stabilizing the country, providing security, and creating a democratic nation. Their motivations cannot be faulted, and from their point of view they were doing the right thing. Yet, from the perspective of many Iraqis, American actions destroyed their security, increased the level of violence, and empowered Shia elites. After Saddam Hussein was deposed and the interim government established, about 65 per cent of the seats in the newly-formed Iraqi Governing Council went to Shia representatives. From an American perspective, this made sense because it was political representation proportional to the population. But from a Sunni perspective, deBa’athification was seen as de-Sunnification. Colonel Derek Harvey, a career Army intelligence officer, suggested that before building a strategy or designing an operation the U.S. military should try to view the world from the Sunni perspective: Think about what if your life, your future, the future of your grandchildren and your children, your place in society, your wealth, even your homes, your jobs, your careers were suddenly taken from you—if the whole world as you knew it was gone, and the future looked bleak because it looked like it was going to be dominated by outsiders, as well as by those that you had fought once before—say the SCIRI [Supreme Council for the Islamic Republic of Iraq] and the Badr Corps, along with Iran—and it looked like the Shi’a theocratic movement was in the ascendancy, linked to Jaafari and Dawah, the political group representing the Shi’a. So think about it from the perspective of many of the Sunnis—it does make a difference when you do that.105

Harvey articulates the essence of subjective perception: understanding how the world looks from another person’s point of view, seeing the situation as it looks through the eyes of the local people. Subjective perception is closely related to empathy, which has been defined as “a complex imaginative process in which an observer simulates another person’s situated psychological states while maintaining clear self-other differentiation.”106 Without the ability to see the world from another person’s point of view, we propose solutions to political, economic, and social problems based on our own taken-for-granted and unexamined cultural norms, values, and ideas. We neglect to ask other people what they value, and what their “solve” might be. “Our solve” in Iraq was based on a Western model of proportional democratic representation in which ethno-sectarian identity did not determine party membership. This solution proved almost unworkable in the complex political environment of Iraq where tribal, political, ethnic and religious identities have always intersected and frequently conflicted. The Iraqi “solve” might have proved equally unworkable given the divided nature of the society, but real solutions must incorporate how people view their own security, government, and society. Simply imposing an external “solve” based on an exogenous political philosophy cannot alleviate underlying tensions or reduce conflict. Unfortunately, the U.S. military system tends to produce soldiers who cannot imagine another’s “solve” and who are not inclined to adopt the subjective viewpoint of another person. Their understanding of the world remains bounded by their own experience, entrenched in their own point of view. This has operational consequences. As one young officer told me, “the problem we have in Iraq is that we’re all white kids from the suburbs. We can’t imagine what it’s like to live in a world where the police are not the good guys—they’re the enemy.”107 When the mission includes ensuring the security of local civilians and the reconstitution of local security forces then suspending preconceptions about the role, function, and nature of security services and understanding that security in Basra means something different than in Baton Rouge is a good place to start. In sum, the American military generally prefers to fight major combat operations and its educational system produces officers and troops highly qualified for this purpose. However, what makes a good officer in a conventional war does not necessarily prepare her for counterinsurgency

or stability operations. The ability to adopt the subjective viewpoint of another person—to empathize with someone from a different society—makes it possible to promulgate a “solve” that is theirs, not ours. This should be the starting point for counterinsurgency and all other forms of irregular warfare, not merely an afterthought in an after-action review.

The social theory problem Even if a military officer felt comfortable with complexity, found a way of slowing the fire hose of battlespace information to a trickle, found time to think slowly without overly relying on heuristics, and was able to hear the solutions that other people have discovered for themselves, that officer would encounter yet another problem: no two people (least of all anthropologists) agree what culture is, or sometimes even whether it exists. If the military wanted to understand the operational environment using academic theory, they would be hard pressed to find concepts that could be put into practice operationally. This might be called the social theory problem. To execute irregular warfare missions, military personnel require skills to help them interact with foreign people and knowledge about the culture and society of those people. Philosophers who specialize in epistemology distinguish between acquaintance knowledge (“knowledge how”) and propositional knowledge (“knowledge that”).108 Acquaintance knowledge can be viewed as a process involving the application of expertise, such as knowing how to fire a weapon.109 Propositional knowledge can be conceived of as a state of mind, a mental condition of “understanding gained through experience or study; the sum or range of what has been perceived, discovered, or learned.”110 Firing a gun, for example, does not require knowledge of theoretical physics but it does require balance, breathing, and coordination, all part of the practical knowledge of shooting a weapon.111 Similarly, application of cultural knowledge to operational problems faced by the military requires both knowledge about the local society (“knowledge that”) and knowledge of how to engage people within the society appropriately, through negotiations for example (“knowledge how”). Socio-cultural knowledge, as used here, means propositional understanding of the theoretical concept of culture and propositional understanding of any specific culture (including one’s own), whether that knowledge is tacit or explicit, individual or collective. On the other hand, socio-cultural acquaintance knowledge (“knowledge how”) is referred to here as cultural competence. These are different things and the military needs both to be effective downrange. As one Special Forces officer noted, Not all soldiers possess the natural ability to effectively interact with civilians. Our conventional forces are not trained in performing these complex interactions … Soldiers need a level of maturity coupled with training in effective techniques that are culturally specific and focus on highlighting adaptive thinking in order to interact with locals, and build the bridge to mutual trust by providing an open conduit for communication.112

As this observation indicates, cultural competence is essentially a skill, which has been defined by Brian Selmeski as a knowledge set that enables individuals to “quickly and accurately comprehend, then appropriately and effectively engage individuals from distinct cultural backgrounds to achieve the desired effect despite not having an in-depth knowledge of the other culture.”113 Cultural competence is the skill that allows socio-cultural knowledge to be applied in different situations. Socio-cultural knowledge and cultural competence should also be distinguished from technical domain knowledge, which refers to expert knowledge about a particular technical area such as economic policy, agricultural development, and educational reform. Technical domain knowledge is necessary but not sufficient for any military engagement that involves the administration or reconstruction of institutions. Institutions, like the people that create and maintain them, often have superficial similarities in form or function. Clam shells, like Euros, can serve as a means of exchange; serial monogamy, like polyandry, provides a means to satisfy sexual desire and reproduce the human species. While the form and function may be similar, the cultural meaning may differ widely. How Iraqis think about the role and function of police differs from the way in which someone in rural Alabama thinks about the role of the sheriff. If the military’s mission involves security sector reform in a foreign country, technical knowledge of policing must be complemented by cultural understanding of the beliefs, norms, concepts and prejudices associated with the police in that particular society. As Brigadier General Ferdinand Irrizarry has observed: You can’t just take a lawyer from Boise and send him to Afghanistan and expect the rule of law to emanate from him like a garden. … The disciplines must be understood in regional context. Take a great city planner, but he’s useless if he doesn’t understand how cities work in Asia. He has to convert his concept of city planning to the situation on the ground.114

In order for a military unit to operate effectively in another society, they ideally need to possess all three types of knowledge: technical domain knowledge, cultural competence, and socio-cultural knowledge. But what exactly does the military require in terms of socio-cultural knowledge? To begin with, different types of operations generate different kinds of sociocultural knowledge requirements. For example, humanitarian aid missions generally have the objective of providing succor and support to a civilian population, whether the cause is a man-made famine or a natural

disaster. During this type of mission, the military must obviously understand the country’s basic infrastructure, since this will influence decisions about the most effective aid distribution routes and about how to restore basic services. In addition, the military would need to evaluate the presence of ‘spoilers’ seeking advantage or attempting to derail the relief mission, understand the existing medical and health care system, identify the roles and responsibilities of local government, and identify food preferences. If the local people view peanuts as animal fodder, peanut butter is probably not the best choice for human food relief. A major combat operation, on the other hand, will probably not require knowledge about the local population’s food preferences, but might require arcane knowledge about the conceptualization of unseen, demonic forces for conducting psychological operations (the ‘White Death’ Russian soldiers believed lurked in the snow during the Finnish-Soviet Winter War, for example).115 Different types of operations create certain socio-cultural knowledge; equally, different levels of war generate different socio-cultural knowledge requirements.116 At the strategic level, a combatant commander responsible for an entire theater charged with deterring future conflict, among other tasks, should certainly understand the religious beliefs and political ideologies concerning conflict resolution in that society. At an operational level, a Joint Force Commander “must ensure that the campaign plan and strategy are built to accommodate the nature and character of the indigenous population.”117 Thus, the commander probably should have a comprehensive understanding of the social structure (including tribes, ethnic groups, civic organizations, and so on), the economic system (including patterns of production, distribution, and consumption), the legal system (including the judiciary, law enforcement, and penal code), and so on. At a tactical level on a squad or platoon, the personal engagement of soldiers and marines with local nationals would require understanding social norms and behaviors so that, at a bare minimum, U.S. forces can avoid grossly offending the locals. In other words, the implied tasks at different levels of war necessitate different types of socio-cultural knowledge of varying complexity to accomplish those tasks. Different phases of conflict also require different kinds of socio-cultural knowledge. In planning a campaign, the U.S. military divides the time sequence into six phases: shape, deter, seize the initiative, dominate, stabilize, and enable civil authority.118 Phase Zero, the shaping phase of the campaign, involves activities: to enhance international legitimacy and gain multinational cooperation by shaping perceptions and influencing adversaries’ and allies’ behavior; developing allied and friendly military capabilities for self-defense and multinational operations; … and mitigating conditions that could lead to a crisis.119

Put simply, Phase Zero refers to the prevention of conflict, and to do that socio-cultural knowledge is critical. The kind of socio-cultural knowledge required during Phase Zero—which at a minimum includes an understanding of prevailing political views, existing ethno-sectarian tensions, attitudes towards regional powers, norms regarding the scope of authority of key leaders, concepts regarding transparency and corruption, and so on—would be quite different than the type of knowledge necessary for “seizing the initiative,” which would likely be much more limited in scope. The knowledge requirements listed above are guesswork: deductions made on the basis of observation and experience. The truth of the matter is that in the mad, chaotic rush to fix the problems in Iraq and Afghanistan, there was no formal process (at least that I witnessed) to align military requirements with programs, contracts, and research funding for socio-cultural research. According to the Defense Science Board, “no single repository, coordination entity, or management function exists today” for DoD social science efforts.120 No process existed in the bureaucracy for determining what kind of sociocultural knowledge was necessary for what particular missions, prioritizing research, or much less funding it. The DoD and the various branches of the military (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines), all of whom had vastly different missions (drug interdiction, governance operations, counterinsurgency, unconventional warfare, amphibious assault), generated their own requirements for socio-cultural data. Sometimes these requirements overlapped and sometimes they were sui generis. Sometimes they were broad and general, and at others incredibly specific. Sometimes the requirements emerged from the bottom up, such as the Joint Urgent Operational Needs Statements from deployed brigades that eventually created the Human Terrain System (HTS). Sometimes these requirements were issued from the top down, such as Department of Defense Directive, 3000.05, Military Support for Stability, Security, Transition, and Reconstruction (SSTR) Operations, which mandated (among other things) that the Commanders of the Geographic Combatant Commands include information “on key ethnic, cultural, religious, tribal, economic and political relationships” as a component of their intelligence campaign planning.121 What did the operational military need to know? As my co-authors and I observed in a 2011 book chapter, to our knowledge, no individuals or agencies have thus far engaged in an empirical study to identify and validate what it is that commanders actually want or need to know about the socio-cultural environment in their area of operations.

Consequently, as part of a multiyear project to revise the training curriculum for the Army’s Human Terrain System, we sought to determine what military socio-cultural knowledge requirements actually were. Our specific goal was to identify “core concepts,” the categories of

socio-cultural information about local populations most commonly used by Human Terrain Teams (HTTs). To do this, we indexed all the “requests for research” made by teams deployed in both Afghanistan and Iraq to our research center in the U.S., which gave us an idea of the research projects teams were conducting downrange. Additionally, we surveyed and interviewed team members regarding their research projects, methods of collection and analysis, and forms of final products. Based on this process, we were able to identify the major concepts salient for brigades and higher echelons in two theaters of war. The things that commanders wanted to know were remarkably consistent between both theaters and over time. They included concepts such as social structure, roughly defined as the “relations between groups of persons within a system of groups” through which people organized themselves (for example, tribal, kin-based, geographical, ideological),122 and how these social groups create and reproduce social identity, inform decision making, and influence leadership structures. Other critical concepts included the political system (both formal and informal), the economic system (both formal and informal), and interests/ grievances (particularly pertaining to security, intra- and extra-group conflict, and administration of justice). Our efforts as part of the HTS represented one way to ascertain the type of socio-cultural knowledge needed by military units. Another way to empirically assess military socio-cultural knowledge requirements would be to collect and analyze commanders’ critical information requirements (CCIRs) in order to ascertain what kinds of socio-cultural and/or technical domain knowledge they express a need for. Doctrinally, CCIRs have two primary components: priority intelligence requirements (PIR), which are focused on opposing forces and other threats, and friendly force information requirements (FFIR), which are focused on the capacity and state of one’s own forces and those of coalition partners.123 The war in Afghanistan demonstrated that a third category was needed. Under the command of LTG David Rodriquez, ISAF Joint Command (IJC) identified and defined the concept of Host Nation Information Requirements (HNIR), concerning friendly nation institutions or organizations. A 2009 draft of the IJC’s HNIR articulates broad categories of required knowledge, such as civil society leadership (formal and informal), public confidence in leadership, relationship of leadership to power structures, relationship of leadership to international community, constitutional government, tribal and traditional government, assistance programs, governmental accountability, perception of government, host nation security forces, perception of access to justice, effectiveness of judicial system, infrastructure, economic resources, perception of quality of life, reintegration programs, and so on.124 In theory, one could aggregate all the HNIRs across all theaters to build a composite picture of socio-cultural knowledge requirements, but to my knowledge this has not been done. Taken together, the HNIR requirements detailed above and the empirical research on “core concepts” offers some insight into the type of socio-cultural knowledge that the U.S. military found necessary in Afghanistan and Iraq. To implement foreign policy downrange, the military would need a model of society that could be applied operationally in different phases of conflict (from “shaping” to “enabling civil authority”), at different levels of war (from the strategic to the tactical), and during different types of operations (from humanitarian aid missions to major combat operations). This model would need to be scalable from small societies (such as nomadic pastoralists) to very large ones (complex, urbanized countries). This model would need to capture at a minimum social organization, economic systems, political systems, legal systems, identity formation, traditional authority structures, types of power and modes of acquisition, decision making, norms and sanctions, the relationship between the society and external forces, beliefs and symbols, and how all of these moving parts fit together.125 This model would first and foremost have to be relevant to the military’s mission, as noted by Brigadier General Benjamin C. Freakley in a 2005 article “Cultural Awareness and Combat Power.” Our real, long term, dilemma is defining the significant military aspects of culture as they might apply in any theater … and further determining how these various aspects of culture manifest themselves and might influence tactical operations.126

Unfortunately, the type of information required for counterinsurgency and stability operations bore little resemblance to what the intelligence system had been designed to produce for the military customer in major combat operations. This flaw came as a revelation to some but had actually been identified almost a decade earlier. During the 1993 Somalia operation, the military discovered that it needed something more than in-depth orders of battle, targeting data, and traditional military capabilities analysis. “Commanders on the ground,” according to Lieutenant General James R. Clapper, Jr., then director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, needed “detailed information regarding local customs, ethnicity, biographic data, military geography, and infectious diseases.” Producing intelligence on these factors can be very challenging. As Clapper notes, “we provided detailed analysis on more than 40 clans and subclans operating in Somalia—far more difficult than counting tanks and planes.”127 With few exceptions, the U.S. military intelligence system had been designed to provide information on the order of battle of opposing forces, focused on quantifying a known opponent and laying out his capabilities in neat templates.128 The order of battle intelligence paradigm relies on lists, taxonomies, and categories to describe the enemy’s composition, disposition, strength, capabilities, limitations, and most likely courses of action. This approach reduces complexity, but in

so doing reifies multidimensional social reality into a checklist of characteristics on a JIPOE. ‘In the city of Najaf, most of the population is Shia Muslim,’ an intelligence officer might report. This kind of trivia may be useful in a limited way, but it does not get to the heart of the matter: how the cultural makeup of a population might affect operations or the likely courses of action a civilian population could be expected to take in the event of a military operation into the heart of the aforementioned city.129

For military personnel whose tasks and missions involved working with the population—whether in building governance capacity, establishing rule of law, or restoring infrastructure—the order of battle approach to the human terrain was flatly inadequate. The complexity of the operating environment renders “a basic collection of facts, polling data, anecdotal references, and statistics insufficient for true understanding within the partnered commands.”130 Commanders and their staffs need “comprehensive” information about the host nation, and moreover they need to understand context: The commander must be served with answers to real and complex issues without losing context as data is brought forward and presented as “truth”. If the commander is served only with threat informational (PIR) and friendly force information (FFIR), decisions can (and often do) skew toward security operations and leave civil considerations and capacity questions unresolved.131

As one Army officer put it, “I could have read Lonely Planet and had a better idea of what was going on in Helmand than I got from our IPB.”132 Checklists do not work for counterinsurgency because they neither clarify relationships between elements nor provide explanations. In order to help them understand the meaning of a behavior, ritual, or object within a given context, military personnel need explanations addressing why, rather than lists of facts addressing what. In the words of USMC General Anthony Zinni, the former commander of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) and special envoy for the United States to Israel and the Palestinian Authority, “What I need to understand is how these societies function. What makes them tick? Who makes the decisions? What is it about their society that’s so remarkably different in their values, in the way they think, compared to my values and the way I think in my Western, white-man mentality?”133 The limits of the military intelligence system came into sharp focus in Afghanistan. In Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan, then-Major General Michael T. Flynn et al. made the case that the “tendency to overemphasize detailed information about the enemy at the expense of the political, economic, and cultural environment that supports it” has hindered counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan. They write: Having focused the overwhelming majority of its collection efforts and analytical brainpower on insurgent groups, the vast intelligence apparatus is unable to answer fundamental questions about the environment in which U.S. and allied forces operate and the people they seek to persuade. Ignorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the powerbrokers are and how they might be influenced, incurious about the correlations between various development projects and the levels of cooperation among villagers, and disengaged from people in the best position to find answers—whether aid workers or Afghan soldiers—U.S. intelligence officers and analysts can do little but shrug in response to high level decision-makers seeking the knowledge, analysis, and information they need to wage a successful counterinsurgency.134

Flynn et al. proposed a variety of means to ameliorate the intelligence crisis in Afghanistan, including division of work along geographic lines, rotation of analysts from the regional commands to field units, and aggregation of information. What Flynn et al. did not address is how to shift the conceptual underpinning of the military intelligence system. The primary difference between military intelligence and socio-cultural knowledge are the questions asked and the purpose behind those questions. Military intelligence typically asks: who is my enemy? Where is my enemy? Why does he fight? The purpose behind those questions is to identify the enemy in time and space in order to neutralize the threat. A socio-cultural knowledge system would need to ask the questions: what is the local political system? Who has power, of what type, and why? What is the local judicial system? What are the laws and sanctions, who makes them, and what is the process for adjudication and punishment? What is the economic system? How do people obtain goods and resources? What do they produce and consume? The purpose behind these questions is the facilitation of governance, economic or legal functions, either in support of a host nation government or in its absence (whether through conquest, collapse, or lack of capacity). Whether the knowledge system of military intelligence could be adapted to include socio-cultural knowledge (or whether a separate system should be developed) remains an open question. The military intelligence system was not designed to produce comprehensive socio-cultural knowledge or explain the context and logic of a society. The same could be said of most social sciences, including anthropology. Indeed, anthropology as a discipline does not possess a standard definition of culture,135 much less a comprehensive theory of culture and society scalable and adaptable to different population groups. The last time such a comprehensive, scalable, and adaptable theory existed in anthropology was structural functionalism in the 1930s and 1940s,136 discredited as a part of the corrupt intellectual legacy of imperialism. As Herbert Lewis noted in The Misrepresentation of Anthropology and Its Consequences, “the basic questions that our predecessors struggled with 100 years ago are still with us, but the hard-won lessons they taught us are being forgotten.”137 Instead of exploring the intellectual legacy of these classic authors, young

anthropologists are taught in graduate school that they are colonialists. As Lewis writes: The only reason to read them is to produce devastating deconstructions and critical readings. That there may be ideas that could be of use today, or bodies of data that can be appreciated and built upon, seems out of the question. This is very troubling because the intellectual problems that are at the heart of our field have not been solved by the hermeneuticists, the postmodernists, the poststructuralists, the postcolonialists.138

Indeed, some anthropologists doubt whether their discipline has increased understanding of humankind at all. In the words of Sir Edmund Leach, during the hundred years of their existence academic anthropologists have not discovered a single universally valid truth concerning either human culture or human society other than those which are treated as axioms: for example, that all men have language.139

While this lack of any useful social theory or established social facts may actually come as good news to those anthropologists who disapprove of their discipline being ‘weaponized,’ it nevertheless comes as bad news for the military. The question arises: why have anthropologists failed to develop a scalable, adaptable theory of society that could be used operationally by the military? The answer has several interrelated parts. Anthropology—the ‘handmaiden of colonialism’—was initially a practical science, applied at the margins of empire in support of governance and administration of the colonies. As early as 1908, anthropologists began training administrators of the Sudan civil service.140 “Government Anthropologists” were appointed in Nigeria and the Gold Coast (now Ghana)141 to facilitate the policy of indirect rule, in which native institutions were incorporated into the machinery of colonial administration. The relationship between anthropology and the British government was formalized in 1926 with the creation of the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures, financed by various colonial governments and led by Lord Lugard, the former governor of Nigeria and architect of indirect rule. The Institute based its mission on Bronislaw Malinowski’s article “Practical Anthropology,” which argued that anthropological knowledge should be applied to solve the problems faced by colonial administrators, including those posed by “savage law, economics, customs, and institutions.”142 Some anthropologists also served as colonial administrators, such as S. F. Nadel, who was Secretary of Native Affairs in Eritrea after the Second World War.143 Whether any of this research was actually useful remains an open debate.144 Such “practical anthropology” had its detractors. E. E. Evans-Pritchard and some of his contemporaries believed that applying anthropology to government problems amounted to an assault on scientific objectivity.145 In 1934 Evans-Pritchard wrote to a fellow anthropologist from Cairo: The racket here is very amusing. It would be more so if it were not disastrous to anthropology. Everyone is advising government—Raymond [Firth], Forde, Audrey [Richards], Schapera. No one is doing any real anthropological work—all are clinging to the Colonial Office coach. This deplorable state of affairs is likely to go on, because it shows something deeper than making use of opportunities for helping anthropology. It shows an attitude of mind and is I think fundamentally a moral deterioration. These people will not see that there is an unbridgeable chasm between serious anthropology and Administration Welfare work.146

Although Evans-Pritchard believed that the application of knowledge would compromise scientific work,147 he nevertheless served in combat during World War II, leading tribesmen against the Italian Army in Ethiopia in 1941.148 The debate concerning the scientific validity of applied research continued during World War II and after.149 But the anthropological rejection of applied research—particularly research performed for government sponsors—began with Project Camelot, an Army-sponsored study on the causes of stability and instability in developing countries. The story begins when President John F. Kennedy signed National Security Action Memorandum No. 124 in 1962, calling for “proper recognition throughout the U.S. government that subversive insurgency (‘wars of liberation’) is a major form of politico-military conflict equal in importance to conventional warfare.”150 This type of warfare required knowledge of the societies in which the conflict was taking place. Testifying before Congress in 1965, Dr. R. L. Sproul, director of the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), now known as DARPA, said: It is [our] primary thesis that remote area warfare is controlled in a major way by the environment in which the warfare occurs, by the sociological and anthropological characteristics of the people involved in the war, and by the nature of the conflict itself.151

Based on the recommendations of the Smithsonian Institution and the Defense Science Board,152 the Special Operations Research Office (SORO), which had been established in 1957 to serve Army’s psychological warfare directorate, was expanded in 1962. According to a letter from the Office of the Director of the SORO, Project Camelot was “a study whose objective is to determine the feasibility of developing a general social systems model which would make it possible to predict and influence politically significant aspects of social change in the developing nations of the world.”153 Project Camelot was designed to test over eight hundred untested and often contradictory hypotheses about internal war, such as were these wars generated by poverty? Or did they result from rapid economic progress?154 While this research sounds in retrospect relatively innocuous, it was denounced by Radio Havana and Radio Moscow as a form of

“imperialism” and criticized by anthropologists as a means to control, enslave, and even annihilate the communities being studied.155 In Washington, following Congressional hearings on the subject, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara canceled Project Camelot in 1965.156 The commonly accepted narrative among anthropologists (often recounted in graduate seminars) is that their protests resulted in the cancellation of Project Camelot. In fact, Project Camelot was curtailed because of a turf war between the Department of State and Department of Defense. In the view of the State Department, such research implied that the military was engaging in foreign policy matters, extending beyond its purely military remit. In the words of Seymour Deitchman, a former Special Assistant in the DoD Office of the Director of Defense Research and Engineering, the DoD was condemned for trying to learn something about its task, since if it tried to do so this implied it was seeking control of foreign policy. On the other hand, the military were condemned for being insensitive to the nuances of international affairs and diplomacy. Either way, the DoD was out of line.157

Across the board, the Vietnam War created a wide rift between the military and academics. “Laying the blame at the boots of the military rather than in the hands of the politicians, many university-based social scientists turned their backs on the problems of [Department of] Defense on moral grounds.”158 Anthropologists in particular sought to cleanse themselves of the toxic muck of government influence that corrupted the moral and intellectual purity of their research and endangered their informants. As Kathleen Gough Aberle wrote in 1967, “We must dissociate ourselves from the acts of governments that seek to destroy these people [about whom we have gathered knowledge] or to infringe their rights.”159 Applied research came to be seen as inherently biased in favor of the sponsor’s interests and ‘pure’ research was nothing more than misguided positivism.160 Anthropology re-cast itself not as a practical, applied discipline that could be used to solve problems of government and administration but rather as an advocacy program for the oppressed. In 1970, Eric R. Wolf and Joseph G. Jorgensen argued in Anthropology on the Warpath in Thailand that anthropology is “a revolutionary discipline,” and that “anthropologists must be willing to testify on behalf of the oppressed peoples of the world…”161 Neither research nor scientific objectivity was to be the basis of anthropology; political activism was the new goal.162 Rather than finding practical and constructive means by which to actually influence policy, strategy, and operations, studying the “dysfunctions of … policy-making”163 became anthropologists’ main focus. They barricaded themselves in the Ivory Tower and spent their time discussing “how many cross-cousins could dance on the head of a pin.”164 In the words of Margaret Mead, I think the withdrawal of anthropologists—just going and sucking their thumbs in corners or marching in demonstrations—was lamentable. If enough anthropologists had been willing to work on Viet Nam, we might have been able to do something that made some sense. But they had all withdrawn.165

In recasting anthropology as a revolutionary discipline, anthropologists rejected its history as the ‘handmaiden of colonialism’ and began to critique their own relationship to power. Many anthropologists came to view it as a form of Orientalism, “a kind of Western projection onto and will to govern over the Orient.”166 In the words of Peter Pels: Around 1970, anthropologists were often told to shun collaboration with the powerful in colonial planning and strategy. Instead, they should side with “indigenous” peoples in the (neo-)colonial struggle, to help the latter to achieve the modernization that a perfidious combination of an ideology of modernization and a strategy of exploitation denied them. In other words, reinventions of anthropology often used images of colonialism as their cutting edge. Only in the last 25 years, however, such critique and reflexivity have become structural, owing to the increasing stress on the third view of colonialism, as a struggle that constantly renegotiates the balance of domination and resistance. Since one cannot simply demarcate a “past” colonialism from struggles in the present, the anthropology of colonialism systematically interrogates contemporary anthropology as well as the colonial circumstances from which it emerged. The anthropology of colonialism is always also an anthropology of anthropology, since in many methodological, organizational and professional aspects the discipline retains the shape it received when it emerged from (if partly in opposition to) early 20th century colonial circumstances.167

In short, anthropologists began to scrutinize their own discipline and its colonial legacy. Scientific objectivity came to be seen as a form of oppression that mystified and concealed the anthropologists’ relationship to power and contributed towards the colonization of the subject. “Scientific objectivity,” in the words of Eric R. Wolf and Joseph G. Jorgensen, “implies the estrangement of the anthropologist from the people among whom he works.”168 In fact, in 2010 the executive board of the American Anthropological Association adopted a long-range plan that removes the word “science” from the organization’s mission statement.169 As one blogger noted, using the term “science” in the association’s mission statement maintained “the colonizing, privileging, superior positionality of anthropology that continues to plague the discipline.”170 One of the fundamental processes of science is the aggregation of knowledge in order to reveal underlying truth. Yet generalization, writes Abu-Lughod, is morally questionable, in that “as part of professional discourse of ‘objectivity’ and expertise, it is inevitably a language of power.”171 To return to the original question: why have anthropologists failed to develop a scalable, adaptable theory of society that could be used operationally by the military? In short, many anthropologists believe that applied research is inherently tainted, that their proper role is one of political advocacy, and that scientific objectivity is not possible. Given the anti-positivism of most contemporary anthropologists, it is highly unlikely that a unified field theory of society will be

developed anytime soon. Finally, given the politics of the discipline and its associated intellectual solipsism, few anthropologists have enough knowledge of the military’s missions and knowledge requirements to produce any social theory of use to the military. Knowledge comes with experience and exposure, and most anthropologists are flatly unwilling to work with the military, believing that to do so would violate their anti-war politics, the sacred values of their discipline, and their ethical commitment to their ethnographic informants. In the words of Catherine Lutz (who wrote a book about the military community of Fayetteville, North Carolina, and might be presumed to be at least somewhat sympathetic towards her military research subjects), “it is wrong to have an institution that specializes in the use of force soliciting research from universities whose job it is to question that institution at its very core.”172 Furthermore, most anthropologists have little to offer from a military perspective because they generally do not understand enough about the institution to do so. Writing in 1949, anthropologist and Army officer Hugh Turney-High noted: The persistence with which social scientists have confused war with the tools of war would be no less than astounding did not their writing reveal, for the most part, complete ignorance of the simpler aspects of military history and theory, and an almost stubborn unwillingness to conceptualize warfare as the great captains have conceptualized it—and still do. It would be very hard to find a noncommissioned officer in the professional armies of the second rate powers who has been as confused as most analysts of human society.173

Turney-High’s observation still holds true today. Most anthropologists say little of interest (whether critical or not) from a military perspective because they lack the relevant knowledge to do so. Today, many anthropologists believe that there is an inherent conflict between the interests of the Westphalian ‘State’ and the interests of the indigenous people whom they study (and to whom they believe they owe a duty of care). In the worldview of many anthropologists, states threaten local societies: global market forces marginalize local economies, the spread of technology harms local culture, political centralization erodes local rights, and the armed forces suppress dissent. For anthropologists, working for any government—no matter how apparently benign—entails a moral compromise. Therefore, the only truly safe posture for anthropologists vis-à-vis the state is criticism of foreign policy from a distance. Indeed, the Network of Concerned Anthropologists (NCA) sponsored a “Pledge of Non-participation in Counterinsurgency,” in which signatories affirmed that they would “refrain from directly assisting the U.S. military in combat,” since working with the military “contributes instead to a brutal war of occupation” and “enables the occupation of one country by another.”174 Presumably, anthropologists who signed the NCA pledge believed that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were unjust, and therefore providing assistance to the military could not be justified on moral grounds. Other anthropologists, including this author, took the view that although we disagreed with the administration’s foreign policy, it was irrelevant: troops in combat (and policy makers in the Pentagon) deserved support from social scientists irrespective of whether these wars were morally just or not. International humanitarian law distinguishes between the jus ad bellum (the question of whether a war is justifiable) and the jus in bellum (the question of whether a war is conducted justly). As Michael Walzer observed in Just War, there is a line “between the war itself, for which soldiers are not responsible, and the conduct of the war, for which they are responsible.”175 Professional soldiers do not get to pick and choose the wars they wish to fight; their service is not contingent on whether a war is just. Yet, professional soldiers are bound under domestic and international law to abide by rules of engagement, conventions for the treatment of prisoners, regulations concerning the treatment of civilians, and so on. In my view, the role of anthropologists was analogous to that of professional soldiers: nothing could be done to change the policy (jus ad bellum), but social scientists nevertheless had an obligation as citizens to reduce the errors caused by a lack of socio-cultural knowledge and thereby improve their execution (jus in bello). By choosing to support the military, we were of course de facto supporting a deeply compromised approach to exporting democracy, globalization and modernization. Yet, in the interest of national security and the well-being of local communities, I believed (and still do) that assisting the military to “make better blunders” was preferable to criticizing U.S. foreign policy from the comfort of the Ivory Tower. Indeed, as the chapters in this book show, anthropologists have often made this choice to engage in what their contemporaries judged to be unjust wars.176 By 2005, the small social science community inside the Beltway had come to the disappointing conclusion that no generally accepted theory of ‘culture’ or ‘social system’ existed within the social sciences, and particularly within anthropology. Theories of culture and society that did exist (such as historical materialism, cultural particularism, cultural ecology, and postmodernism) could not be operationalized for different mission sets, different levels of war, and different phases of operations. Finding nothing off-the-shelf, the military initiated a do-it-yourself social science project. Few social scientists were involved in this process. It was “disappointing,” in the words of one Marine Corps civilian, “that, at a time of heightened interest in cultural issues, the framework for the use of ‘culture’ [was] decided without the support of anthropologists.”177 Different models and theories of culture from a variety of academic disciplines were introduced, discussed, and considered at DoDsponsored meetings and workshops. Most of these concepts, such as ‘cultural intelligence,’ as used in international business, had been designed for other purposes and were not immediately

applicable to military requirements. Attempts were made to include culture and society within the lists of traditional planning factors or among the operational variables that affect campaigns.178 Thus, for example, the acronym METT-T (mission, enemy, terrain, troops, time) received a new “C” on the end for civil considerations. But what ‘civil considerations’ actually meant was not clearly defined, and often determined by bureaucrats and soldiers with no social science training. As Major General Barbara G. Fast noted, “A body of knowledge on culture, economics, geography, military affairs, and politics that was once in the domain of ‘greybeard’ scholars now rests in the hands of high school graduates.”179 Although the military lacked in-house social science capacity and anthropologists lacked relevant theories and models, the requirement for operational social science persisted. And, most likely, this requirement will not disappear any time soon. Now that the DoD’s attention has pivoted to Asia and emergent peer competitors, it is tempting to throw the social science baby out with the counterinsurgency bathwater. Doing so, however, will merely recapitulate the situation the DoD faced in 2005 when this type of war arises again.

The policy implementation problem Suppose our young officer has overcome all these impediments and has somehow located a suitable model of culture that she can employ productively down-range. Now the real problem begins— actually implementing U.S. foreign policy at the point of a gun. As our young officer will no doubt discover, national security policies crafted with the best intentions often have the worst results. The long-term strategic objective in Vietnam, for example, was an independent, non-Communist country —yet exporting a Western political model to an East Asian society was less than successful. The goal in Iraq was also stability and democracy—yet the presence of Coalition forces resulted in more instability locally, nationally, and regionally. The law of occupation in post-World War II Micronesia required occupying forces to change the society as little as possible—yet the very presence of boots on the ground completely altered the society. The most optimistic foreign policy goals—equality for women, economic development, and political liberty—often seem to result during the implementation phase in unintended consequences, operational paradoxes, or unmitigated disaster.180 It is often difficult to determine exactly why the policy adopted looks so different from the policy implemented. As Michael Clark has argued, foreign policy studies have drawn a falsely “linear picture of systems of decision-making; an adoption or a variation of the input-decision-outputfeedback view of the process.”181 In fact, any close analysis of foreign policy implementation will erode the “pervasive strategic image of international politics” as a “game of statecraft involving objectives, choice and manoeuvres,” and reinforce “how little relationship there may be between a purposive choice (where there appears to be one) and the flow of events.”182 The shifting, changing, and unstable brew of military forces, civilian political executives, opposing forces, host nation population, and international actors makes understanding policy implementation challenging. As Friedrich Engels once wrote regarding the flow of history, “there are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces, which give rise to one resultant—the historical event … For what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed.”183 These infinite “innumerable intersecting forces” in policy implementation ensure that the final outcome often looks nothing like the original decision. Michael Clark’s advice vis-à-vis the study of policy implementation was for students and scholars of the policy engineering process to take a non-linear approach to the study of implementation: “If it is worth examining at all, we must accept that it necessarily involves an explicit shift of emphasis away from linear, and arguably rationalistic thinking about foreign policy-making processes.”184 Without intending to follow Michael Clark’s advice, I nevertheless wrote the chapters in this book without a specific set of issues or problems in mind, wanting to see inductively where the stories led and how the issues fell out. What I discovered in examining the thorny problems of policy implementation, ranging in time from British colonial Africa to the Vietnam War, was that the gap between the executive decision and military execution was not adequately explained by mission creep, nor was it explained by a simplistic schema of ‘bad’ decisions faithfully implemented not producing desired results, or ‘good’ decisions improperly implemented also not producing the desired results.185 Rather, the “innumerable intersecting forces” seemed to produce certain patterns in the military implementation of foreign policy that held true in different contexts at different times. Three primary dangers emerged from the cases explored in this book: first, exporting Western models; second, errors of perception; and third, self-defeating praxis. (These issues overlap to a great degree; errors of perception may lead to a self-defeating praxis and vice versa, for example.) Additionally, there were a number of cases that showed clearly ‘what right looks like,’ which are discussed in the conclusion. The first danger in policy implementation—exporting Western models—involves the transposition of social, economic, and political frameworks and concepts into societies that do not possess these concepts, or do not possess them in the same form.186 Exporting democracy, for example, has been a centerpiece of U.S. national security policy for decades.187 As many of the chapters in this book

show, exporting democracy may be a benevolent goal, but it is often counterproductive upon implementation. The chapter on John Useem’s experience as a young Navy civil affairs officer in post-World War II Micronesia, for example, shows that introducing democratic institutions (such as elections) may risk eliminating existing democratic patterns. On Palau, the U.S. military encountered a society that was highly stratified and in which political power was concentrated in the hands of powerful chiefs who ruled by right of inheritance. “An immediate problem that confronts any administration of a society with a hereditary system of authority is that of determining the extent to which inheritance precludes democratic processes,” Useem noted. “It cannot be premised that inheritance implies autocracy in primitive societies. The traditional lines of leadership may actually, as in the case of Palau, provide for a regular line of succession to office but permit a change in office-holder when the individual is deemed unsuitable.”188 Yet, instead of attempting to fully understand how the society of Palau actually worked, and how democracy might mesh with the existing social order, the U.S. military government promoted social equality (thereby altering the social system) and introduced Western-style elections. These changes to the social and political system in Palau, introduced to build democracy, actually had the effect of making it less democratic. As the chapter on Useem’s experience shows, democracy-building in post-World War II Micronesia brought the U.S. military into close contact with a foreign society. In attempting to administer the territory, they encountered all the barriers to using socio-cultural knowledge discussed in this introduction: complexity, epistemology, way of war, and social theory. Establishing military control over the post-war chaos on the island (including the provision of basic humanitarian aid, ensuring physical security, and re-establishing basic government) proved so challenging and time consuming that little consideration was paid to how the local people preferred to govern themselves. Palau’s unique social and political systems were perceived through a Western lens, with limited reference to the existing store of socio-cultural knowledge about how things worked in Micronesia. Not surprisingly, the policy as executed differed from the policy adopted: democracy promotion eroded the Palauan version of representative government. The lesson is that elections do not guarantee representative government, nor does a lack of elections signify autocracy. Other people’s political systems may not appear democratic in form, but may work just as well in practice in insuring political participation. The second danger in foreign policy implementation is errors of perception. As discussed above, the heuristics that enable the military to execute incredibly complex tasks also limit perception and understanding of other human beings. When military personnel do not clearly see the world in front of them, their skewed assessment of reality may result in plans and decisions that either solve problems that do not exist, or create new problems that need not exist. At a June 2003 press conference regarding the situation in Iraq, for example, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stated, “I guess the reason I don’t use the phrase ‘guerrilla war’ is because there isn’t one.”189 Of course, by June 2003 a full-blown insurgency was brewing. Contemporaneous British military intelligence reports estimated there were 40–50,000 insurgent fighters in the country and an Iraqi intelligence director put the figure at 200,000, larger than the U.S. military force in Iraq.190 The Secretary of Defense’s perceptual error meant that corrective action was not taken, likely fueling the growth of the insurgency. Many of the chapters in this book explore how errors of perception about the culture and society of host nations have created negative outcomes for military operations. The chapter on Robert Sutherland Rattray, for example, shows how conceptual models in the minds of British colonial officials (including government anthropologists) constrained their ability to understand African political systems, thereby hindering their ability to govern. The British brought with them to Africa certain assumptions about political systems based on their own paradigm of government. In the British paradigm, government meant a centralized political system with power aggregated up to a singular titular head of government, and with a separation of church and state into different spheres of influence.191 This paradigm led the British to assume (or rather expect) that central authority also existed in African political systems, and then attempt to impose centralization with significant costs down the line. C. K. Meek branded the Igbo as “the most lawless part of Nigeria” because they lacked central authority.192 The British then created paramount chiefs to bring the Igbo into conformity with their paradigm of government. The result (similar to what Useem saw in Micronesia) was the transformation of a society that was fundamentally democratic into an autocracy. “[O]ur policy of Indirect Rule in Nigeria (and possibly elsewhere),” R. S. Rattray wrote in 1934, has a “tendency to build up centralized African autocracies, thus disregarding the basis of African institutions which I maintain were decentralized and essentially democratic.”193 In short, the British failed to recognize the political system of the Igbo (among other African societies) as a legitimate, functioning form of government and subsequently imposed their own idea of political order, thereby destroying the thing they sought to create—governance.194 The third danger during foreign policy implementation is self-defeating praxis, or the choice of a strategy that unintentionally sabotages the overall objective.195 Policy wonks sometimes call this “blowback.”196 In this book, the chapter on Don Marshall’s experience in Vietnam discusses, inter alia, how military objectives that ignore the local society may undercut the strategic objectives they are meant to attain. Marshall was a Harvard-trained anthropologist who served as an Army active duty lieutenant colonel under General Creighton Abrams, Jr. In 1969, General Abrams replaced

General William Westmoreland as the commander of the Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV). His intention was to eschew large-scale conventional operations to destroy the enemy’s main force (e.g., the North Vietnamese Army) and substitute it for a strategy that mixed major combat operations with counterinsurgency. In 1969 General Abrams and Lieutenant Colonel Marshall called this the “One War Strategy;” now the U.S. military would refer to it as “full spectrum operations.”197 This new strategy was based on a study that Marshall and a few other hand-picked men had written for Abrams when he was Chief of Staff of the Army, “Program for the Pacification and Long-Term Development of Vietnam” (PROVN). PROVN recognized that the strategic objectives of the war (an “independent, non-Communist” Vietnam) could not be achieved through kinetic force alone.198 In fact, unrestrained firepower had the opposite effect than that intended: it made the population less secure, made the society less cohesive, and provided motivation for joining the Viet Cong. As Marshall noted, While a [Vietnamese] soldier and a U.S. commander normally would fear artillery fire only from the enemy, a villager fears our artillery and air strikes as much as he fears the enemy rockets or mortars. Thus actions taken by one element to ensure security may constitute a threat to another element in whose name the action is taken.199

In achieving its military objectives, the U.S. became less able to achieve the strategic objective of an “independent, non-Communist” Vietnam.

Conclusion Over and over again, across both time and space, military organizations encounter similar barriers in implementing foreign policy in foreign societies. The problems of complexity, epistemology, way of war, social theory, and policy implementation hamper attempts to achieve both long- and short-term objectives. It would be easy, given this list of intertwined impediments, to come to the conclusion that the task is pure hubris and should not be undertaken. Yet the history of the U.S. clearly demonstrates that even in moments like the present, when attention in the Pentagon has turned away from counterinsurgency and small wars, that tasks which require knowledge of other human beings will never fully abate. So, in a sense, this book and the stories it contains come with an inherent warning about the difficulty of the task. Yet these stories also contain some guidance about what can be done—based on what has been done—that may prove valuable when the time comes to do it again.

2

ROBERT SUTHERLAND RATTRAY AND INDIRECT RULE

The stream crosses the path, The path crosses the stream; Which of them is the elder? Did we not cut a path to go and meet this stream? The stream had its origin long, long ago, It had its origin in the Creator

Ashanti traditional drum poetry1

In 1921, Captain Robert Sutherland Rattray, an anthropologist working for the British colonial government in what is now Ghana, may have averted a war. Rattray—who was equally a scholar and a soldier, an anthropologist and an administrator—had spent many years of his life sitting with Ashanti elders around camp fires in the bush, listening to their stories and songs and participating in their rituals and court procedures. Understanding the nuances of the politics of the British and the Ashanti, Rattray was well positioned to act as interlocutor between them. Five armed conflicts had taken place between the powerful and well-organized Ashanti Empire and the British within one hundred years, caused by disputes over coastal territory, defense of alliances, territorial incursions, or refusal to abide by treaties.2 The cause of the last war that took place between the British and the Ashanti in 1900 was more symbolic than political. The War of the Golden Stool, as it is known, erupted after the Governor of the Gold Coast, Sir Frederick Hodgson, demanded to sit on the Golden Stool. “Where is the Golden Stool? Why am I not sitting on the Golden Stool at this moment?”3 The Golden Stool was the most sacred ritual object of the Ashanti,4 which contained the sunsum (soul or spirit) of the Ashanti nation, and embodied “their power, their health, their bravery, their welfare.”5 If this stool was taken or destroyed, then “just as a man sickens and dies whose sunsum during life has been injured, so would the Ashanti nation sicken and lose its vitality and power.”6 Not even the King of the Ashanti was permitted to sit on the stool. When Sir Hodgson demanded to sit on the stool, the Ashanti remained silent, but “every man left that meeting to go and prepare for war.”7 This “stupendous and costly blunder” provoked an unnecessary conflict.8 Led by the Queen-Mother Yaa Asantewaa (1840–1921), Ashanti forces attacked and besieged the British Fort of Coomassie, resulting in the death of the Governor and several thousand Africans. After the defeat of the Ashanti, the remaining members of the royal court were exiled to the Seychelles and Ashanti territory finally came under the control of the British crown. After the Ashanti royal family had been exiled and their territory taken by the British, the Ashanti buried the Golden Stool in the bush between two great brass pans. In 1921, laborers building a road almost uncovered it, but the custodians of the stool scared them off by averring that the soil contained smallpox. The custodians returned that night and dug up the stool to put it in the safekeeping of Wereko, the chief of Aboabogya. Unfortunately, thieves discovered the new hiding place and removed the golden ornaments which adorned the stool. The British put the thieves in prison, saving them from being killed by an irate mob. A few hours later, the whole of Ashanti “was in a state of national mourning and tribulation, far greater than the loss of any king.”9 Rumors were flying that the British had seized the stool. British officials, in turn, were concerned that another bloody uprising was imminent. There was a lot at stake. The Gold Coast had prospered economically since the last war: roads had been built, health clinics had been opened, and the first university for Africans had been established at Achimota.10 The British did not want a war and were searching for a way to alleviate the situation. As the Government Anthropologist, Rattray produced a confidential memorandum about the meaning of the Golden Stool, recommending that the Ashanti be assured that the Golden Stool was not in British hands, that the Ashanti judicial process be allowed to proceed, and that the British should plead for mitigation of the death sentence demanded by Ashanti law.11 Rattray recognized that British misunderstanding of the power of the Golden Stool might have deadly consequences: “A knowledge of the facts now recorded would possibly have prevented at least one Ashanti war, had its bearing on local feeling and Ashanti politics been fully grasped.”12 He wrote in the memo, I do not think we … fully grasp the results which I believe might follow were we ever to take it from this people. … I believe that, so far from benefiting, had we ever taken this stool—which would have been little more than a ‘trophy’ to us—that its power would have then worked against us. I go further and say that if it be true that this symbol of Ashanti nationality has now been lost or destroyed, that the results will soon be felt by us in a way we

can hardly grasp.13

The memorandum he wrote led to the peaceful resolution of the matter by Sir Charles Harper, the Chief Commissioner of Ashanti, who did as Rattray recommended: leave justice in the hands of the Ashanti chiefs.14 Rattray’s role was officially recognized in the 1921 “Annual Report for Ashanti,” which noted “Captain Rattray’s researches have already proved of practical value, for it is due to his investigations that much that is new in the history of the ‘Golden Stool’ has come to light, and with such knowledge Government has seen its way to deal in a sympathetic spirit with the disturbing event of its desecration.”15 Later, Rattray became the first European to actually see the Golden Stool, which he described as “the proudest day of my life.”16 Despite his success in resolving the conflict between the British and the Ashanti, and although he produced voluminous scholarly tomes on a variety of West African societies, Rattray has been largely forgotten by his fellow anthropologists and consigned to the dustbin of history. Only scholars who specialize in the Ashanti are likely to have read his work, and he is often dismissed as a pernicious agent of British imperialism. He has been criticized for misinterpreting historical facts,17 failing to attend to power relationships,18 and contributing to the “reification of ‘tradition’.”19 He has been characterized as “powertool of colonial rule,”20 engaged in the production of “governmentoriented knowledge, shaped for ruling and exercising power.”21 However, irrespective of these criticisms, Rattray’s contribution to averting war is an example of how cultural knowledge can be used to resolve conflict peacefully, or even prevent it in the first place. How did Rattray—a Scot born in India in 1881—come to have such deep knowledge of the Ashanti? Rattray, an impish, red-haired child with enormous ears,22 was by nature rebellious and adventurous. While still a teenager, he volunteered against his family’s wishes as a Scout during the Boer War (1899–1902),23 after which he signed on to work for the African Lakes Corporation in what is now Malawi, herding cattle and selling dry goods.24 Despite the fact that Rattray was most probably dyslexic, he had a remarkable facility for spoken languages and began collecting local folklore, stories, and songs in order to learn the Chinyanja language (part of the Bantu language family). These collected materials were published as Some Folk-Lore Stories and Songs in Chinyanja, With English Translation and Notes (1907), “a dry, meticulous little book.”25 While recovering back in Britain from a dangerous fever, Rattray’s family tried to convince him to follow the family tradition and apply for the Indian Civil Service. Rattray, however, wanted to go back to Africa. India, he said, was too civilized for him. He joined the Gold Coast Customs Service, a remote outpost of the Empire associated in the minds of the British public with a series of wars against the Ashanti.26 When Rattray arrived, the last war had ended only six years previously and the area was still not completely “pacified;” gunrunning still took place up and down the Volta River.27 Now that the British government was paying an incentive of forty pounds for passing language proficiency exams, Rattray began learning Hausa by collecting traditional stories. This became the basis for the book Hausa Folk-Lore, published in 1913.28 In 1909 Rattray’s first (1907) book of folklore came to the attention of Sir Hugh Frazer who recommended him for admission to Exeter College, Oxford, as part of a new scheme to educate colonial servants in the emerging field of anthropology. “From his first days in Oxford he developed an ambivalent attitude towards the academic world: he liked to impress it and he liked to be thought of as a scholar, but at heart he despised any learning which could not be immediately related to ‘real life’.”29 Promoted to Assistant District Commissioner at Ejura, Rattray returned to the Gold Coast from Oxford, triumphant with his own academic success. His job as Assistant District Commissioner involved supervising the provision of labor for building a new paved road, inspecting the police, and observing legal procedures in native courts.30 (During this tour in 1912, Rattray produced a small volume, Mole-English Vocabulary, with Notes on the Grammar and Syntax, which was the first book on the language. Unfortunately, he did not receive any incentive pay for the Mole language exam as no one was qualified to examine him.)31 Probably as a result of his close contact with the Ashanti people, Rattray’s interest shifted from language to culture, and he began work on a book entitled Ashanti Proverbs: Primitive Ethics of a Savage People, “a not altogether satisfactory bundle of anthropological and linguistic notes.”32 When World War I was declared, Rattray obtained a commission in the British army as a Captain in the intelligence corps.33 He fought against the Germans in Togoland during World War I, and was mentioned in dispatches.34 Though he rose steadily through the British colonial ranks, he was not particularly well-suited to administration. Fluent in Hausa, Twi, and a variety of other West African languages, Rattray was known to the Ashanti as amoako (red pepper) because of his feisty personality and red hair.35 He was strongly opinionated, believing that the government should embrace the “values and structures authentic to the West African peoples”36 and resented government interference in scientific research.37 Probably what most irked his colleagues in the colonial administration was his empathy and identification with the people of West Africa: “Rattray was certainly an oddity among colonial officers of his time, displaying now and then a not altogether respectable tendency to ‘go native’.”38 Though he had hoped for further promotion in the regular civil service, Rattray was appointed as the first (and only) head of the new Anthropological Department on the Gold Coast in 1921. This position “compartmentalized” his activities, and prevented any potential embarrassment to the government.39 In the view of his superiors, Rattray had “an artistic temperament”40 and was “completely unsuited for administrative work.”41

Accepting that he would never become Governor of the Gold Coast—his early ambition—Rattray immersed himself in the lives of the “ancients” in “remote villages,”42 producing “minute and exact studies with accurate detailed accounts of social and religious beliefs, rites, and customs.”43 During the 1900s when Rattray was working as a government anthropologist among the Ashanti, the British colonial administration in Nigeria was experimenting with a system of government called indirect rule that was based on the principle of using local institutions to facilitate governance. If a foreign power wishes to use local institutions, rather than impose their own forms of law and government on the local society, they must invest time, manpower, and energy to acquire knowledge of these indigenous institutions. In the early 1900s, the British realized they simply did not have the knowledge they needed to implement indirect rule in Africa efficiently, expediently, or effectively. The British mainland was swept by a “tide of public policy and learned opinion” impatient “with European ignorance of ‘colonial’ peoples.”44 Training programs were developed for colonial officers, subject matter experts were recruited, new social science concepts and methods were developed, and debates ensued about the ethics and epistemology of social science to support colonial administration. Although it is no doubt inflammatory to acknowledge it, many of the lessons of indirect rule are still relevant today. While the U.S. National Security Strategy no longer bluntly articulates democratization as an objective,45 the U.S. government has continued to engage in governance of foreign countries, whether justified on moral or pragmatic grounds. Just like indirect rule in Africa, these operations require knowledge of the local society and its institutions or they run the risk of a slow and steady loss of credibility and capacity. Indeed, the U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan suffered from many of the same problems that plagued British colonialism in Africa: local institutions were ignored or destroyed either intentionally or inadvertently; Western paradigms of government were imported and imposed on local communities; basic knowledge about local societies was lacking forcing administrators to do socio-cultural research; research institutions, conceptual frameworks and methods were developed after the fact; and policy makers and administrators ignored the information that was available. The similarities, though separated by time and geography, raise some critical questions: What kind of cultural knowledge matters in a particular context? What are the impediments to obtaining it (bureaucratic, cultural, or academic)? How does the military intersect with foreign civilians? This chapter begins with a brief discussion of the origins of European colonial expansion and the various modes of European rule. Indirect rule is described as an administrative system, which (in theory) used indigenous institutions for governance. I then discuss how implementation of foreign policy creates a variety of knowledge imperatives, which governments are often unprepared or unable to address on both an individual and systemic level. (As the U.S. discovered in Iraq and Afghanistan, cultural knowledge can be as beneficial as it is difficult to acquire.) Three disjunctions of indirect rule are then discussed, including the dangers of exporting Western models, the problem of self-defeating policies, and the tyranny of the paradigm. In conclusion, I consider how the British experience with indirect rule in Africa that may be pertinent to current conflicts.

Indirect rule In 1884, the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck held a conference of European nations to discuss a variety of African issues. On the agenda was access to littoral trade routes, suppression of the African slave trade, restrictions on importation of firearms into Africa (giving Europeans a monopoly on guns in Africa), and occupation of territories. The conference resulted in the Treaty of Berlin, which essentially made the Free State of the Congo the private property of Léopold II of Belgium; established free trade throughout the Congo basin; prohibited the international slave trade (but not forced labor); introduced the doctrine of limited “effective occupation;” required notification of any new African coastal possessions; and established rights for the European powers to pursue ownership of territory.46 The Berlin Conference ushered in the ‘Scramble for Africa’ (1885–1910), as this period of European colonial expansion is generally known, resulting in almost complete control of the African continent by European powers within twenty-five years.47 In most cases, European incursion into Africa followed a somewhat predictable pattern. First came the travelers, missionaries, and traders. Then came treaties of commerce and mutual assurance.48 Then a protectorate was established in the form of an unequal alliance, and then spheres of influence were delimited. Residents and administrators were appointed, and finally annexation took place.49 Following annexation, European states employed various models of rule in colonized African territories. As Mahmood Mamdani notes, the central question of colonialism is “how can a tiny and foreign minority rule over an indigenous majority?”50 There are three main answers. ‘Settler rule’ refers to the establishment of European immigrant homesteads on African territory, and was practiced by the British in Kenya and the French in Algeria. ‘Direct rule’ involved the imposition of a single centralized administration and a single legal order and was associated with French, Belgian, German, and Portuguese colonies.51 Direct rule did not utilize or recognize indigenous social or political institutions, but typically divided territories into administrative units controlled by European administrations at the national, district, and local level.52 Direct rule involved “the

appropriation of land, destruction of communal autonomy, plus defeat and dispersal of tribal populations.”53 The third major form of governance was indirect rule, which is generally assosicated with British territories. Indirect rule has become almost synonymous with the name of Lord Fredrick Lugard, the first Governor General of Nigeria.54 Although Lugard did not invent the concept of indirect rule,55 he turned “a rather widespread expedient into a carefully elaborated system,” drawing up “a comprehensive code of laws with regulations and instructions,” and rationalizing the system in his later writings.56 Based on his experiences in the colonial service, he wrote the Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (1922) and Political Memoranda (1906), which were the “canonical books of the profession.”57 They popularized the concept of indirect rule, which spread quickly from Northern Nigeria to other African territories.58 In 1935 Margery Perham, an Oxford historian, defined indirect rule as “a system by which the tutelary [guardian] power recognizes existing African societies, and assists them to adapt themselves to the functions of local government.”59 In contrast to direct rule, which imposed a foreign administrative system on the local society, British indirect rule (theoretically) utilized indigenous forms of government as part of the colonial machinery. Indirect rule, in Rattray’s view, entailed “the administration of the African masses by or through Africans, on lines conforming to their own national customs and traditions,” with the European “only there to guide, with a minimum of interference, being prepared eventually to quit, leaving the African ‘to stand alone’.”60 Because it was relatively inexpensive and involved less overt violence than either direct rule or settlement, indirect rule has been called the “art of light administration,”61 a “kinder, gentler” imperialism.62 Indirect rule worked by incorporating local African institutions into the colonial administration as subordinate units of government called Native Administrations.63 In the words of Dr. K. A. Korsah, an African barrister who served as both a member of the Legislative Council and Executive Council of the Gold Coast: Every country has its own political, social and economic organisations, based on the customs and traditions of its inhabitants, and established by their Sanctions as their national or tribal institutions, and which evoke obedience from all the inhabitants. These institutions were the governments of the states which administered the territories prior to the partition of Africa by the European Powers. They are now generally known as Native institutions and in so far as they exercise authority within the colony, they are called Native Administrations.64

In the system of indirect rule, a government of British administrators was “super-imposed on the group of states which fall within the boundaries of the territories for which each government is so constituted.”65 Since, in theory, the British administrative machinery of indirect rule was superimposed on pre-existing indigenous political systems, only a “minimal undermining of the traditional sources of authority” took place. According to historian Michael Crowder, the main change for the Fulani Emirs of Northern Nigeria, for instance, was that they now owed allegiance to the British Government rather than to the Sultan of Sokoto, and collected taxes on its behalf, though they retained, in most cases, 70 per cent of the amount collected for the administration of their native authority.66

In the ideal type of indirect rule, the resident worked hand-in-hand with each emir or paramount chief. Lord Lugard, writing about Uganda in 1893, asserted that “the object to be aimed at in the administration of this country is to rule through its own executive government … the Resident should rule through and by the chiefs.”67 This paramount chief ruled over his own people according to local customary practice, exercising jurisdiction over his territory through ‘headmen’ who collected taxes and paid them to the native treasury. These funds in turn paid government salaries, maintenance costs, for the construction of roads, schools, and so on.68 The paramount chiefs appointed and dismissed subordinate chiefs, allocated land, and adjudicated disputes. Native chiefs were, in theory, “an integral part of the machinery of the administration. There are not two sets of rulers—British and native—working either separately or in co-operation, but a single Government in which the native chiefs have well-defined duties and an acknowledged status equally with British officials.”69 The idealized construct of indirect rule, which super-imposed a British administrative structure on pre-existing political, legal, and financial institutions and incorporated native administrations into the government, was complex in implementation. Nigeria alone had over 400 tribes when the British assumed control of the territory, requiring adaptation of indirect rule to a wide variety of local political and social circumstances.70 Given this variation, indirect rule as a system had to allow for a “wide variety both in the forms and in the degree of authority delegated.”71 This flexibility was made possible by three characteristics of the system. First, unlike French direct rule, the British never standardized administrative forms or methods.72 Second, unlike the French colonial system in which the metropolitan government controlled the initiative in all essential matters, British administrators had very wide discretion at the local level.73 Third, rotation of British administrators promoted adaptation, readjustment and rectification of the system. As Perham noted regarding Tanganyika: The right authorities, having seen the wrong ones properly treated, have come forward and proclaimed themselves. … Apparently simple chieftainships have slowly revealed themselves as complex constitutional systems. The administration was taught to work for ends other than convenience, uniformity and finality. The result was a collection of 200 different native administrations showing the greatest possible variety as to form, area and population.74

Indirect rule worked in theory by grafting a British administrative superstructure on to pre-existing, indigenous forms of political and legal organization. To incorporate African forms of governance into a system of native administration, British colonial officials had to understand at a minimum the mechanisms of local government, the distribution of power, and the legal process for each and every society they annexed. In short, indirect rule created a new imperative for knowledge about African traditional political, social, and legal systems. Thus, it has been said that “the need for anthropologists arose from the introduction of Indirect Rule as a form of government.”75 The British colonial government, however, lacked the knowledge required for effective administration and, moreover, lacked a knowledge system that could produce such knowledge. As William Halse Rivers Rivers, the British anthropologist and psychiatrist, noted in 1917: “Any attempt to govern a people even partially on the lines of their own culture demands knowledge on the part of the rulers, knowledge which at present they do not possess, and in general make no effort to attain.”76 What knowledge imperative was created by indirect rule? Administrators believed that they comprehended societies with a centralized government (such as civilizations of ‘the East’ which were covered by Oriental studies) well enough, but the tribal people of Africa and the Pacific were “a novel type,” and administrators “did not find personnel of a class which they could readily associate with themselves in the formation of the legal administrative institutions of the country.”77 In the words of anthropologist C. K. Meek who worked among the Ibo, “the necessity of studying the social structure is proportionately greater among peoples lacking a central form of government, as their modes of regulating conduct are highly complex and by no means obvious to a European observer.”78 The imperative was for empirical, scientific research instead of the impressionistic work of untrained administrators. In 1926, after visiting West Africa, the Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies observed that the people of Africa should be studied objectively and [we should] base our policy on real understanding acquired not only from personal contact but from scientific study of their mental and moral characteristics, of native law and custom, of native history, language and traditions. Native methods of agriculture, native arts and crafts, should be examined scientifically before any attempt is made to supersede what we find existing. Herein lies the importance of anthropological work, an importance which it is difficult to overestimate.79

For the most part, however, the knowledge imperative of indirect rule was not fulfilled by scientists but by “the old hand, the man on the spot” whose knowledge was a “working knowledge of the surfaces of African societies” that was “incomplete and provisional.”80 As Alfred Cort Haddon, the scientist who led the Torres Straights Expedition, noted in 1921, “‘fragmentary and unsystematic study’ will almost inevitably tend to incomplete observations and ill-digested conclusions, and the half-knowledge which the officer would possess (of which he himself would hardly be aware) would probably prove to be of very little practical value.”81 Colonial officers were not social scientists, and they were often handicapped by their lack of scientific training. Sir Richard Temple, former Governor of Bombay, wrote in Anthropology as a Practical Science (1914) that: If their relations with the foreign peoples with whom [administrators] come in contact are to be successful, they must acquire a working knowledge of the habits, customs, and ideas that govern the conduct of those peoples, and of the conditions in which they pass their lives. All those who succeed find out these things for themselves, and discover that success is dependent on the knowledge they may attain of those with whom they have to deal. … The man who is obliged to obtain the requisite knowledge empirically, and without any previous training in observation, is heavily handicapped.82

Even if officers had some anthropological training,83 a variety of factors often impaired their research, including lack of time, lack of mutual confidence with the local population, and conflicts with official duties.84 As Perham noted, Political officers were not qualified to carry out what is, after all, expert anthropological research. … unavoidably or not, officers were often denied the time or the conditions in which to carry out their preliminary investigations. They had to make rough-and-ready arrangements with the groups as they annexed them.85

Very little research was conducted systematically. While reports on various African societies had been produced by missionaries and traders for hundreds of years, much of the information had been collected in a haphazard fashion. For example, one historian noted that “up to 1930 anthropological knowledge about Northern Rhodesia had accumulated in characteristically random fashion through the activities of amateur enthusiasts who were either officials of the British South Africa Company, who administered the territory, or missionaries.”86 The knowledge about African culture and society that was developed by the individual officers of the Colonial Service was not effectively captured or codified for future use. “In fact the words ‘native law and custom’ are perhaps the most frequently recurring of all phrases in official relations, yet nowhere are the general principles of this law to be found, much less has any codification been attempted, even in the smallest tribal area.”87 Colonial administrators needed to know how ‘primitive’, decentralized societies actually worked: therefore anthropology was useful to colonial governments not as a study of origins, but as an analysis of how societies work.88 The imperative was not for theoretical or ‘pure’ knowledge, but knowledge that would serve a practical purpose. In the words of Lord Lugard: Each subject of inquiry must be directed towards some clear and definite objective, and the by-products of

investigation put aside for later use. Take, for instance, the question of labour, which touches both the economic and the sociological sides of research. On the one side we want to know what is the effect on the village community of the absence of a large percentage of the adult males engaged in wage-labour. Does it produce immorality or decrease the birth-rate? Does it throw extra work on the women, and does this in turn (if it be so) increase infant mortality and prevent births? What again is the effect on the labourers themselves, and what effect do they produce on the village community when they return? Do they bring back and put into practice improved methods of agriculture and animal husbandry? Is their influence, as a result of their long absence and contact with Europeans, beneficial or harmful to tribal life?89

As this quote indicates, colonial officials needed to understand African social, political, economic, and legal systems, and the relationships between them; in short, indirect rule required a conceptual framework for explaining the social order.90 Was there a ‘science of society’ that could explain the underlying logic, despite apparent differences?91 To meet the requirements of colonial administrators, this conceptual framework would have to be adaptable to a wide variety of societies, whether they were tribes or kingships, had patrilineal or matrilineal descent, and whether they practiced Ifa or Islam. The model would have to be scalable so that it could be applied to large population groups such as the Ashanti or small population groups such as the Ibo. To prevent destruction of the social basis of traditional systems, the model would have to be explanatory rather than descriptive, that is it would have to explain how religious beliefs influenced law (for example) rather than just offer a list of rules and regulations. The model would have to be synchronic rather than diachronic, explaining (for example) how Islam is currently practiced in the society rather than explaining the origin of Islamic beliefs. The model would have to explain how the system functioned in abstract terms, alongside all the exceptions that make reality so messy. In other words, it would have to explain why cross-cousin marriage is prohibited in general, and the specific instances where exceptions were made. The model would have to explain the ‘functions’ of various social phenomena (such as twin infanticide, burning of widows, human sacrifice) within the whole of the society rather than simply discounting them as bizarre aberrations held over from the past. The “pragmatically effective administrative knowledge”92 of colonial administrators, however, was often based on scientifically outmoded theories such as social evolution. Having been exposed to the ideas of evolutionary anthropology through education or popular media, many district officers saw Africans as “savages” undergoing a process of social evolution towards “civilization.”93 Moreover, there was no standard vocabulary on which to draw. “Every year large numbers of anthropological reports are produced, the Secretariats overflow with them, but they are written by amateurs, District Officers, each using terms with a different connotation. Authoritative definitions are required of such terms as tribe, clan, sub-clan, village, village-group, town, community, and so on. Such a vocabulary would be an invaluable aid to clear thinking.”94 Much like the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan, the British lacked a system to collect, analyze, disseminate, and manage socio-cultural knowledge during the period of indirect rule in Africa.95 Similarly, there was a lack of trained social scientists, no standard method of collection and analysis, limited knowledge management and ‘pre-deployment’ training, and no standard conceptual model to explain how a society functioned. During the period of indirect rule in Africa, the British frequently lacked the knowledge needed for policy, strategy, operational planning, and execution. More importantly, they also lacked a system to produce and sustain that knowledge. Much of what the British implemented in Africa backfired because they did not understand the environment in which they were operating. For example, a well-intentioned district commissioner in Uganda limited the dowry of Acholi girls to two head of cattle and allowed money to be substituted for an animal. Superficially, such a plan made sense: price limits on brides would control profiteering and a monetary dowry would put marriage within the reach of those who had no livestock. However, these well-intentioned changes had a variety of unanticipated negative consequences. Formerly, Acholi girls married when they were physically mature. But now, because the worth of a small girl was only two head of cattle, immature girls must be betrothed and married before their value exceeded that of the cattle. A mature girl whose dowry had been paid with two head of cattle would only remain with her husband for a period of time equivalent to the worth of the cattle. Relatives of the girl did not consider the marriage legally binding. The unintended consequence was that “the limited dowry has introduced a species of legalised prostitution.” As J.H. Driberg, a colonial officer of the Uganda and Sudan Civil Services, noted: “from lack of anthropological knowledge the tribal life of the Acholi has been effectually ruined.” He continued: The choice is now before us: shall we choose to preserve their ancient institutions, exalting them, breathing into them, it may be, a new spirit, revivifying them and raising them into an enduring edifice? Or shall we prostitute them as a sacrifice to our ignorance, leaving as our memorial the tortured soul of peoples whom unwittingly we have betrayed and, thinking to benefit, have doomed to infinitude of misery, desolation, and, at the last, extinction?96

Because the British understanding of African societies was often superficial and incomplete, and the forces at work in the society—political, social, and economic—were not well understood, uprisings and rebellions often came as a surprise.97 British colonial officials, for example, believing that they understood the Ibo after thirty years of ‘governing’ them, were taken by surprise by the

uprising of Ibo women in southern Nigeria in 1929.98 Following the riots, a commission of enquiry was held,99 which emphasized the importance of government familiarity with native institutions. Lord Passfield, then Secretary of State for the Colonies, wrote: The need for further enquiry into the social organisation of the inhabitants on the South-Eastern Provinces naturally suggests the question to what extent the services of investigators trained in anthropological science has been, and may still be profitably employed. I propose to take steps to improve and increase the amount of instruction in anthropology imparted to newly appointed administrative officers who are busily engaged in the work of administration to carry out anthropological research of great value.100

In short, the British solution to the failure of indirect rule among the Ibo was not to hire more anthropologists, but to train colonial officers in anthropology. From the early 1900s, anthropologists proclaimed the utility of their discipline for colonial administration. In 1903, for example, anthropologist H. Ling Roth observed that, Politically, it is of the first importance that our governing officials should have a thorough knowledge of the native races subject to them—and this is the knowledge that anthropology can give them—for such knowledge can teach what methods of government and what forms of taxation are most suited to the particular tribes or to the stage of civilisation in which we find them. In connection with this, there can be no doubt that, with adequate knowledge, much bloodshed could have been saved in the past, both on our frontiers and in our colonies.101

The problem was, in the words of Audrey Richards, “the anthropologist often offers his help, but seldom condescends to give it.”102 Anthropology was promising in theory, but in practice it was difficult to apply for three main reasons. First, the discipline—as it existed between 1900 and 1930—could not adequately address the government’s knowledge requirements. It was not that the British had no knowledge of the Ibo, for example. The problem was that they had the wrong type of knowledge. An anthropologist named Northcote Thomas had been conducting research among the Ibo since his appointment as a government anthropologist in Nigeria in 1906. In 1913, Thomas published a six volume Report on the Ibo-speaking People of Nigeria,103 which provided minute details about Ibo law (such as dispute resolution and regulations governing marriage), languages, and proverbs. Northcote Thomas’ work was “descriptive rather than analytic,”104 more like a dictionary than a grammar. A description of the parts of a society without an analysis of how the parts functioned as a whole did not meet the knowledge imperative of indirect rule, which depended on an understanding of the social order as a totality: government anthropologists and district officers before the formulation of British social anthropology, although able to report on language, custom, diet and disease as a series of topics in any one culture, were less able to make social order as such intelligible … it was the system of law, the secret of order, which [colonial officials] needed to know.105

A conceptual framework suitable to indirect rule would have had to be adaptable, scalable, explanatory, synchronic, abstract, and holistic. Anthropology as a discipline only began developing such a conceptual model—functionalism—in the 1920s, partly in response to the knowledge imperatives of colonialism. Bronislaw Malinowski, “the intellectual father of British applied colonial anthropology,”106 is generally credited as one of the fathers of functionalism, along with Alfred Radcliffe-Brown. Functionalism (and subsequently structural functionalism) saw society as a structure comprised of groups (and the relations between them) in which parts of the society (such as ritual, sex, economy) functioned to maintain equilibrium within the social whole.107 Yet, with some significant exceptions, functionalism was developed too late to be used as a conceptual model in indirect rule.108 Towards the end of World War II, the discipline began to strongly distinguish between academic and applied anthropology. In 1946, Evans-Pritchard announced that “it may be held that it is laudable for an anthropologist to investigate practical problems. Possibly it is, but if he does so he must realize that he is no longer acting within the anthropological field but in the non-scientific field of administration.”109 Functionalism (and later structural functionalism), which was associated with applied colonial anthropology, was one of the casualties of the shift towards ‘pure’ science. Functionalism was rejected by anthropologists for its lack of historical focus, for freezing societies in time,110 for its epistemological origins in colonialism,111 for using tautological reasoning,112 and for being “reactionary.”113 Functionalism had been the dominant paradigm within anthropology, and with its death there was no replacement. As a discipline, anthropology has apparently abandoned the search for a unified field theory of social organization. Anthropology since the 1960s has experienced fragmentation into various ‘schools’ such as Marxism and feminism, and has indulged in an obsessive, reflexive introspection about its origins and how these origins affected the epistemology of the discipline.114 Anthropology, and the social sciences in general,115 do not offer a generally accepted comprehensive conceptual model for culture or society (whether there should be such a model is another question). There are only competing theories. However, the need for a conceptual model that explains social order and can be used in an applied military context still exists.116 The second reason that anthropology was difficult to apply in colonial administration was that it

lacked operational relevance. As P. E. Mitchell, then provincial commissioner in Tanganyika and later Governor of Kenya, observed: Anthropologists have largely occupied themselves with the past, or at least with the passing; and they have developed a technique of their own in recording and discussing in particular the curious or quaint in primitive societies. Thus if an inhabitant of a South Sea Island feels obliged on some ceremonial occasion to eat his grandmother the anthropologist is attracted to examine and explain the ancient custom which caused him to do so; the practical man, on the other hand, tends to take more interest in the grandmother.117

Malinowski also noted a variety of barriers to the application of anthropology to practical problems, including the tendency to focus on exceptions rather than systems,118 on origins rather than how things work in the present,119 and on the gap between “the theoretical concerns of the anthropology of the schools on the one hand, and practical interests on the other.”120 The third hindrance to the application of anthropology was the slow nature of anthropological research. After the Aba Riots (and also prompted in part by Northcote Thomas’ reappointment), there was a debate in the colonial office about the value of anthropology. According to one official, while “there was no question of the ultimate value of anthropological work in connection with the problem of administering a country like this [for example, Nigeria],” it was easy to lose sight of “the ultimate benefits in view of the apparently small results achieved in actual practice in the early years of such work.”121 The main collection method of anthropology, ethnography, requires an anthropologist to spend years living with the people under study. While indirect rule required a depth of knowledge that probably could only be acquired through years of fieldwork, years of immersion in a foreign society does not conform to the time-line of government, which even in the 1920s was faster than ethnography. P. E. Mitchell, reflecting on this period, observed that: Anthropologists, asserting that they only were gifted with understanding, busied themselves with enthusiasm about all the minutae [sic] of obscure tribal and personal practices, especially if they were agreeably associated with sex or flavoured with obscenity. There resulted a large number of painstaking and often accurate records of interesting habits and practices, of such length that no one had time to read them and often, in any case, irrelevant, by the time they became available, to the day to day business of Government.122

The fourth barrier was that anthropologists themselves were often eccentric and difficult to work with. Northcote Thomas was, according to a colonial office administrator, “a recognised maniac in many ways. He wore sandals, even in this country, lived on vegetables, and was generally a rum person.”123 R. S. Rattray—though he was both an anthropologist and a colonial official—was seen as partisan to the Ashanti, with questionable loyalties to the British. Unlike many of his anthropological contemporaries, Rattray participated in the world of the Ashanti not just as an observer, but as a believer. “I feel that I do not need to make any excuses,” he wrote, “for having taken part in … ‘Heathen and Idolatrous rites’ in order to elucidate the origin of religious beliefs.”124 Because of connection to the Ashanti, Rattray came to be known by Africans and Europeans alike as oboroni okomfo, which means “white witch doctor.”125 Anthropologists had agendas, which frustrated many colonial officials. The Colonial Secretary Malcolm MacDonald wrote to Lord Hailey in 1940: “I feel that I shall be pressed … to include an anthropologist, but I gather that it will be rather hard to find one who has not his own personal axe to grind, and I am told that in any case anthropologists, as a class, are rather difficult folk to deal with.”126 The gulf between the social scientists and administrators made anthropology difficult to apply to the practical problems of indirect rule. As one anthropologist reminisced, My first [district commissioner] said ‘We’ve nothing to hide’, making it clear that he supposed I had come to dig out scandal; he had no idea what I was after, or indeed what anthropology was. My second one said ‘We’ve had anthropologists here before’ … in the tone in which he might have said ‘We’ve had mice’.127

Anthropologists often saw administrators as ignorant functionaries, and administrators often saw anthropologists as interfering busybodies.128 Many District Commissioners believed that they ‘knew the native’, and that their years of experience made them far more expert than the anthropologist with only one or two years’ residence.… District Commissioners were often suspicious of all outsiders in their territory. The anthropologist, with his unique opportunities for ‘making trouble’—particularly if he was a ‘do-gooder’ at heart—was especially worrisome.129

Despite Malinowski’s plea that anthropologists should focus on research, “leaving to statesmen (and journalists) the final decision of how to apply the results,”130 the patterns had already been established. The outcome was that anthropologists, with few exceptions, did not have a seat at the table when decisions were made. In 1944, Audrey Richards reviewed the fifteen years in which anthropology was supposed to have been used in support of indirect rule and concluded that the level of support was minimal.131 A variety of anthropologists who worked in a colonial context noted their own lack of contribution to the colonial enterprise. Evans-Pritchard commented: Professor Seligman once told me that in all the years he had worked in the Sudan or on the Sudanese problems he was never once asked his advice and that the only time he volunteered it, in connection with the rain-makers of the Nuba Hills, it was not taken. During the fifteen years in which I worked on sociological problems in the same region I was never once asked my advice on any question at all.132

The thorny problems of cultural disjunction Anthropology, although it held some promise of alleviating the knowledge gaps of indirect rule, could not be effectively applied. The socio-cultural knowledge the British needed for administration could not be acquired ‘off the shelf,’ nor was there a knowledge system to produce it. Colonial officers frequently became responsible for fulfilling the knowledge imperative of indirect rule: what is the political structure? How is power distributed throughout the society? What are the institutions that govern people’s lives? The answers to these questions depended on their individual capabilities for research, their own cultural biases, their professional experiences and ambitions, their intentions good or bad, and their attitudes towards the African people they encountered. As Margery Perham noted in 1935, the British “tendency to misunderstand and the temptation to mishandle native institutions spring from the same fact, a dissimilarity so great between the two societies in contact as to make mutual comprehension or co-operation extremely difficult.”133 While the theory of indirect rule appeared to offer a solution to the complex problems of governing foreign societies, its implementation conformed to the old adage that ‘no plan survives contact with reality.’ The mutual incomprehension between British colonial officers and the African societies they encountered resulted in a variety of unanticipated cultural disjunctions. The following section discusses three disjunctions of indirect rule that resonate with recent U.S. military interventions in Central Asia and the Middle East. Indirect rule worked (in theory) by imposing a political administrative superstructure onto preexisting political and judicial systems. Although Lord Lugard believed that the principles of indirect rule had general validity,134 and could be applied throughout Africa, certain indigenous political systems were more compatible with direct rule than others. Indirect rule was first employed by Lugard in the Hausa Kingdom in Northern Nigeria. In many ways, Hausaland was unique: the Hausa shared a common culture, were unified by Islam, “acknowledged a suzerain in the holy rule of Sokoto,” had a rudimentary bureaucracy, and a literate ruling class. When the British encountered them, the Hausa had a complex, well-developed political and judicial system with centralized executive authority. “The imposition of a still higher authority could therefore be accepted by emirs and people with little disturbance, political or administrative.”135 Colonial governments were encouraged by the success of indirect rule in Northern Nigeria, where it meant little more than allowing the centralized Fulani and Hausa Emirates to carry on as they had before British rule. To function effectively as a system, indirect rule required a centralized political system with authority vested in an executive agent. As Perham once noted, “When the agent of our society approaches the African society he looks at once for the seat of executive power.” As the first step of indirect rule, colonial officers sought to identify an individual with the authority to implement judicial and executive functions within a given community.136 However, implementing indirect rule in the decentralized societies of Ashanti and the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast, which lacked clear executive agents, was much more challenging.137 What happened to the theory of indirect rule when those indigenous political systems had a different type of order, authority, and legitimacy? In 1921, Rattray was appointed Special Commissioner and head of the Anthropological Department in Ashanti.138 The Chief Commissioner of Ashanti, Sir Charles Harper, had requested Rattray by name. “I want an expert,” he wrote, “to collect and report upon all manner of customs, fetish, stool, marriage, burial, family, games, etc. etc. and to codify native law and custom with regard to land, timber, hunting, fishing, travelling. Such work would be of scientific value and of incalculable importance from an administrative point of view.”139 Rattray’s first paper as a government anthropologist was on the Golden Stool, and the second on Queen Mothers of the Ashanti. What Rattray discovered during the course of his research was that the political system of the Ashanti was not a centralized despotism with clearly established executive authority, but rather an interlocking system of partly autonomous clan-based groups. In other words, it was more like feudal Europe than Louis XIV’s France.140 In Rattray’s view, “decentralization was the dominant feature of the Ashanti Constitution.”141 Moreover, the Ashanti system was inherently democratic. While the British may believe they have perfected democracy, Rattray wrote, to an old Ashanti Western democracy is a pale imitation of their own system: “An Ashanti who was familiar alike with his own and our Constitution would deny absolutely our right to apply this term to ourselves or to our Constitution. To him a democracy implies that the affairs of the Tribe (the State) must rest, not in the keeping of the few, but in hands of the many. … To him the State is literally a Res Publica; it is everyone’s business.”142 Although the Ashanti political system had chiefs, their power was not absolute: the Queen Mothers—the mothers of the clan chiefs and of the superordinate king—asserted a vast amount of political power and authority, in part because the Ashanti system of tracing descent is matrilineal and matripotestal, meaning that lineage is traced through the female.143 This type of social organization afforded Ashanti women in general (and the Queen Mothers in particular) very high social status and significant legal rights, including custody of children, the right to inherit property, and the right to alienate property.144 Queen Mothers played a significant political role, including determining succession, advising the ruler, receiving petitions, choosing the ruler’s wife, and presiding over certain legal cases.145 But the most important power of the Queen Mothers was

transmission of royal blood: among the Ashanti, “a king’s son can never be the king, but the poorest woman of royal blood is the potential mother of a king.”146 In Rattray’s view, the British administration, in a rush to establish functioning government among the Ashanti, had been too eager to identify and strengthen the power of chiefs and had overlooked the power of women. In particular, the administration had ignored the central role of the Queen Mothers who were, in fact, the linchpins of the entire political system. Historically, the Queen Mothers were the ‘power behind the throne,’ and successive generations of Europeans had alienated them by giving all their attention to the chiefs.147 In 1923, Rattray wrote: To-day the Queen Mothers are unrecognized by us … In other words, the Ashanti have simply accepted the fact that our system seemed to take no official cognizance of women as a power in the family and in the State, and therefore did not question our methods. Now I feel certain we have here a tremendous potential power for good in these old mothers of Africa … Surely if we that is, the Government, do not in some small measure give the respect and honour that has always been the Queen Mothers’ right and the Queen Mother is to an Ashanti the personification of motherhood we cannot be surprised if her children follow our example.148

Rattray urged the government to officially recognize the Queen Mothers and pointed out that the recognition of their power would: do more for the moral welfare of the Ashanti race than by the expenditure of many thousands of pounds on a campaign conducted through the medium of the comparatively small number of educated African women.… Some recognition of this kind would, I believe mark an epoch in African administration, and the results for good would be very great. If, however, we really wish to break up the clan system, then we are doing the right thing by ignoring the position of these women, for they are the keystone of the whole structure.149

Of course, the British colonial administration did not actually wish to break up the clan system of the Ashanti, but rather to use it for the purposes of governance. Rattray’s sarcastic point, which we will return to later, was that too often colonial policies inadvertently defeated colonial interests. Indirect rule, which required a centralized political system with authority vested in an executive agent, was highly compatible with the political systems of the Hausa and the Fulani, but less so with the Ashanti and the Yoruba. But what happened when indigenous political systems possessed a completely unfamiliar, unrecognizable type of order, authority, and legitimacy? This question is highly relevant following a decade in which the U.S. has been involved in the reconstruction, creation, and development of institutions of governance in Iraq and Afghanistan. Under the Bush administration, much of this effort was described as political “democratization” and economic development. The promotion of democracy in the Middle East and Central Asia became a subject of debate in policy circles, raising a variety of questions. Were tribal societies organized according to kinship and locality capable of democracy, or was democracy appropriate for individualistic societies? Were Iraqis, who had experienced years of totalitarianism at the hands of Saddam Hussein, capable of self-governance, or did they need a ‘strong man’ to rule them? Would the introduction of democracy to societies divided along ethno-sectarian lines result in political fragmentation? The same quandaries arose almost 100 years ago when the British encountered the Ibo (or Igbo), a tribal people in southeastern Nigeria. Their decentralized political system, which functioned through a complex web of social ties based on lineage, baffled the British. Perham, usually a sympathetic observer of African social life, called the Ibo “one of the least disciplined, and least intelligible, of African peoples.”150 The Ibo are an ethnic-linguistic group,151 whose system of governance before colonization (with the exception of a few ancient kingdoms such as Nri152 and Onitsha153) was essentially democratic and decentralized.154 Ibo society was acephalous, meaning without political leaders or a central political authority.155 Decisions were made by a council of elders made up of family leaders, or umunna (children of the same father), a patrilineal line of descent tracing itself back to an ancestor. Because each member of the council of elders was accountable to their village and kinship group, Ibo governance contained a system of checks and balances that prevented the consolidation of power. At the village level, male age grade groups performed the functions of governance, including the provision of security and administration of justice.156 The community decision making process was consensus based, and involved the participation of entire communities in protracted discussions.157 The political system of the Ibo did not conform to the British paradigm of government, lacking centralized authority, hierarchical structures, and executive agents. Because Ibo society appeared to lack an obvious executive authority, the British simply assumed that political and judicial institutions did not exist. For example, F. H. Ruxton, writing in 1930, stated that the Ibo do not “possess any deeply rooted religious or political traditions of their own.”158 In Rattray’s view, however, the Ibo and other similarly decentralized societies did have an inherent order, imperceptible though it might be to colonial administrators. The failure to perceive that order was a problem of selective perception compounded by a failure of observation: The complexity of a so-called “primitive” tribal society would have been unintelligible to them, the intimately related social units would have seemed lacking in cohesion, nothing worthy of the name of constitution or state would have been apparent. There would have seemed to have been no one of importance whom the white man, accustomed to his kings and queens and secular force and physical sanctions could have called in to help him to govern. After thirty years of anthropological science and advance, an English Governor can still write “what

more natural than we should use for this purpose (i.e. to govern the Natives) the tribal institutions of the people themselves if we can find them.” Of course, they are always there to be found if we look deeply enough.159

In the view of the British, societies where political order was diffuse, consensual, or nonhierarchical were structurally incompatible with indirect rule. Ibo patterns of traditional government “were hopelessly unsuited to the needs of the colonial state. Its system of checks and balances, its pursuit of consensus by protracted discussion, its use of religious sanctions, and especially, its small scale, rendered it impracticable.”160 Furthermore, the Ibo lacked executive authority; executive power corresponding to the British model simply did not exist:161 “The complex distribution of duties according to seniority, sex and status, with ancestral and magical sanctions, offered, even less than among the Yoruba, any agency which an alien ruling power could use for the performance of any administrative activities.”162 The British could not find a way to adapt indirect rule to the Ibo system, so they adapted the Ibo system to indirect rule.163 Their initial solution was to create paramount chiefs through the mechanism of warrants, which recognized the appointed individual as rulers of their community. Donald Cameron, a colonial governor, described the warrant chief system as a way to “make, as it were, a crown or a king at the top and then try to find something underneath on which it mightperhaps-appropriately be placed.”164 Following the introduction of chiefs, the British built “something underneath” by introducing “councils”—aggregated family units. A district officer in Nigeria noted that “These Councils had to be trained to take responsibility which was difficult because there was no tradition of Government…They were, therefore … something which had to be built up from nothing.”165 Nothing could have been more foreign to Ibo society; the warrant chiefs had not been determined by consensus, but had been appointed by an external power and were thus not responsible to their local communities,166 but were only answerable to the British political officers. Encountering a political system that was structurally incompatible with indirect rule, the British brought it into conformity with the requirements of colonial administration. In so doing, they created the preconditions for despotism. In the system of indirect rule, power aggregated upwards from the family to the village and then to the district level, and was finally concentrated and distilled in the “emir” of the Native Administration. Because of this tiered concentration of power, the system of indirect rule tended to recognize, reward, and entrench despotic rule. Additionally, because colonial administrators sometimes appointed “chiefs” when they could not easily be identified in the local political structure, the tendency of indirect rule was to create despotic rulers where none previously existed. Indirect rule also tampered with traditional checks and balances in the political system, empowering chiefs who in pre-colonial days would have been “subject to control by a council or liable to deposition if they became too unpopular.”167 “[O]ur policy of Indirect Rule in Nigeria (and possibly elsewhere),” wrote R. S. Rattray in 1934, has a “tendency to build up centralised African autocracies, thus disregarding the basis of African institutions which I maintain were decentralised and essentially democratic.”168 Ironically, the British took a system that was essentially democratic and consensus-based and, in the name of progress and moral obligation, created the preconditions for despotism. One might reasonably ask whether the same process occured in Iran with the overthrow of Mossadegh in 1953? Or Guatemala in 1954? Or Congo in 1960? The primary method for implementing indirect rule, as discussed above, was the utilization and incorporation of local institutions as mechanisms of governance. However, the very notion of utilizing local institutions inherently contains two conflicting impulses. First is the desire not to interfere with the native society, or to interfere only minimally. After all, how can one utilize local institutions if they are altered so much they become completely different in form and function? Thus, in Northern Nigeria, for example, the British pursued “a policy of minimal interference with the chiefs and their traditional forms of government.” British district officers were supposed to limit themselves to acting as advisors to the chiefs.169 (This same policy of noninterference in local government and social institutions, as the later chapter on military governance discusses, exists as a legal doctrine during military occupation of territory.) The second impulse in indirect rule is the desire to reform or reshape the society. After all, how can an interceding state abide offensive practices (such as stoning for adultery) or inefficiencies (such as corruption) in the host nation government? According to Michael Crowder: The use of indigenous political institutions for the purposes of local government was contingent on certain modifications to these institutions. These modifications fell into two categories: modifications of aspects of traditional Government that were repugnant to European ideas of what constituted good government; and modifications that were designed to ensure the achievement of the main purpose of colonial rule, the exploitation of the colonized country. Examples of the former would be the abolition of human sacrifice… Examples of the latter would be the introduction of taxes.170

Thus, rather than strictly abiding by a doctrine of non-interference, the British engaged in a program of selective social change, modifying or destroying ‘objectionable’ institutions while simultaneously sustaining ‘desirable’ ones. This same impulse to reshape societies has manifest itself in more recent military efforts to reform ‘repugnant’ aspects of culture (such as introducing schooling for girls in Afghanistan) and political systems (such as building free markets and creation of democracy in Iraq).

‘Progress’ was the slogan that justified the modification of African practices “repugnant to European ideas.” Progress, in the era of British colonialism, meant the political, social, and economic reformation of indigenous African societies. The specific elements of progress were, in the words of Lord Lugard, “training of the native rulers; the delegation to them of such responsibility as they are fit to exercise; the constitution of Course of Justice free from corruption and accessible to all; the adoption of a system of education which will assist progress without creating false ideas; the institution of free labour and of a just system of taxation; the protection of the peasantry from oppression, and the preservation of their rights in land, etc.”171 Inherent in the notion of progress was a conviction that British civilization was morally and socially superior to all others, and that this superiority resulted from the inevitable march of ‘social evolution.’ The idea of social evolution, a commonly-held and unchallenged view among the British educated classes at the time, posited that human societies progressed from the extended family group, to the tribal group, to the kingdom, and finally to complex democracy.172 Kingships, such as those among the Hausa, would theoretically have more highly developed political organization and social regulation, such as centralized government, commerce, taxation, and courts of justice,173 than those found among the clan-based Ibo.

Progress under indirect rule, however, did not mean transformation of the natives into Englishmen. Unlike the British colonialism of the 1800s before the era of indirect rule, which was characterized by the view that the “backwardness” of non-Western societies could be “fixed” through the substitution of British institutions,174 indirect rule emphasized development of African institutions along their own path, toward their own end state.175 Proponents of indirect rule assumed neither that the path of African progress, nor the final form, would resemble British institutions of government. Sir Donald Cameron, for example, advocated the retention and development of African institutions to make the native a “good African,” not to “Westernize him and turn him into a bad imitation of a European.” Cameron’s view was that the British administration should ensure that “the political energies and ability of the people are directed to the preservation and development of their own institutions.”176 Progress was also a code word for the imposition of order on what the British saw as a chaotic continent. British presence had caused a breakdown in tribal structures, and the result—in the view of the British—posed a threat. As Fulani bin Fulani wrote in 1919, “Over most of tropical Africa the old order of tribal society is dead, dying, or doomed.”177 The breakdown of tribal authority was perceived as dangerous: in his report on East Africa for 1909–1910, Sir. P. Girouard wrote If we allow the tribal authority to be ignored or broken, it will mean that we, who numerically form a small minority in the country, shall be obliged to deal with a rabble, with thousands of persons in a savage or semisavage state, all acting on their own impulses, and making themselves a danger to society generally.178

The solution, in the eyes of Lord Lugard, to the breakdown of the tribal system and the ensuing chaos was not to maintain the old order—the urgent need is for adaptation to the new—to build up tribal authority with a recognised and legal standing, which may avert social chaos. It cannot be accomplished by superseding—by the direct rule of the white man—such ideas of disciple and organisation that exist.179

The role of the administrator was not just to watch and wait for progress to take place, but to actively encourage social evolution. According to Lord Lugard: It is the task of the administrator to accelerate the slow process of evolution … from the most primitive stage of the family group which owes no other allegiance than the patriarchal through the tribal stage, to the stage where the authority of a chief is recognised, and some measure of cohesion and co-operation is introduced. In the final or “kingdom” stage despotic powers are exercised by the chief, generally with a council of advisers, and orders are carried out by special functionaries.180

In this final stage of progress, African institutions that were considered offensive to British ideas of ‘decency’ and ‘morality’ would be eradicated, and new, more ‘civilized’ standards and methods would be introduced.181 In the words of one district officer: Among native social customs requiring detailed scientific investigation, not to ascertain their origins but to hasten their disappearance, may be mentioned twin-murder, witch-craft, trial by ordeal, burial in houses, marriage of girls below the age of puberty, and child prostitution in some of the larger coast towns.182

The British had few qualms about the imposition of their own customs on local society in the name of ‘civilization.’ The point is well illustrated by the Indian story in which the Brahmans protested against the prohibition of suttee because it was a sacred custom of the Hindus which should be respected. “Be it so”, replied Sir Charles Napier. “The burning of widows is your custom. Prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive, we hang them and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.”183

Indirect rule involved not only selective progress through the modification or destruction of ‘objectionable’ institutions, but also selective preservation of ‘desirable institutions’ within a society. From a purely pragmatic perspective, if these institutions were going to be used for the utilitarian purposes of governance, then logically they had to be preserved. Some colonial officials such as Sir Donald Cameron recognized this and argued that the colonial administration should ensure that “the political energies and ability of the people are directed to the preservation and development of

their own institutions.”184 Anthropologists involved in the colonial enterprise, such as Rattray, were the strongest advocates for preservation,185 but they supported preservation on a variety of different grounds. Some argued for preservation in the interests of science,186 believing that progress would destroy African cultures. Writing in 1926, a colonial officer in both the Uganda and Sudan Civil Services mused that if anthropologists were in charge of policy, they would: demand that native institutions should be left entirely untouched and that native tribes should be granted absolute autonomy such as existed in the period before European or other intervention. It would mean the complete evacuation of Africa, to take only one area, by all the protecting powers and the withdrawal of all nonAfrican elements and all alien economic enterprise. … Non-intervention, though to many it may be a desirable ideal, is no longer a practical policy.187

The other primary argument for preservation was that African institutions had value in and of themselves. This argument was grounded in cultural relativism (or “cultural agnosticism”),188 a concept first articulated by Franz Boas in 1887: “civilization is not something absolute, but … is relative, and … our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilization goes.”189 Cultural relativism has two main components: first, the view that there is no universal standard by which a culture can be measured; and second, that society is an integrated whole, in which beliefs, practices, customs, and norms have meaning within the context in which they are found.190 If one accepts the first premise of cultural relativism—that no universal standard exists by which to measure a society—then all institutions are equal and worthy of preservation. This was the perspective of many anthropologists,191 including Rattray.192 Instead of relegating traditional African culture to the “mausolea of dead or dying cultures,” the goal, Rattray wrote, to aim at progress for their race which is based on their own institutions, religion, manners and customs; that they will become better and finer men by remaining true Ashantis and retaining a pride in their past, and that a greater hope lies in their future if they will follow and build upon lines with which the national sunsum or soul have been familiar since first they were a people.193

In Rattray’s view, indirect rule should promote “the retention of all that is best in the African’s own past culture.”194 While preservation of African institutions avoided or delayed the wholesale destruction commonly found in systems of direct rule,195 contemporary observers noted that preservation was not without consequences. A policy of preservation tended to “stabilise procedures and relationships which the people themselves—in the absence of British compulsion—might have modified or abolished.”196 A policy of preservation froze African institutions into stasis and prevented them from evolving in a natural way. “It is idle to contend that all the traditional customs and usages should be preserved,” as K. A. Korsah noted in 1944. What are known as ‘Native Customary laws’ are the traditional usages of a people, which have become so widely known and acknowledged as to receive the ‘sanctions of law in the community’; these customs constantly change as the people progress, and the moment you try to freeze them into immobility you produce retrogression. It is quite wrong to treat them as museum pieces which cannot be changed.197

Preservation also potentially denied Africans the opportunity to progress along Western lines. Most educated Africans, in the words of Perham, “reject the control of conservative chiefs and demand as rapid an initiation as possible into the culture and political forms of the civilised world. If we withhold this initiation they will suspect that we have reasons other than their own wellbeing for holding them back.”198 Preservation of African social forms, as Perham’s statement indicates, was inherently paternalistic, seeking to help Africans but denying them the right to choose their own destiny.199 The belief that African institutions could be selectively preserved, whether grounded in paternalism or pragmatism, contained an inherent logical flaw. African institutions could not be preserved in their original form because the imposition of indirect rule had already radically altered social and political life.200 Similarly, the moment that any government puts boots on the ground in a foreign society, the process of social change has already begun. Africans had swiftly adapted to European colonization, and nothing could stop that process. “What government has the power and the knowledge to prevent men from adapting their culture to the many and drastic changes we have made in their environment?”201 The answer is, of course, none. Regardless of the inherent flaws in the policy of preservation, in order to preserve desirable institutions, administrators had to understand how various social institutions—religion, law, politics, kinship, and economics—actually worked, and how those institutions were interconnected and interdependent. Yet the prevailing attitude of many Europeans, including members of the British colonial administration, was that the Africans were—in the words of an old slave trader: stupid and unenlightened hordes; immersed in the most gross and impenetrable gloom of barbarism, dark in mind as in body, prodigiously populous, impatient of all control, unteachably lazy, ferocious as their own congenial tigers, nor in any respect superior to these rapacious beasts in intellectual advancement but distinguished only by a rude and imperfect organ of speech, which is abusively employed in the utterance of dissonant and inarticulate jargon.202

Thus, the mission of anthropologists such as Rattray who were determined to preserve African culture and society, was to counter the biased and erroneous stereotypes that existed in the minds of the administration through empirical research. Once the complexity and the beauty of Ashanti customs and religion was recognized, Rattray believed, it would be impossible to dismiss them as mere “heathens bowing down to sticks and stones.”203 Consequently, Rattray recorded the complexity of Ashanti cosmology, demonstrating—contrary to the prevailing view—that the supreme God, Nyame, had not been introduced into Ashanti mythology by Christian missionaries, but had always been a central feature of it.204 Rattray’s approach to research was highly inductive (determined not by an overarching hypothesis but by the concerns of his ethnographic informants) and appears at times (like much of the writing of his era) as a jumble of irrelevant, technical details. Only late in his career did Rattray articulate what he recognized as the underlying order of Ashanti society. Religion, in Rattray’s view, was the central fact of Ashanti society and the basis of their law: “A living Universe—the acknowledgement of a Supreme God—sanctity and reverence for dead ancestors—religion which is inseparable from law—these were the foundations on which the old order was based.”205 Understanding the totality of the Ashanti social system was critical in Rattray’s view for the successful implementation of indirect rule. In writing Ashanti Law and Constitution (1926), Rattray observed that if the administration wished to use the information correctly, it must be done with reference to the religious system that undergirded the legal system: “Upon the correct application of this knowledge must, I believe, depend our satisfactory tutelage of this people, and ultimately their own success in self-government.”206 From both a pragmatic perspective and from a humanistic one alike, Rattray believed that Ashanti religion must be preserved. Yet, even as he wrote about their traditions in the 1920s, Ashanti society was experiencing enormous change due to the incursion of Christianity. The 1921 Annual Colonial Report: Ashanti contained statistics on the high rate of conversion to Christianity, which was at that time nearly fifteen thousand a year.207 How could indirect rule based in theory on Ashanti law be implemented if the Ashanti religion upon which the law was based was being systematically eroded? Indirect rule involved a combination of selective progress (modification or destruction of ‘objectionable’ institutions) and selective preservation (sustaining desirable institutions). For British colonial administrators, the question was: how can we selectively modify and/or preserve certain elements of the society without destroying the system as a whole? The dilemma inherent in colonial social engineering was that societies are integrated systems, not just the sum of their parts. A change in one aspect of the system may alter others, or destroy the entire system itself. Basil Thomson, writing about Fiji in 1908, noted that The fabric of every complete social system has been built up gradually. You may raze it to the foundations and erect another in its place, but if you pull out a stone here and there, the whole edifice comes tumbling about your ears before you can make your alterations.208

One approach often taken by colonial administrators to selective social modification was the substitution of social function—in other words, the substitution of less offensive institutions that served the same social function without destroying the system or creating a cascade of unintended consequences. In New Guinea, for example, Australian administrators wished to abolish the custom of homicide as a manhood initiation rite. E. W. P. Chinnery, an Australian who served as a government anthropologist in New Guinea, described how “a meeting of the chiefs was held, and the principles of the custom were analysed. The gathering decided that the essential thing to be proved was the possession of courage. As a result of the discussion, candidates for initiation were permitted to qualify by killing a wild boar instead of a man.”209 This type of social engineering requires a deep and comprehensive knowledge of the target society. To execute such a program, it would be necessary to understand how the society worked as an integrated system, to identify the ‘functions’ of aberrant or inexplicable social customs, and evaluate how these behaviors and activities were connected to other parts of the whole. With that knowledge, ‘objectionable’ social institutions could potentially be modified without destroying the system or creating a cascade of unintended consequences. In the words of Perham, the British hoped to understand how African cultures were integrated and so to recognize the functions of certain customs which seemed to our grandfathers the perverse aberrations of the heathen. We identify in miniature and under primitive disguise the elements common to all human societies, and we begin to question whether those elements, instead of being wholly destroyed, might not be re-expressed in forms more serviceable to the needs of to-day.210

As these comments indicate, the goal was to refashion ‘objectionable’ social institutions in more palatable form. The conundrum is that the destruction of ‘objectionable’ institutions may also destroy desirable ones, and conversely that sustaining desirable institutions may preserve those deemed ‘objectionable.’ Let us return to the contradiction that Rattray identified regarding indirect rule among the Ashanti: how could indirect rule grounded in and dependent on Ashanti law be implemented if the religion upon which the law was based was being systematically eroded? Indirect rule worked in Northern Nigeria because the policy was to avoid interference with the local

Islamic religion. Yet, among the Ashanti, the administration encouraged indirect rule while simultaneously supporting missionaries in their efforts to erode the old religion upon which Ashanti law and politics depended. In his words: In Northern Nigeria, those who framed the administration on the existing foundation were also fostering legal institutions which were based on the existing religious beliefs. In that country, however, this religious foundation of the legal and constitutional system remained unassailed and unassailable because “it is against the government policy to permit Christian propaganda within areas which are predominantly Muslim;” the respect which we show in Nigeria to the tenets of Islam could hardly be expected to be accorded in Ashanti to a religion, which, up to a few years ago, had been branded as one of the lowest forms of worship “fetishism.” In the latter country indeed, there is some indication that its inhabitants may embrace Christianity—at any rate in a superficial and outward form—in years which may not be very remote. In introducing indirect rule into this country we would, therefore, appear to be encouraging on the one hand an institution [law] which draws its inspiration and vitality from the indigenous religious beliefs, while on the other we are systematically destroying the very foundation [religion] upon which stands the structure that we are striving to perpetuate.211

As Rattray’s example makes clear, in attempting to modify institutions that did not conform to their ideas of decency, such as the “fetishism” of the Ashanti, the British often inadvertently destroyed the institutions needed for indirect rule. Many of the institutions that the British found ‘objectionable’ were in fact the cornerstones of the ‘desirable’ institutions needed for indirect rule. Judicial, economic and executive functions, for example, often had their basis or foundation in religion or kinship, which were also the locus of ‘savage’ practices such as twin murder or witchcraft. Since the era of British colonialism in Africa, intervening governments have continued the mythological quest to transform the social fabric of host nations, introducing gender equality in Afghanistan, abolishing Shinto in Japan, democratizing Iraq, and so on. Yet, as many of the chapters in this book demonstrate, Rattray’s warnings regarding the unintended consequences of social change have not been heeded. In many cases, in encouraging the development of certain institutions (such as democracy) we weaken others (such as kinship networks) which constitute the foundation of the society we wish to save. This is self-defeating praxis. When Western governments engage with non-Western societies, whether in the context of colonization, occupation, or economic development, their own culture influences their perception of the cultures they find. Cultural norms, concepts, and ordering schemas influence the questions we ask, what we think is important, and how we understand other people. When the U.S. re-formulated the government of Iraq after the end of major combat operations, for example, they were operating according to certain assumptions about government. Democracy (as opposed to autocracy or socialism) was assumed to be the best type of government for Iraq. Party membership in the Ba’ath party was assumed to indicate an ideological commitment (rather than just an instrumental requirement for government or professional life). Centralization of power in a unitary state was assumed to be the most natural arrangement (rather than devolution of power to ethnically dominated territories or reestablishment of the monarchy). Assumptions such as these reflect a Western paradigm of government. While it is natural and normal for planners, policymakers, and military personnel to operate from within the framework with which they are familiar, paradigms can also result in perception failure, blinding the individual to phenomena that do not conform to the archetype. Errors in perception can result in solutions that are unsuitable for local conditions, with cascading negative effects. In the context of indirect rule, the culture the British carried in their heads contained certain paradigms about the structure and function of government. Their life experiences and cognitive frameworks framed their understanding of African society. Like the U.S. in Iraq, the British brought with them to Africa certain assumptions about political systems based on their own paradigm of government. In the British paradigm, government meant a centralized political system, with power aggregated up to a singular titular head of government and a separation of church and state into different spheres of influence.212 As David Cannadine has argued in Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire, the British colonial world resulted from: a deliberate, sustained and selfconscious [sic] attempt by the British to order, fashion and comprehend their imperial society overseas on the basis of what they believed to be the ordering of their metropolitan society at home.… the social structure was generally believed to be layered, individualistic, traditional, hierarchical and providentially sanctioned; and for all the advances towards a broader, more democratic electoral franchise, it was in practice a nation emphatically not dedicated to the proposition that all men (let alone women) were created equal.213

This paradigm, which could also be considered a form of ‘selective perception’ bias, had two main consequences. First, the paradigm led the British to assume (or expect) that central authority existed in African political systems. African states with centralized authority systems conformed most closely to the British paradigm, and were therefore the most familiar. As Rattray observed, it was almost inevitable that the first societies to be recognised in Africa should have been highly centralized ones.214 In a place where everything must have seemed strange and foreign, highly centralized societies with a division between secular and sacred authority (like the Hausa) were the most similar in form and function to the British model, and therefore the easiest to comprehend.215 The

British discovered an “outward form of government” that was “quite intelligible” to them: “Here were the secular temporal authorities so dear and indispensable to our minds.”216 Second, while centralized states were easy to recognize because they conformed to the paradigm, non-conforming states were correspondingly difficult to recognize. Because the British expected to see their reflection in the mirror of African society, they often failed to recognize political forms as they actually existed. Rattray saw this first-hand when he began his last tour in Africa in 1928 in the remote northernmost part of what is now Ghana. Unlike the politically and economically sophisticated society of the Ashanti, here he was surrounded by nearly-naked “primitive” inhabitants whose “property consisted only in bows and arrows, pots, calabashes, and live stock.”217 Unlike the centralized political system of the Ashanti, in the Northern Territories small fortresslike compounds lay scattered throughout the countryside, each family a political unit unto themselves. Historically, according to Rattray, these tribal groups were divided into totemic clans ruled by priest-chiefs called the Ten’dana among the Nankanse or Tengsob among the Lobi, who wielded a form of power based on spiritual sanctions. Long ago, Muslim invaders had established political suzerainty over these Northern tribes, imposing patrilineal descent along with “a new and unheard-of political conception, namely the idea of territorial and secular leadership in place of the immemorial institution of a ruler, who was the high priest of a totemic clan and dealt only in spiritual sanctions.”218 Among some (but not all tribes), a “dual mandate” developed, whereby the Ten’dana managed “magico-religious” concerns and the secular chief “was recognized by every one as a kind of titular head, he had a red fez and wore clothes, but really interfered hardly at all with the life or private affairs of the masses.”219 Then the British arrived, and demanded to see “the King.” Meanwhile: the tribal rulers, the Ten’dana, who were old aristocrats in their own way … kept aloof and in the background. Some wholly unimportant, and often worthless individual (from the local standpoint), was thrust forward to confront the stranger. … This emissary was told the white man’s demands and hastened off to inform the real Chief, i.e., the Ten’dana, who saw to it that the order was carried out. At first, this individual acted as a kind of intermediary between the Ten’dana and the white man, and was merely regarded with faint contempt by all the villagers.… In the course of time, however, many of the individuals came to dig themselves in and became more assured and confident of their positions… The real ruler, almost before he realized it, often to his wonder and indignation, found himself becoming of less and less account in the eyes of his people, until at length there made its appearance in this part of Africa something which every one, African and European alike, knows to be an anomaly—a local despotic ruler. There are many of these petty unconstitutional European-made Chiefs in the Northern Territories.220

In short, the British “accepted the claims of the political overlords and overlooked the position of the Ten’dana,”221 who held the real power in the society. “Mistakes in the recognition of native authorities,”222 as Rattray observed, often led to elevation of the wrong authority, leading to the structural disempowerment of other social groups. In this particular case, the British were befuddled by a political system which did not conform to their paradigm about separation of church and state.223 The consequence of neglecting the real anchors of traditional society was, in many cases, the creation of local despots. Rattray’s attempt in Tribes of the Ashanti Hinterland (1932) to encourage administrators to pay more attention to the Ten’dana, rather than ignoring them in favor of the secular chiefs, was unsuccessful.224 The problem with paradigms is that they blind you to other possibilities, other concepts, other ways of organizing political and social life. They can be tyrannical because even when you try to avoid their power, they exert an unconscious influence. Rattray, in his interesting but unsuccessful novel The Leopard Priestess (1934), wrote: Sometimes with little real knowledge of Africa’s past history, tradition, legal code, constitution, religion, we have attempted to build up working plans of government for various regions, which are ostensibly based on native institutions but in reality are sometimes only our own Western ideas of constitutional Government under a thin disguise.225

Conclusion Rattray had learned to fly while on leave from an assignment in Africa, and was the first person to fly from England to the Gold Coast (now Nigeria). Such a solo flight was a dangerous enterprise: the plane in which he flew across Africa was essentially a “small open sports car with wings,” with no radio and no possibility of rescue if he crashed. Before the flight, he made arrangements in case of his death: the publisher of his manuscripts was directed to keep the text out of the hands of anyone who would “missionize” the Ashanti.226 In the end, the flight was a success, and Rattray became fixated by aviation. In 1937, after coming back to England after his last tour in Africa, he wrote, “Well I’m happy in a way. I live in the skies. I have taken up the finest of all sports—gliding—and have the very comforting feeling that if I get killed there are worse deaths.”227 Rattray died in a gliding accident in May 1938, aged 57 years old. Despite the many books he published and his remarkable life, Rattray’s name has become lost in history. In part he is forgotten by anthropologists because his subject was narrow, his writing dry, and he was never a university professor (and so never had students to celebrate his intellectual legacy). But he is also forgotten because of the colonial context in which he worked, an episode of history that most anthropologists would rather forget and most government officials do not

remember. Much like Rattray, the lessons of indirect rule are also often overlooked. These lessons are easy to dismiss, clouded as they are by the grim history of European colonialism in Africa. While certainly less brutal than Belgian colonialism in the Congo, British indirect rule nevertheless facilitated the expropriation of labor and natural resources from a subordinate population. Even Lord Lugard conceded this point: “it would be absurd to deny that the initial motive for the penetration of Africa by Western civilization was … the satisfaction of its material necessities, and not pure altruism.”228 Indirect rule, even when implemented with the best possible motives, caused a great deal of human suffering and resulted in catastrophic long-term social and political upheaval. While it may not be possible to fully disentangle the relevant lessons of indirect rule from the choices, themes, and questions posed by the cultural disjunctions that resulted, given recent U.S. interventions in a variety of foreign countries, and the likelihood that such interventions will occur again in the future, these cultural disjunctions are indeed worthy of consideration. The first point to consider is whether the basic principle of indirect rule—the use of indigenous institutions for governance—could be applied by the U.S. military in an overseas stability operation. Would operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have been easier and more efficient if indigenous institutions had been used from the outset? The second concerns socio-cultural knowledge. Indirect rule, as a system of colonial administration, functioned by imposing an administrative superstructure on local African political, economic, and legal systems, and then (theoretically) incorporating those systems into the government. In so doing, indirect rule created an imperative for knowledge about traditional African societies. The British government, like the U.S. government in Iraq and Afghanistan, was initially unprepared or unable to address the requirement on both an individual and systemic level.229 The British government did not know what it needed in terms of a knowledge system, and therefore could not build it. The lack of a knowledge system put the burden on colonial officers to do this research. As the U.S. military discovered in Iraq and Afghanistan, soldiers rarely had the formal qualifications to undertake social science research, much less the time to do it, and had to make a ‘best guess’ about how the local government worked and who the legitimate authority figures were.230 The third lesson of indirect rule that deserves consideration is the tyranny of the paradigm. Much like the British, whose concept of government blinded them to what actually existed, the U.S. in Iraq had difficulty understanding tribal structures which did not conform to the Western model. If these paradigms are so deeply entrenched, why bother even trying to transcend them? As a District Officer remarked in 1930: Though the Government does all it can to foster and develop native administration and the native courts the tendencies are mostly in the direction of English forms of local self-government, of English procedure and of English legal conceptions. It may be that to miss the goal of real native administration is ineluctable, but at any rate it should not be missed through ineptitude on our part, through a lack of knowledge of native polity.231

The fourth consideration is whether the introduction of Western economic and governmental forms and structures will result in unanticipated negative consequences. Indirect rule survived as a system of administration in Nigeria for over fifty years, yet the cumulative effect was the destruction of African institutions that were both the object and the basis of that system. Any intervention changes both the physical and social environment in which it takes place, but political actors often underestimate the effect that they have on the environment in which they are operating. The Bush administration’s de-Ba’athification policy in Iraq, for example, created the pre-conditions for the insurgency. Similarly, the policy prohibiting recognition of tribes disempowered the Iraqi institutions that eventually proved necessary for the administration of the country. The final lesson is that Western systems may be structurally incompatible with indigenous concepts of order, authority, and legitimacy. From a military perspective, it is easy to assume that the purpose of military force is to impose one’s will on the adversary. But it is often forgotten that the adversary (or in the case of stability operations, the civilian population) has agency in the situation, and may comply or resist depending on the circumstance. The operational environment is not white space on a map. There is already a society there, in that territory, with their own ways of governing themselves, their own means of providing security for themselves and their children, and their own hopes and dreams. Western ideas of law, governance, and economic progress may be structurally incompatible with this, and may even destroy the indigenous forms of government that it seeks to preserve. “Meddlesome care,” as Alfred Cort Haddon wrote in 1921, “when based on ignorance, is apt to defeat its own end.”232

3

URSULA GRAHAM BOWER AND MILITARY LEADERSHIP

It is as though we lived, and one had died; Weeping, we remain. O since we weep, return again, ascend! O mount the road! O climb the steep again!

Zemi Naga wedding song1

In 1937, a young British debutante named Ursula Graham Bower travelled to India. Her mother hoped that Ursula would meet a husband,2 maybe from the British Colonial Service or perhaps a wealthy tea planter. Bower herself had hoped to go to Oxford to study archeology, but her family thought educating girls was a waste of money,3 and viewed Oxford as a “hotbed of socialism.”4 So Bower dropped out of boarding school before graduation,5 spent six months at a finishing school in Switzerland, and then ‘came out’ as a debutante during the London season.6 Savings that could have paid for a university education went towards an Aston Martin sports car instead.7 After arriving in India, she went hiking with friends along the India-Burma border. Out in the hills she encountered the Naga, a group of tribal headhunters. The Naga had a strong warrior tradition which involved raiding neighboring tribes, killing their victims, and taking their heads as trophies. At the time of Bower’s first visit to the Naga in 1937, headhunting was still a common practice. The year before, the Assam Rifles had launched a punitive expedition to Pangsha “to put an end to this aggressive village’s predatory habit of raiding smaller villages to take prisoners—destined for human sacrifice.”8 Head hunting was both symbol and evidence of masculine bravery. “A Naga male could not consider himself a true man until he had taken his first head, and the greater the number of heads taken in battle, the greater the prestige of the warrior. It was believed that in capturing the head, a warrior seized the spirit and vitality of his enemy. The rotting heads would decorate the eaves of the nagas’ [sic] bamboo and thatch homes, or would be hung from ceremonial poles in the villages.”9 Each man in the village was expected to contribute a skull to the collection. As a Baptist Missionary observed in 1907, “Men were dubbed women or cows until they had contributed to the village skull house.”10 After a few months living in the town of Imphal and making trips into the hills to visit the tribes, Bower ran out of money and went home to England. Her photographs of the Naga were surprisingly good and the Royal Geographical Society of London exhibited them.11 Anthropologists at the PittRivers Museum in Oxford encouraged her to do further ethnological work among the Naga, who had not been thoroughly studied. Back in India in 1939, she was given permission by James Philip Mills, the Governor’s Secretary and Director of Ethnography in Assam, to travel alone to the Zemi Naga area.12 Travel to the Naga Hills was strictly controlled, and allowed only by special permit.13 Even after Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India in 1877, the Naga rebelled against British colonization. “Despite punitive expeditions, fines and public hangings,” the British had conquered only twelve Naga tribes by 1880, and the remaining fifty-four never came under British dominion.14 Eventually, the British adopted a ‘hands off’ administrative policy that respected Naga law and institutions, facilitated the gradual annexation of Naga territory into the British administration,15 and restricted access to the hills to prevent exploitation of the Naga while allowing the Naga themselves free movement.16 Permission to travel into Naga territory was an exceptional privilege and Bower was lucky to be granted a permit. Living in the village and bound by Zemi law and customs with no special treatment, Bower felt at home.17 “It was as though I had rediscovered a world to which I had belonged the whole time; from which, by some accident, I had been estranged.”18 She spent a number of years living in a village, traveling through the hills, dispensing medical treatment, and taking photographs of Naga rituals and everyday life.19 Eventually she became integrated into their community. “When I first reached Laisong, I was outside it,” she recalled. As their reserve melted, the wall dissolved, and I found myself on the far side and looking back at a familiar world seen topsy-turvy, as Alice passed through the looking glass and saw her own room reversed when she looked back. So seen, the world I had left did seem odd; there was the foundation for the Zemi attitude. Civilsation had certain features which were only apparent to an outside view.20

The Naga, for their part, accepted her into their community, and some even worshipped her as a goddess, believing that she was the reincarnation of the prophetess Gaidiliu who had led a revolt against the British years earlier.21

Bower’s peaceful life among the Naga came to an end in 1942 when Malaya, Singapore, and Burma fell to the Japanese. British troops were forced across the Burmese border back into India as part of a massive withdrawal over the Irrawaddy River at Mandalay. Fearing that the Japanese would also flood across the border into India, the British Army established a guerrilla troop called V Force in 1942 to gather intelligence in the hills along the 800-mile frontier. In the event that the Japanese took control of India, V Force would remain in place and conduct hit-and-run operations.22 Naga support was critical to the British war effort, in part because the Japanese invasion was most likely to barrel directly through Naga territory. “The district would be of importance if invasion came,” Bower observed. “One thing was clear. Nothing could be done without the Zemi [a subtribe of the Naga]. Not only were they in the great majority, but their villages lay at every strategic point.”23 Not only was control of Naga territory critical, but the tribesmen themselves knew the jungle better than any foreigner could, which would enable them to provide valuable intelligence about Japanese movements in the hills. Only the Nagas could pass through the jungle as ghosts, moving between India and Burma to spy on Japanese troop concentrations, integrating themselves with Japanese officers by pretending to support the overthrow of the British and hanging around Japanese camps to pick up intelligence while playing the role of simple minded rustics.24

Indeed, as Army intelligence wrote in 1944: “The quantity and quality of operational information received from the local inhabitants has been a major factor in our success to date. A high percentage of our successful air strikes have been the direct result of local information.”25 In August 1942, Colonel Rawdon Wright walked fifty miles into the Naga Hills to meet Bower. He had been tasked with recruiting for V Force and wanted her opinion on whether the Naga would support the British or the Japanese. More importantly, could they be recruited as Army scouts? She told him that most of the Zemi Naga distrusted the British:26 the combination of British suppression of the Gaidiliu rebellion, mismanagement of the region, and Japanese brutality toward captured prisoners would make recruiting difficult.27 Despite these hindrances, Bower agreed to help. Within a few months she had succeeded in recruiting Naga scouts, and had established a ‘watch and ward’ system in the hills. In each village, scouts and runners were staged out of the village halls so that news and orders would pass quickly down the line. Scouts were to detain all strangers passing through the Naga Hills, report crashed aircraft, and rescue downed airmen.28 There was no wireless, so they used code words over the railway telephone. As Bower recalled, “‘One elephant’ meant ‘ten Japanese,’ which caused a great deal of confusion when somebody crossed the Silchar border with forty genuine elephants.”29 In 1944, three Japanese divisions totaling more than 80,000 men crossed into India. The Japanese 31st Division split into two parts, encircling Bower’s position. Two British NCOs arrived at her camp, informing her that the front line was no longer 150 miles in front of them, but 20 miles behind them. What front line there was lay on the railway, twenty miles behind us. We were the only thing between it and the Japanese. The sergeants had asked me what force I had to meet them. I’d told them—one hundred fifty native scouts, one Service rifle, one single-barreled shotgun and seventy muzzle loaders.30

As the Japanese moved through the jungle towards their objective—the city of Kohima31—the V Force units were overrun, their troops scattered, and commanders missing.32 In response, Bower organized a screen of observation posts and a warning system of beacons and native runners so that she could inform the Fourteenth Army of the Japanese advance. “With all the European V Force operatives dead, captured or in hiding, and the RAF’s aerial photography of limited value in jungle terrain, the Nagas provided the only reliable flow of intelligence to 2nd Division on Japanese movements around Kohima.”33 When Bower was informed that fifty Japanese had entered their territory, she sent a patrol out and sent a cable to HQ: “Going forward to look for the enemy. Kindly send rifles and ammunition soonest.” General Slim, upon receiving the telegram, read it and said “We must support her.” He sent along rifles, tommy-guns, ammunition, grenades, extra rations,34 and a “gift-platoon” of Ghurkas.35 Later, General Slim acknowledged the critical role that the Naga played in the defense of India: These were the gallant Nagas whose loyalty, even in the most depressing times of the invasion, had never faltered. Despite floggings, torture, execution, and the burning of their villages, they refused to aid the Japanese in any way or to betray our troops. Their active help to us was beyond value or praise. … They guided our columns, collected information, ambushed enemy patrols, carried our supplies and brought in our wounded under the heaviest fire, and then, being the gentlemen they were, often refused payment. Many a British and Indian soldier owes his life to the naked, headhunting Naga, and no soldier of the Fourteenth Army who met them will ever think of them but with admiration and affection.36

Bower’s Naga warriors were so effective that the Japanese—ironically—offered a bounty to the Naga of one hundred rupees to bring in Bower’s head.37 American pilots nicknamed her the Jungle Queen and a comic was devoted to her exploits. Two BBC Radio 4 plays, The Naga Queen by John Horsley Denton and The Butterfly Hunt by Mathew Solon were based on her life, and that of her husband, Tim Betts. In recognition of her bravery, although she never had an official military title or rank,38 she was honored as a Member of the Order of the British Empire and awarded the Lawrence of Arabia medal.

This chapter considers a couple of perplexing questions: how does a young British woman succeed in leading a group of patriarchal, hierarchically organized, tribal headhunters with a pattern of hereditary political office? In fact, how does anyone from a foreign culture lead members of a different culture into battle during wartime? Due to the ‘fog of war,’ the ambiguity of cause and effect, the fear of death, and heightened emotions, leadership in combat may be one of the most challenging of human endeavors. Even more difficult is the task of leading people from another culture in combat. A woman leading men in combat is perhaps unusual, but Ursula Graham Bower was not just leading men during a war, she was leading Naga headhunters. The literature on crosscultural leadership indicates that roles and norms depend on cultural context. If desirable leadership traits are culturally dependent, then it seems likely that the Naga would not have accepted Bower as a leader under any circumstances. Yet, in a society where leadership was hereditary, male, and based on the collective, Ursula Graham Bower was able to lead the Naga successfully against the Japanese. This chapter considers how that happened and why it was possible.

Leadership What is leadership? General Dwight Eisenhower said that “leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.” Of course, there are many styles of “getting someone else to do something.” James MacGregor Burns, in his classic book Leadership (1978), divided political leadership into two types: transactional and transformational. In transactional leadership, “leaders approach followers with an eye toward exchanging” something of value.39 On the other hand, transformational leadership is less about compliance than the leader’s ability to transform his followers. According to Burns, “the result of transforming leadership is a relationship of mutual stimulation and elevation that converts followers into leaders and may convert leaders into moral agents.”40 Bernard Bass, expanding and applying Burn’s ideas to organizational management, argued that transactional leaders “mostly consider how to marginally improve and maintain the quantity and quality of performance, how to substitute one goal for another, how to reduce resistance to particular actions, and how to implement decisions.”41 In contrast, transformational leaders raise colleagues, subordinates, followers, clients, or constituencies to a greater awareness about the issues of consequence. This heightening of awareness requires a leader with vision, self-confidence, and inner strength to argue successfully for what he sees is right or good, not for what is popular or is acceptable according to established wisdom of the time.42

What are the typical leadership behaviors of transformational leaders?43 Bass argued that transformational leaders engage in four primary behaviors. First, “idealized influence” or charisma which motivates subordinates to achieve higher levels of performance. Second, transformational leaders offer “inspirational motivation” or a collective organizational vision that creates a commitment to the organization among its members. Third, transformational leaders engage in a process of “intellectual stimulation” which encourages the individual growth of subordinates. Finally, transformational leaders use “individualized consideration” to build personal bonds with subordinates.44 What sort of leader was Bower? Reading the business and academic literature on transformational leadership leaves one with the impression that transformational leaders transform their followers in a linear top-to-bottom flow. What the case of Ursula Graham Bower shows, however, is that transformations work in both directions simultaneously. Leaders may transform followers, but followers also transform leaders. Bower did not set out with the ambition of leading the Naga, but only of living among them as an anthropologist. Before she could transform the Naga into a guerrilla commando unit, the Naga transformed her from a stray British debutante into a member of their community. This transformation from guest to member took place over a number of years, and was based on developing mutual trust through shared experiences (such as sickness, festivals, fires, ghosts, deaths, storms, and tigers). Trust was also facilitated through keeping promises in every detail.45 A key event in the development of trust took place in 1942 when heavy rains (combined with a plague of grasshoppers a few months earlier) destroyed most of the Naga crops. This was followed by an epidemic of measles, an outbreak of dysentery, and famine in a neighboring village. Initially the villagers concealed the extent and severity of the famine, afraid that if they accepted food from outsiders they would have to repay it. Bower intervened and secured emergency supplies from the British government. She reassured the famine-stricken villagers that “if there’s any catch in it, any interest to pay, I’ll make up every last anna myself, I swear I will.”46 Her intervention, combined with her personal guarantee, offered a demonstration of her loyalty to the community. In turn, their acceptance of the food showed the trust that had been established. Once she had become a member of their community, the Naga transformed her into a leader. This transformation would probably not have taken place but for World War II. In 1942, the Japanese were just beyond the border. As Bower wrote, “the Zemi were afraid … Invasion in the autumn seemed certain and what to do when it came was a problem for all of us.” The Naga were worried about what would happen if the British simply withdrew from Naga territory as they had from

Burma, leaving local people to fend for themselves against the Japanese. In July, the transformative moment came. “Over in Manipur, the Kabui, Zemi and Lyeng had held a meeting to decide on joint action should the administration withdraw. They asked whether, in that event, I would stay behind as their leader. I sent back, for the moment, a non-committal reply. But, if the invasion came, I meant to stay.”47 It was at this moment, fearing the transformations that the war might bring, that the Naga transformed Bower from a member of their community to their leader. To rule truly means to serve.48 Only after Bower’s transformation into a member of the Naga community, and then into a leader through consent of the Naga tribes, does her own style of leadership emerge. In 1942, when the only thing preventing the Japanese invasion was the monsoon, her assistant Namkia came to her in tears. He was torn between loyalty to Bower and loyalty to his family and tribe. He asked “Suppose raiding breaks out again in the hills when the British go? Who’ll look after my wife and children? … They say [in the village] this isn’t our war, and we ought to leave it alone—we aren’t Japs, we aren’t British; we’re Zemi. What’s it to do with us?” Bower answered him: I don’t know what’s going to happen, either. But my home’s here in Laisong, and I’m coming back to it whatever happens.… I don’t think you Zemi will be able to stay as neutral as you think—certainly not if the Angamis and Kukis take sides; and I doubt you’ll find the Japs a fair exchange for the British. … [In the] meantime, there are all these people coming through from Burma, in the devil of a state. I’ve been told to go down and help; and I’m going, with anyone I can find to go along with me. If you people won’t come, it’s my bad luck—I’ve had the orders, not you.49

Her answer to Namkia shows important elements of transformational leadership. First, she offered an affirmation of loyalty to the Naga (“my home’s here”). Second, she presents the current situation not in terms of abstract nation-state politics, but in terms of local concerns and interests (neutrality impossible if the other tribes take sides). Third, she appeals to the Naga sense of compassion (refugees coming through Burma). Fourth, she displays bravery by example (I’m going alone if I have to). Her style of leadership clearly worked with the Naga: “Asipui-ghao,” Namkia said. “Dear elder sister—don’t be afraid, we’re all in it together.”50 As this short passage shows, Bower’s style of leadership among the Naga was transformational. But the transformation that took place was as much in her as a leader as it was in the Naga as followers. First, she experienced a transformation from outsider to being a member of the community; next she was transformed from a member of the community to a leader. And only then, after the war changed everything, did she have an opportunity to shine as a transformational leader in the classic sense.

Gender and leadership Ursula Graham Bower was a woman leading men. What role does gender have in leadership? There are two main theories about how gender affects leadership. The “gender-centered perspective” posits that a leader’s individual attributes vary according to their gender.51 Thus, female leaders tend to be nurturing, while male leaders tend to be task oriented.52 The opposing model, termed the “structural perspective,”53 assumes that the organizational role the individual occupies is more important than their gender.54 According to this theory, organizational expectations established for managerial performance determines behavior, and managerial success is measured against those expectations regardless of gender.55 Somewhere in between these two theories is the idea of “gender congeniality,” which is the “fit between gender roles and particular leadership roles.”56 Thus, in organizations such as the military, where leadership positions are typically defined in more masculine terms, leadership would be described as congenial to men. In fields like education and nursing, leadership is defined in more feminine ways and therefore could be described as congenial to women.57 Are women more ‘transformational’ than men as leaders? Judith Rosener argues based on an international survey that men tend to “view job performance as a series of transactions with subordinates—exchanging rewards for services rendered or punishment for inadequate performance. The men are also more likely to use power that comes from their organizational position and formal authority.” Women, on the other hand, encourage their “subordinates to transform their own self-interest into the interest of the group through concern for a broader goal. Moreover, they ascribe their power to personal characteristics like charisma, interpersonal skills, hard work, or personal contacts rather than to organizational stature.”58 Sally Carless, in her pioneering study of the banking industry in Australia, also found that superiors and managers “rated female managers as more transformational than male managers.”59 Yet, according to subordinates, “female and male managers who perform the same organizational duties and occupy equivalent positions within the organizational hierarchy do not differ in their leadership style.”60 So we can conclude that the extent to which men or women are judged to be more transformational depends very much on who is being asked. Yet Carless’ study also showed that while no differences were found for the more masculine or task-oriented leadership behaviors … such as innovative thinking and visionary leadership,” gender differences do exist for “the more interpersonally-oriented behaviors, viz, participatory decision making, praising individual and team contributions and caring for individual needs.61

How was Bower’s leadership ability enabled or constrained by her gender? In the context of British upper class society in the 1930s, women were decorative objects whose primary function was supporting their husbands, child bearing, and managing the home. Although World War I had seen a huge influx of women into the workforce, followed in 1928 by universal suffrage, the “cult of domesticity” that emerged in the 1930s perpetuated the stereotype that women were delicate flowers whose place was hearth and home.62 Even as a child, Bower found this environment oppressive: “I was bitterly resentful that I was not a boy. I can remember bursting into floods of tears at the age of three, being quite inconsolable that I couldn’t follow my father into the Navy.”63 Forced to leave boarding school before graduation so that the funds could be used to support her brother’s university education, Bower reluctantly ‘came out’ during the London season. Bower observed that what her mother wanted “was a really attractive debutante daughter, which was a desirable thing for her generation—who would make an extremely good marriage. Careers didn’t enter into it. Career women were dull. Well, the last thing I was, was an attractive debutante.”64 Even traveling alone to India, geographically very distant from London, put her right back in the bosom of British society at Imphal. Her plan to participate in a hill walk “was met with a great deal of tut-tutting and a firm belief that at the end of three days I would be borne home in a fainting fit.”65 Among the Naga, Bower was beyond the geographical reach of the rigid, paternalistic attitudes of the British upper class towards her gender. But in turn she became part of Naga society which had equally strong gender norms. Among the Naga, “the legal rights of women were almost none, and to all appearances men were paramount in Zemi society.” Married women did not play a part in public life and could not enter the main hall of a morung. In addition, it was considered unclean and unnatural for a man to eat an animal that had been killed by a woman. Despite the exclusion of women from public life, Bower believed that women were the “most powerful influence” on Zemi Naga society. Their power stemmed from the economic value of their work. “They cooked, brewed and pounded rice … they carried wood and water, they sowed, weeded and reaped … they spun and dyed, they wove and sewed, they kept the home and raised the family.”66 Behind the scenes, women were “the real rulers of the community.”67 “They could on occasion take action as such; I have known, in a village riot, the women arm themselves with clubs and go in in a body to break it up, each mother collecting her sons and each wife her husband and running them out by force to cool off at home.”68 Although Bower was integrated into Zemi Naga life in most ways, she was exempted from local gender norms governing the behavior of women.69 A couple of factors mediated the stringent application of Naga gender norms in Bower’s case. First, although cultural norms tell people what they should do, in practice people modify or ignore social norms when conditions require. Although the Naga believed that hunting was a man’s job and eating game that had been killed by women was taboo, once Bower bought a shotgun, “exigency sensibly took precedence over tradition.”70 The second factor at play was the phenomena of the ‘honorary male,’ in which women visiting from a foreign society are treated as men and considered immune from customary norms for women’s social roles in the society they are visiting.71 As the Royal Anthropological Institute noted in 1967, “among very unsophisticated natives … a woman may find that she is regarded primarily as a stranger and is given the status of male.”72 Having been accorded the “unprecedented privilege of being an honorary man,” Bower was allowed into the morung, which was usually taboo for women. “They counted me in on rather the Joan of Arc principle,” observed Bower. “I wasn’t entirely a lady, in both senses, so I was allowed in.”73 Among the Naga, exigency took precedence over tradition. Likewise, among the British Army, the exigencies of the imminent Japanese invasion demanded that someone lead the Naga—even if it were a woman. “As a woman,” Bower noted, “I was a freak in the job, and I was always afraid that they’d find an excuse to fire me. They said that sooner or later they’d send a British officer to take over.”74 No regular officer ever arrived to replace her, and it is possible that the Army was not even looking for one. V Force, like many other special operations units, had to adapt to conditions as they found them. This need for flexibility meant that in Bower’s case, competence trumped gender as a controlling factor in command assignments. This is not to say that she was immune from the institutionalized prejudice of the British Army at the time against women holding leadership positions. As Colonel Scott, Assistant Quartermaster General for V Force, observed: “Tough for a woman. Always wrong twice—once for being wrong, and once for being a woman.”75 Senior leaders in the British Army were also aware of their own gendered stereotypes and were able to poke fun at them. On a visit to headquarters, Bower was summoned to see General Slim. “My knees were knocking,” she recalled. “There behind the desk, looking astounded as I was, was Bill Slim. He leapt up, held out his hand, shook mine warmly and said, ‘Oh thank God. I thought you would be a lady missionary with creaking stays.’ After that we got on like a house on fire.”76 In sum, while women may have some advantages over men in the domain of interpersonal connectivity between leaders and subordinates, they often have to overcome the social norms associated with their gender both in their country of origin and in the host nation where they are operating. The phenomena of the ‘honorary male’ combined with the exigencies of war gave Bower the opportunity to overcome the social norms that constrained her.

Military leadership in extremis

With the exception of mobs and riots, most organized human activity undertaken by groups involves some sort of leadership. Business, education, sports, theater—even Scrabble tournaments—have produced different concepts of leadership. How ideal leadership is conceptualized depends to a great degree on the purpose of the institution and the context in which leading and following takes place. Thus, for example, Pee Wee Football and the NFL both involve winning through competition, but because both the context (kids versus professional athletes playing) and the purpose of the institutions (sports education versus sports business) are vastly different, the leadership style of professional quarterbacks would be considered inappropriate on an elementary school’s football field. Why is this distinction significant? In considering models of ideal military leadership, both the purpose of the institution and the context of leadership must be taken into account. The purpose of the U.S. military, which sets it apart from all other social institutions, is found in the Preamble to the Constitution: “to provide for the common defense.”77 Or the words of Samuel Huntington, the purpose of the military is “the management of violence.”78 This is true for most militaries in most nations. While the institutional purpose of military organizations remains constant, the context in which leading and following takes place may vary. “Leadership and its effectiveness, in large part, is dependent upon the context … It is socially constructed in and from a context where patterns over time must be considered and where history matters.”79 Military leadership in a garrison context is different from military leadership in combat;80 leading a platoon is different from leading a brigade; leading a logistics unit is different from leading a fighter squadron; wartime armies are different from peacetime armies. Many U.S. Army soldiers tell stories about how ineffective generals were frequently relieved of command during World War II (at least 16 of the 155 generals who commanded divisions were relieved during combat).81 On the flipside, officers who excelled at leading men in combat, such as General Patton, were swiftly promoted. As one scholar noted, a peacetime army can usually survive with good administration and management up and down the hierarchy, coupled with good leadership concentrated at the very top. A wartime army, however, needs competent leadership at all levels. No one yet has figured out how to manage people effectively into battle; they must be led.82

Leadership in combat is a type of in extremis leadership, which has been defined by U.S. Army Colonel Tom Kolditz “as giving purpose, motivation, and direction to people when there is eminent physical danger, and where followers believe that leader behaviour will influence their physical wellbeing or survival.”83 Unlike most other types of organized human activity, military leaders and subordinates may be required to risk their lives and/or take the lives of others in pursuit of national security objectives.84 The consequence of ineffective leadership in the military is far greater than that of other social institutions. Failure in a corporate environment, for example, rarely results in death or injury to self and others.85 The context of military leadership in extremis is also different from leadership in most other forms of institutions: planning for operations in a combat setting is significantly different to a non-combat setting as the adversary may or may not respond as expected, adding to the overall ambiguity of war. What are the attributes or characteristics that make effective combat leaders? Kolditz, who studied both military and civilian leaders in dangerous situations, concluded that their common characteristics were: competence; trust; loyalty; inherent motivation; learning orientation; shared risk; and a common lifestyle.86 Research conducted at the U.S. Military Academy West Point determined that effective combat leaders are physically fit, brave, technically competent, genuinely interested in the welfare of subordinates, and friendly yet distant.87 Other scholars have observed that the complexity of combat requires a dualistic “Janusian” leadership style (named after the Roman God Janus, who had two faces): “they must be able to assume different contradictory or competing leadership roles at different times and in dramatically different situations.”88 Janusian leadership requires both traditional “linear” thinking and a “non-linear” intuitive approach. “We can see fighting empirically as an illustration par excellence of nonlinear thinking guided by gut feel and intuition … It requires a high tolerance for ambiguity and the ability to make sense of novel situations.”89 While there is little agreement on what personal qualities make an effective combat leader, there is some agreement that transactional leadership—which is characterized more by management than what military readers recognize as “leadership”—is almost completely ineffective in in extremis settings.90 Military leadership, especially during wartime and outside of garrison settings, tends to be of the transformative rather than transactional variety. Kolditz explains that: When serving in crisis conditions where leadership influences the physical well being or survival of both the leader and the led—in extremis contexts—transactional sources of motivation (for example, pay, rewards, or threat of punishment) become insufficient. Why should a person be motivated by rewards when he might not live to enjoy them? Why would a person fear administrative punishment when compliance might lead to injury or death? Soldiers in such circumstances must be led in ways that inspire, rather than require, trust and confidence. When followers have trust and confidence in a charismatic leader, they are transformed into willing, rather than merely compliant, agents.91

There is no way to manage men into battle—they must be led. Ursula Graham Bower exemplified transformational leadership in war. After the siege of Kohima,

Bower’s mission changed from guerrilla warfare to training British troops for jungle warfare. Bower taught British soldiers who had been sent to her for training how to spike the feet of their enemies with bamboo rods, how to check the water for snakes, how to burn leeches off with a cigarette, how to make a spear, and how to orienteer in the jungle.92 One British soldier described her effect on them: “We were captivated. Every one of us said later that if she’d said ‘I want you to hang yourself by the neck from the nearest tree,’ I am sure we would have done it. I would have followed her into the jaws of hell. She was an exceptional person.”93 In the words of one RAF pilot, “We had the highest regard for her, and she was wonderful. After our course, when we left, she was sweetness itself. ‘Now boys, keep safe, and don’t forget the words I’ve told you.’ And I remember them still: ‘Umri sai-brung da mutai kalao’ which is Naga for ‘We are friendly airmen, take me to your chief.’”94 The leadership style of Ursula Graham Bower had a transformational effect on the British soldiers she trained, and also had an equally powerful effect on the Naga who she led in combat. In 1944, the British detachments near the Chindwin River were overrun, and Bower and her unit were now twenty miles behind the front line. As the Japanese began to approach their positions, the Nagas asked permission to return to their villages. Bower was left alone in the jungle to face the Japanese. I thought, “Here it comes—they’ve reached the limit, and I don’t blame them. We never recruited them for this, they’re not trained for it, they’re not armed for it, and I cannot hold them. We’ve got this very small chance of getting out of it alive, and I simply cannot ask them to go with me on a suicide mission.” So I said, “All right—you go,” never thinking I would see them again. Much to my surprise, every single man was back within the stipulated twenty-four hours, and it wasn’t until about ten days later, when the excitement was over and we had time to breathe and reinforcements had arrived, I noticed that Namkia was not wearing his beautiful gold and yellow deo-moni bead necklaces, which were such a valuable feature of his costume. I asked him what had happened to them, and he then explained that all of them had gone home, arranged for the guardianship of their wives and families in the event of their death, which they expected to take place within three days, had made their wills, handed over their heirlooms and property to their families for their heirs. They were all comparatively young men, they had young families, quite young children and everything to lose—and they never thought they would survive. I didn’t think I was going to either, so we were all square on that, but they had returned to meet the end with us, and now they wore only their beads for burial. I’m afraid I rather googled at Namkia. This had taken me so much by surprise, and he said, “What did you expect? How could we have abandoned you—left you, a woman, alone to face it, while we fled to safety? How could we have lived afterwards to hear our children called after by others in the village street, ‘Child of a coward!’ It was far better to remain and die with you.” I felt about six inches high.95

Both the purpose and the context of military leadership in extremis distinguish this form of leadership from other types. While the characteristics of military leaders in combat leave room for disagreement, it seems clear that military leadership—especially in times of crisis—tends to be of the transformative rather than transactional variety. The purpose of both the Naga and the British military effort was almost identical—defense against the Japanese threat. The overall context was quite similar—leadership in extremis. What was remarkably different, however, was the culture of Naga warriors and British soldiers—the cultural context. If we accept the proposition that “leadership itself is embedded in its context” and that “one cannot separate the leader(s) from the context any more than one can separate a flavor from a food,”96 then how do we explain Ursula Graham Bower’s effectiveness as a leader in two vastly different cultural contexts?

Cross-cultural leadership While some form of leadership can be found in all societies,97 the concept of leadership is culturally contingent.98 The culture of a particular society will influence how categories of ‘leader’ and ‘subordinate’ are demarcated, how leaders are expected to behave, and what they are expected to accomplish.99 Leadership may be a cultural universal, but can the same be said for transformational leadership? 100 Some scholars have argued that the concept itself is derived from Western culture, and therefore cross-culturally invalid.101 Some researchers posit that leadership is “culture-specific” and have not found evidence for the universality of transformational leadership.102 On the other hand, Bernard Bass believed that transformational leadership was universally valid, in the sense that it can be correlated with positive results in a variety of different societies, and that these societies typically prefer this form of leadership.103 Bass also recognized that variation of leadership traits might be possible “because the same concepts may contain specific thought processes, beliefs, implicit understandings, or behaviors in one culture not another.”104 In other words, the attributes associated with transformational leadership may be universally valid, but specific behaviors representing these styles may vary profoundly.105 For instance, “Indonesian inspirational leaders need to persuade their followers about the leaders’ own competence, a behavior that would appear unseemly in Japan.”106 Accepting the preponderance of empirical evidence that leadership is culturally dependent and that transformational leadership has cross-cultural validity, what specific attributes of transformational leadership are cross-culturally endorsed? In the late 1990s, the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) study surveyed sixty-two nations to determine whether leadership attributes associated with transformational leadership were cross-culturally valid.107 The GLOBE study showed that some leadership attributes, such as integrity, teamorientation, and intelligence, were viewed as universally positive. Other leadership traits, such as

ruthlessness and irritability, were seen as universally negative. Culturally contingent attributes, which in some countries were believed to contribute to good leadership but were viewed negatively in other countries, included enthusiasm, sensitivity, and risk taking.108 It is important to note that “not only are these attributes culturally contingent, the behaviors reflecting them may also take on different meanings in different cultures. What is perceived as sensitive or compassionate in one country, may be seen as weakness in another. Similarly, risk-taking behavior may be seen as reckless in one country, but may be perfectly normal, expected behavior in another.”109 Thus, in Mexico, charisma was seen as desirable in a leader but considered potentially dangerous.110 Australians, while valuing charisma in leaders, also value egalitarianism; thus, leaders must always be perceived as just “one of the boys.”111 In China, the ability to communicate leadership vision is considered a positive attribute of leaders, but Confucian values create a preference for a soft-spoken style.112 How was leadership construed among the Naga? Unfortunately, the Naga were not included in the Project GLOBE study, and therefore we must engage in a little creative deduction concerning their preferences for leadership attributes. What is known about the Naga, specifically the Zemi Naga among whom Ursula Graham Bower lived, is that leadership was hereditary. Ownership of the land and control of the village was handed down through the families of “men of the soil”—the kadepeo. “The kadepeo, or original founder, was the leading man in each village community, and each kadepeo’s descendants succeeded to their ancestor’s position, duties and rights on the reoccupation by the community of his particular site.”113 The kadepeo presided over the village council, and along with the village priest, chose the elders of the community to serve on the council. The kadepeo had enormous authority, but could be overruled by the council if public opinion was overwhelmingly behind it. The village councils, which decided all matters important to the village and served as courts of justice, commanded great respect and their judgments were accepted as irrevocable.114 As discussed above, the Zemi Naga were patriarchal, with women having limited rights, playing only a small part in public life, and bearing a number of taboos. The Zemi were also oriented towards the collective rather than the individual. As Bower wrote: Men often spoke of their clan or family as of themselves, “I”—“I founded Gareolowa,” “I killed an Angami down there by the river, before the British came.” It proved on inquiry to be some ancestor, not always a direct one; they would speak of ten or fifteen generations back in such an intimate tone. So closely were the past and the present linked in one long continuity that the individual life was almost lost in them, for they were one.115

This collective orientation is related to a significant feature of their social structure—the morung system. Among the Naga, children lived with their parents until the age of eight, at which time they went to live in a morung—essentially a great hall controlled by a clan or kienga. “You joined your kienga, willy-nilly, the day you were born. A detachment from one morung or another came to the house to claim you as soon as you drew breath.”116 The morung disciplined and educated the young, united the households of the village, and was an instrument by which the elders could control the community.117 Normally each morung belonged to a different clan, but among the Zemi Naga fathers, sons, and brothers might each be members of different kiengas. Morung loyalties among the Zemi Naga, therefore, cut across all other divisions, meaning that Zemi Naga society was likely even more collective in nature than other Naga tribes. As Bower observed, members of a morung “are more self-reliant and their sense of service to a corporate body is well-developed. They have not lost their individualism; but they have a view of the world in relation to themselves, a grasp of mutual duties as well as rights.”118 If leadership attributes are culturally dependent, then it seems likely that the Naga would not have accepted Bower as a leader under any circumstances. In a society where leadership was hereditary, male, and focused on the collective, how was a female amateur anthropologist with no military training able to lead them in war? Although she did not meet the Naga prototype for leadership, Bower had a few things working in her favor. First, over a number of years, she had become a member of the Naga community. In a cross-cultural military context, prolonged contact appears to be a critical precondition to the process of adjustment and the establishment of trust.119 Her status as a member of the collective was a precondition to being able to lead the Naga. In many small societies, especially tribal ones, being a member of the collective means an orientation towards collective rather than individual well-being. In 1942, for example, the Naga’s hopes of surviving a Japanese invasion were slim. British soldiers who had been captured by the Japanese were tortured and killed; the Naga who had supported the British were brutally punished. In the event their position was overrun, Bower and her Naga scouts planned that Bower would shoot herself, and Namkia would cut off her head and bring it to the Japanese as proof that she was indeed dead. Only this would enable the village to survive without punishment.120 The existence of this plan, which thankfully never came to pass, clearly demonstrated Bower’s “full liability” commitment to the community’s well-being.121 Second, collective social organization works through individual bonds of trust rather than through transactional processes. Through years of shared hardship, Bower was able to establish the trust that enabled her to lead. Bower herself noted that personal attachment was the basis of Naga loyalty: I think it was Dundee who said that no-one could lead a Highland Army who had not shaken every man in it by the hand, and much the same is true of the Assam Hillman, to who any leader is first among equals and nothing

more. His attachment is not to the unit, but is entirely personal, and you cannot count on any man unless that attachment exists.122

In short, her leadership was based on individual bonds of trust, not positional authority. Third, Naga leadership during war was based on the morung system. The head of the morung was “host and headmaster to the boys, as his wife was matron. He taught them by precept and example in peacetime; he led them in war.”123 Bower (as an honorary man) was able to utilize this feature of the Naga social structure first to organize a canteen on the railway, and then later for scouting operations. She described how “we at Laisong, that little group of half a dozen or so, had become a team, a kienga, a matriarchal family. There was no telling what its ties, which were delicate and undefined, could stand.”124 Bower, in organizing her work unit as an informal kienga, utilized the preexisting social structure to achieve her goals rather than importing an unworkable, foreign system of organization. In other words, she used what she found in the society to build what she needed. It seems self-evident that the culture of a particular society will influence how the status of a leader is defined, how leadership roles are determined, and the norms for what leaders should and should not do. Among the Naga, leadership was hereditary, patriarchal, and centered on the collective. Despite the fact that she was both a woman and an ‘outsider,’ Bower was able to overcome the constraints of the Naga leadership prototypes by employing relevant features of the culture (e.g., group membership, bonds of trust, and morung social organization) to achieve her objective. In leading across cultures, as this case shows, context sometimes trumps attributes.

Cross cultural in extremis military leadership How does a young, British woman succeed in leading a group of patriarchal, hierarchically organized, tribal headhunters with a pattern of hereditary political office? In fact, how does anyone from a foreign culture lead members of a different culture into battle during wartime? Armies, in the classic Westphalian model, are comprised of individuals from a single country and are controlled by a nation-state: the single-ethnic single-state military organization. Thus, we refer to the British Army, the Turkish Army, the Japanese Army, and so on. Individuals within nation-state armies are predominantly citizens of that nation, or have hopes of becoming citizens of that nation (thousands of Filipinos hoped to attain U.S. citizenship by serving in the U.S. Navy after World War II, for example).125 Like any normative model, the classic Westphalian model of homogenous nation-state armies is riddled with exceptions. For example, single-ethnic multi-state military organizations, in which military units formed of single ethnic groups unite together in a multi-state coalition, have ancient origins. In 853 BC, a league of twelve kings united their armies to resist the expansion of the Assyrian empire. Each member had his own unique culture: “Each spoke a different dialect, prayed to a different god, ate different food, and adhered to a different set of rules and social norms.”126 In a cross-national military operation involving multiple states, units are generally commanded by officers from the same nation as the troops with a coordinating command echelons above. To provide a relatively recent example, the 3rd Canadian Division that stormed the beaches during Operation Overlord was commanded by a Canadian general, Major-General R.F.L. Keller, while the U.S. Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force (SCAEF) was commanded by an American, General Dwight Eisenhower. Another exception to the classic Westphalian model are multi-ethnic single-state military organizations that combine multiple ethnic groups from a given society into a military unit. As Cynthia Enloe notes in her classic book Ethnic Soldiers, almost every multi-ethnic society has a few groups that have been stereotyped as ‘martial races,’ such as the Gurkhas in the British Army, the Bedouin in the Kuwaiti Army, the Sikhs in the Indian Army, the Iban in the Malaysian Army, and Japanese-Americans in the U.S. Army.127 In the armies of multi-ethnic societies, martial races were often segregated within units characterized by “deliberate cultivation of insignia and uniforms highlighting the distinction of the unit.”128 The so-called martial races were frequently commanded by officers who were members of the ethnic group that dominated the state elite.129 The most interesting exception to the Westphalian nation-state military model is the multi-ethnic multi-state military organization. Multi-ethnic multi-state military organizations, in which soldiers of one nation are led by officers from another, most often come into existence during wartime as ad hoc special operations units. Perhaps the best known example of leadership of a multi-ethnic multistate military organization is T.E. Lawrence who served as a British liaison officer during the Arab Revolt of 1916–18 and led Arab irregular troops in a guerrilla campaign against the Ottoman Empire. The operations are variously referred to by the U.S., United Kingdom, and NATO as “surrogate operations,” “partnering indigenous forces,” “proxy forces,” “security forces assistance,” “partisan operations,” and “out of area operations.” The fact that these types of operations have no common name in the military lexicon (as indicated by an email inquiry by the author to various colleagues in the special operations community) demonstrates their relative rarity. The types of missions these units perform are also highly variable. The Chindits, which included a variety of international personnel under British command, conducted long range penetration behind enemy lines in Burma during World War II. The Sarawak Rangers, who were Malays commanded by British officers, conducted counter-guerrilla and police actions between 1947 and 1963. Members of the

Australian Army Training Team Vietnam (AATTV) commanded Vietnamese nationals in counterinsurgency operations. Kachin tribesmen in Burma were led by OSS Detachment 101 in combat operations. The V Force units, such as the one commanded by Ursula Graham Bower, involved a multitude of tribal groups commanded by British officers and were primarily geared towards intelligence collection. What enables cross-cultural military leadership in multi-ethnic, multi-state military organizations? Researchers who want to answer this question usually begin with an analysis of the unique personal qualities of the individual in the leadership position. What individual traits and attributes did this leader possess that enabled him or her to triumph over adversity? Was it courage? Stamina? Perseverance? This approach dominates military studies of leadership and doctrine. Army Field Manual 6–22, Army Leadership, for example, provides great detail about the individual attributes of a successful leader, including character (“empathy,” “warrior ethos,” “ethics”); leader presence (“professional bearing,” “confidence,” “resilience”); and intelligence (“mental agility,” “interpersonal tact,” “domain knowledge”). In reading military biographies, whether of Julius Caesar or General Omar Bradley, it is easy to conclude that the genius of a single general won any number of wars. While this individual-centered approach can certainly contribute to an understanding of the qualities that make a leader great, it tends to valorize the individual and overlook the context in which their leadership occurs. Psychologists who study military leadership also tend to take this individual-centered approach and focus their attention on the traits and attributes of individuals that enable effective leadership (since it is often the military sponsoring such research and forming the research questions in order to improve testing, selection, and training of candidates, it is hardly surprising that this approach to leadership dominates the field). Similarly, much of the research on cross-cultural leadership also takes this approach, focusing on leadership traits and/or the knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) of leaders. The million-dollar question that everyone seeks to answer is: what are the specific knowledge, skills, and abilities that enable an individual to succeed in a cross-cultural environment? The U.S. military refers to this as cross-cultural competence: “the knowledge, skills, and affect/motivation that enable individuals to adapt effectively in cross-cultural environments. Crosscultural competence is defined here as an individual capability that contributes to intercultural effectiveness regardless of the particular intersection of cultures.”130 In this definition, crosscultural competence is that which enables an individual to adapt to a foreign society regardless of whether that society is Canada, Japan, Nagaland, or another exotic locale. Cross-cultural competence is “culture-general” in the sense that it can “facilitate performance in any multicultural setting, whereas regional knowledge and skills contribute to performance in a specific culture.”131 Cross-cultural competence, as it is currently configured in military leadership theory, works on the assumption that we can take someone who is adaptable, charismatic, and courageous and put them on the ground with the Montagnards, the Naga or the Kachin and—in theory—their individual traits will deliver strong leadership performance regardless of the context. But would T.E. Lawrence have done as well with the Naga as with the Arabs? Would Ursula Graham Bower have been able to lead Lawrence’s guerrillas as well as she led the Naga? The answer in both cases is most likely no. Individual skills and attributes, such as courage, intelligence, and confidence certainly facilitate leadership, but they are only part the total context in which leadership occurs. When we think about context we have to think beyond the individual—to the individual in the organization, to the organization within the overall environment. Context thus might refer to echelon (from theater to platoon); to location (from headquarters to forward operating base); to the type of operation (from major combat to intelligence gathering); to geography (from jungle to urban warfare). Context might also refer to the type of command and control of the unit, the military culture of the time, domestic political debates about the war in question, constraints imposed by higher headquarters, and a host of other factors. In considering military leadership in multi-ethnic, multi-state military organizations, context includes (at a minimum) understanding the culture of the leader and the culture of those being led. In this specific case, Bower was not just a woman leading men in battle. She was an Englishwoman, who carried with her the worldview, gender norms, and food preferences common to her class, her time, and her nation. She was also leading Naga, who carried in their minds the warrior ethos, religious beliefs, and sense of humor common to their own society. Social psychologists often remind us that “contact is always between a minimum of two people.”132 Leadership, similarly, is a process that always takes place between a minimum of two people. Leadership (as opposed to pure coercion or duress) implies a relationship of mutual consent and recognition between leaders and subordinates. When this process takes place across a cultural divide, leadership can be viewed as a form of cross-cultural contact. There are few scientific, empirical studies that examine military leadership within a cross-cultural and in extremis environment.133 Even fewer take an explicitly contextual approach. A rare and valuable exception was made by Kelly Lea Fisher, a former U.S. Air Force officer whose 2010 dissertation uses a case study of the Australian Army Training Team Vietnam to examine military leadership in a cross-cultural and in extremis context. Fisher used interviews, diaries, and reports as the basis of her inductive, qualitative analysis from which she generated fifty-seven key findings pertaining to cross-cultural military leadership in extremis, grouped in relation to the context in which they arise. So, for example, some findings pertain to the overall context of the Vietnam War

(e.g.: “the ambiguity of a counterinsurgency war in a foreign setting influenced the nature of military leadership”); other findings pertain to the Australian/Vietnamese cross-cultural context (for example, “unintended violation of social and religious beliefs may undermine military leadership effectiveness and well-being”). Additional findings pertain to military leadership in a cross-cultural context (for example “respect is earned by demonstrating competency and courage as a warrior, not through positional power alone”). Matching up Fisher’s fifty-seven findings on cross-cultural military leadership with Bower’s experience leading the Naga would be a tedious and dull exercise. But suffice to say, there are a number of salient factors that enable cross-cultural military leadership in multi-ethnic, multi-state military organizations. Factors mentioned in the previous section include prolonged contact and trust. Below I discuss how cultural congruence, rapport, and adjustment contribute to cross-cultural leadership in extremis. Any attempt to understand the context of cross-cultural military leadership in multi-ethnic, multistate military organizations should probably begin with an acknowledgement of the staggering barriers to achieving anything at all. Foremost among these hindrances is the problem of cultural difference. Misunderstanding cultural differences can result in overestimation or underestimation of the enemy’s capability. Ethnocentrism, or the assumption that cultural differences indicate cultural inferiority, can result in the dehumanization of the enemy and the potential for atrocities.134 Cultural differences can create barriers to mission accomplishment in multinational operations, including miscommunication, confusion, and demoralization.135 Cultural differences within units— even within units from the same nation-state—may affect cohesion and morale, as racial differences did in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. Cultural differences between leaders and followers can also impede effective leadership,136 which can in turn impede organizational objectives.137 Cultural insensitivity by a military leader may also undermine unit cohesion.138 Cultural difference, however, is not the same as cultural distance. Bower—an English debutante trying her hand as an amateur anthropologist—could not have been more different than the Naga. Superficially, she had nothing in common with them (“a fine group of men they were,” noted one British Army captain, “with dark, smooth skinned limbs and a manly bearing. … Their knees were covered by a series of bangles piled one over the other. Their torso was left quite bare. … Carmen Miranda herself was never more loaded with bangles, rings, necklaces, beads, ear-rings, charms, nick-nacks and juju … to complete the picture was their jet black hair, cut pudding basin wise and decorated with flowers”).139 Yet, paradoxically, she felt that she belonged with them. Reflecting on her experience, she wrote that the Naga had become “bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh … we knew that, across the barriers of caste and custom and colour, human beings are one, all struggling along the same dark road.”140 What Bower experienced among the Naga was something called cultural fit, which refers to the congruence between the personality of an individual and the culture or society in which that person is located. The flipside of cultural fit is cultural distance, which refers to the lack of congruence between the individual and the culture. Cultural congruence has been identified in international business management as a source of friction in the mergers and acquisitions process,141 as a factor in the productivity of work units,142 and a human resources consideration for international assignments.143 Cultural distance, on the other hand, can be measured through scores on the dimensions of culture identified by anthropologist Geerte Hofstede,144 including individualism/collectivism, power distance, masculinity/femininity, and uncertainty avoidance;145 by distinctions among cultures according to preferences for rational-legal authority versus traditional authority and scarcity values versus postmodern values;146 and using the GLOBE dimensions.147 Because of the complexity of individuals and of culture, no individual perfectly meshes with their own culture. Instead, individuals can be thought of as unique and complex conglomerations of biology, psychology, and culture in a constant process of growth and change. They actively create, redefine, participate in, reject, and envision their culture. Simultaneously, their culture also influences their ideas, values, perceptions, and preferences. Because not all individuals in a given society fully and completely share the cultural values and norms of that society, an individual’s cultural framework might be either congruent or discrepant with the larger societal culture in which they live.148 Thus, a citizen of North Korea with a strongly individualistic orientation would be a poor fit with their society of origin, where collectivity is the social norm and individualism is considered a danger to the state. A very ambitious Australian might find the “tall poppy syndrome” (in which the most ambitious individuals are equalized with their peers)149 oppressive, and might be more comfortable living in a society which rewards extraordinary achievement. Poor cultural congruence is not unusual: in one study, for example, researchers found that at least 30 per cent of a given society’s population did not fit the dominant individualistic or collectivistic cultural norms.150 For ‘sojourners’ (such as refugees, emigrants, foreign students, and Peace Corp volunteers), cultural congruence can ease the process of adjustment to a foreign society. In theory, if one’s own culture and the host nation’s culture are similar, adjustment will be easier: “the quality, quantity and duration of social difficulty appears to be a function of the differences between the foreigner’s culture of origin and the receiving society.”151 Conversely, the greater the discrepancy (or distance) between one’s own culture and the host nation’s, the more difficult the adjustment.152 Just as in

everyday life, the degree of congruence between the cultures of origin and destination affect subjective wellbeing, including mental and physical health.153 Despite the physical, linguistic and cultural differences, Bower felt a strong—almost mystical— sense of connection with the Naga. She fit with them culturally. The first time she saw Naga people in India she recalled experiencing a sense of “real déjà vu.”154 She felt incredibly drawn to the place and the people “with a power transcending the body—a force not of this world at all.”155 As time went on, she began to feel that “this is my place, and I belong here.”156 Even after the war, Bower never lost her strong bond with the Naga people. When she arrived back in England, she lamented: “How could one explain that home was no longer home—that it was utterly foreign, that home was in the Assam hills and that there would never be any other, and that for the rest of our lives we should be exiles?”157 The Naga also apparently felt that Bower fit amongst them—to the degree that some of them believed that she was the manifestation of the Priestess Gaidiliu. This strange story begins in 1929, when a local man proclaimed himself messiah of a new religion that blended paganism, Hinduism, Christianity, and “a sacred python just to top everything off.”158 While this new religion promised the coming of a unified Naga Kingdom, its mode of operation involved human sacrifice, extortion, and violence against the neighboring Kuki tribe, culminating in an uprising in 1931 against the British administration. The uprising was suppressed, houses and fields were burned, forced labor was introduced, and the Priestess Gaidiliu was arrested and found guilty of aiding and abetting murder and sentenced to fourteen years in prison. After her arrest, she told her followers that she would stay in hiding until the chosen time and then she would return in a shape that her enemies could not recognize.159 Many of the Zemi Naga recognized Bower as this unrecognizable “shape.” As she recalled, “No matter what I was doing, sleeping, eating, resting, or even bathing, the hut was invaded regardless by somebody crying parrot-phrases: ‘O my Mother! O Queen, O Goddess! You are our mother, you are a goddess, there is none greater, there is none better than you!’”160 Bower felt it was her duty to notify the British administration that the Naga apparently thought she was an incarnation of this rebel priestess. James Philip Mills, the Governor’s Secretary and Director of Ethnography in Assam, observed dryly that, “if they must have a goddess, they might as well have a government one.”161 He sent her back to her camp in the hills “to monitor the level of support for the still incarcerated Gaidiliu—and her ideal cover was her established occupation as an anthropological observer.”162 Cultural fit refers to the congruence between the personality of an individual and the culture or society in which that person is located. Rapport, on the other hand, refers to the congruence between two individuals, regardless of their society of origin. In a military context, rapport has been identified as a critical factor in the success or failure of military advisors,163 in training missions,164 and among commanders of multinational forces.165 Failure to achieve rapport with their local counterparts was the largest single cause for the dismissal of senior U.S. advisers in Vietnam.166 In her study, Fisher similarly found that “establishing rapport was a critical element between the Australians and their foreign [Vietnamese] counterparts and soldiers, and a necessary skill to gaining influence within the indigenous unit.” Establishing and maintaining rapport involved communication skills, but “the compatibility of personalities between individuals played a pivotal role in developing rapport.”167 Rapport, although it appears to be critical in cross-cultural military leadership, is intangible, elusive, and idiosyncratic.168 It is not well understood as a factor in cross-cultural military leadership.169 In a 1965 RAND report on American advisors in Vietnam, Gerald Hickey observed: The greater the adviser’s professional competence and his ability to establish rapport with the man he is advising, the more likely is it that the counterpart will accept and act on his advice. One quality without the other will greatly diminish the effectiveness of the American. Professional expertise … has not been the crucial problem in the advisor-counterpart relationship. A faculty for effective interaction with a foreign national and the skill necessary to developing and expressing that faculty are much more intangible. They play no part in traditional military pedagogy, and their great importance is perhaps not yet fully understood in all quarters that must concern themselves with the novel requirements of counterinsurgency.170

As Hickey astutely observes, the military culture of the leader’s native country may disdain rapport building with indigenous forces. In the U.S., this institutional aversion to interpersonal connection has continued since the Vietnam War. “Whereas in most regular militaries, particularly the American, depersonalization and discontinuity are built into the training and operating dynamic so as to encourage a unit-as-machine conception and interoperability, in training foreign, ethnically different forces this elicits problems of establishing trust, track-record, rapport, and problem-solving abilities.”171 This caused some difficulty for Coalition troops in Iraq, where Iraqi “officers themselves have repeatedly complained about coalition trainers’ and units’ aloofness from Iraqi soldiers and disinterest in interacting meaningfully with them.”172 Bower experienced an almost mystical cultural fit with the Naga, and also had excellent rapport with her closest Naga counterpart, Namkia. Initially, Namkia was hired as an interpreter, and while competent in his duties, maintained an aloof attitude. Only after a number of shared hardships (including sickness, presence of a tiger in the camp, and death of a relative) did he and Bower establish a deep, personal bond. Bower described him as a pagan humorist, a Zemi to the backbone, with all the faults and virtues of his tribe and race, he still had an

inner core, a moral citadel. … He could no more compromise with wrong than he could stop breathing … he was an honest man, an accurate interpreter, an organizer, an expert in tribal law, and a notable man among the Barail Zemi.173

Her relationship with Namkia also became critical to her ability to recruit and lead the Naga. Adjustment to a foreign culture is not as simple as learning how to use chopsticks or order a drink in an exotic bar. Rather, adjustment to a different culture is a multidimensional process with at least three key aspects: social-cultural adjustment (for example, successful interpersonal relations with members of the host society); work adjustment (for example, the ability to adapt to local work conditions and requirements); and environmental adjustment (for example, adaptation to local food, transportation, housing conditions).174 In 1960, the anthropologist Kalvero Oberg described the difficulties inherent in adjusting to a new culture, and introduced the concept of “culture shock:”175 Culture shock is precipitated by that anxiety that results from losing all our familiar signs and symbols of social intercourse. These signs or cues include the thousand and one ways in which we orient ourselves to the situations of daily life: when to shake hands and what to say when we meet people, when and how to give tips, how to give orders to servants, how to make purchases, when to accept and when to refuse invitations, when to take statements seriously and when not. … Now when an individual enters a strange culture, all or most of these familiar cues are removed. … No matter how broad-minded or full of good will you may be, a series of props have been knocked from under you, followed by a feeling of frustration and anxiety.176

Oberg described culture shock as having four phases. The initial honeymoon phase of “fascination by the new” is followed by a phase characterized by hostility and aggression: “Instead of trying to account for conditions as they are through an honest analysis of the actual conditions and the historical circumstances which have created them, you talk as if the difficulties you experience are more or less created by the people of the host country for your special discomfort.” The third phase of learning to function in the new environment is followed by the fourth phase of accepting the “customs of the country as just another way of living.”177 Some people are better at adapting to foreign cultures than others; this is a matter of individual capacity.178 There are those of us who struggle to get along in a new culture, fumbling around with strange eating utensils and worrying about making an embarrassing faux pas. Other people seem to fit right in, navigating social situations with aplomb—the so-called “overseas type” who can adjust well to any foreign society.179 And then there are those individuals who seem unable to adapt, perpetually frustrated as they cling to their own cultural viewpoints and behaviors. “Although not common,” as Oberg pointed out in 1960, “there are individuals who cannot live in foreign countries.”180 What are the personality variables that predict individual adjustment to a foreign society? In a study for the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences, Allison Abbe, Lisa Gulick and Jeffrey Herman produced an excellent summary of the existing literature on the variables that may influence adjustment: • Tolerance for ambiguity, which means the ability to react to uncertain situations and environments with minimal discomfort. Individuals who were tolerant of ambiguity experienced less culture shock.181 • Self-monitoring, which refers to the capacity to observe and adjust one’s behavior in a socially appropriate way depending on situational cues.182 Self-monitoring may be beneficial for job performance if the job functions include cross-cultural interactions.183 • Prior cross-cultural experience may help individuals cope with new cultural experiences.184 • Self-efficacy, which refers to “beliefs in one’s capabilities to organize and execute the courses of action required to produce given attainments,”185 may lead to better work and social adjustment.186 • Cognitive complexity, meaning to the amount of variability allowed in a single category of objects or events, led to better cultural adjustment.187 • Sense-making, which refers to the ability of individuals to cope with cultural paradoxes and contradictions, may help individuals adjust better to foreign societies.188 • Non-ethnocentrism was also a strong predictor of an individual’s ability to adjust to a new culture.189 • Social initiative, or willingness to communicate in cross-cultural settings,190 may facilitate adjustment. • The ability to empathize with people from a difference culture may lead to improved personal and overall adjustment.191 • Interpersonal skills, such as conveying warmth, showing consideration, and displaying tact, were strong predictors of cross-cultural adjustment.192 • Self-regulation, which refers to emotional regulation, stress management, and coping, are critical features for cross cultural competence,193 with emotional regulation being the most consistent predictor of adjustment. • Adaptability (also referred to as flexibility) is “the ability to adjust one’s behavior or cognitive frames of reference in response to situational cues—in particular, in response to cultural cues.”194 Individuals who are adaptable complete international assignments more successfully,195 and

adjust better to intercultural work environments. The last item on the list—adaptability—is the key attribute that enabled Bower to lead the Naga in an unconventional warfare environment. In her academic writing, her biography, and her memoirs, Bower devotes little time to introspection. While she describes events and people in great detail, she does not spend much time pondering what aspects of her character fit with the Naga, or what attributes allowed her to adapt to the environment. However, passages in her own writing shows that she was able to adjust her cognitive frames of reference and her behavior to the cultural environment in which she was operating. For example, after the visit of the local V Force commander, Bower agreed to begin recruiting the Naga to form a local intelligence unit. The Naga were by no means friendly toward the British: British suppression of the Gaidiliu rebellion combined with prior mismanagement of the region had made the Naga wary and mistrustful. Bower and her friend Namkia began recruiting efforts in a village called Hamgrum, which had been the center of the rebellion against British rule years before. When she arrived in the village, a community meeting was called. The Naga expressed their unwillingness to join the fight against the Japanese. “Why should we fight for the Sahibs? We didn’t fight for the Kacharis, we didn’t fight for the Manipuris—why should we fight for the British?” Namkia argued back: “Why shouldn’t we? Did the Kacharis or the Manipuris stop the Angamis raiding? Haven’t the Sahibs done that? Haven’t they given us roads and salt-markets? Haven’t they given us protection and peace? Don’t we owe them something for that?” The debate heated up and one man, with a child on his back, yelled, “lies, lies lies!” It was at this point that Bower jumped up and began debating the villagers: “It’s not lies, but the truth! … If you Zemi won’t do it, then the Kukis will! Or else there’ll be troops here to do the job for you—how would you like that? I’m offering you guns—where are your own guns? When did you last have guns?”196 What is interesting is that Bower did not make an argument to the Naga about how they should support the British administration out of a sense of duty to the Crown. She did not offer the Naga a recruiting pitch that would appeal to British people, but appealed directly to Naga self-interest. The first part of her speech appeals to inter-tribal rivalry (“if you Zemi won’t do it, then the Kukis will!”); the second part raises the prospect of loss of control over territory (“there’ll be troops here to do the job for you”); the third part offers the prospect of weaponry, an important aspect of Naga selfidentity as warriors (“I’m offering you guns.”). The final Naga concern was that they would be forced to serve outside of their own territory, leaving their women alone with foreign troops stationed nearby. Bower yelled, “You didn’t like it before, did you, when the troops got off with your girls? Don’t squeal at me later if things go wrong! Fools!” After this intense debate, Bower agreed to take an oath (taken very seriously by the Naga) that they would get guns and remain in their own the territory, resulting eventually in a successful recruiting drive.197 The key aspect of Bower’s success in recruiting, training, and leading the Naga was her ability to adapt her behavior and cognitive framework to Naga society. As one study on cross-cultural leadership in NATO observed, “The most effective leaders … will be those who can adapt their leadership style to suit different cultural contexts.”198 Equally important, however, was the fact that she did not expect or demand that the Naga would adapt to her. She accepted them as they were, and never demanded that they substitute tea-drinking for the local homebrew zu or replace animist magic with Christianity. Nor did she require the Naga to organize their operations according to British notions of command and control. Instead, she let the Naga employ the morung lodge system as the organizing principle. Decades later, Australian military advisors in Vietnam adopted the same principle: instead of imposing preconceived ideas of how things should be done on their Vietnamese counterparts, they let the Vietnamese determine how forces should be organized. In the words of one Australian advisor: “If the Vietnamese organisation said that there were to be two squads in the platoon, then we adapted our contact drills, for instance, to fit in with their organisation and their weapons.”199 Following the lead of indigenous forces tends to be the exception rather than the rule for multiethnic multi-state military organizations. Military leaders working with foreign troops—whether commanding a multinational organization or leading small units of foreign forces—tend to assume that “because I’m in charge, and we have the majority of resources and troops, you people should adjust to how we do things.” Yet, while doing it the “Yankee way” may be the most efficient means of reaching a given objective, it may not win the war. As T.E. Lawrence noted in 1917, “Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them.”200

Conclusion Bower’s family had hoped she would find someone to marry, and finally she did. Rumors had circulated among the other V Force soldiers that a woman was leading the Naga up in the hills. Major Tim Betts had heard about the “Naga Queen” and had wanted to meet her. Before he was able to do so, his camp was overrun by the Japanese. Betts escaped and walked for three weeks through Japanese held territory to Kohima. He spent the siege in the hospital, and when he returned to his unit he asked his commanding officer for leave in order to meet the Naga Queen with a view to matrimony. Stunned, the colonel had no words and simply signed his leave forms. Major Betts

walked into the hills to meet Bower, claiming that his visit was an opportunity to collect butterflies. Instead, he collected a wife, and Bower and Major Betts were married in 1945 according to Naga custom.201 The village kadepeo officially adopted Bower, giving here the Naga name Katazile—giver of all. Major Betts gave her adoptive father a spear and 100 rupees as her marriage price.202 Shortly thereafter they journeyed to Tibet where Major Betts had been given a post by the Indian Government with the North-East Frontier Service. After almost two years in Tibet, Bower and Betts returned to Britain in 1948. Unhappy being back in London, they bought a coffee plantation in Kenya but political unrest soon put an end to their plan of farming (see the chapter on Kenya in this volume), and so they moved to the hills of Scotland, where Bower worked on her manuscripts and raised her two daughters. In 1950, she finally received a doctorate in anthropology from the University of London.203 In 1960, the Naga entered her life once again. After Indian independence, the British government handed over control of Naga territory to the new Indian government. Although the Indian government signed an agreement that gave the Naga some autonomy in return for of the resources of the foothills, Naga territory was soon occupied by Indian troops. In 1954, the Indian Army began burning and pillaging villages, forcing the Naga to labor on government projects, and committing atrocities against Naga women. The Naga formed a Home Guard to protect themselves against the Indian Army, but the 2000-strong Naga force could not stand up against 30,000 Indian troops. In 1960, the Naga came to plead for the British to intercede with the Indian Government on their behalf. Bower helped her Naga friends maneuver through the British foreign policy system, but in the end little could be done aside from bringing diplomatic pressure to bear. In 1963, Nagaland was inaugurated as the sixteenth State of India under a puppet government. Bower was deeply connected throughout her life to the Naga, as they were to her. When Bower died in 1988, three of her Naga friends served as pallbearers at her funeral.204 The connection between Bower and the Naga raises some perplexing questions about the nature of cross-cultural leadership, most presciently: how does someone from a foreign culture lead members of a different culture into battle during wartime? The answers that I’ve offered to these questions have not identified any discrete, consistent variables that can be easily measured, but rather have highlighted the importance of the context in which Bower lived and worked. The problem with talking about context is that singularity prevents generalization. “Contexts can be so complex that no single microscopic view is sufficiently detailed and comprehensive to suggest a singular productive view of leadership or leadership effectiveness.”205 Acknowledging that context often looks as messy as chaos, what conclusions can we draw about the contextual factors that hindered or helped Bower? And can we draw any general observations about cross-cultural military leadership in extremis from Bower’s experience? The first conclusion we can draw is that Bower was able to lead the Naga because World War II transformed the circumstances of people’s lives around the world—for Londoners during the Blitz; for tribal people during the Japanese invasion of Burma. The second conclusion we can draw is that Bower was able to lead the Naga because the Naga had transformed her from an outsider to a member of their own community, and then from a community member to a community leader—of their own initiative. In broader terms, one generalization we can draw is that leaders may transform followers, but followers also transform leaders. The third conclusion is that Bower succeeded in leading the Naga by overcoming the social norms associated with her gender both in her country of origin and among the Naga. More broadly, for the purposes of cross-cultural military leadership in extremis, leadership sometimes requires overcoming the social context in which we find ourselves, including gender norms, ascribed roles, patterns of thought, and other forms of social control that tell us how things should be and what is possible. The fourth conclusion about Bower’s success is that she transcended the Naga leadership model (hereditary, patriarchal, and centered on the collective) by tapping into relevant cultural features (such as the morung collective) to achieve her objectives. The broad generalization here is that leadership models are not static, and people may change their ideas about what constitutes ideal leadership based on changing circumstances. While people may believe that certain attributes are ideal (for example, flag officers should be over six feet tall), other contextual factors may be more important in reality. The final conclusion we can draw is that Bower’s success in recruiting, training, and leading the Naga was facilitated by a mutual feeling of cultural congruence that bordered on the mystical from both her perspective (déjà vu) and their perspective (manifestation of a goddess); by the rapport she established with her primary Naga interlocutor; and by an experience of deep cultural adjustment. While most military personnel tasked with leading foreign forces will not experience the “luck of the cultural fit,” it is nevertheless possible to adjust to a new environment and to establish rapport with a host nation counterpart. This brings us to the final answer to the question, how does anyone from a foreign culture lead members of a different culture into battle during wartime? What the story of Ursula Graham Bower shows is that, in leading across cultures, the burden of adaptation falls on the guest and not on the host.

4

GREGORY BATESON AND INFORMATION OPERATIONS

D: Why do animals fight? F: Oh, for many reasons. Territory, sex, food… D: Daddy, you’re talking instinct theory. I thought we agreed not to do that. F: All right. But what sort of an answer do you want to the question, why animals fight? D: Well. Do they deal in opposites? F: Oh. Yes. A lot of fighting ends up in some sort of peace-making. And certainly playful fighting is partly a way of affirming friendship. Or discovering or rediscovering friendship. D: I thought so…. Gregory Bateson, Metalogue, ‘What is an Instinct?’1

In 1945, the tall, erudite, pipe-smoking British anthropologist Gregory Bateson volunteered to lead a mission behind enemy lines to rescue three Office of Strategic Services (OSS) agents. Dangerous missions behind enemy lines were not unusual in the OSS. Created in 1942, it was the first U.S. venture into organized espionage, subversion, propaganda, and related activities under the guise of a centralized intelligence agency.2 Loosely modeled on the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and British Security Service (MI5), the OSS was the predecessor to both CIA and U.S. Army Special Forces. The OSS agents Bateson went to rescue were Indonesian nationals who had been captured by the Japanese. They had somehow escaped from captivity, but their current whereabouts were unknown. Most likely, they were dead or lost in the jungle. As a Malay speaker, Bateson was the only candidate suitable to lead the mission. As one of Bateson’s colleagues noted, “we all knew that the war would be over soon and nobody was anxious to risk his life at such a time.”3 Yet Bateson, who had no military experience, volunteered. Since the Americans had no ships available for the mission, the British sent a destroyer to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to pick up Bateson and his team of twelve U.S. commandos. As the ship sailed to the island of Batu, Bateson, a perpetual observer of the human condition, took hundreds of photographs whenever the boat dropped anchor. Mostly he seemed to enjoy photographing local women nursing their children. Arriving at Batu, the landing party trekked into the jungle and found the remains of a camp. Unfortunately the missing agents had disappeared into the jungle and were never seen again. On the way back to Ceylon, the ship was attacked by a Japanese plane and limped back to port. When Bateson landed, one of his female colleagues—delighted that they had returned safely—kissed him and said, “You don’t know how glad I am to see you back.” Bateson, in his prickly British way, said, “Of course you are glad. You did not want me on your conscience for the rest of your life, did you?”4 For this service, Bateson was awarded the Pacific Campaign Service Ribbon.5 Bateson was an unlikely OSS operative: although he was an expert on a variety of Asian societies, he had no military training. Bateson came from the British intelligentsia. His grandfather William Henry (1812–1882) was Master of St. John’s College, Cambridge, and Gregory’s father William Bateson (1861–1926) was the leading anti-Darwinian British biologist of his era.6 In such a scientifically oriented household, wrote Gregory, “boyhood was mainly devoted to natural history: butterflies and moths, beetles, dragonflies, marine invertebrates, flowering plants, etc.”7 Bateson entered St. John’s College in 1922, intending to study zoology. But after a trip to the Galapagos Islands in 1924, he switched to anthropology (a move he described as a “sort of revolt” against his father).8 His advisor, A. C. Haddon, sent him “out to the Sepik River, New Guinea, to study historical culture contact between the Sepik and Fly River peoples.”9 Bateson described these field expeditions as “groping very unhappily … to establish some theory in anthropology.”10 The final product of these years in New Guinea was Naven, a book Bateson described as “very difficult for people to read,” but which influenced later anthropologists such as Claude Levi-Strauss, who did “a good deal to make my stuff readable and ‘safe’ for anthropologists.”11 While in New Guinea, Bateson met Margaret Mead. There, on the Sepik River inside a mosquito tent, Mead and Bateson fell in love, having realized that they represented “a male and female version of a temperamental type.”12 Bateson possessed a quiet self-containment that Mead liked in a man, and the kind demeanor of an English gentleman.13 In 1936, they wed in Singapore, and for their honeymoon they went to Bali to conduct fieldwork. “During their two years in Bali, she was interested in character formation; he, in the theory and dynamics of social interaction.”14 They

developed new ways of observing, and of understanding the process of observation itself,15 undertaking “an elaborate photographic study of personal relations among the Balinese, especially interchange between parents and children.”16 Their research was published as Balinese Character17 and became a foundational text of what is now called “visual anthropology.” Bateson started out as an anthropologist, but made important contributions to many other fields. After the war, he became involved in the new field of cybernetics: the theory of properties of closed self-corrective circuits,18 and introduced these ideas into the social sciences. In the 1950s, while working at the Langley Porter Clinic, a psychiatric institution, Bateson developed the double bind hypothesis “which provided a framework for the formal description of schizophrenic symptoms and the experience of the schizophrenic within his family,”19 still considered a valid theory of schizophrenia in psychiatry today.20 Between 1949 and 1963, Bateson served as Ethnologist at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Palo Alto, California, where he was allegedly involved in a number of experimental psychological warfare initiatives, including the CIA’s Operation MK-Ultra.21 Bateson also supposedly introduced the beat poet Allen Ginsberg to LSD.22 Bateson later wrote: “Enough mental hospitals and schizophrenic families is after a while enough … so I went off in 1963 to study dolphins.”23 Bateson’s work on animal communication with both dolphins and octopi is considered pioneering research, with continued validity today.24 When a book of his collected essays, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, was published in 1972, Bateson became a prominent figure in the American counterculture movement.25 His thinking also influenced the development of the ecology movement in the U.S.26 When reading about Bateson, it is tempting to view him as an eclectic genius whose contributions to the fields of anthropology, psychiatry, philosophy, animal communications, and art theory are merely the result of an intellectual variety of attention deficit disorder. Yet Bateson’s contribution to such a wide variety of disparate disciplines results from his approach to the study of the world: he was less interested in things-in-themselves and more interested in the connections between them. Writing in 1973, he rejected Western epistemology based on a linear, Newtonian view of the world: “the ways of nineteenth-century thinking are becoming rapidly bankrupt, and new ways are growing out of cybernetics, systems theory, meditation, psychoanalysis, and psychedelic experience.”27 The radical discontinuities of his thought made it easy for his critics to dismiss much of his work as a product of “the intellectual lotus land of California, where eclectic theories and mystical philosophizing lie thick as Los Angeles smog.”28 Even Bateson recognized that “very few people have any idea of what I am talking about.”29 What then, if anything, can we learn from the life and legacy of Gregory Bateson with relevance to information operations (IO)? By most accounts, U.S. information operations have been expensive and have generally not had the intended effect. One possible reason they have been less than successful is the neglect of cultural context. In order to bring culture back into IO, this chapter suggests how three of Bateson’s concepts might be employed. The first concept discussed is Bateson’s idea of the premise, cultural ‘facts’ considered to be true and axiomatic for members of a culture that weave together to create a coherent, intrinsic logic. The second concept with applicability to IO is Bateson’s idea of schismogenesis, the patterns inherent in a social system that produce either equilibrium or disequilibrium, that Bateson believed could be manipulated to produce intended effects. The third and final concept considered in this chapter is the frame, a heuristic mechanism for organizing experience and guiding action that affects how we understand the world and how the world understands us.

Losing the war of ideas In the U.S., information is considered to be an instrument of power “equal to diplomatic, military, and economic efforts” at the national strategic level.30 Among the “four elements of national power” captured by the acronym DIME (diplomacy, information, military, and economic), only information lacks an oversight agency in the U.S. government responsible for carrying out those functions. In the U.S., information operations have generally been conducted to support war efforts, and ad hoc agencies created to meet wartime requirements have been disbanded at the end of hostilities.31 With the exception of the U.S. Information Agency during the Cold War era, information creation and dissemination has not been centralized in a single agency within the government and is instead decentralized and found throughout the various agencies of government. As a result, the informational element of power within U.S. government bureaucracy, developing communications strategies, and coordinating activities has often proved extremely difficult. No overarching strategy guides the dissemination of information by the U.S. government: a Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigation concluded that “the absence of such a strategy complicates the task of conveying consistent messages to overseas audiences.”32 In the words of a former National Security Council member, “there is no overarching knowledge or information strategy at the national level, nor is there a focused and effective mechanism for coordinating dissemination to all prospective audiences around the world—allied, friendly, neutral, potentially hostile, and hostile.”33 Within this complex, decentralized bureaucratic system, all the federal agencies follow their own processes and procedures regarding information production and dissemination. The military also has its own way of doing things. Generally, almost all information functions carried out by the

military fall under the umbrella of IO. Information operations are defined by the U.S. military as “the integrated employment, during military operations, of IRCs [information related capabilities] in concert with other lines of operation to influence, disrupt, corrupt, or usurp the decision making of adversaries and potential adversaries while protecting our own.”34 IRCs, in turn, are the tools, techniques, or activities that may be used to affect the information environment,35 such as electronic warfare (EW), cyberspace operations (CO), military information support operations (MISO), civil-military operations (CMO), military deception (MILDEC), intelligence, and public affairs (PA).36 Despite the joint doctrine definition, there is confusion in the military about what IO actually is. For example, General Kevin P. Chilton, the Commander of U.S. Strategic Command, observed in 2009: “You ask ten different people what IO is, and you’ll get ten completely different answers. We have a lot of doctrinal work to do here.”37 Since nobody in the U.S. military seems to agree on what IO actually is, it is not surprising that the capability is not properly utilized. During a visit to the Army War College in 2006, former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said, “If I were grading, I would say we probably deserve a D or D plus as a country as to how well we’re doing in the battle of ideas that’s taking place in the world today. … We have not found the formula as a country.”38 Yet, despite its questionable utility, from 2005–09, U.S. spending on IO rose from $9 million to $580 million per year.39 In July 2009, the late Congressman John Murtha, then chairman of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, cut more than half of President Obama’s fiscal year 2010 budget for military information operations.40 Congress did not believe that the DoD knew what its information operations “needs were, what they had, and what they should cost.”41 Similar problems exist at the national strategic level with strategic communications. A central goal of U.S. strategic communications has been to promote a positive view of U.S. policies in the Islamic world—according to the 2010 National Security Strategy, to counter “a bankrupt agenda of extremism and murder with an agenda of hope and opportunity.”42 Yet, over the past few years international polls have indicated that the U.S. is not popular in the Islamic world.43 A 2012 Pew poll found that citizens of predominantly Muslim nations—81 per cent in Egypt, 75 per cent in Turkey, 88 per cent in Pakistan, and 88 per cent in Jordan—held unfavorable views of the U.S.44 Why has the U.S. military failed to employ IO (or more broadly, strategic communications) effectively? Commentators have observed that IO has been hindered by a variety of problems, including a mismatch of words and deeds that has led to a loss of credibility;45 poor organizational structure, in which no single agency has authority;46 problems in selection and training of officers;47 and no centralized approval authority for messaging.48 While these structural issues certainly limit the effectiveness of U.S. strategic communications efforts, it also struggles with an additional problem that is not so much structural as it is perceptual: the assumption that messages that appeal to audiences in Kansas City will also play well in Karachi. In other words, IO often ignores the cultural context of the intended audience. At the tactical level, examples abound of the military’s failure to craft messages that are comprehensible to the local population. In Afghanistan, some of these blunders resulted from the assumption that Afghans were operating with the same basic knowledge as citizens of ISAF member nations. For example, rear vehicles in NATO convoys carried signs warning other drivers to stay back 150 meters. Unfortunately, the intended audience often did not know what a meter was, “let alone 150 of them.”49 In other cases, the military failed to understand the world from someone else’s subjective viewpoint. For example, the $25 million reward offered for information leading to the capture of Osama bin Laden was an incomprehensible sum to many Afghans who lived on the equivalent of $2 per day.50 A more significant error was the tendency to project American versions of reality, with little apparent consideration paid to the concepts, ideas, and beliefs of local Afghans. For example, when: PSYOP applied the terrorist label to the Taliban, the efforts lost credibility because it appears that most Pashtun target audiences do not consider the Taliban to be international terrorists and do not accept the premise that the Taliban had anything to do with the attack on New York City on 9/11 (despite their alliance with al-Qai’da). Moreover, as the war on terrorism continued in Afghanistan, long after most of al-Qai’da had fled the country and abandoned its camps, this became less credible as a justification for a foreign occupation.51

The lack of cultural nuance in messaging is a problem not just at the tactical level, but throughout the U.S. strategic communications bureaucracy. By way of example, one day in August 2006, I received a phone call from the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and was asked to come to the Pentagon to review a speech. After I arrived, I was informed that I would be making comments and suggestions for the President’s four upcoming speeches. After reading them, I suggested that any discussion of the U.S. desire for peace in the Middle East would be seen as hypocritical in light of the recent failure of Secretary of State Condolezza Rice to call for an immediate ceasefire in Lebanon. I also offered the view that the rhetoric of unilateralism (“Lone Ranger talk”) might play well within the U.S., but it alienated our European allies and most Muslims in the Middle East. Judging by the form and language of the speeches that were subsequently delivered, my comments were ignored. This was not surprising: I was just one ‘eyes-on-review’ of a speech that would have been read by hundreds of people throughout Washington before the President uttered a word of it.52 In theory, IO—whether at the tactical or strategic level—should include the culture of the target

audience as a significant planning element. The most recent joint IO doctrine, Joint Publication 3–31 Information Operations, breaks the information environment into the physical dimension (infrastructure, technology, etc.), the informational dimension (collection, processing, storage, etc.), and the cognitive dimension, which “encompasses the minds of those who transmit, receive, and respond to or act on information.… These elements are influenced by many factors, to include individual and cultural beliefs, norms, vulnerabilities, motivations, emotions, experiences, morals, education, mental health, identities, and ideologies.” Joint Publication 3–31 also notes that the cognitive dimension “constitutes the most important component of the information environment.”53 Despite the fact that the importance of culture has been acknowledged by the military as a factor in successful IO, and despite the existence of a framework for including culture as a factor in current IO doctrine, IO for the most part has been conducted in a culturally tone-deaf manner. The question that arises is: why? Why does IO not include culture as part of its core competency? Two possible answers will be discussed: first, the American belief that everyone else in the world is just like us; and second, the U.S. military conceptualization of IO as a combat rather than a concept system. American IO is hampered by the fallacy of universalism. That is, the U.S. in its IO efforts seems to assume that other societies are just like us; that whatever differences may exist are superficial and temporary aberrations that can be overcome. If they are not quite like us, we can bring them into conformity with our idealized self-image. As Ken Friedman once wrote, “We tend to think of Arabs as underdeveloped Americans—Americans with sheets on … All we have to do is make believers out of them, to get them the proper education, teach them English and they will turn into Americans.”54 With the exception of certain psychological operations and black propaganda efforts, almost the entire propaganda machine of the U.S. has historically been geared towards making other people just like us by promoting American values and promising audiences access to the American ‘way of life.’ For example, in 1948 the Marshall plan provided $15 million of subsidies to U.S. publications in Europe, such as the International Herald Tribune, to promote a positive view of the U.S.55 This type of propaganda is “aimed much more at the promulgation of ideas and prejudices, of a style of life, than of a doctrine, or at inciting action or calling for formal adherence.”56 Jacques Ellul referred to this as the “propaganda of integration:” a “long-term propaganda, a self-reproducing propaganda that seeks to obtain stable behavior, to adapt the individual to his everyday life, to reshape his thought and behavior in terms of the permanent social setting.”57 Integrationist propaganda seeks to enmesh the audience into the host nation culture in order to promulgate adherence to host nation ideas and prejudices. Integrationist propaganda is bound to fail when used during wartime against a foreign audience. French integrationist propaganda in Algeria from 1955 onwards was no match for the propaganda of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN). As Ellul notes: The propaganda of the FLN was an act of agitation designed to arouse feelings of subversion and combat; against this the French army pitted a propaganda of integration, of assimilation into a French framework and into the French administration, French political concepts, education, professional training, and ideology. But a world of difference lay between the two as to speed, ease, and effectiveness; which explains why, in this competition between propagandas, the FLN won out at almost every state. This does not mean that the FLN propaganda reflected the real feeling of the Algerians. But if some say: “You are unhappy, so rise and slay your master and tomorrow you will be free,” and others say: “We will help you, work with you, and in the end all your problems will be solved,” there is little question as to who will command allegiance.58

Like French integrationist propaganda in Algeria, the U.S. has also labored under the fallacy of universalism, assuming that predominantly Muslim audiences share the same basic values and want the same things as Americans. In 2001, for example, the State Department launched the $15 million ‘Shared Values’ initiative in the Middle East, which included a series of mini-documentaries about the lives of American Muslims where ‘real people’ described the social tolerance of American life. The State Department bought airtime on television and radio and paid for advertising in newspapers during Ramadan, reaching an estimated 288 million people.59 Underlying the ‘Shared Values’ initiative was a naïve conviction that if Muslim publics only understood the U.S. better, they would be more likely to support its polices. The campaign was the brainchild of Charlotte Beers, a former Madison Avenue advertising executive best known for her successful re-branding of Uncle Ben’s rice, who had recently been appointed as the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. As a successful, practical advertising executive, Beers had been trained and educated to see her professional task as branding. Central to this market-based approach is manipulating the consumer’s emotional relationship to the product.60 In the “Shared Values” initiative, the United States, itself, was the brand. In Beers’ words, “there’s a great belief in Muslim countries that the whole lifestyle of our country and its way of being is decadent, faithless.”61 Thus, Beers concluded, “We’re going to have to communicate the intangible assets of the United States—things like our belief system and our values.”62 In Jacques Ellul’s terms, this initiative was integrationist propaganda: it promised assimilation into an American framework, using American political concepts and ideology, and was based on a false assumption of universalism—that Muslims around the world are really just like us. Of course, it also violated almost every rule of propaganda during wartime: it targeted deeply-held audience values; it contradicted existing audience opinions, beliefs, and predispositions; it failed to present a counter-

narrative; its complexity made it vulnerable to oppositional reading; and it assumed that Muslims everywhere are fundamentally the same. In the words of one U.S. Army public affairs officer: DoD’s so-called STRATCOM/IO campaign which was focused strictly on trying to change ideology through reasoning based on a Western outlook, including appeals to promoting consumer materialism, and Charlotte Beers with her Madison Avenue techniques for selling American ideology in the Middle East, was a giant black hole based on faulty assumptions and cultural obtuseness that would only make the situation worse.63

This branding and marketing approach to propaganda continues to be ineffectively employed against Islamic State.64 At the beginning of the Iraq war, the socio-cultural and cognitive dimension of communication with foreign audiences was treated as an afterthought. In 2003, I was asked by a couple of bright young officers at the Army 1st IO Command to come and give a briefing on culture and IO. As the commander and his staff listened politely, I made the case for why understanding Iraqi culture might be important for IO. For example, leaflets displaying a female eye were supposed to encourage Iraqis to report tips to a hotline, but were instead likely to be interpreted as the Coalition giving the ‘evil eye’ to the Iraqi people. “Yes, I agree, that’s important,” said the commander. “However, that’s not what IO is all about.” My reply was perhaps too tart: “Maybe not, but perhaps it should be.” Understanding something of the history and conceptual genealogy of IO helps to explain why it tends to ignore culture. In a 2010 monograph Christopher W. Lowe asks “if Information Operations is a tool to win the battle of ideas, why has the military designed Information Operations around a suite of capabilities that includes electronic warfare, operational security, and military deception?”65 Lowe argues that the design of IO as a system “is optimal for an altogether different function: the disruption of enemy, and preservation of friendly information flows, and the subsequent establishment of a relative command and control advantage. In other words, Information Operations is designed for battle, not for the battle of ideas.”66 While many possible genealogies exist for IO (including psychological warfare), Lowe argues that IO actually grew out of cybernetics. The field of cybernetics was developed by mathematician Norbert Wiener who was working on improving anti-aircraft technology at the beginning of World War II. Wiener’s basic idea “was to use electrical networks to determine, several seconds in advance, where an attacking plane would be and to use that knowledge to direct artillery fire.”67 The underlying calculation model that Wiener employed in his anti-aircraft predictor was the servomechanism, similar to feedback devices such as thermostats or self-guided torpedoes.68 What Wiener discovered was that “the pilot behaves like a servo-mechanism, attempting to overcome the intrinsic lag due to the dynamics of his plane as a physical system.”69 Thus, the concept of the manmachine interface was born. Wiener came to see the anti-aircraft predictor as the “articulated prototype for a new understanding of the human-machine relation, one that made soldier, calculator, and fire-power into a single integrated system.”70 Bateson first met Wiener in 1942 at a conference on Cerebral Inhibition, (which Bateson noted “was a respectable word for hypnosis!”). Bateson left for Asia soon afterwards and while he was overseas, “bored and frustrated, I occasionally comforted myself by thinking about the properties of closed self-corrective systems.”71 In fact, Bateson had already been thinking about feedback loops and systemic equilibrium present within cultures and individual relationships (such as schismogenesis, discussed later) since the early 1930s. Bateson met with Wiener again in 1944 and 1946 at the Macy Conferences, which brought together mathematicians, physicists, social scientists, and psychologists to develop the concept of cybernetics.72 Bateson corresponded with Wiener about game theory, communication engineering, psychiatry, and paradoxes throughout 1947 and 1948, as Wiener was writing his masterpiece, Cybernetics.73 While “there is no way of determining the role that conversations with Bateson may have played” in Wiener’s development of cybernetic theory,74 Bateson was clearly delighted with the concept. Cybernetics offered Bateson a unified theory based on physical and mathematical models of the world that could be applied to human society.75 He organized a Macy conference in September 1946 to introduce Wiener’s ideas to the social science community,76 which led to the later development of systems theory.77 Although the U.S. military paid little attention to the idea of cybernetics, the Soviets adopted the concept shortly after Wiener’s book was published in 1948.78 In order to address the complexity of the battlefield and the increase in information flow, the Soviets came to conceptualize “weapon systems, including both machines and the people who operate them, as cybernetic systems.”79 By the second half of the 1970s, the Soviets had incorporated cybernetics into their concept of radioelectronic combat (REC).80 What was different about REC from anything in the West was the idea of an integrated system, combining “signal intelligence, direction finding, intensive jamming, deception, and suppressive fires to attack enemy organizations and systems throughout their means of control,”81 in order to destroy the enemy’s command and control systems, while protecting one’s own. Subsequently, REC provided the blueprint for the American version of an integrated electronic warfare capability,82 dubbed Command, Control, Communications Countermeasures (C3CM).83 In 1993, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff renamed C3CM Command and Control Warfare (C2W), designating it as “the military strategy that implements Information Warfare,” and added psychological operations to the list of capabilities.84 In 1996, the Army’s new FM 100–6 Information Operations added public affairs (PA) and civil affairs (CA) as types of “operations that the that the

Army currently uses to gain and maintain information dominance.”85 The most recent joint publication on IO, JP 3–13, continues the same conceptual trajectory and defining IO as the “integrated employment” of electromagnetic capabilities and information-based stratagems used “to influence, disrupt, corrupt, or usurp the decision making of adversaries and potential adversaries while protecting our own.”86

Bringing culture back into information operations Given this conceptual genealogy, it is hardly a surprise that at the beginning of the Iraq war IO was conceptualized, organized, and taught primarily as a means to disrupt or protect command and control systems. The recent inclusion of socio-cultural factors in JP 3–13 notwithstanding, IO is primarily a technical system. Cybernetic command and control systems—invented in the U.S., developed by the Soviets, and then re-conceptualized in the U.S.—were first and foremost a warfighting tool, not a conceptual tool. Yet cybernetics was a field which influenced Bateson and to which Bateson made contributions. Is it possible to put Bateson back into IO and thereby improve the ability to communicate and influence effectively across cultures? Three of Bateson’s ideas are discussed below in order to explore how they might be used in IO: the cultural premise, schismogenesis, and frames. In 1939, following Hitler’s invasion of Poland, Bateson and Mead “realized that Hitler presented a terrible threat to everything we valued in the world.”87 It was time to leave their idyllic research in Bali behind and do something that would make a difference. After arriving in the U.S. Bateson worked for the Committee on National Morale, a private organization preparing social scientists to participate in defense policy and planning.88 While working for the Committee, Bateson wrote a pamphlet on American passivity and defeatism and designed a game that would educate players about differences between democracy and dictatorship.89 Subsequently, Bateson was hired to analyze Nazi propaganda films at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City “for the light which they throw on what makes Nazis tick and what sort of prognosis one can make about how they will behave in certain circumstances—for example, defeat.”90 He then took a position as a teacher of Melanesian Pidgin English at the Naval School of Military Government & Administration at Columbia University. In 1943, Bateson was recruited by the OSS and began serving in the Morale Operations (MO) Branch. Whereas the Office of War Information was responsible for ‘white propaganda’ that acknowledged its sources, the MO conducted ‘black propaganda’ that disguised its source and was disowned by the government.91 The MO’s role was to incite and spread dissention and disorder within enemy countries, and to promote subversive activities against enemy powers. In enemyoccupied countries, MO was charged with supporting resistance,92 and distributing secret propaganda by radio and rumor, pamphlets, leaflets, and pictures.93 After an initial period of service with the OSS in Washington, DC,94 Bateson deployed to South East Asia in 1944 as a member of Detachment 404. Attached to British South East Asia Command in Ceylon under the command of Lord Louis Mountbatten, Detachment 404 conducted regional propaganda campaigns and ran missions into Siam, Burma, and Malaya.95 His supervisor, anthropologist Cora Du Bois,96 noted that the collaboration with Bateson held “the most pleasure and interest” of any of her OSS work. Bateson, however, was unhappy at headquarters.97 Because some of his bosses believed he was unsuited to field missions, he was stuck in Kandy, training agents for the field and inventing black propaganda campaigns.98 At the end of 1944, Bateson finally got his chance to serve in an OSS field unit on the frontlines in the Arakan Mountains of Burma, where the British were soon to launch a counteroffensive against the Japanese.99 In Burma, he had the opportunity the put his theories into practice, though only on a small scale.100 Bateson interviewed Burmese locals, investigating how to create suspicion of the Japanese and improve Arakanese views of the Allies.101 He then put this knowledge into practice, devising schemes that would damage Japanese morale such as radio broadcasts intended to discredit and disrupt Japanese operations in the Pacific Theater. Bateson was apparently good at his job. The British thought his “the most useful and most intelligently directed branch” of the whole OSS unit in the Arakan.102 Bateson sought to incorporate local culture into operations to make them more effective. For example, in talking with locals, Bateson discovered that yellow had important symbolic meaning among the Burmese, traditionally associated with Buddhism and with political independence (Burmese students had used a symbol of a yellow fighting peacock during the fight for independence in the colonial period).103 Bateson suggested that the OSS should drop yellow dye into the Irrawaddy River. For the Burmese, as Bateson argued, yellow symbolizes political independence; therefore, dyeing the river yellow would be interpreted by the Burmese as a portent of Japanese defeat. Unfortunately Bateson’s plan to turn the Irrawaddy River yellow never came to fruition since the dye which turned yellow in salt water simply sank in fresh water.104 Bateson referred to the “given facts of a culture”—such as the association for the Burmese of the color yellow with political independence—as a premise: “a generalised statement of a particular assumption or implication recognisable in a number of details of cultural behavior.”105 In Bateson’s view, every culture had a unique underlying pattern comprised of premises knitted together into a

coherent whole.106 In other words, the premises are the threads out of which the culture is woven “into a coherent scheme.” For example, Bateson notes that among the Iatmul of New Guinea, “a mother gives food to children, a mother’s brother is identified with the mother, therefore mother’s brothers give food to children. And by these syllogisms the whole structure of a culture is netted together into a coherent whole.”107 The role of anthropologists and cultural analysts is to interpret this cultural logic, “fitting together the various premises of the culture.”108 Premises are pervasive throughout a culture, and are reflected in myriad ways. Often the premises of a culture will be explicitly stated by the people—as the Burmese told Bateson about the meaning of the color yellow—but “in many cases they may only be stated in symbolic terms—by the terminology of kinship, by metaphoric clichés, more obscurely by ritual, or, in Iatmul culture, by some trick in the giving of personal names.” Even if a premise is not explicitly stated, just by observing the culture, “it can be shown over and over again to be implicit in the behavior of individuals.”109 A premise that is active in the mind of a population pervades everything, “so that culture as a whole appears as a complex fabric in which the various conflicting ideological motifs are twisted and woven together.”110 Premises are taken as true and given by individuals within the society. The validity of a premise, Bateson wrote, “depends upon the subjects belief in them [sic].”111 Premises are not static, but can change—both in the minds of individuals and at the level of culture. The more deeply embedded the premise, however, the more resistant it is to change. In Bateson’s view, premises that pertained to “smaller systems or gestalten of the universe” could be more easily shifted. If a premise was shifted, the change might have a cascading effect in the worldview of an individual—or potentially a society. “If a man achieves or suffers change in premises which are deeply embedded in his mind, he will surely find that the results of that change will ramify throughout his whole universe. Such changes we may well call ‘epistemological.’”112 The possibility that a premise can change is of great importance for IO. Premises are unique to culture, but they are also shared between cultures, particularly at the somatic level. “When two human beings meet, they inevitably share many premises about such matters as limbs, sense organs, hunger, and pain.”113 Additionally, human beings share the notion that language and gesture are mediums of communication even though the form may vary by culture.114 What value does Bateson’s concept of the cultural premise have for contemporary IO? The short answer is that the failure to take the premises into account results in ineffective IO. For example, in 2007 U.S. PSYOP personnel dropped soccer balls from Blackhawk helicopters in Khost province in Afghanistan. This was done, according to the ISAF spokesman, “in the spirit of goodwill, something that we hoped would bring Afghan children some enjoyment.” Yet the governor of Khost province noted that some of the local Afghans were “upset and angry” because of the soccer balls.115 Why were the Afghans so disturbed by this gesture of goodwill? The soccer balls each had the flag of a Coalition nation on them. However, the Saudi flag has the shuhada (declaration of Islamic faith) written on it, which contains the words Allah and Prophet Muhammad. The active premise in the minds of the Afghans of Khost province, and indeed deeply embedded in all Islamic societies, is that the word of God is sacred. Islam teaches that the words of God, in particular the Koran, should not be defiled through an impure touch, or by coming into contact with the ground (Muslims, for example, may sit on the ground while reading the Koran but the book itself sits on a kursi, a chair).116 In Islam, the Koran is just one manifestation of the word of God; the shuhada is another. In African Islam, for example, “The written word was more important for its magical qualities than for the message it carried, and the Qur’an was a sacred object rather than a source for legislation.”117 Thus, the premises, woven together, might lead to a syllogism ala Bateson such as: the word of God is sacred, the shuhada is the word of God, and therefore kicking a soccer ball with the word of God written on it defiles God. Conversely, getting the premise correct may lead to a successful information campaign. For example, in the Pacific Theater during World War II, leaflets encouraging Japanese soldiers to surrender were not effective. The premise in the minds of the Japanese was ‘surrender results in death.’ The 1941 Senjin kun, or Code of Battlefield Conduct, intoned that, “One who knows shame is strong. … Do not endure the shame of being made prisoner while alive; die and do not leave behind the sullied name of one who foundered and fell.”118 When the Foreign Morale Analysis Division (an agency of the Office of War Information) recognized the negative meaning of the word “surrender” to Japanese soldiers, they changed the words to “negotiation for resumption of peaceful conditions” which had a positive valence,119 and supported a different premise—“peaceful resolution of conflict is beneficial.”120 In many societies around the world whose populations have limited formal education, cultural premises are often grounded directly in concrete experience.121 In Afghanistan in 2007, for example, the British wanted to push the Taliban out of the Sangin Valley in RC South but had only 5,500 NATO troops with which to do it. The problem was that 14,000 fighting-age Afghan males lived in the Sangin Valley. The Taliban told the people of Sangin that NATO was coming to destroy their poppy crops, their main source of income, so the local population had an excellent reason to take up arms. The Taliban were relying on the premise ‘NATO destroys poppy crops,’ a premise active in the minds of the population because of direct experience. NATO thus had to defeat, invalidate, or shift the premise. RC South, realizing that they were going to have a difficult time

convincing the population of Sangin that their intentions in the valley had nothing to do with poppy crops, established a falsifiable claim to compete with the credibility of the Taliban. In an earlier operation around the town of Babaji, Afghan National Army and NATO forces had gone in and cleared the Taliban out without destroying the poppy crops. RC South put together a handbill detailing that NATO troops were not after the poppy crop and that if they did not believe them, they could go to Babaji and see for themselves. This action removed NATO from the equation entirely and required local people to verify their own premise. When the allied soldiers entered the Sangin Valley, the locals did not mobilize against them, and the Taliban where pushed out of the area.122 As Bateson noticed, cultural premises will often not be expressed directly but will be inherent in many traditional cultural forms such as proverbs,123 poetry, folk beliefs,124 and myths. Vietnam, for example, has an ancient tradition of fortune telling,125 which rides on the premise ‘spiritual masters can interpret the influence of Heaven.’ Edward Lansdale exploited this premise in a PSYOP campaign in Vietnam: I had noted that there were many soothsayers in Vietnam doing a thriving business, but I had never seen any of their predictions published. Why not print an almanac for 1955 containing the predictions of the most famous astrologers and other arcane notables, especially those who foresaw a dark future for the Communists? The result was a hastily printed almanac filled with predictions about forthcoming events in 1955, including troubled times for the people in Communist areas and fights among the Communist leadership.… To my own amazement, it foretold some things that actually happened (such as the bloody suppression of farmers who opposed the poorly-executed land reforms and the splits in the Politburo). The almanac became a best-seller in Haiphong, the major refugee port. Even a large reprint order was sold out as soon as it hit the stands.126

In sum, we can say that Bateson’s idea of the premise—concepts active in the minds of a population, accepted as true, and that when woven together form a coherent pattern reflected throughout the society—has some utility for IO. Bateson believed that premises were not static, but could shift and change. Consequently, IO can be used to defeat, invalidate, or shift the premise. Next, we consider how Bateson’s idea of schismogenesis might be applied to IO. Bateson first visited the Sepik River region of New Guinea in 1929 when he was twenty-five years old and undertaking research for his master’s degree. When the schooner dropped anchor, Bateson got off the boat and spent a few days in a village. He found himself among a tribal group called the Iatmul, a “fine, proud, head-hunting people.”127 Life in the Iatmul village was marked by “a continuing smouldering irritation,” involving aggression, feuding, boasting, revenge, and head hunting. Among the Iatmul, “everything that goes wrong is attributed to lack of homicide.”128 “The brutality of the culture is shocking,” Bateson observed, “but there is a certain fineness and pride in it all.”129 After returning from New Guinea to England, Bateson had difficulty reintegrating into English life. “I came to Cambridge feeling that my Iatmul were very noble. And at the high table of St. John’s College, I was terribly shocked at the unreality of [the] elegant intellectual weaving of quasischolarship and quasi-wit which … terrified and shocked me deeply.”130 Bateson was as uncomfortable in Cambridge as he had been in New Guinea. Part of the problem was that, in the words of fellow anthropologist Edmund Leach, “in the working situation in social anthropology in Cambridge at that time … there was no one who really understood what Gregory was talking about.”131 Despite his complaints about the violence of the Iatmul, Bateson returned for a second expedition of fifteen months.132 Bateson’s fieldwork among the Iatmul in New Guinea became the basis for his first and only ethnography, Naven: A Survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture of a New Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of View.133 The book, while considered a classic in anthropology, “so questioned the grounds of its own authority, even as it employed conventional ethnographic rhetoric to construct descriptions of an alien culture, that anthropologists did not know what to make of this eccentric work as ethnography.”134 Naven remains the type of book that graduate students talk about, rather than actually read. The Iatmul, whose “social organization, kinship and religious systems are developed to an extreme of complexity,”135 practiced a ritual called naven that fascinated Bateson. This ritual was performed to mark a child’s first adult deeds. Of these the most important is homicide. … Next to actual homicide, the most honoured acts are those which help others to successful killing. … Another act contributory to killing which may be honoured is the enticing of foreigners into the village so that others may kill them. Far behind these in importance come such achievements as the killing of a large crocodile, the killing of a wild pig, the spearing of a giant eel, etc.136

The naven ritual itself involved male transvestitism (“assumption of grotesque femininity”),137 insertion of fruit into the anus, mimicked copulation, wearing body parts of the enemy dead, gifts of food, vigorous dancing, ritualized beatings, attacks on female vulva, pantomime birth, rubbing of buttocks, and a variety of other provocative activities. While from a Western perspective, the ritual perhaps seems shocking and disturbing, Bateson saw it as the key to Iatmul culture, a lens through which to understand the entire society. A full summary of Bateson’s interpretation is beyond the scope of this chapter, but it is worth noting that Iatmul society, in Bateson’s assessment, was prone to violence, plagued by accusations of sorcery, lacking codified law, dependent on vengeance as a form of sanction, and beset by quarrels that divided the

society. The rivalries and tensions in Iatmul culture, expressed and resolved ceremonially in naven, raised the question for Bateson: why didn’t this society implode? Why did social tensions not accelerate to breaking point?138 In answering these questions, Bateson identified a unique social process called schismogenesis, which holds enormous potential benefit to IO. In order to fully understand the concept, we must return to Bateson’s question: “what prevents a society from imploding?” In answering, he first offers a functionalist explanation. Writing in the 1930s, Bateson was influenced by the theoretical models predominant in the anthropology of the time, specifically the functionalism of Alfred Radcliffe-Brown which saw “all the elements of culture in their bearing upon the solidarity, the integration, of the group.”139 Thus, Bateson sought to understand what function this violent, sexual ritual served in the society. Did the ceremony fulfill individual emotional needs? Does the ceremony train individuals for their social roles? “Does the naven have any effects on the integration of Society?”140 In Bateson’s assessment Iatmul society lacked internal cohesion. “The larger villages are continually on the point of fission, and the fissions which have taken place in the past are always ascribed to quarrels which have split the parent community.”141 These fissions invariably occurred along the lines of Iatmul patrilineal groups, such as clans that split off from the larger community. By strengthening the affinal links (relations through marriage), the naven ceremony reduced tension and prevented fission among patrilineal groups. In Bateson’s view, then, the naven ceremony had an “integrating effect” on Iatmul society. But Bateson went much further than the standard functionalism of the time (foreshadowing what is now known as cybernetics or systems theory), and sought to understand the actual social processes that maintained or altered social equilibrium. “I am inclined to see the status quo as a dynamic equilibrium,” he wrote, “in which changes are continually taking place. On the one hand, processes of differentiation tending towards increase of the ethological contrast, and on the other, processes which continually counteract this tendency toward differentiation.”142 In other words, social systems are paradoxically both stable and constantly changing. What, Bateson wondered, was the micro-mechanism of change within the system? The central social process that Bateson identified was schismogenesis, defined as a “process of differentiation in the norms of individual behavior resulting from cumulative interaction between individuals.”143 Schismogenesis, as Bateson observed, was of two different types. The first he termed complementary schismogenesis. “It is at once apparent,” wrote Bateson, that many systems of relationship, either between individuals or groups of individuals, contain a tendency toward progressive change. If, for example, one of the patterns of cultural behavior, considered appropriate in individual A, is culturally labeled as an assertive pattern, while B is expected to reply to this which what is culturally regarded as submission, it is likely that this submission will encourage a further assertion, and that this assertion will demand still further submission.144

Schismogenesis between complementary pairs (such as husband and wife, parents and children) established or clarified differences and also created a consistent pattern of behavior. The second type of schismogenesis—“symmetrical schismogenesis,”—involves a pattern of escalation: “If, for example, we find boasting as the cultural pattern of behavior in one group, and that the other group replies to this with boasting, a competitive situation may develop in which boasting leads to more boasting, and so on.”145 Bateson believed that the process of schismogenesis was always present, always occurring, leading to increasingly greater tension and hostility within social systems. Yet in most societies, hostility “does not increase to a point of total disruption but persists instead at a fluctuating level.” Tension, hostility, and even violence were normal features of any social system: “the tension of this hostility is part of the dynamics of society, an essential part of the motivation system which makes the social machinery work.”146 If schismogenesis was constantly occurring, “inevitably advancing toward such differentiation that some outside factor is bound to precipitate the final collapse,” what kept the escalation in check?147 “I have described the breakdown of marriage in such terms that it is inexplicable that any marriage should ever be a success,” Bateson wrote, but “we know that marriages are sometimes successful, and that they sometimes recover from an unstable condition. We must therefore think of schismogenesis, not as a process which goes inevitably forward, but rather as a process of change which is in some cases either controlled or continually counteracted by inverse processes.”148 Noting that the processes are culture specific, Bateson identifies a variety of counteracting processes, such as unification of groups, “either in loyalty or opposition to some outside element.”149 The process of schismogenesis was not confined to Iatmul society; Bateson believed it was present everywhere: in intimate relationships between individuals; in mental illness; in culture contact between colonizer and colonized; and perhaps most interestingly, within the international system. In Bateson’s view, the international system of Europe, which had been in equilibrium for most of the nineteenth century, had imploded in the 1930s because complementary patterns—trade relationships in particular—had broken down in the face of international rivalry. The international rivalry had resulted in part from the attempt to bond classes and ideologies in complementary schismogenesis against an external enemy.150 As Bateson wrote in 1935: At the present moment, the nations of Europe are far advanced in symmetrical schismogenesis and are ready to fly at each other’s throats; while within each nation are to be observed growing hostilities between the various

social strata, symptoms of complementary schismogenesis. Equally in the countries ruled by new dictatorships we may observe early stages of complementary schismogenesis, the behavior of his associates pushing the dictator into every greater pride and assertiveness.151

To put it simply, schimogenesis results in what the U.S. military sometimes refers to as ‘the spiral down:’ a self-reproducing set of conditions resulting in continual deterioration. Schismogenesis, according to Bateson, was a natural process within human social systems. But he also believed that it could be manipulated through information to create a particular effect: Bateson believed that schismogenesis could be engineered in both individuals and systems. Sometime in the early 1930s, Bateson began conceptualizing how it might be possible to psychologically manipulate Mussolini into “nervous breakdown” by aggravating his relationship with his advisors and his enemies, and “push him further into war so that his downfall is assured.” “It’s all very fiendish,” he wrote to Margaret Mead, “but I really believe it is worth attempting.”152 As in the mind of an individual, schismogenesis could be engineered in a society to exacerbate preexisting divisions. Bateson wrote to the Master of his college at Cambridge describing how one could create schismogenesis in German society through “black” propaganda: “a sort of emotional jujitsu, in which the spontaneous reactions of the opponent are played upon and increased to his undoing.” Thus, Bateson believed, it was critical to study German propaganda to understand the internal dynamics of the society, and German misinterpretation of British propaganda, which could then be deliberately manipulated.153 Unsurprisingly, in 1935 nobody at the Prime Minister’s Office or the Foreign Office was interested in psychological warfare against Germany or Italy in the absence of war. The British propaganda effort in the hands of the newly-created Ministry of Information was disorganized, unsympathetic to a “psychological approach,” and had “the degree of psychological sophistication that one expects in a public bar.”154 Bateson wrote to Mead after his attempts failed: “We are just a little too late all along the line. … If we had the products of ten years work of a dozen first class people on the lines we now know … we could almost certainly even now clean up the mess—indeed if that knowledge were general the mess would be inconceivable. But we just haven’t got it.”155 Again, it seemed that nobody really quite understood what Bateson was saying. What exactly was Bateson saying? Bateson argued that societies do not implode (yet continue to change) because of complementary processes of symmetrical and complementary schismogenesis. While these processes are inherent in all human systems (psychological, social, and interpersonal), they can be manipulated to achieve a desired effect. Yet, as discussed below, any attempt to manipulate the system will be resisted because of what Bateson called the self-corrective nature of systems. In 1968, Bateson gave a lecture called Conscious Purpose Versus Nature, in which he articulated a concept of self-corrective systems, adapting cybernetic theory to social systems: “when we talk about the processes of civilization, or evaluate human behavior, human organization, or any biological system, we are concerned with self-corrective systems.” Systems, in Bateson’s view, are by their nature conservative. “As in the engine with a governor, the fuel supply is changed to conserve—to keep constant—the speed of the flywheel, so always in such systems changes occur to conserve the truth of some descriptive statement, some component of the status quo.”156 People, like machines or societies, are self-corrective systems. “They are self-corrective against disturbance, and if the obvious is not of a kind that they can easily assimilate without internal disturbance, their self-corrective mechanisms work to sidetrack it, to hide it, even to the extent of shutting the eyes if necessary, or shutting off various parts of the process of perception.”157 How does the process of self-correction work in the socio-cultural domain?158 Self-confirming belief systems often have built-in immunities that prevent the introduction of new information or ideas. Fundamentalist Islam as articulated by Sayyid Qutb, for example, has three central pillars that make it almost immune to external information. The first, rabbaniyyah (Lordship of God), posits that Islam is “a divine vision that proceeds from God in all its particularities and its essentials. It is received by ‘man’ in its perfect condition. He is not to complement it … or delete any of it; rather he is to appropriate it and implement all its essentials in his life.”159 Because Islam, according to Qutb’s reading, is already perfect, nothing created by man can enter the system. Second, thabat (constancy), which comes only from God, “controls all human activity and change so that it may not proceed without guidance [from God].” The doctrine of constancy ensures that all change to the system is rejected: “Those who attempt to alter this vision either under the name of renewal, reform or progress … are our real enemies.”160 Finally, the principle of comprehensiveness (shurmul) in Qutb’s version of Islam posits that unity comes from a divine source and therefore “this vision … rejects every foreign element” which may corrupt it.161 The point here is that one cannot alter a self-correcting system, such as fundamentalist Islam or religious cults, through disconfirmation or cognitive dissonance, because that which does not fit within the system is expelled from it. Fundamentalisms are closed self-correcting systems of thought, with heightened immunity built into their belief structures. However, any system with a high level of internal order is vulnerable to the exploitation of the contradictions inherent in the system. In the words of Ellul, “the skillful propagandist will seek to obtain action without demanding consistency, without fighting prejudices and image, by taking his stance deliberately on inconsistencies.”162 How would this work in an actual information operation?

David Kilcullen has argued that if “the global jihad is best understood as a globalized insurgency” in which a variety of local terrorist and insurgent organizations have been aggregated into a larger movement, then “this suggests an alternative—indeed, a diametrically opposed—strategy for the War on Terrorism, namely ‘disaggregation.’”163 A strategy of disaggregation, in Kilcullen’s view, would break “the links that allow the jihad to function as a global entity. In this strategy, victory does not demand that we pacify every insurgent theater from the Philippines to Chechnya. It demands only that we identify, and neutralize, those elements in each theater that are linked to the global jihad.”164 In outlining his strategy of disaggregation, Kilcullen focuses primarily on the material aspects—supply, logistics, information, sanctuary, personnel—but also identifies the importance of “discrediting [the] ideological authority” of Al Qaeda.165 In order to discredit the ideological authority of Al Qaeda and deny “the ability of regional and global actors to link and exploit local actors,”166 one needs to accelerate the pre-existing schismogenesis between insurgent groups. Tensions between groups—especially well-armed paramilitaries and insurgents—often result in splits and fissures, as seen during the course of the war in Northern Ireland where the IRA split multiple times into a variety of sub-organizations who then laid claim to dominance, resulting in factional fighting and reduced effectiveness against their primary adversary, the British. The difficulty in engineering a red-on-red schism by accelerating schismogenesis within Islamic fundamentalist groups is that their belief systems are self-correcting, and reject most information external to the system. Therefore, such a campaign would have to exploit the internal logical contradictions within the ideological system itself. Something very closely resembling the manipulation of schismogenesis was undertaken against the insurgency in Iraq by the U.S. military. In 2004, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was viewed by many of the Iraqi Sunni population as a credible leader of the anti-Coalition resistance. He swore an oath of loyalty to Bin Laden and changed the name of his militant organization to Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). Zarqawi declared war on the Shia population in 2005, apparently with the objective of causing an ethno-sectarian civil war,167 thereby creating the chaotic preconditions for the establishment of the Caliphate. But within the world of Islam, this strategy directly contradicted one of their own sacred values: defense of the umma, especially the legal prohibition on attacking Muslim civilians.168 One cannot claim to defend the umma and simultaneously carry out attacks on its members. In order to highlight civilian casualties caused by AQI, U.S. PSYOP units produced a series of opeds, satellite TV public service announcements, and political cartoons.169 One cartoon caricatured Zarqawi with a bandolier over his shoulder and standing amid piles of skulls. The caption read: “I will kill, slaughter and kidnap more and more humans to satisfy my desires and be worthy to receive the title of murderer.”170 This PSYOP campaign forced Zarqawi to publicly deny that he had killed fellow Muslims,171 but these denials were not effective. The head of the Mujadheddin Shura Council, made up of eighteen clerics, tribal chiefs, and former Ba’athist Party members, called Zarqawi a “criminal.”172 Even his masters in Al Qaeda disapproved of his tactics: in 2005, radical jihadist Ayman al-Zawahiri sent Zarqawi a letter telling him to stop posting executions on the internet and killing civilians: “the mujahed movement must avoid any action that the masses do not understand or approve … lest the people should say that Muhammad used to kill his Companions.”173 The schismogenesis reached a climax during the battle of Fallujah in February 2005. “PSYOP exploited the fissures between Abu Musab Zarqawi’s fighters and the Salafist Iraqi fighters; highlighting the fact that Zarqawi had run away from the impending battle in Fallujah and had left the Salafists to fight on their own.”174 The Salafist Iraqi fighters then turned on AQI. As the Marines discovered when the battle ended, many of Zarqawi’s foreign fighters died from bullet wounds to the back of their heads, fired from close range.175 In the words of BG Mark Kimmitt, Director of Strategic Communications for MNF-I, “this program was the most successful strategic psychological operation planned and executed by the JPOTF.”176 In sum, although many societies have self-correcting belief systems and high immunity to external invalidation, existing processes of schismogenesis within these systems can nevertheless be accelerated by exploiting the contradictions inherent within the ideology or belief system itself. Bateson’s attempts to apply his theories to real-world problems were often hampered by the complexity of his thought. One of his admirers wrote after his death that “he could be almost incomprehensible unless you already knew what he was talking about.”177 Despite Bateson’s attempts to introduce and socialize the concept, schismogenesis was not employed by the British during World War II in their psychological warfare campaigns. On the other hand, another of Bateson’s ideas—the concept of a ‘frame’—has become part of the popular lexicon (although his name is often not attached to it). The concept of the ‘frame’ entered popular culture in 1974 when Erving Goffman published a book called Frame Analysis, which became one of the most-read titles in the history of social science.178 In the 1990s, ‘frame theory’ became a staple concept for scholars in social psychology, communication studies, political science, sociology, and linguistics. Most scholars who write about ‘frames,’ ‘frame analysis,’ and ‘frame theory’ credit Goffman with first conceptualizing the concept. Goffman, however, acknowledged that he borrowed it from Bateson.179 Bateson developed the idea of framing after a visit to the San Francisco Zoo in 1952. He observed “two young monkeys playing, that is, engaged in an interactive sequence of which the unit actions or signals were similar to but not the same as those of combat.”180 Bateson hypothesized that the

message “this is play” establishes a kind of “paradoxical frame”181 around activity and the meaning of that activity: “Not only does the playful nip not denote what would be denoted by the bite for which it stands, but, in addition, the bite itself is fictional. Not only do the playing animals not quite mean what they are saying, but, also, they are usually communicating about something which does not exist.”182 In Bateson’s mind, frames were metacommunicative: the existence of a frame provided the viewer with instructions or guidance about how the messages included in the frame should be interpreted. For Bateson (and later Goffman), frames were a basic cognitive structure through which individuals perceived and represented reality. “The frame around a picture,” Bateson wrote, “says, ‘Attend to what is within and do not attend to what is outside,’” so that perception of the ground is inhibited and perception of the figure is enhanced.183 Framing, for Bateson and Goffman, was primarily an unconscious psychological process that organized the individual’s experience of reality.184 Where do frames originate? One answer is that frames are embedded in “pre-existing codes and traditions.”185 In other words, they are embedded in culture. When individuals encounter new information or have new experiences, they rely on pre-existing cultural frames to interpret that experience. The most popular TV show in the world in the 1980s, Dallas, was interpreted by viewers around the world in alignment with their pre-existing cultural frames. In the U.S., Dallas appealed to audiences in part because it affirmed that rich people have problems too. Viewers in Algeria, however, read it as a reminder of the traditional values of allegiance to extended family; Dutch viewers saw it as a feminist manifesto; and Russians saw it as evidence of the moral decay of the West. The show translated into many different cultures because people were able to interpret it according to their own pre-existing cultural frames. For the Japanese, however, Dallas did not fit into the preexisting ‘rich people’ frame and the show fared poorly—if these Texans were so rich, why were they cooking their own food?186 Frames are pre-existing cognitive schemes, embedded in culture. But why does this matter for IO? Because individuals draw on pre-existing frames to interpret new information, messages will be interpreted according to the frames active in the minds of the population. For example, in a November 2003 speech, President Bush said: “The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution.… As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export.”187 While this message aligns perfectly with American political frames of ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom,’ other audiences may not possess these frame, or they may chose alternative ones that correspond to their own political vision. Thus, Salafi extremists interpreted this message as yet another attempt by Western Crusaders to impose foreign values on Muslims. It was met with a fatwa from Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, an important fundamentalist ideologue, declaring democracy a “religion” that is at odds with Islamic principles of monotheism. The more the United States promoted its goal of democracy for Muslims, the more evidence extremists had to reproduce their Crusader analogy.188 The key point is that frames are embedded in lived reality and cultural context. American notions of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ are policy frames deeply embedded in American political culture. The jihadist frame for the same set of circumstances is deeply embedded in Middle Eastern fundamentalist culture, namely the concept of anti-imperialism and defensive jihad. Wholesale transposition of a frame derived from one culture into another culture is unlikely to be successful and any communication is likely to be reframed by the receiver. Frames are not static and can be changed purposefully. Bateson, in studying schizophrenia, noted that schizophrenics lack the ability to frame reality,189 and that the therapeutic process often involves the intentional “manipulation of frames.”190 Thus, for Bateson, framing was not simply an unconscious process that arose haphazardly from the cognitive organization of reality. Rather, frames could be altered intentionally in the minds of individuals, and potentially also at the social level. In the disciplines of political science and communications studies, framing is also generally understood as an intentional process where a media outlet or a powerful individual articulates the meaning of a social issue and provides a set of normative evaluations. For example, as Robert Entman has argued, “To frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described.”191 If framing is an intentional process that can be influenced by a powerful voice (such as the mass media, a social movement, or political actors), disagreement about interpretation is inevitable. Indeed, Goffman noted that many situations arise where “there is no way in theory to bring everyone involved into the same frame. Under these circumstances one can expect that the parties with opposing versions of events may openly dispute with each other over how to define what has been or is happening. A frame dispute results.”192 When the interpretation of situations or events are contested, social movements, the media, and other powerful voices will often attempt to shift or alter the way an issue is framed in order to mobilize followers or shift adherents to their political position.193 Changing beliefs by adding information is not effective with a sophisticated audience.194 In fact, knowledgeable individuals are

often “inoculated” against attitude change by prior exposure to counter-attitudinal arguments.195 Framing, on the other hand, operates “by activating information already at the recipients’ disposal, stored in longterm memory.”196 In other words, frames shift perspective based on information that individuals already possess by emphasizing a certain aspect of the issue, which is then accorded greater weight in the individual’s view. The important point is that “political knowledge and sophistication, whether narrow or broad, do not insulate one from the effects of framing (as it might from the effects of persuasion via belief change), but rather seem to promote framing effects.”197 Framing, then, is an effective means of changing attitudes with a sophisticated audience. While framing does not require additional information in order to change individual attitudes, frames must resonate with the culture of the audience. Frames resonate when individuals perceive the proffered frame as credible and salient.198 One element of salience is what Snow and Benford refer to as “narrative fidelity”: “to what extent are the proffered framings culturally resonant? To what extent do they resonate with the targets’ cultural narrations?”199 In other words, frames are most likely to resonate with a target audience when they correspond to the pre-existing norms, values, and narratives of the individual and the group. How is this relevant for IO and strategic communication more broadly? Democracy promotion programs in U.S. foreign policy often try to change the attitudes of audiences through the addition of information about the benefits of democracy, such as the ‘Shared Values’ campaign’s approach of communicating “the intangible assets of the United States.” The provision of additional information to change attitudes is unlikely to work with a sophisticated audience that already has knowledge about democracy. This approach is also unlikely to work because it does not offer a frame that resonates with the pre-existing culture of most Muslim audiences. Can we imagine an IO campaign that would offer a culturally resonant frame to a politically sophisticated Muslim audience that might actually work to promote democracy? Islamic political philosophy is firmly anchored in the deep, central values of the religion. In Islam, God is the true sovereign and ultimate source of legitimate law. Law made by a sovereign monarch or a people’s democracy, according to various Islamic legal scholars, is illegitimate because it substitutes human authority for God’s sovereignty. According to Sayyid Abul A’la Maududi, for example, “Islam, speaking from the view-point of political philosophy, is the very antithesis of secular Western democracy … [Islam] altogether repudiates the philosophy of popular sovereignty and rears its polity on the foundations of the sovereignty of God and the viceregency (Khilafah) of man.”200 (On the other hand, some scholars have argued that Islamic heritage and democracy are completely compatible and that Islamic guidelines for social and political behavior, such as the concept of consultation (shurah) and consensus (ijma), could be used as a foundation for Islamic democracy.201) Given this disagreement within the Islamic world, a more effective frame for promoting democracy that resonates with pre-existing culture is justice. Justice (‘adl) is central to Islam, and the Koran makes the establishment of justice on earth a responsibility of man. The Qur’an says: “We sent aforetime our messengers with clear Signs and sent down with them the Book and the Balance, that men may stand forth in Justice.”202 Although not completely defined, justice in Islam connotes fairness, reciprocity, equality, and compromise. Justice requires consensus (ijma) and consultation (shurah), ideas which are also present in Western notions of liberal democracy. As Islamic legal scholar Khaled Abou El Fadl has noted, justice and diversity are core values that could be “appropriated” to support “a democratic constitutional order.” Although El Fadl notes that justice as a concept has not been subject to close examination in Islamic doctrine, he argues that it “could be developed into a notion of delegated powers, where the ruler is entrusted to serve the core value of justice by ensuring rights of assembly, cooperation, and dissent.”203 In considering the relevance of frames to IO, the critical point is that, while they may be an unconscious cognitive structure for organizing experience and perception, frames may also be shifted and changed intentionally. In order to change how a phenomenon is viewed, the new or replacement frame should correspond to pre-existing cultural constructs. Frames, once they come into existence, exert a certain amount of control on how an individual perceives reality: they become the premise from which further interpretation is generated. In the realm of national security, how U.S. policy makers understand the internal socio-cultural dynamics of other societies contributes to the strategies they employ to address those problems and crises. In other words, how we frame the problem often determines the solution. The past fifty years of American foreign policy offers a multitude of examples of how cultural framing has led to poor policy outcomes, including the ‘warlord’ frame in Somalia in 1993; the ‘communism’ frame in Iran in 1953; and the ‘liberation’ frame in Iraq in 2003. In Bosnia in 1993, the U.S. decision not to intervene was in part the product of an inaccurate cultural frame. The violence in the Balkans was interpreted in Washington, DC not as a nationalist counterrevolution instigated by political elites who mobilized ethnic identities as a source of political power after Tito’s fall prevented the state from guaranteeing the population’s security,204 but as the product of ‘ancient ethnic hatreds.’ In the words of Secretary of State Warren Christopher, “the hatred between all three groups—the Bosnians and the Serbs and the Croatians—is almost unbelievable. It’s almost terrifying, and it’s centuries old.”205 If the violence in the Balkans was seen as ancient rather than political, military intervention had no hope of ending the conflict and could not be justified from a

strategic or policy perspective, a view held by many in Washington, DC, including President Clinton who said that the war could only stop when “people there get tired of fighting each other.”206 But was the ‘ancient ethnic hatred’ frame accurate? Anthropologists such as Tony Bringa and William Lockwood, who collectively spent decades studying life in ethnically mixed rural Bosnia, observed that villages were generally peaceful, with a variety of political, ecumenical, and social mechanisms for accommodating differences between ethnic groups.207 Bosnia had a relatively high proportion of interethnic marriage before the war,208 which would suggest that “ancient ethnic multiculturalism” might be a better description of the social environment prior to the fall of Tito. If not from lived reality, where did the ‘ancient ethnic hatreds’ frame originate? Vocalized by senior U.S. policy makers, this frame was an old theme that had been forcefully articulated in journalist Robert Kaplan’s popular 1993 travelogue Balkan Ghosts.209 Kaplan wrote that the country was “full of savage hatreds, leavened by poverty and alcoholism. The fact that the most horrifying violence—during both World War II and the 1990s—occurred in Bosnia was no accident.”210 Bosnia was like an infection spreading throughout Europe: twentieth-century history came from the Balkans. … Here men have been isolated by poverty and ethnic rivalry, dooming them to hate. Here politics had been reduced to a level of near anarchy that from time to time in history has flowed up the Danube into Central Europe. Nazism, for example, can claim Balkan origins.211

In 1993, just as President Clinton was considering armed intervention to halt the war in Bosnia, he read Balkan Ghosts. Though Kaplan himself had actually argued in favor of intervention, the frame was more powerful than any evidence-based argument presented by the author. In Kaplan’s words, “The history of ethnic rivalry I detailed reportedly encouraged the President’s pessimism about the region, and—so it is said—was a factor in his decision not to launch an overt military response in support of the Bosnian Moslems, who were being besieged by the Bosnian Serbs.”212 The failure to intervene came at a heavy price: 97,207 people were killed during the Bosnian war, of which 40 per cent were civilians. 3,372 children died during the war.213 The ‘ancient ethnic hatreds’ frame, in the case of the war in the Balkans, was used by the Serbs to justify ethnic cleansing, and by the Clinton administration to avoid intervention.214 The frame became the premise from which further interpretation of the situation was generated. As Bateson reminds us, frames are both exclusive and inclusive: by including certain meanings within a frame, other meanings are excluded; and by excluding certain meanings, others are included. The frame limits and narrows our understanding of reality. If the frame is wrong, the solution is often wrong as well. When thinking about frames, it is tempting to view them as nothing more than a heuristic device to help us organize our thoughts or as harmless cognitive structures that exist only in our minds. However, frames may influence reality itself. In their article “What the Axis of Evil Metaphor Did to Iran,” Daniel Heradstveit and G. Matthew Bonham note that the ‘axis of evil’ metaphor restructured the American war on terror from a focus on Al Qaeda to a focus on a group of states (North Korea, Iran, and Iraq) that may or may not have possessed nuclear weapons and/or supported terrorism.215 This ‘axis of evil’ discourse represented “an effort to restructure the international system as it was in the 1930s—an attempt to see the world through the eyes of that period.”216 The authors argue that once we accept the ‘axis of evil’ metaphor as true, the ontological changes produced by the metaphor shift how we understand the world: The important thing about the “evil” component of the metaphor is that evil has no specific goal—except to produce evil. As an ontological force evil has no interests of its own except the interests related to its destination: that is why all negotiations with evil are fruitless. There is no way to make a deal with evil. … Therefore, the Forces of Evil have to be destroyed totally by the Forces of Good.217

The ‘axis of evil’ frame shifted the way Americans saw the international system, but it also shifted political reality for Iranians (and presumably North Koreans and Iraqis as well). Prior to the ‘axis of evil’ speech, U.S.-Iranian relations had thawed: President Khatami was talking about a “dialogue of civilizations;” Secretary of State Madeline Albright had apologized for the U.S. role in the overthrow of democratically elected Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadeq and for the support of the Shah’s brutal regime; and Iran had been the first Muslim country to condemn the September 11 attacks. Additionally, Iran was poised to become a member of the anti-Taliban coalition, had supported the Northern Alliance, and had participated in the 2001 Bonn conference that designed the transitional administration for Afghanistan. The ‘axis of evil’ speech undid much of this progress towards political rapprochement. After Bush’s speech, in the view of Iranian elites, the foundation for the normalization of relationships between the U.S. and Iran was destroyed, the position of the hardliners was strengthened, and the government had a new pretext for the elimination of the opposition. Bush, by branding Iran as part of the ‘axis of evil,’ was “pouring oil on the flames of antiAmericanism.”218 In sum, we can conclude that frames, as Bateson saw them, were cognitive maps that organized an individual’s experience of reality, and which could be shifted and changed through intentional processes. However, frames involve a certain amount of danger: frames not only potentially inhibit our perceptions, and therefore our foreign policy decisions (as the ‘ancient ethnic hatreds’ frame influenced intervention decisions in Bosnia), but frames can also have unintended and potentially

damaging effects on both the one who builds the frame and those who exist within it.

Conclusion In considering Bateson legacy as a military anthropologist, we must first acknowledge that Bateson’s time in the OSS was brief, and in many ways was more of an interlude in his professional academic career than a defining moment. Yet, some of Bateson’s early theories and ideas permeated his OSS experience (such as schismogenesis), and some of Bateson’s later concerns (such as cybernetics) were probably influenced by his experience in the OSS. The world has also changed considerably since Bateson broadcast black propaganda messages to the Japanese. Yet some of his concepts are still deeply relevant to current IO. Would Bateson approve of his ideas being applied as part of a war effort? Before World War II, Bateson had a very practical approach to using social science in a military context. He had little patience for presenting a “full length portrait of a culture,” and believed instead that the purpose of science was “to answer problems, to elucidate principles.”219 Moreover, he believed that social scientists had a direct and important role to play in national defense. “Our enemies in this war are applying social science on a large scale, for the first time in history,” wrote Bateson in 1943. “They have a planned economy; and they are using various sorts of applied psychology in their propaganda, and they are doing this with quite sufficient success to make it essential that we use our own social scientists, both for defense and attack.”220 Bateson, like many other social scientists, made enormous contributions to the war effort. But this historical moment came to an end in 1945 when atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The nuclear detonation in Japan offered tangible proof of the value of science to the war effort, but caused many scientists to reevaluate their roles and responsibilities (including Oppenheimer, the bomb’s creator, himself ) and to think deeply about the nature of war itself. On the day it was dropped, Bateson was at his desk typing. While the office erupted around him in cheers of joy and relief, Bateson was oblivious. One of his colleagues asked, “Gregory, what in God’s name are you typing?” He replied dryly: “I’m writing about the future of life insurance in the atomic age.”221 Despite the humorous quip, Bateson saw immediately how the existence of the bomb would change existing patterns in the world. While still in theater, Bateson wrote directly to the director of the OSS, “Wild Bill” Donovan, that the nuclear bomb would cause nations to use indirect methods of warfare. Bateson recommended that the United States should no longer rely on conventional forces for defense, and should establish a third agency to employ clandestine operations, economic controls, and psychological pressures as part of this new mode of warfare.222 This organization is now known as the Central Intelligence Agency.223 Bateson finished the war with mixed feelings about doing social science in a government context. The work with the OSS, he wrote to Radcliffe-Brown, was “interesting in patches … but a total waste of time so far as any visible effect on planning and politics … And I brought back home with me a profound cynicism about all policymaking folk.”224 Beyond the normal boredom and frustration of doing applied social science in wartime, Bateson had deeper concerns about the techniques of manipulation. In an unpublished essay from 1941, entitled “Problems of Applied Science and Manipulation,” Bateson wrote that “when we have a good knowledge of the culture and psychology of a community, the habits and motivations of the people, and the processes and tensions at work among them, we can rather easily devise methods of influencing them in one direction or another.”225 The fact that Germany had been changed “beyond all recognition” by its departments of propaganda, welfare, and police “planned on rather crude scientific lines” showed that the social science of population manipulation was mature enough to engineer the desired effect. One issue that worried Bateson was the end result: “What effects would these inventions have upon the total functioning of the community?”226 Another related concern of Bateson’s was the tendency in applied social science towards instrumentalism, or the pragmatic view that the usefulness of an idea is the ultimate proof of its validity. Writing in 1942, he noted that the war: is now a life-or-death struggle over the role which the social sciences shall play in the ordering of human relationships. It is hardly an exaggeration to say … this war is ideologically about just this—the role of the social sciences. Are we to reserve the techniques and the right to manipulate people as the privilege of a few planning, goal-oriented and power hungry individuals to whom the instrumentality of science makes a natural appeal? Now that we have the techniques, are we, in cold blood, going to treat people as things? Or what are we going to do with these techniques?227

For Bateson, techniques of persuasion, influence, and manipulation existed, social scientists were actively participating in their development and application, and the tools were being used successfully to remake societies such as Nazi Germany. The next ten years will either see Goebbels’s machine victorious, or it will see something that we call Democracy victorious and strengthened by a healthy application of scientific techniques. I do not believe that democracy can survive without the techniques, and I do not believe that it can win the war by taking Dr. Goebbels for a model.228

The question, then, for Bateson was how do we use these scientific methods of persuasion beneficially to promote democracy?

Bateson’s answer was that the techniques themselves were neutral; the purpose and effect toward which the tools were employed was the central concern. He wrote: If the applied social scientist is successful in his operations, he is thereby not merely using qualities already extant in the population, he is also promoting those qualities. … The problems of applied social science in a democracy are therefore very much more difficult than those which our enemies face. They are contemptuous of their own population … and they are willing to let that population (and ours) sink to the level of puppets. They can therefore use a social science which predicates these characteristics, and such a social science is comparatively easy to devise and apply. They have devised it and are applying it at a rate which quite seriously threatens our own well-being and survival. We, I trust, are not willing to reduce our population to this level. We believe … that in the end, decency, morality, spontaneity, initiative, unselfishness, and a number of other rather imperfectly defined (but definable) qualities are important ingredients of “human nature,” and we are not willing to educate these ingredients out of our people. Rather, we believe that these ingredients will help us to win the peace. Therefore, in our applied social science, we have to assume these complex qualities in our population; we have to work to promote them; and we have to do this at a time when the enemy is busy applying a simpler, more cynical, and, for short term operations, more effective brand of social science.229

The central question of this chapter is: what can we learn from the life and intellectual legacy of Gregory Bateson with applicability to current IO? It may seem strange to reach so far back in time— to the 1930s—to find the concepts of the premise and schismogenesis, as Bateson articulated them first in Naven, or to the 1950s for the idea of frames. Yet these concepts have current and enduring relevance to IO. It may also seem strange to delve into an ethnography of a ‘primitive’ New Guinea society for concepts that are feasible in Afghanistan, Iraq, or other battlespaces—what, after all, can the socio-cultural system of a group of headhunters really tell us about the rest of the world? It is my view that Bateson’s ideas of the premise, schismogenesis, and frames are transferrable to many different contexts because they capture a part of human experience that is fundamental. One might even say that these are fundamental concepts. In a 1980 review of Bateson’s book Mind and Nature, Terence Turner noted that readers sometimes rejected Bateson’s work because he tended to extrapolate general principles of the highest order directly from examples, connected loosely by metaphor or analogy.230 Bateson paid little attention in general to middle-range analytic problems, such as the organization of kinship systems. Far from omission, this was Bateson’s intellectual method. He was committed to the search for fundamental principles in science based on observation of the real world.231 “‘Explanation’ is the mapping of data onto fundamentals,” he wrote, “but the ultimate goal of science is the increase of fundamental knowledge. … It is all too clear that the vast majority of the concepts of contemporary psychology, psychiatry, anthropology, sociology, and economics are totally detached from the network of scientific fundamentals.”232 Fundamentals, for Bateson, had to be based on reality and not just abstraction. Bateson was undeniably an empiricist: In scientific research you start from two beginnings, each of which has its own kind of authority: the observations cannot be denied, and the fundamentals must be fitted. You must achieve a sort of pincers maneuver. If you are surveying a piece of land, or mapping the stars, you have two bodies of knowledge, neither of which can be ignored. There are your own empirical measurements on the one hand and there is Euclidean geometry on the other. If these two cannot be made to fit together, then either the data are wrong or you have argued wrongly from them or you have made a major discovery leading to a revision of the whole of geometry.233

Fundamentals—such as the concepts of the frame, premise, and schismogenesis—emerge out of patterns of human life that are consistent across time, space, and place. Like Euclidean geometry, it is possible to apply these concepts in contexts different to that in which they were discovered because the underlying patterns of human life remain constant. I began this chapter by noting that it is tempting to view Bateson as a brilliant scholar with some undiagnosed form of intellectual attention deficit disorder, which caused him to jump from anthropology to morphology to philosophy to psychiatry with equal finesse. Yet Bateson’s contribution to such a wide variety of disparate disciplines was the by-product of his epistemology: he was less interested in things-in-themselves and more interested in the connections between them. For Bateson, the world was not a collection of objects or people, but rather a network of relationships, bound together by communication.234 Nothing existed in isolation from its context, and without context, words, objects or people had no meaning. The meaning could only be found in the pattern that surrounded and composed those words, objects, and people. This sounds simple enough, but at the deepest level requires a shift in perception (and even epistemology). In Bateson’s words, You have probably been taught that you have five fingers. That is, on the whole, incorrect. It is the way language subdivides things into things. Probably the biological truth is that in the growth of this thing—in your embryology, which you scarcely remember—what was important was not five, but four relations between pairs of fingers.”235

For Bateson, it is not the fingers that make up the hand, but rather the relationship between the fingers themselves. Dynamic, shifting patterns are interwoven in the social, biological, and psychological realms. Bateson called this interweaving “the pattern which connects.”236

5

TOM HARRISSON AND UNCONVENTIONAL WARFARE

Mighty as iron, shining like silver, Roaring like the most fearful of storms, with hail threatening, To terrify the otters swimming in unknown waters, Lest river turn to stone, and great rocks fall; To petrify the women of peoples as yet unseen Lest the harvest falter and man disappears— On journeys none have quite taken To lands where man has not yet been: Even to hunt the rhinoceros, not yet; Even to follow my dream, no so… At the place where the wild waters tremble Up to the edge of the moon.

Kelabit song1

In 1944, British Army Major Tom Harrisson (1911–76) was the first person to parachute into Borneo, territory which at that time had been occupied by the Japanese Army for three years. As two Liberator bombers circled over the upland plateau of Borneo, thick with jungle and ringed by steep mountains covered with fog, Harrisson thought it looked like “an archipelago of island peaks set in a silent and sunless sea of white.”2 In 1944, most of central Borneo was uncharted territory; the paratroopers in the plane had little idea of what lay beneath the cloud cover. For Harrisson, “this was the third dropping sortie, the thirty-second hour of flying over Japanese-held territory, in my final effort to get in. If it was to be done, this must surely be it.”3 Even though they were unsure of their exact location or what lay beneath the clouds, they had to attempt the jump; time was short and there would not be another opportunity. With their parachutes strapped on their backs, Harrisson and seven operatives from the Australian special operations command unit known as Z Special waited to jump from the planes. After “drifting nervously through the damp cloud,” Harrisson and his soldiers landed in a swamp. Was this hole in the jungle the only one in the interior?; and was it sufficiently good landing ground to build up as a base? Had we landed anywhere near where we intended anyway? Were there people living anywhere near enough for us to find them in time to survive? If so, would they help us—or take our heads instead? Where were the Japs?4

If something went wrong on the mission, Harrisson would take full blame: not only was he the unit commander, but it had also been his idea to parachute into Borneo in the first place. Borneo, falling under the Allied Theater Command for the South West Pacific, was strategically important because it bordered on two critical sea routes: the South China Sea and the Makassar Strait. General MacArthur’s plan in 1944 was to prevent the Japanese advance in the Pacific by building a series of bases, starting in New Guinea, then the Maluku Islands, then Borneo, then the Philippines. To take Borneo from the Japanese, the Australian Ninth Division would first take Tarakan Island and then the oil fields of Sarawak, one of Japan’s main suppliers. Harrisson’s mission was to lead Z Special’s Operation SEMUT (meaning ‘ant’ in Malay) in order to collect intelligence about Japanese movements in Borneo.5 As they planned the mission, the critical question was: what was the best means of initial penetration onto the Japanese-occupied island of Borneo? The standard procedure in Australian military doctrine was to insert troops on the coastlines via submarine since it was the easiest and quickest way to move men and supplies. However, Harrisson was appalled by the idea of using submarines.6 Japanese forces were concentrated across the coast, so any movement of soldiers from the beaches upriver to the interior would surely be detected.7 Despite serious opposition from both colleagues and senior officers, Harrisson would not back down, arguing that by “far the best way of beginning intelligence and guerrilla operations prior to organized landing in Borneo, would be to work from the far interior outwards, from heart to skin.”8 Parachuting into the unknown, unmapped territory of central Borneo was ill-advised and dangerous, but given the Japanese positions on the coast, it was the best course of action. The problem with this plan was that most of the interior map was either blank or completely inaccurate.9 Although the territory was theoretically divided among the Sultan of Brunei, Rajah Brooks, and the Dutch colonial administration, the political boundaries separating Sarawak and

Dutch Borneo had never been surveyed and overlapped “by as much as 20 miles on different maps.”10 Not only was the geography of Borneo’s interior a mystery, even less was known about its indigenous inhabitants. No information about these tribes existed in government files, and no anthropologists had studied them. Having been a member of the 1932 Oxford University Expedition to Sarawak, Harrisson probably knew more about the inhabitants of the interior of Borneo than anyone else within the allied special operations community (this being the reason why he was initially recruited). To prove that parachuting into Borneo was both feasible and preferable to coastal submarine landings, Harrisson needed to demonstrate convincingly to his superiors that the local inhabitants would be amenable to providing information about the Japanese, or at least not kill the paratroopers on sight. Perusing dusty copies of the Sarawak Museum Journal, Harrisson discovered that the upland interior of Borneo was inhabited by headhunters known as the Kelabit (or Kalabit). These people made clothes out of bark, were known for their treachery, lived in longhouses, and irrigated crops of rice on plains that were “as flat as a board and covered with long grass or scrub vegetation when not cultivated.”11 The last feature was of critical importance for the mission: as any paratrooper will tell you, landing on flat ground is much less hazardous than landing in a jungle canopy. Harrisson was delighted with his research: “No one in Australia had even suspected an upland plain, let alone irrigated rice fields and independent people living in para-troop country, right inside Borneo.”12 Informed of Harrisson’s discoveries, the Z Special commander agreed to his plan to parachute into Borneo. After the Liberator dropped them in a tick-infested swamp, the soldiers saw an olive-skinned man waving a white cloth back and forth. As they later discovered, this was the chief’s son-in-law and he was terrified of the men who came from the sky. The Kelabit “knew vaguely that aeroplanes were artifacts (containing people); but they had no idea that people could drop out of them deliberately and the planes continue on. And although markedly less suspicious than most groups of humans, they felt it possible, if not probable, that spirits were mixed up in all this.”13 Based on their own mythology, the Kelabits thought it was likely that spirit people would be friendly, “or, at the worst, subject to propitiation, susceptible to amiable protestations plus adequate supplies of borak [rice wine], rice, pork and women.”14 The soldiers were led to a longhouse at the foot of a mountain where they were greeted by the chief wearing a “leopard skin hat, hornbill feathers, old beads, brass earrings, a tattered khaki coat (Brooke relic of rank), leg bangles, sword in embroidered sheath, and all the rest.”15 Both the Z Special soldiers and the Kelabits were bewildered and amazed with each other. “The first things the Kelabits wanted to know were: were we humans? And how did we get out of the aeroplane? The first things we wanted to know were: were there any Japs in the immediate vicinity? And would these people help us—at first simply hide and feed us?”16 SEMUT 1’s mission was to build an intelligence network in north-central Borneo to help prepare for the Australian Ninth Division’s assault and to convince the local people to stop supplying food and labor to Japanese occupation forces. As the sun climbed in the sky, Harrisson and the soldiers drank borak with the Kelabit elders, conveying in broken Malay their intention to fight the Japanese. The Kelabit chief, Lawai Bisarai, wanted to know whether “we [would] back him up against the Japanese with arms? We got it across, more or less, that we could and would, rapidly and with vim.”17 At that moment, Harrisson went well beyond his orders, and told the Kelabit that he would accept volunteers to fight against the Japanese.18 The Kelabit were angry at the Japanese for destroying the inland economy (preventing the Kelabit from getting the cloth, thread, medicine, and other trade goods they needed), and for confiscating their weapons. Moreover, many of the Kelabit eagerly joined Harrisson’s unit believing that SEMUT’s presence “would not only permit but would actively encourage a return to the sacred and thrilling headhunting raids of song and legend.”19 (Headhunting, though outlawed years earlier by the government, had remained a core part of the Kelabit cultural identity.) Thus, instead of just building an intelligence network, Harrisson built an army of barefoot warriors, armed with guns, spears, and blowpipes who went on to kill or capture over 1,500 Japanese, suffering only eleven casualties.20 For this feat, Harrisson won the coveted Distinguished Service Order (DSO), a British military decoration awarded for distinguished service in war. Those who knew Harrisson were surprised neither by his success leading indigenous forces nor that he exceeded his orders to raise such a force in the first place. Harrisson came from an upper class British family with a history of military service. His father, Brigadier General Geoffry Harrisson, was a war hero in the Boer War and World War I and set an impossibly high standard for his highly intelligent, highly competitive son. Harrisson, in his own estimation, possessed an “apparently insatiable ego, the drive to do whatever I had to do or wanted to do, either before or better than anyone else (preferably both).”21 Equal to this fierce competitive spirit, Harrisson also possessed: an unquenchable curiosity and an apparently endless, tireless urge to record what I saw, plus a certain ability to dissociate myself from violent feelings about it. The thing which makes science tick and threaten humanity, ticked in me until I wanted no other. The burning search for some sort of final satisfaction in knowledge, regardless of power.22

Harrisson’s iconoclastic, competitive brilliance emerged early in his life, and never wavered. While still at boarding school, Harrisson wrote Birds of the Harrow District (North-West Middlesex) 1925–1930 (1931), still considered a standard ornithological text today. Inspired by the new ecological approach to bird watching, Harrisson and a friend then undertook a national census of the crested grebe. While still attending school, with no funding, and working only in their spare time, Harrisson and his friend recruited the largest group of bird watching volunteers ever assembled: 1,300.23 At nineteen years of age, he joined the poorly planned and nearly disastrous Oxford Expedition to Arctic Lapland. Later, back at home in England, he was expelled from Cambridge University for his rowdy behavior (which inspired Malcolm Lowry to model a character in Under the Volcano on Harrisson). Unemployed, disinherited, and with no degree, Harrisson nevertheless organized and led the Oxford Expedition to Borneo, producing a book about the experience, Borneo Jungle: An Account of the Oxford Expedition of 1932 (1938). Disgusted with the British scientific establishments’ obsession with specimen collecting—“an unthinking bloody flux of slaughter”24—Harrisson spent two years on the island of Malekula in the New Hebrides living among people who still practiced ritual cannibalism.25 In his book about the experience, Savage Civilisation (1937), Harrisson challenged the conventional progressive liberalism of 1930s British foreign policy, arguing that the Malekulans did not need Western democracy, Western religion, or Western customs because they were “in many ways as, and in some ways more, civilized that the Europeans in the same part of the world,”26 a rather radical position to take in the 1930s. When Harrisson returned to England after his years in the South Seas, he developed a method for studying social conditions called ‘Mass Observation,’ now referred to as ‘crowd sourcing.’ When World War II began, he documented the British public’s reaction to the Blitz by chasing the bombs as they were falling, an experience which became the basis for the book Living Through the Blitz (1976). Now semi-famous, Harrisson frequently appeared on the newly-formed BBC as an expert on birds, cannibals, and the latest dance craze.27 But in 1942, he turned his back on fame, science, and family, and volunteered for service in the British Army, which is the focus of this chapter. Despite his prolific writing and radical views, Harrisson has been mostly forgotten by anthropologists. None of his books are assigned as reading in universities, and scant references to his work appear in footnotes. In fact, he is reviled by many in the anthropological community.28 Harrisson was an easy target for anthropological scorn: he never completed a university degree, much less a PhD; most of what Harrisson knew he learned by doing. Like many autodidacts, Harrisson’s prolific writing and wide cross-disciplinary knowledge ensured that he really did not belong anywhere; many of his scientific contemporaries excluded him as persona non grata from their disciplinary clubs. While it is little surprise that anthropologists have forgotten Harrisson, one might think that one of the most successful unconventional warfare campaigns ever fought by the Allies would merit some interest. But neither the World War II Borneo campaign nor the later 1963–6 Borneo Confrontation have garnered much attention from military historians or contemporary authors. One recent exception is British Army Major Emile Simpson’s book War from the Ground Up (2013). Offering the Borneo campaign as an example of the “pragmatic” approach, Simpson notes that British forces under the command of Major General Walter Walker understood “the situation below the jungle canopy,” and “instead of trying to work round the terrain (both the physical and cultural terrain), [the British] worked with it, in both political and military terms.”29 Although Simpson omits this fact, it was Harrisson’s relationship with the Dyaks that enabled the British to operate so successfully in central Borneo. Harrisson served as an advisor, an intelligence source, and a unit commander in the conflict. Whenever he and Major General Walker landed during their reconnaissance of the interior, Harrisson would encourage the locals to join the fight. As Walker noted, “As soon as he landed and stepped out [the Dyaks] all came rushing up to him. It was as if Jesus Christ had arrived.”30 Harrisson also came up with the idea for the Border Scouts, an auxiliary force designed to oppose any Indonesian incursion into the territory.31 As Walker recalled, Harrisson’s leadership of the native irregulars—what came to be known as ‘Harrisson’s Force’—“grew to a strength of nearly two thousand and played a major part in containing the rebellion and, later, in cutting the escape routes of fugitive rebels.”32 Although most histories fail to mention it, British success in the Borneo Confrontation (at least according to Major General Walter Walker) owed much to the knowledge, skills, and connection to the local people brought to bear by Harrisson. Although the Dyaks certainly revered him, in his own world Harrisson’s personality inspired more annoyance than love, more irritation than loyalty. General Walker characterized Harrisson as a “rogue elephant;”33 his biographer as “a romantic polymath, a drunken bully, an original-thinking iconoclast, a dreadful husband and father, a fearless adventurer, a Richard Burton of his time.”34 Most of his commanding officers disliked him; he had no respect for rank, breeding, or class, only for an individual’s intelligence, fortitude, and competence. Most of the soldiers he led in Borneo in World War II hated him; one even threatened to shoot him with an automatic weapon.35 Devious and domineering, Harrisson intentionally made himself the object of wrath as a means of building group cohesion.36 But being reviled by superiors and subordinates alike did not detract from the effectiveness of his combat leadership; in the words of one soldier, Harrisson “had an almost hypnotic power over those who worked for him; he would ask the most impossible things of us and we would willingly do them.”37

In this chapter, I ask the question: what can we learn about unconventional warfare from the experience of Tom Harrisson—anthropologist, soldier, and hell-raiser extraordinaire? Harrisson’s military expertise was in unconventional warfare, a form of conflict in which soldiers work ‘by, with, and through’ indigenous forces. Working alongside local people to fight an illegitimate government or occupation force requires rare and unusual personal attributes and skills, even beyond the ordinary military virtues of intelligence, courage, and expertise with weapons. Unconventional warfare necessitates three things in soldiers who it: deep local knowledge; acculturation to the local society; and adaptation to the indigenous way of war. Harrisson’s remarkable experience in the jungles of Borneo not only illustrates the importance of these personal skills and attributes, but also the dangers inherent in using them.

Unconventional warfare Harrisson was recruited into special operations by accident. After boot camp, he was selected as an officer and served with the 161 Reconnaissance Regiment in Northern Ireland where he “soon succeeded in littering Ulster with bogged or crashed Bren gun carriers and scout cars.”38 Lacking adequate driving skills for the motorized infantry, Harrisson looked around for other military service opportunities. Somehow, his name came to the attention of the newly-formed Special Operations Executive: In the relics of a Northumberland Avenue hotel, I was interviewed by Colonel Egerton-Mott. It took some time to understand what he was talking about. He seemed to be under the impression that I was a Communist. At that moment this was a good thing to be in his eyes, for it was Allied policy to work with and encourage Communist Chinese as guerrillas against the Japanese in South-East Asia. … Years later I came upon Egerton-Mott again, bowler-hatted, and [an] important official in the Colonial Development Corporation. He told me that MI5 had mixed up my life with another person of the same name (only one ‘s’), a well-known left-winger in Spain and so on. (I was, at the time, Parliamentary Liberal Candidate for Watford, Herts.) Anyway, Mott offered me Borneo in the end, adding that I was about the last of their hopes. They had already (he said) asked everyone with any conceivable knowledge of the country, including my colleagues of the 1932 Oxford expedition.39

Harrisson accepted the offer and was sent for special operations training. At the time, the Special Operations Executive was a new organization designed to conduct irregular warfare in occupied territories.40 “Parachuting, coding, disguise, hiding, searching, tailing, burglaring, stealing trains, blowing up railway bridges, shamming deafness, passing on syphilis, resisting pain, firing from the hip, forgery and the interception of mail, were some things one could learn in intense concentration.”41 Joint Publication JP 3–05, Special Operations, defines unconventional warfare as “activities conducted to enable a resistance movement or insurgency to coerce, disrupt, or overthrow a government or occupying power by operating through or with an underground, auxiliary, and guerrilla force in a denied area.”42 In many ways, Harrisson’s operation with the Dyaks of Borneo conforms to the ideal type of an unconventional warfare campaign: preparation of the battlespace; clandestine insertion into a denied area to make contact with an opposition group; development of a plan in conjunction with indigenous forces; recruit, train, equip and organize the local forces; successful overthrow of the hostile government; and transition to a new government.43 Where counterinsurgency involves destroying resistance in support of the host nation government, unconventional warfare represents the opposite: support to resistance movements against the host nation government. Unlike direct action missions, in unconventional warfare military forces are not self-contained autonomous entities. Rather, they must work hand-in-hand with an indigenous resistance group in order to achieve their objectives. Successful cross-cultural military cooperation entails living, working, drinking, fighting, and sometimes dying in a different culture than one’s own. For Harrisson in Borneo, just as for special operators today, the key task in unconventional warfare is to conduct operations “through, with or by indigenous populations,”44 in the form of an “underground, auxiliary, and guerrilla force in a denied area.”45 U.S. Army Special Forces aligns its forces regionally, which enables it to become familiar with the local language, political system, and geography. In practice, however, the force is too small and the world too big for complete coverage of all 192 countries and 6500 spoken languages. Thus, as Jessica Glicken Turnley has observed, We find SOF operators who are native Spanish speakers in Iraq. SOF knowledgeable about the Philippines are deployed to Afghanistan. How quickly can these men learn to function effectively in entirely new cultures and speaking different languages? Do they have an aptitude for this type of interaction that goes beyond a collection of behavioral facts or vocabulary sets?46

Turnley asks an important and difficult question. Many years ago, while conducting research for a DoD report, I observed part of the Special Forces Qualification Course at Fort Bragg. I was trying to discover to what degree the assessment and training incorporated socio-cultural knowledge and cross-cultural skills. One afternoon I met with the psychologists on staff, who explained how a variety of psychological tests were used to identify beneficial personality traits and those likely to lead to poor performance, such as a hostile attitude towards authority. Afterwards, I went back out

to Camp Mackall to talk to the training group commander. After telling him excitedly about my visit with the psychologists, he just looked at me and said, “None of those tests matter. We know it when we see it.” In other words, despite all the empirical, scientific testing in the qualification course, selection was ultimately based on the intuition of the instructors. Over the years, as I’ve met and worked with a variety of military personnel, I’ve wondered: what is that ineffable, untestable quality that Special Forces must possess? What is that special quality so sublime that it cannot be measured quantitatively on a psychological test? Nobody—neither psychologists nor Special Forces themselves—seems to know exactly what that special ingredient actually is. But sometimes they do attempt to describe it. In his graduation remarks to a new group of Green Berets, for example, Brigadier General Bennet Sacolick, then Deputy Commanding General of the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School, opined that: We may be the only force in the world that intuitively understands the balance between diplomacy and force and possess the judgment to determine which is most applicable in any given situation. It’s understanding the equilibrium between these two seemingly polar opposite notions and instinctively knowing when to apply each. … Special Forces Soldiers that have become experts in the economic and political environments of these countries combined with their intuitive abilities to work through, with and by our indigenous friends.47

Special Forces are not only selected on the basis of qualification course instructors’ intuition; they are also selected for their individual intuitive abilities. (Ironically, anthropologists share this strange intuitive craft with Special Forces. Anthropologists often talk about fieldwork as something intuitive,48 that cannot be taught. As Alfred Kroeber remarked in the 1940s “Some can, and some can’t.”49) Most readers probably do not associate intuition—a form of perception that arises from the subconscious mind—with military institutions, yet this quixotic, ephemeral concept nevertheless weaves through both military doctrine and military history. In Sources of Power, Gary Klein concluded (based on a study of how firefighters, pilots, nurses, and military personnel make decisions) that intuition does not really exist.50 Rather, what the uninitiated call “intuition” is actually a non-deliberate, unintentional, unconscious pattern matching process in which experienced decision makers refer to mental models, prior experience, stories, metaphors, and analogies that enable them to recognize situations as typical and make decisions without conscious analytical processing.51 But if intuition depends on experience in order to recognize key patterns that indicate the dynamics of a situation, what happens when presumptive experts encounter a completely unfamiliar situation? Observers see and interpret events, actions, and objects on the basis of the context in which they are found. But what if the context itself is completely unfamiliar? What if our unconventional warfare expert finds himself in the middle of Borneo with a tribe of headhunters? When confronted with novel events or unique circumstances for which no referent experiential pattern exists, individuals must rely on observation of the local environment to “allow new patterns to emerge.”52 These observations must be contextually specific if they are to have any military value or scientific validity. As discussed in the following section, discovery of emergent patterns through careful, conscious observation of phenomena in context will eventually provide our unconventional warfare expert with enough local knowledge to triangulate perception of the battlespace.

Local knowledge “Like sailing, gardening, politics, and poetry,” Clifford Geertz once observed, “law and ethnography are crafts of place: they work by the light of local knowledge.”53 To this list one should add unconventional warfare; another activity defined by and dependent on local knowledge. Why is local knowledge critical to unconventional warfare? Unconventional warfare, by definition, always takes place in foreign territory and entails close contact with indigenous forces.54 A foreign military force cannot succeed without a comprehensive understanding of the geographical and human terrain. This idea is nothing new, having been clearly explicated by Sun Tzu centuries ago: “We are not fit to lead an army on the march unless we are familiar with the face of the country—its mountains and forests, its pitfalls and precipices, its marshes and swamps. We shall be unable to turn natural advantages to account unless we make use of local guides.”55 While Sun Tzu’s ingredient list to some extent might apply to all types of war, the last item on the list—local guides—assumes an additional importance in unconventional warfare. Unconventional warfare entails recruiting, assisting, training, and leading foreign nationals in war against their own government or an occupying power, and therefore means fighting by, with, and through indigenous partners. But that relationship goes both ways; it also entails convincing a large group of local nationals to fight the war by, with, and through you. Special Forces become a means through which local military forces can challenge the political hegemony of their own government or an occupying power. For this symbiotic cross-cultural military partnership to work, both parties must trust each other. Unlike many of the societies of Western Europe, which employ a transactional model of social relations with specific, short-term quid pro quo outcomes and minimal involvement of the parties, many non-Western societies build trust face-to-face over a long period of time, through mutual commitment and obligation.56 In a society with a relational rather than transactional model of

human interaction (such as the Naga in Burma or the Dyaks in Borneo), the development of trust, commitment, and rapport sufficient to sustain the rigors of war requires proximate, prolonged personal contact. “Effective leadership of [North American] Indian scouts,” observed Thomas Dunlay, depended far more on the personal qualities of the leader than on his formal, legally based authority … in the regular forces the insecure or obtuse officer could fall back on the authority of his commission and the harsh disciplinary measures that regulations and custom made available. With Indian scouts these sanctions could easily produce the opposite of the desired result.57

Cross-cultural leadership in combat requires heart, not a book of rules. Neither the trust necessary to fight side-by-side, the rapport necessary to sustain trust, the empathy necessary to establish rapport, nor the knowledge necessary to develop empathy can be generated remotely through radio signals, satellite reconnaissance photos, or even library books. Rather, it must be acquired on the ground where the campaign will take place. Social scientists refer to this as research in situ—research in the place where the phenomenon being studied exists in real time.58 At the age of nineteen, Harrisson joined the 1930 Oxford University Exploration Club expedition to Arctic Lapland. The youngest person on the expedition, he was included for his skill in bird watching. Although competent as scientists, the members of the expedition knew little about traveling through the wilderness and were inadequately prepared for their two-month trek across the Norwegian arctic.59 After returning to England—slightly malnourished but with no permanent damage—Harrisson concluded that “the Arctic is a racket,” which entitled young men to call themselves “explorers” so that “young women at cocktail parties will listen to them when they are talking about uninteresting things.”60 The Arctic was too easy, too accessible; Harrisson wanted something that would challenge him intellectually and physically. “Denied the magnificence of piracy or terribly dangerous travel,”61 Harrisson had the patience for neither these quasi-expeditions nor for his studies at Cambridge University. He spent most of his time at Cambridge getting dead drunk, disrupting lectures, having fist fights in the street, and otherwise rebelling against the establishment. When he was asked to leave, Harrisson’s father—highly displeased with his son’s drunken brawling—disinherited him. Penniless and homeless, but with a reputation as being reliable on expeditions to strange places, Harrisson was asked to organize an expedition to study the flora and fauna in the province of Sarawak in Borneo. This was a rare opportunity: for the first time in many years the absolute ruler of Sarawak—an Englishman named H.H. Charles Vyner Brook, also known as the ‘White Rajah’—was permitting an expedition deep into uncharted territory.62 Travelling around the country, the team visited longhouses, attended local funerals, competed in longboat races, and drank rice wine compulsorily with the Dyaks. During the last three weeks, Harrisson parted company with the rest of the expedition. Alone, he paddled along the river and hauled his canoe over unnavigable rapids. During his journey, the lowland tribal people told Harrisson about “a lost tribe” in the central highlands who were living in “another world—fabled for its big men, sexy women, cold nights, rich harvest, irrigation, inaccessibility, cattle and goats.”63 On his twenty-first birthday, he climbed Mount Dulit, a 4000-feethigh mountain in north-central Borneo. From the peak, Harrisson could see 100 miles in every direction, including the central highlands of Borneo. On Mount Dulit, Harrisson wrote, he “came of age” and realized that nothing prevented him from choosing the life he wanted—“exploring, brains, birds and writing.”64 In the moment of his epiphany, he could not have known that he would return to Borneo in 1944 to lead this “lost tribe” in combat against the Japanese. Although many detractors dismissed these expeditions as the useless shenanigans of privileged boys masquerading as science, no other Oxford expedition produced anything close to the “quantity and variety of scientific results as did this expedition to Sarawak.”65 More importantly, perhaps, the expeditions confirmed Harrisson’s belief that the only way to really understand natural phenomena —both birds and human beings—was to observe them in their natural context. “For myself, this solo trip started me on all my subsequent activities, and made me determined never again to go on an elaborate expedition, but to aim at simplicity and living in the land, on the land, of the land, nativewise, whether in the jungle or the Arctic or England.”66 Birds, sea turtles, humanoid fossils, and headhunters were all, Harrisson believed, best studied in situ—in the place where they were found. In the early 1930s, when Harrisson first conducted research in the South Pacific, ‘ethnographic fieldwork’ (the anthropological version of research in situ) was a new and innovative research method. Most nineteenth century anthropology involved armchair theorizing about the nature, evolution, and physiology of humans on the basis of accounts provided by “travelers, traders, missionaries, and administrators.”67 Mucking around in mosquito infested swamps held no interest for the British gentlemen scholars of that period. At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, many natural science disciplines became more professionalized, less willing to rely on secondary sources, and less focused on developing taxonomies and other abstract ordering systems. (As Henrietta Kuklick argues, colonial pacification also made fieldwork less dangerous and more feasible.68) As a result, scientists from many disciplines left the comfort of their armchairs for mildewed tents.69 Generally, Bronislaw Malinowski receives credit among anthropologists for asserting the scientific

value of extended periods living among native populations after he exhorted his fellow anthropologists to “relinquish his comfortable position … on the verandah.”70 Unlike a questionnaire or distant theorizing based on secondary sources, research in situ reveals “the actual way in which primitive politics are worked,”71 as Malinowski wrote in 1929. In other words, fieldwork produces neither the theory of how social institutions should work, nor the history of how they have worked in the past, but rather granular local knowledge about how institutions work in the present time.72 According to the precepts of anthropology, a lone anthropologist residing in a grass hut would eventually become so deeply embedded in native life that he would understand “native actions … from a native and not from an European point of view,”73 as A. C. Haddon phrased the ethnographic goal in 1893. “Heroic fieldwork” (what might also be called the machismo of wretchedness) conducted in dangerous locations among cannibals, headhunters, or witchdoctors would not only test the anthropologist’s character, but would also reveal the truth from the native’s point of view.74 In this “small footprint science,” no research instruments, no laboratories, no survey teams were necessary. In theory, a lone anthropologist would himself serve as the research instrument.75 What is the point of this long discussion about the scientific value of ethnographic fieldwork? Like ethnography, irregular warfare is, in Geertz’s phrasing, “a craft of place” that works “by the light of local knowledge.” Unconventional warfare requires highly precise intelligence at the lowest possible level.76 In the 2011 Special Operations Command (SOCOM) Posture Statement, for example, Admiral Eric T. Olson, the Commander of United States Special Operations Command, stated that “understanding the operational context of the environments in which we operate is a hallmark of SOF … and understanding the value of ‘micro-regional expertise’ allows SOF to conduct its activities with more predictable outcomes.”77 Unconventional warfare intelligence requirements—such as micro-regional information about ephemeral topics in exotic locations—differ substantially in both method and content from the conventional intelligence produced by ‘2’ shops, the intelligence element on military staff.78 For example, the traditional means for collecting intelligence (such as signals intelligence, technical intelligence, and open source intelligence), as General Boykin observed, “can be difficult in the irregular battlespace because of various human-terrain factors that deny or compromise observation.”79 Moreover, traditional theater-level intelligence tends to focus on an adversary’s capabilities and force composition rather than context.80 Finally, in conventional scenarios, intelligence is disseminated from the top down; in irregular warfare, intelligence from the tactical level must be transmitted to the strategic levels, from “mud to space.”81 When theater and national intelligence systems cannot produce the required intelligence, soldiers must become collectors. This is nothing new: during Harrisson’s mission in Borneo, the intelligence system could provide only limited relevant information; the onus lay on the soldiers themselves to conduct their own research. In this sense, Special Forces often act not just as intelligence consumers, but also as intelligence producers.82 However, most soldiers have limited training in field research methods. In light of this, how can they best acquire local knowledge? In order to get granular, micro-regional intelligence—especially when it pertains to motivations, intentions, beliefs, and other non-empirical elements of human life— Special Forces must establish what is called “persistent presence.” Simply put, persistent presence means deploying soldiers to a particular location and leaving them there for a long time so that they establish trust, develop contacts, and become integrated into local communities.83 When Special Forces produce empirical, qualitative, inductive intelligence through persistent presence on the ground and embedded in a local community, they are basically conducting what anthropologists call “fieldwork.”84 An alternative to using Special Forces as intelligence gatherers is to recruit and incorporate indigenous people into the military (whether temporarily or permanently). Presumably, since these individuals come from the local society, they already possess the requisite local knowledge concerning topics such as terrain, weather, population, language, and adversary strengths and weaknesses. As James Campbell notes in Making Riflemen from Mud, local irregular forces can thus provide “knowledge of local geography, culture, language, and personality that no outsider can ever hope to gain without such cooperation with immediately neighboring forces.”85 In addition, local auxiliary forces may also have environment-specific specialized skills such as tracking, patrolling, navigation, and communications.86 Another option for collecting granular intelligence concerning the lowest tactical level is to employ professional researchers.87 In response to a sociocultural knowledge shortfall in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. Army created the Human Terrain System (HTS) in 2006. With mixed civilian/military teams embedded in every brigade, division, and corps in both theaters, HTS conducted empirical social science research based on military requirements.88 This approach to developing local knowledge has a number of benefits, including the use of trained researchers to conduct research, thereby leaving soldiers free to perform their mandated military tasks. However, there are also drawbacks. For example, embedding civilians in a military staff makes them vulnerable to the same dangers faced by soldiers. Is it worth dying to discover the price of cooking oil in rural Afghanistan?89 In essence, both anthropology and unconventional warfare are “crafts of place” dependent on “local knowledge.” Regardless of whether local knowledge is obtained by soldiers, indigenous

forces, or social scientists, the requirement persists. To some degree, both anthropology and unconventional warfare involve intuition (or at least some sort of inherent capacity that cannot be acquired through training or education). In turn, intuition—according to Gary Klein and Daniel Kahneman—involves recognition of typical patterns and anomalies as they occur naturally in the environment. How does an outsider—whether anthropologist or soldier—come to recognize patterns in context? After returning to England in 1936 on a cargo boat from the South Pacific, Harrisson (twenty-four years of age at the time) was recovering from malnutrition and his only income came from “selling his diseased blood to medical students.”90 He had not read a newspaper or heard a radio for over two years, and he found it difficult to make sense of his own rapidly changing society: King George V died resulting in the abdication crisis; the Winter Olympics brought Hitler’s regime to public attention; and Britain withdrew troops from Egypt. “Britain, by 1936,” he wrote, “was quite bewildering enough to anyone, let alone a de-tribalized young man without any visible means of support beyond a pair of by now rock-hard feet.”91 Harrisson felt somewhat detached from the world around him. “This ‘stranger’ situation,” Harrisson recalled, “the feeling of belonging to England and not belonging to it,”92 led him to an epiphany. …with the shock of clarity that absence and return can refresh, I saw that … all over the world people like me were going to study other civilizations on a scale of intimacy and detail which had not yet been applied in our “civilized” societies. I myself, for instance … Why not study the cannibals of Lancashire, the headhunters of Stepney?93

In the 1930s, the idea of studying one’s own society was only just emerging in the new field of sociology. Harrisson decided to observe blue collar British society in the factory town of Bolton and took a job in a cotton mill working eleven hours a day.94 At this point, Harrisson had no real plan for the future. Perhaps he would write a book about the British working class? Perhaps he would finish his degree? But life works in strange ways: in 1937 Harrisson published a poem in a British weekly magazine. Since he had no money to buy a copy, he went to the library to read it. By coincidence, on the same page he found a letter to the editor seeking volunteers to engage in “mass observation” of “coincidences” and “symbolic situations” in British public life. Despite the incomprehensible surrealist jargon, Harrisson contacted the signatories—surrealist poet Charles Madge and documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings—and convinced them that their research method, self-documentation, was not adequately scientific. Instead, he suggested that the group should use direct observation (essentially watching people without their knowledge of being observed). This was an unusual approach: in the 1930s public opinion was typically studied using survey research. Direct observation had rarely been used as a scientific method.95 Readers are probably thinking that while Harrisson’s biography is interesting, how is the scientific methodology of a 1930s surrealist experiment relevant to the importance of local knowledge in unconventional warfare? The primary means of data collection in “mass observation” (as the method came to be known) was the observation of human behavior. This approach may seem somewhat simplistic, but in fact observation requires a great deal of skill in order to know what, when, who, and how to observe, and finally, what does it mean? Observation begins with watching. In Harrisson’s view, when conducting fieldwork the researcher should “see what people are doing. Afterwards, ask them what they think they are doing, if you like.” This approach to research—focused on observation rather than explanation—developed out of Harrisson’s ornithology background. “You don’t ask a bird any questions. You don’t try to interview it, do you?”96 As readers with counterintelligence training know, what people say is often less important than what they do. Observation as a data collection technique in the social sciences can be inductive or deductive, qualitative or quantitative. Inductive research begins with detailed observation of the world, discovering through the research process what salient concepts, patterns, and relationships exist. Unlike deductive research, inductive research begins without a firm hypothesis; theories evolve as the research progresses based on emergent patterns. As Russell Bernard notes, inductive research “involves the search for pattern from observation and the development of explanations—theories— for those patterns.”97 Harrisson’s preferred method was to collect data without a theoretical framework or a provable hypothesis, allowing the researcher to gradually perceive underlying patterns.98 The qualitative, inductive approach to research parallels the process of attentive observation used by soldiers to identify patterns, whether of weather, terrain, or enemy action. Units on patrol soon learn the importance of small details from which the pattern often emerges (the slight differences in shape and texture that distinguish IEDs camouflaged as rocks by the side of the road from actual rocks, for example). This type of pattern recognition process among operational military personnel bears little resemblance to the quantitative approach used for military assessments in the Pentagon, or the “voodoo math” of update briefs in a tactical operations center.99 In an actual combat situation, most military personnel employ a radically different mental process: qualitative, inductive pattern recognition.100 Of course, a significant problem in conducting observational, qualitative, and inductive is that

‘truth,’ ‘facts,’ and ‘perspective’ are almost always subjective, determined by the observer. How should a commander make sense from the confounding and confusing plethora of subjective perspectives? In war, as in everyday life, no single perspective on a battle tells the whole truth. “War is always a mixture of different, conflicting stories,” wrote Ahmed Rashid, “depending on whether you are crouching in a ditch or sipping tea at the Presidential Palace. To have dinner with Petraeus and then tea with President Karzai is a central part of the story, as is journeying to the edge of the city to the tiny, unlit, unheated flats, to talk to a former Taliban official.”101 The multiplicity of viewpoints and the fragmentation of political narratives, as Emile Simpson has argued in War from the Ground Up, create a “kaleidoscopic battlespace,” a complex “mosaic” of meaning and interpretation.102 To reduce the complexity of the battlespace (as discussed in the introduction to this volume), military organizations often impose polarizing, simplistic frames on a situation. Thus, a multiplicity of well-armed Pashtun men with different histories, beliefs, organizations, networks, and motivations are lumped together into a broad, often vague category called “Taliban.”103 Reality is, of course, always more complex than the labels we assign to it. Instead of reducing complexity, Simpson argues a military commander ought to perceive the battlespace kaleidoscopically, from multiple perspectives simultaneously. Although Simpson does not use the term, in military theory this type of immediate, intuitive perception of the totality of a battlespace is sometimes called coup d’oeil, commonly translated as “stroke of the eye.” “It is by the eyes of the mind,” wrote Napoleon, “by reasoning over the whole, by a species of inspiration that the general sees, knows and judges.”104

Coup d’oeil possesses five characteristics: it is immediate, intuitive, internalized, inherent, and integrated. First, for Clausewitz coup d’oeil was “a marvelous pitch of vision, which easily grasps and dismisses a thousand remote possibilities which an ordinary mind would labor to identify and wear itself out in doing so.” Thus, coup d’oeil— a “superb display of divination”—represents immediate knowledge that occurs in the moment of perception.105 Second, coup d’oeil transcends the narrow parameters of tactical logic; it emerges from the realm of intuition, divination, and instinct. As Michael Handel once wrote, The successful general is not the one who carefully implements his original plans… but rather the one who intuitively reads the chaos on the battlefield well enough to take advantage of passing opportunities.… Since it is impossible to weigh all of the relevant factors for even the simplest decisions in war, it is the military leader’s intuition (his coup d’oeil) that must ultimately guide him in effective decision making.106

Third, perception seems to involve an internalization of knowledge. As Clausewitz noted, “when all is said and done, it is really the commander’s coup d’oeil, his ability to see things simply, to identify the whole business of war completely with himself, that is the essence of good generalship.”107 Fourth, like luck, coup d’oeil cannot be borrowed and it cannot be taught; like ethnographic ability, it is inherent. Napoleon believed that commanders were either born with this quality or not: The general never knows the field of battle on which he may operate. His understanding is that of inspiration; he has no positive information; data to reach a knowledge of localities are so contingent on events that almost nothing is learned by experience. It is a faculty to understand immediately the relations of the terrain according to the nature of different countries; it is, finally, a gift, called a coup d’oeil militaire … which great generals have received from nature.108

The last characteristic of coup d’oeil brings us back to Simpson’s “kaleidoscopic battlespace.” Coup d’oeil means a total integration of multiple perspectives: instead of disaggregating the situation into component parts, a commander’s coup d’oeil enables her to see the whole picture. This gestalt moment of total understanding resembles what the U.S. military refers to as ‘situational awareness’—“immediate knowledge of the conditions of the operation, constrained geographically and in time.”109 More than just perception or attention, situational awareness involves the “integration of multiple pieces of information and a determination of their relevance to the person’s goals,” and at the highest level, “the ability to forecast future situation dynamics.”110 While situational awareness generally refers to an individual’s cognition of multiple streams of data, coup d’oeil pertains to multiple perspectives on a single stream. Perceiving kaleidoscopically from multiple perspectives is to envision the battlespace in its entirety, from all angles simultaneously. Thus, in theory, a talented commander should instantly grasp the significance of terrain—both human and geographical—for both her purposes and for those of her adversary (to me that hill looks like an obstacle, but to my enemy it provides excellent cover). Our talented commander should envision the battles-pace from the tactical to the strategic level, including potential political ramifications of squad level decisions (in my mind conducting a night raid minimizes violent resistance, but to CNN it looks like a war crime). Our talented commander should also conceptualize the chess moves of the conflict temporally, recognizing intuitively what should be done to reach the “object beyond war.” To return to our protagonist, Tom Harrisson: much like coup d’oeil, Mass Observation involved a simultaneous triangulation of multiple perspectives. Observation was conducted entirely by

volunteers distributed across both time and space; in London alone over 1,500 people volunteered as observers.111 Instead of envisioning a battlespace, Mass Observation aimed to capture multiple perspectives in the public space, including events, opinions, and activities. Mass Observation entailed “the observation of everyone by everyone, including themselves.”112 Similar to what is now called “crowdsourcing,”113 Mass Observation employed the collective intelligence of non-expert citizen volunteers to produce knowledge.114 The goal was to use the amassed material to look at an event from so many different angles that any bias would be discounted or minimized by crosschecking.115 Although surrealist painters (such as Mass Observation co-founder Charles Madge) had played with concept of simultaneous perspective to draw attention to multiple points of view, Mass Observation was the first formalized scientific attempt to triangulate social reality by having multiple observers report on the same event. Mass Observation began supporting Whitehall’s war effort after Britain declared war on Germany in 1939. Working first for the Ministry of Information and then for the Director of Naval Intelligence,116 Mass Observation was, in Harrisson’s words, able to “offer a then unique service for the study of private opinion and the interpretation of broad trends: those amorphous marshlands of the mind which in war-time are dubbed ‘morale.’”117 When Mass Observation was commissioned to write a series of official reports on the social and psychological effects of the German aerial bombardment, Harrisson put himself forward to conduct the research and became by his own estimation “the most widely blitzed civilian in Britain.”118 As he wrote in Living Through the Blitz, the government’s “deeply ingrained contempt for the civilian masses” skewed their estimation of casualties, led to inadequate provision of social services to bombing victims, and resulted in scanty infrastructure protection.119 Up until the point at which Harrisson’s lack of diplomacy completely exasperated his sponsors, Mass Observation provided the British government with a kaleidoscopic perspective on the social reality of the home front. More importantly, it taught Harrisson how to triangulate data so that multiple perspectives on the same phenomenon could be integrated. In summing up this section, we can conclude that unconventional warfare—working by, with, and through indigenous people—requires local knowledge. Only research in situ (fieldwork) can produce local knowledge of the depth and granularity necessary for unconventional warfare. That research— whether conducted by uniformed military personnel, anthropologists-for-hire, or local nationals— must be based on inductive, qualitative observation in order to reveal emergent patterns. Understanding these local patterns—of topography, human behavior, or sounds in the jungle at night —may eventually facilitate a kaleidoscopic integration of multiple subjective perspectives in what the military terms coup d’oeil. Recognizing local patterns is necessary but not sufficient for effective unconventional warfare. One must also adapt to them.

Acculturation and assimilation Following the 1932 expedition to Borneo, Harrisson joined the Oxford Expedition to the New Hebrides, a relatively uncharted chain of islands in the central Pacific. But Harrisson quickly became bored and disheartened collecting specimens.120 “Birds and bats were clearly not enough,” he wrote. “It was impossible to be satisfied with anything else then the stuff which made humans tick. I moved firmly away from parrots and mice, to men who could also explain themselves away and refute, while being studied.”121 When the rest of the members of the expedition sailed for home in 1934, Harrisson stayed in the islands. Only long-term immersion in another society, Harrisson believed, could produce real understanding.122 Determined to conduct deep immersion, he chose the most challenging ethnographic situation possible: a tribe of warring cannibals known as the Big Nambas.123 The French planters “told me I was mad, that I was bound to be shot or clubbed, and that I had much better stay where I was.”124 But, ignoring their warnings, Harrisson paddled a dug-out canoe across the straits and landed on a coral beach. There, under the palm trees, some Big Nambas were waiting to trade shell beads, red dye, and pigs. “They were the strangest people I had ever seen,” wrote Harrisson, “with dark skins, thoroughly dirty and muddy, as if they had never had a bath. I found later that they never had, because there is no way of having one in the place where they live.”125 The Big Nambas wore pig tusk bracelets, tortoiseshell earrings, penis belts made of red bark, and carved stone nose rings. “If they looked queer to me, I must have appeared rather odd to them too.” Harrisson had long hair (“of intense interest” to the women)126 and a bushy beard. His legs were covered with sores and bruises, and he was barefoot and badly sunburned. His chest and arms were decorated with Borneo tattoos and ritual scarification marks. “Of course, it was a good thing that I looked so unlike most civilized white men. It was because I seemed so different from the others, and because I had no gun or sun-helmet, or anything with which I could harm them, that very soon these Malekulan natives came up to me and we got into conversation.”127 The chief invited Harrisson to their remote village up-country. “So off we went up into the high mountains, thus cutting off my last link with civilisation. It was a long time before I saw another white person again.”128 In the end, Harrisson spent almost two years living with the Big Nambas, becoming fully integrated into the society—no doubt made easier by his high tolerance for kava, a stimulating psychotropic beverage.129 In 1840, a British admiral had described the Big Nambas as “very low in the scale of human beings … filthy, insolent, and troublesome as a people.”130 Living among them, Harrisson discovered

that these ‘savages’—though they were cannibals with no written language—possessed highly developed and complex stonework, dancing, and sand art, involving continuous line sand drawings in geometrical patterns which told stories, communicated ideas, and could even represent laws.131 This unique, complex culture of the Big Nambas (and, in fact, most indigenous people of the New Hebrides) was being swiftly destroyed by Western disease, the slave trade, Christian missionaries, gun powder, and depopulation. “We have brought these fine people low,” he wrote, “with our twin curses, the germ and the gun.”132 The ferocity of Harrisson’s attachment to the Big Nambas—“the most interesting, in many ways the most admirable, people left in the Pacific”—was matched by his disgust with the brutality and hypocrisy of his own society in their treatment of them.133 “Despite all the Acts, Regulations, Orders, Amendments, International Agreements,” Harrisson wrote, in the 1930s indentured servitude “was going on absolutely unchecked in practice in the New Hebrides,” accompanied by murder, rape, and arson of the native people. The treatment of the people of the New Hebrides and the hypocrisy and brutality of the British, Australian, and French governments led Harrisson to conclude that the ‘savages’ of Malekula were in many ways more civilized than the colonial powers who ruled them. “One only needs to watch a ‘savage’ becoming ‘civilised,’ to see how ephemeral many of our superficial criteria are,” Harrisson wrote. “There is no difficult transition between ‘cannibal’ and ‘Christian.’ Environment and education are the determinants in Malekula, as in Mayfair.”134 ‘Going native,’ as I will discuss below, requires not only empathy for the local people, but also cutting psychological and social ties to home. Harrisson’s admiration of the Big Nambas and his doubts about the morality of his own society were dual psychological forces that enabled Harrisson to go native on Malekula, a skill which would later become critical for him in World War II Borneo. In the book he later wrote for children in 1943 about the Big Nambas, Living Among Cannibals, Harrisson described what he learned about going native: I trained myself to live on the native food, and to eat with my fingers—and to eat quickly before my native companions had gobbled up everything! I learnt to go for long marches without water, because sometimes drinking-water cannot be found for long distances, and the natives never carry it. I got used to sleeping on the ground, in the mud, or on a few sticks cut from a dead tree and balanced just above the ground. I trained myself to travel quickly and silently through the dense jungle, as well as to be able to keep up the native dances for hours at [a] time; sometimes these dances go on all through the night without stopping. I even went so far as to be initiated into some of the secret rites.135

In Harrisson’s view, understanding a society was only possible when one could live it as a native. “Dancing and war are the Malekulan approaches to understanding. So it is necessary to dance and to fight before you may understand fully.”136 Despite his enthusiasm for living off the grid with a tribe of cannibals, by his second year on the island Harrisson had become depressed, lonely, and physically ill with recurrent malaria. One day an enormous yacht—the Caroline—anchored in the bay. The yacht belonged to Douglas Fairbanks Sr. who had come to ask Harrisson to star in a film called Oxford in the Jungle. Once filming started, both Harrisson and the Big Nambas grew aggravated with the Hollywood fantasy of ‘savages,’ which bore little relationship to the actual culture of the island. “I do not know what has happened to the film, or care,” Harrisson wrote. “I hope they cut out me. … But it taught me a great deal, [and] snapped me out of my awful … depression that was almost suicidal, and merged the end of my island stay into laughter and the outside reality!”137 Instead of going back to Hollywood on the yacht as planned, he turned his back on fame and fortune and jumped ship in Tahiti. In 1937, he hitched a ride on a slow freighter back to England, just in time for World War II. The skills he had learned on Malekula in the New Hebrides would serve him well a few years later in another tropical jungle—Borneo. Harrisson gave his Borneo operatives three rules of warfare. First, everyone should go barefoot as much as possible; in a place where only Europeans wore shoes, a boot print in the mud would signal their presence incontrovertibly to the Japanese.138 Second, SEMUT 1 soldiers would be provided little, if any food from headquarters. This rule forced his operatives to adapt to the local environment and eat what the locals ate. “SEMUT 1 operatives had no hope of surviving, much less accomplishing their mission, unless they had the wholehearted support of the local people wherever they stayed. If they could not make the local people like them well enough to feed them, they were as good as dead.”139 The third rule was to scatter his operatives in groups of no more than three, forcing them to integrate into local communities.140 Harrisson’s rules forced his operatives to ‘go native’ to a significant degree, and the benefits were considerable: it concealed their movement; developed trust with the local people; and consequently improved intelligence. As one of his subordinates noted, “We were not given good jungle training.… We were very raw. But I think Tom, telling us to go native and live off the land, in a lot of cases probably saved our lives. He said, ‘You’ve got to rough it.’ And when you rough it, you are alert all the time. You aren’t sitting playing cards.”141 The hardships these rules placed on soldiers, however, were also considerable. They caught typhus and malaria, went without food for days at a time, lost a third of their body weight from hunger and dysentery, and developed weeping sores that would not heal. “For leaving them without food and other comforts,” as his biographer noted, “for forcing them to walk all over Borneo, for never praising them directly or sympathizing with their miserable conditions, a couple of these young men seriously considered murdering Tom.”142

Among military personnel, the term ‘going native’ has a predominantly negative valence, associated with loss of perspective, misplaced loyalty, and mission failure. Going native “typically corresponds to an apparent dereliction of duty with regards to their original purpose for being in the foreign area in the first place.”143 On the other hand, going native also has a romantic mystique associated with soldiers who have done so in the pursuit of national objectives, such as T.E. Lawrence, and often in contravention of established rules and orders.144 Much of this mythology of the soldier-gone-native has been perpetuated in cinematographic portrayals, such as the Last Samurai, Dances with Wolves, and Farewell to the King (which is roughly based on Harrisson’s life). Going native also has mixed connotations among anthropologists. On the one hand, since the predominant anthropological methodology—participant observation—requires that anthropologists live for extended periods of time among the people they study, full assimilation into the society serves as a badge of accomplishment and rite of passage. Thus, in graduate school, stories are told about the disciplinary ancestors who took part in secret rituals, learned forbidden knowledge, or married local people: Evans-Pritchard used the local oracles for regulating his affairs when he was with the Azande;145 Liza Crihfield Dalby took on the social role of a geisha during her fieldwork in Japan;146 Frank Hamilton Cushing spent forty years in a Zuni Pueblo and was initiated as a war priest. Stories such as these perpetuate the archetype of the ‘gone native’ fieldworker,147 an experience for which many anthropologists yearn. On the other hand, going native also implies a loss of scientific objectivity in which the anthropologist becomes so deeply enmeshed in the worldview, politics, and religion of the local society that they are no longer impartial and objective.148 Don Kulick, in his essay “Theory in Furs: Masochist Anthropology,” argues that going native is a type of psychosis among anthropologists: “an overflowing and disgorging of the unconscious into the realm of the lived.”149 The concept may exist as a fear/desire in both anthropology and the military, but what can the social science literature actually tell us about going native? Generally, it has been categorized as a subtype of acculturation. In the 1930s, anthropologists began to study how continuous first-hand contact between the colonial powers and indigenous societies resulted in social change and cultural adaptation,150 defining acculturation as the process of cultural change resulting from contact between two autonomous and independent cultural groups.151 Anthropologists noted that this twoway process was not necessarily egalitarian,152 and often involved some element of domination or coercion.153 Sometime in the 1970s, however, anthropologists rejected the idea of acculturation entirely (previously a canonical staple), partly as a byproduct of an aversion to the notion of cultural boundaries.154 In the view of some anthropologists, treating cultures as discrete entities promoted separatism and nationalism,155 excluded subaltern groups thereby legitimating inequality and domination, and objectified and reified culture.156 Although anthropologists have more or less abandoned the study of acculturation and repudiated the notion of cultural difference,157 cross-cultural psychologists and scholars of international management have developed an interest in acculturation as an individual phenomenon involving transition from one culture to another. The processes and problems of individual cross-cultural adjustment impact the performance of multinational corporations, including skills required for longterm expatriate success, personality characteristics beneficial for adaptation to a foreign culture, and how individuals adapt over time to new environments.158 Although there has been some recent attention paid to cultural competence, the literature on military acculturation is quite slim. Scientific studies on military acculturation tend to focus on topics important for selection and training, specifically desirable individual personality traits and the most effective forms of training. Bearing the paucity of literature in mind, any discussion of ‘going native’ requires us to build a new model since little applicable to military cross-cultural adaptation exists. First, it is worth noting that acculturation can be conceptualized as a scale;159 it is not an either/or proposition, but involves movement (both physical and psychological) from one culture to another. Second, there appear to be at least three levels of accultruation: shallow acculturation acculturation, liminal adaptation, and going native. Third, these levels of acculturation can be distinguished by three psycho-behavioral elements: manifest behavior, conflict (stress), and level of mission focus. At the low end of the acculturation scale—shallow acculturation—soldiers adopt local practices, customs, and clothing for purely pragmatic and instrumental reasons. Often, borrowing the style of headgear, facial hair, or clothing reflects tactical considerations related to operating in the environment in question. For example, T.E. Lawrence, while leading Arab guerillas against Ottoman troops during World War I, dressed like a Bedouin in long, flowing white robes. He also carried three or four changes of clothing on an extra camel so that his clothes would remain spotlessly clean.160 This attire was not just a fashion choice: Capt. William Shakespear, another British agent operating in Arabia at the time, refused to dress like an Arab and was killed by a sniper in 1915 because his British uniform made him an easy target.161 Adopting the external signifiers of the indigenous forces—such as headgear, beards, or clothing— may demonstrate an alliance of interests, cement a partnership with local nationals, or win the respect of the local people. Special Forces in Afghanistan, for example, often wore beards to “win the respect of tribal chieftains in a land where beards are taken as a sign of manliness and maturity.”162 Sharing the same burden as indigenous people also builds camaraderie. While traversing the interior of Borneo to recruit indigenous forces, Harrisson and his men “went

unarmed, carrying our own personal baggage—something unheard of for any previous European— and to an unnecessary extent sought to express our wish to be one and the same as all the people we had already implicated in this initially precarious enterprise.” Enduring the same conditions and hardships as the locals “really sewed up the loyalty of the immediate surrounding villages,” such that by the end of third week, Harrisson had recruited 100,000 volunteers.163 Adopting clothing, modes of transportation, or even military tactics does not necessarily signify any deep connection to the local population. In fact, adversaries often mimic or borrow each other’s tactics and technologies during armed conflict—a form of adaptation called “antagonistic acculturation.”164 During the French-Indian wars, for example, British troops adopted the guerrilla tactics of their opponents. Similarly, during the Boer War, British forces adopted new skirmishing and deployment tactics, and these were subsequently introduced into the British Expeditionary Force of World War I.165 “Overt hostility, that is actual warfare, seems to impose very little bar to cultural borrowing. Each of the hostile groups may recognize in the other a foeman worthy of its steel, and one from whom elements of culture can be taken with gain rather than a loss in prestige.”166 During shallow acculturation, few psychological conflicts arise, and those that do generally involve violation of country-of-origin regulations: wearing a beard, drinking rice wine, sacrificing chickens, and many other local practices are generally prohibited under the regulations (indeed, beards are not allowed under U.S. Army regulation 670–1 regardless of tactical or cultural considerations). Another type of conflict in shallow acculturation concerns the difference between culture-of-origin customary norms and those in the host society. One Canadian officer, for example, observed that he found it very uncomfortable the first time an Afghan National Army (ANA) general took him by the hand to go walking and talking together. The notion of holding hands with another man was bearable, however the knowledge that the author’s troops were watching and snickering and would undoubtedly bring back the story to the unit was much more difficult to accept.167

In shallow acculturation, normative conflicts are almost always resolved in favor of the individual’s nation of origin. Thus, the Canadian officer was more concerned with what his unit would think about socially inappropriate hand-holding rather than what the Afghans would think about the socially inappropriate omission of hand-holding. Over the course of weeks, months, or years (and maybe even never), soldiers may transition from a state of shallow acculturation to something deeper. When and if they reach the middle of the acculturation spectrum—liminal acculturation—soldiers continue to adapt their behavior to local norms and values, but their reasons for doing so change. Their formerly instrumental, calculating approach to the population (drink tea with the sheikh in order to obtain his support) is displaced by intangible, personal motivations (drink tea with the sheikh because you enjoy his company).168 ‘Liminal’ means existing betwixt and between states of being—not dissimilar to the transition from child to adult. Liminal experiences often produce significant stress: in this case, existing betwixt and between cultures may result in cognitive dissonance or the destabilization of an individual’s moral code.169 In 1962, Brigadier General William Yarborough, the commandant of the U.S. Army Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, wrote a short essay on expectations of Special Forces in unconventional warfare that highlights many of the sources of acculturation stress inherent in the unconventional warfare mission: The Special Forces soldier must be able to influence those indigenous personnel and their leaders with whom he finds himself affiliated on an operational mission. Owing to the ever present risk that any demonstrated or even suspected act of disloyalty on the part of a committed Special Forces soldier could disaffect the indigenous forces and cause complete failure of the mission, the soldier’s loyalty to his mission, to his nation, and to the contemporary indigenous personnel must be unquestionable.… He must make an unhesitating response to the truth and proper act as defined by local customs, policies, and laws.170

Although Yarborough opines that a Special Forces soldier must be unquestionably loyal “to his mission, to his nation, and to the contemporary indigenous personnel,” under certain circumstances, loyalties to the mission and loyalties to the local people might come into conflict. One such example is that of Major Jim Gant, a Pashto-speaking Army Special Forces officer whose work with a tribe in eastern Afghanistan in 2003 led to the initiation of “village stability operations” in Afghanistan. At one point, Gant: decided to give [the villagers] as many weapons and as much ammo as I could get my hands on. I felt like not only was it the best thing to do, but the moral thing to do as well. I had asked them to risk so much—what else was I supposed to do? I am comfortable with the decision for two reasons. First, the tribe needed more weapons to help defend themselves and, more importantly, Malik Noorafzhal and his people viewed these weapons as great gifts. These were gifts not only of honor but trust as well. These gifts bound us together even more than we already were. Power in this area was about the ability to put armed men on the ground to attack an adversary or defend their tribe. Guns were the ultimate currency.171

As this quote shows, Major Gant’s loyalty to the indigenous people came into conflict with statutory legal authority, and in this case was resolved in favor of the local people for both practical self-defense reasons and for intangible reasons of friendship and honor. Yarborough also writes that a Special Forces soldier must “act as defined by local customs, policies, and laws.” But what if local customs, policies, and laws are opposed to U.S. customs,

policies, and laws? Interpretation of the international law of armed conflict and rules of engagement often differ between nations, even between allies.172 In the U.S., killing or torture of prisoners, trophy taking, rape, murder of civilians, and looting are considered to be a violation of both military and international law. However, in other societies taking trophies from the dead (such as hunting a Japanese head in Borneo) may be considered appropriate or even required by local standards. When Special Forces soldiers work with indigenous units, they may be torn between abiding by the local rules of engagement and their country-of-origin version.173 Ethical dilemmas due to conflicting social norms can often become a source of deep psychological tension,174 and there is often no bright line for soldiers to follow, especially when they are isolated and far from home. Unconventional warfare demands a high level of what psychologists term “host culture involvement,” defined as assimilation into the local society including the creation of social bonds, conversion to the local religion, financial investments, and a feeling that the new place is home.175 Major Gant, for example, developed a filial relationship with one of the tribal elders and felt an obligation to protect him and his tribe as if he were the man’s actual son. “Afghanistan. I feel like I was born there,” wrote Gant. “The greatest days of my entire life were spent in the Pesch Valley … I love the people and the rich history of Afghanistan. They will give you their last bite of food in the morning and then try to kill you in the evening.”176 The danger arises when soldiers develop a high degree of host culture involvement in combination with a low “culture-of-origin involvement.”177 For psychologists, “culture-of-origin involvement” refers to the degree to which an individual retains social, family, and financial ties to their home of origin; identifies themselves by culture-of-origin; intends to return home someday; and so on. Low culture-of-origin involvement means cutting ties to home; intending never to return; and identifying with the adopted country. The combination of a high degree of host culture involvement with low culture-of-origin involvement frequently results in a total loss of mission focus. The best example of this process and its result can be found in the film Apocalypse Now. “Things get confused out there, power, ideals, the old morality, practical military necessity,” muses the character Lieutenant General Corman. Out there with these natives, it must be a temptation to be god. Because there’s a conflict in every human heart, between the rational and the irrational, between good and evil. And good does not always triumph. Sometimes, the dark side overcomes what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. Every man has got a breaking point. You and I have one. Walter Kurtz has reached his. And very obviously, he has gone insane.178

At the far end of the acculturation scale, ‘going native’ means complete assimilation into a local community.179 In a military context, going native includes three chronological elements: an internal change to the psyche of the individual; perceived or actual conflict concerning the individual’s loyalty to their country-of-origin; and finally, the loss of mission focus. Beginning with the first element, sociologists and psychologists have observed that assimilation involves internal changes within the mind of the individual, a “psychic condition necessitating a consciousness of kind.”180 This internal change often begins with emotional involvement with the host nation communities. In his monograph A Combat Advisor’s Guide to Tribal Engagement, Patrick James Christian notes that “Success at combat advising depends on psychological and emotional connection and such connection creates discomfort during the insertion and extraction of competent advisors into targeted tribes or cultural-political entities.”181 For Christian, a U.S. Army Special Forces officer with deployments to Ecuador, Columbia, Sudan, Ethiopia, and Iraq, this “compelling emotional-sympathetic response” towards the local community is necessary to the mission but may interfere with a soldier’s ability to make rational, impartial judgments. “If the combat advisor cares too much, he will not be able to make the difficult decisions regarding the tribe if and when such a time comes.”182 Second, these internal changes may result in perceived or actual conflict regarding loyalties to their country-of-origin. From a conventional military perspective, sending soldiers out into the wild creates a danger that they will go permanently ‘off the reservation’ While flexible command and control over special units provides the latitude necessary to complete the mission, this latitude also provokes a certain amount of anxiety in the minds of conventional headquarters. Having been admonished not to go native by his superiors, Christian recalled: From the perspective of a conventional warfighting officer or NCO participating in counterinsurgency, such close relations with tribal leaders and their followers may seem to be a narrow separation from “treating with the enemy.” Many such military leaders perceive all or nearly all members of that host nation society to be in some way responsible for the insurgency … This is, of course, why such conventional military headquarters are mostly dysfunctional in countering the insurgency in the first place.183

Third, when host nation involvement is combined with dissociation from country-of-origin,184 soldiers may shift their loyalty from their country-of-origin to the host community. From a military perspective, the shift of loyalties inherent in joining a new community endangers the entire mission. As Christian notes: There exists in every tribal engagement mission an invisible line that divides the communal identity of the tribe from the combat advisor team. This line represents the willingness to submit to the will of the communal whole as an individual member. This is a line that the combat advisor can never cross without submitting to the will and authority of the tribe and its leaders, thus forfeiting the mission. Such submission removes the combat advisor from his role as impartial consultant-advisor-guide and places him in a subservient role in the

community.185

In other words, transfer of loyalty to a new social collective subordinates the soldier to the will of that collective, and is therefore incompatible with mission execution.186 This transfer of loyalty—the sense of devotion, allegiance, and attachment—is at the heart of the military’s going native taboo. Going native resembles treason, except it occurs in the cultural rather than the political domain. In sum, going native remains controversial among anthropologists because it implies a loss of scientific objectivity. Among soldiers, it is also taboo because it may incur a loss of mission focus. But the question remains, did Harrisson go native? First, Harrisson’s depth of feeling for the people of Borneo indicates an internal emotional state typical of going native. When told by the Dutch to remove his Australian forces from their territory, Harrisson told the Dutch commanding general: Sir, I only care about this thing from one point of view. I hope I am not being too sentimental or absurdly romantic when I say that I feel very deeply indeed about these people. I cannot feel any differently about them or any less devotion to them, whether they are now to be classed again as the subjects of the Dutch, the British or anyone else. I must implore you to consider what will happen to them if you only think of this matter in terms of military or immediate political precedent or prestige.187

At that point, “taking both of us wholly by surprise,” Harrisson burst into tears. The Dutch general kindly offered him a cigarette.188 Second, Harrisson’s loyalties to his country-of-origin came into direct conflict with his loyalty to Borneo at the end of the war.189 After Japan had surrendered and the Armistice was signed, a Japanese unit of 350 men was still marching through the Borneo jungle, unaware that the war had ended. Despite the presence of enemy forces, the Australian 9th Division commander ordered Harrisson to demobilize the Dyaks and avoid engaging the renegade Japanese unit. According to an Australian official military history, “the 9th Division had reached its objectives, and it was not part of its task to extend its control throughout the hinterland or to ‘mop up’ the broken Japanese army.”190 The Australian 9th Division apparently did not believe Z Special reports that a Japanese column was marching through the jungle. Frustrated by the failure of the headquarters to understand the situation on the ground, Harrisson assembled a makeshift force and set off into the jungle. “As I was supposed to have no arms—let alone a private army with me—and as we were clearly heading up for a private war in peace, I was excessively bothered by trying to keep the peace with 9 Div. and avoid their reaching a state of nerves where they would actually call the whole thing off.”191 Harrisson procured the weapons and the troops quasi-legally and eventually, after hiking around in the jungle, located the Japanese column. Over the course of two days, Z Special and the Japanese exchanged small arms fire. On the last day of October 1945, “in a highly inconsequential ‘ceremony,’ the Japanese commander handed me his sword, as we stood beside a rice hut, which I remember was almost falling down as a relic of the previous harvest season.”192 Do Harrisson’s actions indicate a conflict of loyalties leading to a definite loss of mission focus (for example, the disobeying of direct orders)? The answer to this question depends on how the mission is defined and who defines it. Presumably, Harrisson’s objective was to establish peace and security in the interior of Borneo; a condition that could only be achieved by eradicating the Japanese unit, despite this being a clear violation of the Armistice. On the other hand, in the view of 9th Division, the war had been won and thus all hostilities must cease forthwith. Harrisson clearly felt that the objective (security) could not be achieved without violating the Armistice. The regular army, however, felt that violation of the Armistice prevented the objective (peace) from being achieved. One might conclude that Harrisson had a harder time adapting to the Western military system than he did adapting to the Kelabit way of war.

Adapting to the indigenous way of war In unconventional warfare, U.S. forces must operate “through or with an underground, auxiliary, and guerrilla force in a denied area.”193 Unlike direct action missions, in unconventional warfare U.S. forces are not self-contained autonomous entities; they cannot simply impose their own way of doing things on indigenous irregulars. Rather, they become dependent on the local knowledge, manpower, and skill of indigenous forces to achieve their mission, and therefore they must adapt to local preexisting social, economic, and geographical circumstances. As Colonel John Jandora has observed, “The key is to stay within the culture and to assess the practice of war according to the native ethos and logic, not according to Western criteria. The operative question is: how do foreign armies engage their enemy, not how should they engage him.”194 Probably the best known example of practicing war according to “native ethos and logic” is that of T.E. Lawrence. In an interesting passage in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence explains how he developed a strategy against the Turks based not on the Arab and not British ‘way of war.’ He writes that the “suitable maxims on the conduct of modern, scientific war” did not fit the situation on the ground, and that the classical military theorists were wrong that “‘victory could be purchased only by blood’ … for we were indubitably winning our war.”195 In arriving at this method of fighting this kind of war, Lawrence first identified the Arab objective as “geographical, to extrude the Turk from all Arabic-speaking lands in Asia.”196 Second, Lawrence identified the indigenous force’s theory of victory: for the Arabs, victory was defined by geographical control, not by the number of enemy dead.197 Third, he identified the adversary’s weakest link, which in this case was material

resources: “In Turkey things were scarce and precious, men less esteemed than equipment. Our cue was to destroy, not the Turk’s army, but his mineral. The death of a Turkish bridge or rail, machine or gun or charge of high explosive, was more profitable to us than the death of a Turk.”198 Fourth, Lawrence identified the natural advantages and fighting preferences of his own forces, which we refer to as ‘the way of war’: “Our largest resources, the Beduin on whom our war must be built, were unused to formal operations, but had assets of mobility, toughness, self-assurance, knowledge of the country, intelligent courage. With them dispersal was strength.”199 Attacking their lines of supply instead of doing battle directly with the Turkish Army utilized the natural advantages of the Arabs, and minimized their weaknesses. Lawrence’s fifth and final consideration was the local force’s weaknesses. In this case, the Beduin—both because of the value they placed on human life and because they were warriors not soldiers—could not tolerate casualties: “Governments saw men only in mass; but our men, being irregulars, were not formations, but individuals. An individual death, like a pebble dropped in water, might make but a brief hole; yet rings of sorrow widened out therefrom. We could not afford casualties.”200 In total, these five elements of “native ethos and logic”—both pragmatic and cultural—led Lawrence to a strategy for the campaign: the Arabs should avoid presenting any target to the Turkish Army, and should avoid battle as much as possible: Most wars were wars of contact, both forces striving into touch to avoid tactical surprise. Ours should be a war of detachment. We were to contain the enemy by the silent threat of a vast unknown desert, not disclosing ourselves till we attacked. The attack might be nominal, directed not against him, but against his stuff; so it would not seek either his strength or his weakness, but his most accessible material. In railway-cutting it would be usually an empty stretch of rail; and the more empty, the greater the tactical success.201

Like T.E. Lawrence, Harrisson developed a military strategy for unconventional warfare that effectively utilized the indigenous ‘way of war.’ In this case, the Kelabit’s objective was to rid Borneo of the Japanese (a goal shared by the Allies),202 who had disrupted the island economy, preventing the Kelabit from obtaining the cloth, medicine, thread, and other trade goods upon which they depended.203 Second, the Kelabit theory of victory in fighting the Japanese (like the Arabs fighting the Turks) was defined by geographical control, not by the number of enemy dead. Third, the weakest material link of the Japanese, in Harrisson’s view, was their lack of jungle craft.204 “What chance had the Japanese, always moving with elaborate equipment and nearly always on the defensive, in these [jungle] conditions? How could they hope to compete with the silent hunter, let alone the soundless blowpipe and poisoned dart?”205 But what about the fourth factor considered by Lawrence, the fighting advantages of indigenous forces? The most significant natural advantage possessed by the Kelabit was their warrior spirit. The Kelabit “admired boldness,” wrote Harrisson, and felt “the urge to fight and kill. The total impact of their history, song, ritual, spiritual belief and observances honoured physical bravery in combat; and this had been denied them for many years past.”206 When Harrisson’s unit unloaded the weapons from the air drop containers, including rifles, carbines, Sten guns, Bren guns, hand grenades, sub-machine guns and high explosives. The very sight of these weapons acted with compulsive force upon every able-bodied Kelabit male.… All that any ordinary man wanted was to be allocated some lethal weapon on charge. The idea of levelling it at all was madly exciting; a mood that we sharply exploited by fire-arms practice upon the plain. The idea that white men might actually sanction a return to arms for murderous purposes seemed almost as marvelous as the para-facts of our appearance. The promised opportunity of shooting, at a later date, at the Japanese (who had confiscated their own shot guns and compelled them to bring down and sell products for little or nothing, as taxation) produced an enthusiasm which must—even at this great distance—have stirred uneasily all the ghosts of Strensall and Sandhurst. As the borak spread its added courage into the cockles of these bold hearts, I began to realize that tone of my big problems was going to be damping down over-enthusiasm and keeping control over the urge to kill.207

In addition to being natural warriors, another advantage possessed by certain Dyak groups was their natural command and control structure derived from tribal organization.208 This was nothing new; social ordering for defense of the tribe and its claimed territories can be traced back to our early ancestors.209 Even in recent conflicts, tribal social networks form the “basis for military organizational structures, imbuing the latter with much flexibility and … durability under stress.”210 On the island of Borneo, as Harrisson discovered, the Kelabits, “though very strong individualists, basically submerge personal interests and adopt very strict discipline under their own leadership when necessary.”211 Similarly, the Kenyah (a river dwelling people) had “the great advantage of having powerful chiefs and clear-cut hierarchies, facilitating command and control.”212 The Iban, on the other hand, lacked a class system which meant that in large groups “they are not easily amenable to order or disciplined organization.”213 Harrisson admired the Iban as jungle warriors, but found them unsuitable as partners in unconventional warfare: “we could not exercise so much control in activities which by their very nature, put a premium on individuality, irregularity and at time impulse.”214 The Kelabit revered military prowess and had a social organization that enabled command and control. In addition, the Kelabit already possessed the skills and techniques required for jungle warfare as a result of their hunting practices.215 The preferred Kelabit method for killing Japanese was not direct assault or trench warfare, but jungle warfare. As Harrisson noted, “the principles

involved in attacking Japanese in the jungle are precisely those involved in hunting deer or monkeys. Necessarily, through generations of group experience and years of personal experience, the male population of the interior can move in accordance with this simple law of jungle success: “do not be smelt before you are heard; do not be heard before you are seen; and, below all, do not be seen.”216 The Kelabits were masters of jungle stealth: I have, in fact, actually seen a Kelabit (for a dare) touch a wild pig, which was in full possession of all its faculties and fit. There are plenty of records of these people getting close enough to rhinoceros to spear them, though not necessarily with lethal effect; and the rhinoceros, though regarded as one of the stupidest and most unseeing animals of the forest, has a notorious sense of scent and hearing, as well as an extreme sensitivity to vibrations and movement upon the jungle floor.217

Their weapon of choice—the blowpipe—was ideal for hunting in the jungle because it was both deadly and completely silent. “A master blowpiper can hit a monkey in a treetop, provided the foliage is not too dense. He can shoot further sideways, level, than any sizeable target is ever likely to be distinguishable and tree-free in the underscrub.”218 Many of the Dyak tribes smeared their blowpipe darts with a poison obtained from tree sap, which stopped the heart within an hour if deeply embedded in the flesh. “The dreadful advantage of the blow-pipe attack,” Harrisson wrote, “is its silence. If you miss with your first, just flip in a second dart from the bamboo quiver, press lips against the pith base and with sibilant puff, barely audible, whirl the next point at a target a hundred feet, or further, away.”219 In the early days after landing there were not enough guns to go around, so Harrisson sanctioned the formation of several blowpipe groups. Once the weapons were dropped by parachute, Harrisson replaced blowpipes with firearms. The Kelabit, unaccustomed to this type of armament, quickly learned how to use them and incorporated them into their jungle warfare praxis. We never had to teach a Kelabit or Murut how to move or kill. But there was always an appreciable danger that in moving they might kill themselves, with things like hand-grenades; or kill each other, instead of the enemy, by a combination of over-enthusiasm and the automatic lever on a carbine or Sten gun.220

Even after the Kelabit switched to guns, blowpipes remained the weapon of choice for one nomadic group called the Punans—“wizards, naturally of quiet movement and poison-dart accuracy.”221 The Punan roamed in small bands in the uplands of central Borneo living off wild vegetables and game. Having few interactions with either the government or other tribes, the Punan only became aware of the Japanese occupation because they were no longer able to obtain tobacco. “They had never seen any of these monsters. They had only heard of them from the settled people with whom they bartered, as ‘Orang Gippun’. That was enough. They wanted to liquidate these Gippun and get back to tobacco.”222 The Kelabit hunted deer, monkeys, and wild pigs in the jungle (typically with a poison dart blowpipe), but they also hunted humans for their heads. The head had tremendous power in the Kelabit worldview because it “sees, eats, speaks, hears and smells,” and is therefore the one “indispensable” part of the body. “In a sense, it is everything. A head can exist without a body, where a body cannot persist without a head.”223 Traditionally, the Kelabit hunted heads for four main reasons. First, heads might be taken “for renewing the vitality of the longhouse and land” during difficult times, such as famine or flood. In this type of headhunting, according to Harrisson, the community was replenished through the concentrated magical force of the severed head. Second, the Kelabit took heads “as an expression of hatred and insult to another community” when the underlying disagreement could not be settled by other means. This would be considered an act of war. Third, the Kelabit took heads “as an act of individual protest, most often by an upper class man who feels humiliated … especially if his wife publicly rebukes and/or privately nags him for some inadequacy.”224 This type of headhunting would avenge humiliation. Fourth, as Harrisson noted, “the young man who went out and got an enemy head could marry anyone available, and often his success would cause some specially attractive girl to propose to him.”225 In this case, headhunting symbolized bravery and physical prowess. When a head-hunting party returned to the longhouse, the heads had to be washed and purified on the ground below. As this was done, the women sang, sobbed, stamped, and danced with the head. These protective measures existed to ensure that the head’s “power is not too great for the place; and to prove that the good qualities (which go with the head) alone get in, shedding anything bad, including everything to do with the body and the alien spirits attached to another community.”226 After bringing the head into the long-house, the Kelabit spent “several days of visiting, drinking, dancing and general pleasure,” and then: placed in a rack hung on the verandah. This particular head then becomes a centre for important spirit offerings and prayers, for the time being. The longer a head has been around, the less its febrile power is felt to be. Thus in any severe run of ill-fortune, grave accidents, or inexplicable disasters, a new head offers hope of retrieving the situation and preventing further misfortunes. A disaster is no isolated incident; it is rather a warning that something is wrong somewhere and every one had better attend to the atmosphere smartly.227

Following the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824, both the British and Dutch governments conducted campaigns to eradicate headhunting from Borneo. The Dutch officially declared headhunting illegal in their territory in the 1890s and encouraged missionaries to convert the coastal Dyaks to

Christianity, believing that the “civilizing influence” of religion would prevent headhunting.228 Similarly, in Sarawak under the Brooke dynasty, headhunting was banned in theory.229 However, the hands-off policy of the Brook Rajahs—while it protected the Kelabit from other tribes, ensured their access to trade goods, and prevented proselytizing by missionaries230—enabled headhunting to continue sporadically in the uplands.231 While the Kelabit were not especially active headhunters when Harrisson arrived in 1943, headhunting was nevertheless an important element of their culture.232 Longhouses were decorated with human skulls hanging from the rafters,233 and many Kelabit stories, songs, and sagas recounted over borak around a fire concerned headhunting and glorious deeds of the past. Because heads were still required for ritual purposes, the government kept “a small store of human heads which are let out to tribes for ceremonial purposes. A suitable fee is charged, and the number of the head and date of loan recorded in a catalogue.”234 The government seems to have tolerated this aspect of local culture, despite its obvious hypocrisy. As A. C. Haddon noted, “Head-hunting is rigorously put down, and rightly so; but when the Government organises a punitive expedition, say, to punish a recalcitrant head-hunting chief, the natives comprising the Government force are always allowed to keep what heads they can secure.”235 Despite attempts to eradicate the practice, by June 1945, as Judith Heimann notes, “headhunting was back in vogue in northern Borneo.”236 The practice was not widespread, but Dyak troops under the control of Z Special did take Japanese heads. In one case, within twenty-four hours, an Iban unit accompanied by Z Special soldiers killed and beheaded eleven Japanese. When the soldiers notified Harrisson that the Iban were cutting off Japanese heads upriver, he replied, “The civil authorities and the mission people will not like this.”237 After the Australian 9th Division set up its headquarters in northwest Borneo in 1945, the local Dyaks “would sometimes bring one or more heads to brigade headquarters with the same air of triumph that a house cat would bring a dead rat to its mistress.”238 Harrisson recognized that he could neither eradicate headhunting nor ignore it. To secure his advantage over the Japanese and complete the mission, he had to incorporate the Kelabit way of war —including headhunting—into the fight against the Japanese. Consequently, Harrisson used the Dyak kinship system as a command and control mechanism; he wove their jungle warfare practices (including stealth and blowpipes) into his own tactics and he adapted to the Kelabit concept of hunting. Headhunting, unlike most Western concepts of war, does not involve direct assault. Among the Kelabit, “the object of head-hunting is to hunt, get and bring back one or more heads; normally one per operation.”239 Hunting—whether of animals for food or people for their heads—did not involve combat between well-matched adversaries; when a head needed to be taken, even the head of a child sufficed. The Kelabit felt no “need for open man-to-man challenge” with the Japanese, preferring to kill them as quietly and expediently as possible. Even when the Kelabit went to war against their neighbors, violence took the form of a single, brutal symbolic act—lopping off a human head with a large blade.240 Harrisson adapted the indigenous way of war to the fight against the Japanese, but he had concerns about the long term effect of weapons on Dyak (and especially Kelabit) society. Using the blowpipe to kill other human beings was “to the Kelabit mind, as to mine … much like using poison gas in Western war. It was a deadly thing to do—lest the idea of fighting with blowpipes should be established, sanctioned by experience and subsequently continued.”241 Harrisson found it ironic “that this return of the white man was to lead the now completely peaceful hill peoples back into the paths of pre-white headhunt and war.”242

Conclusion What can we learn about unconventional warfare from the WWII experiences of Tom Harrisson? At the level of the individual, the simple take-away—as Judith Heimann notes—is that soldiers fighting unconventional wars have to be “observant, shrewd, original, independent, tough, energetic, and inured to danger and discomfort. In short, you had to be much like Tom.”243 Another lesson that could be drawn from this chapter concerns the requirements of the military as an institution, specifically the knowledge, skills, and abilities required by unconventional warfare as a type of military practice. Indeed, most of this chapter has focused on that mid-range analysis, arguing that working by, with, and through indigenous forces to oppose a government or occupation authority implicitly mandates certain knowledge, skills, and abilities which are generally quite rare in any group of men: local knowledge, adaptation to the indigenous way of war, and acculturation without ‘going native.’ But perhaps the most interesting lesson falls in the realm of unintended systemic consequences. Like the examples offered in other chapters of this book, military engagement with non-Western societies—including unconventional warfare in 1944—results in paradoxes that appear to be inherent in the war system as a whole. Harrisson’s operation in Borneo contains at least three. First, the paradox of local knowledge can be summed up with the oxymoronic phrase ‘armed anthropology.’ Unconventional warfare intelligence requirements—such as “micro-regional” information about ephemeral topics in exotic locations—can only be produced in situ and requires that Special Forces assume the role of anthropologists. Most anthropologists do not believe it is possible to conduct ethnography with an M-16 slung over their shoulder; likewise, most soldiers do

not believe it is possible to conduct unconventional warfare with nothing more lethal than a pencil and pad of paper. Yet both of these communities recognize the value of inductive, qualitative research. Moreover, they both believe that intuition (coup d’oeil) plays an integral role in pattern recognition and integration of multiple perspectives into a synthesized whole. The second paradox opposes the military’s pragmatic command and control requirement and the equally utilitarian need for Special Forces soldiers to operate ‘off the reservation.’ As noted in the introduction, unconventional warfare demands that Special Forces operate outside the regular military system of order. Military organizations are characterized by order, discipline, and routine; they act according to set procedures, follow established planning processes, abide (more or less) by the guidelines set out in doctrine, defer to international humanitarian law, and so on. Military organizations generally do not allow much free choice, nor do they easily tolerate iconoclastic individuals within the ranks. (British military records show that Harrisson’s “views and extraterritorial activities … made him an object of scorn and loathing to his very regular Colonel.”244) Despite the orderly structure and process of the military machine as a whole, the core mission of Special Forces (and their progenitors, the OSS) requires that these soldiers use unconventional tactics, employ irregular forces, and operate for long periods of time with limited command and control. Their job—paradoxically—requires them to ‘go off the reservation,’ to withstand the cognitive dissonance of being in uniform but operating outside the order of the regular Army. Harrisson fully accepted this confusing state of chaos was part of the job. Regarding his command in Borneo, he wrote: We lived the military life that every decent soldier dreams of on active service. With “Z”, a private could have as much decision as a colonel, a major more than a major-general. For nearly everything that I did in wartime Borneo I answered to no one, beyond reporting by radio. … This is not to say that I did not obey orders. I obeyed all I could, and explained when I could not. Those under my command conducted themselves in the same way towards me. None of them took orders from anyone else except “Z”. In war this was disciplined paradise. It was also the only method of operating inside Borneo, with effect.245

Geographic separation from the chain of command, the secret nature of operations, and the need for autonomy more or less require that Special Forces integrate into local communities and live simply off the land as a matter of survival.246 Thus, the paradox of unconventional warfare is that the weak command and control structure necessary to achieve military objectives enables acculturation, but the acculturation required for the mission also potentially endangers the operation if taken to an extreme. Third, the paradox of adaptation brings military necessity into conflict with military ethics. (We might identify this as the ‘snake eater’ paradox, referring to the unappetizing demands of survival that potentially violate Western cultural norms.) At the beginning of this chapter, I noted that, unlike direct action missions, in unconventional warfare U.S. forces are not self-contained autonomous entities that can simply impose their will through force. Rather, they must conduct operations through, with, or by indigenous populations. Deeply immersed in the local world, soldiers are purposefully isolated from their own society, and often detached from their own culture’s moral norms of right and wrong. As General Yarborough noted in 1962: “The Special Forces soldier not only will be confronted with the problem of making the right decision more often than most soldiers, he [will] also often have to make decisions alone and stripped of the normal cultural and psychological influences that constantly prompt a soldier to act in a manner accepted by his society.”247 Some of these ethical conflicts may involve relatively minor matters, such as accepting accolades from indigenous forces. (In Harrisson’s case, he fell asleep on the second night in the Kelabit longhouse, and “woke up to find myself a Rajah. … I was The Rajah. Plain and flatly that—though I was slow to realize it!”248) A more significant ethical conflict concerns military norms for the treatment of enemy dead. In Harrisson’s case, should a Special Forces soldier follow rules and regulations prohibiting military personnel from taking enemy body parts as war trophies? Or should practitioners of unconventional warfare—working by, with, and through indigenous forces—abide by the military norms of their non-Western compatriots? If it is the customary practice of indigenous forces to eat snakes or cut off the heads of their enemies, refusing to participate or accept the gift may gravely insult the host with consequences to the mission. On the other hand, in this era of synchronic communication, eating snakes or taking scalps with the locals may result in court martial. Harrisson and his compatriots erred on the side of military necessity rather than ethics. In a PBS documentary based on Judith Heimann’s book the Airmen and the Headhunters (which details how Harrisson and his men rescued a downed U.S. bomber crew in Borneo), one photo shows a Japanese head elevated on a pole that had been presented to Australian forces by the Dyak warriors. Nobody seemed to mind a decapitated head on a pike in the photo, which presumably indicates an acceptance of the practice. Just as unconventional warfare generates a number of paradoxes, Harrisson himself was also something of a paradox. As a scholar, Harrisson took pleasure in violating conventional wisdom, trespassing on normative boundaries, and tipping sacred cows. In an era when many anthropologists still believed in social evolution, Harrisson believed in the equality of all humanity: “We are not superior to the Borneans, nor indeed to cannibals, cattle drivers or kings. We are different. Each man is different. And not very.”249 In an era of anthropological scholarship when “valid comparative generalizations,” “theoretical frameworks,” and “informant ethnology” were

fashionable, Harrisson believed that ethnography should be approached inductively from the local point of view, by full participation in local life. What oceans of error we should have been spared if those who wrote about the “savage,” primitive mentality, had done more primitive living! … Surely recorded customs have no standing and point unless the conditions and necessities which determine them, which cause and are caused by them, are well understood. A man should keep his notebook out of the way until he can do (moderately well) at least two things peculiar to the people he is living among. The savage is no longer savage when his is no longer fighting and fearing and making. Yet it is on missionised or pacified “savages” that most of our modern theory is based.250

As a soldier, Harrisson was also something of a paradox. He understood the military necessity of unconventional warfare in Borneo to support the overall Allied strategy in the Pacific. Yet, he knew that military presence in upland Borneo could potentially destroy the very people it was intended to protect: It was only too obvious that if we were going to overthrow the Jap regime we must in parallel put back some other. I was worried about the effects of our dislocating the whole of the interior economy—by introducing all sorts of new services, medicines, currency and by introducing people on a large scale to new trade routes, saleable commodities and other people with whom they had never been in direct contact before. Psychologically I was even more worried by the possible effects of reintroducing and vigorously sanctioning the killing of human beings. How would anyone be able to stop this, click, on an external armistice?251

Concerned for the well-being of the Dyak, Harrisson stayed on in Borneo after the war as the “officer administering the interior” with the British Borneo Civil Affairs Unit. Eventually he was appointed as the curator of the Sarawak Museum and editor of the Sarawak Museum Journal. He continued to explore the island, discovering the oldest remains of homo sapiens sapiens known at the time in the Great Cave of Niah. He founded the first orphanage for infant orangutans; started the first green sea turtle conservation effort; and produced a series of six television documentaries about Borneo for the BBC which won the Cannes Grand Prix. For his exploration of Borneo over the course of thirty years, Harrisson was awarded the Royal Geographical Society’s Founder’s Medal, a royal medal given to explorers such as Sir Richard Burton.252 He died in a car crash in Bangkok in 1976. Throughout his life, Harrisson felt an intuitive, otherworldly connection to Borneo and its people: “I found in these people something I had been looking for without success in the West. Answers to an unhappiness which I had not yet learnt to analyse and offset on my own.”253 Yet, paradoxically, his efforts to protect and popularize the amazing beauty of the island contributed to its destruction. “Tattooing, long hair, flashy beads, bone hairpins, leg bangles: all these and much else are OUT,” he wrote after the war, replaced by missionaries, the English language, literacy, Protestant hymns, and cash instead of salt (only the local custom of penis piercing seems to have survived the Western cultural onslaught). The highlands of Borneo from where Harrisson and the Kelabit operated have been transformed into a very posh golf course. “Carelessly we obliterate what we do not understand.”254

6

JOHN USEEM AND GOVERNANCE OPERATIONS

Ngkora beab ere Ngaraard, el kma lisiu e kma lisam. [Like the rat of Ngaraard, eating your coconuts, then mine.] A proverb of Palau which tells the story of a pet rat owned by the chief of Ngaraard, who ate the coconuts of the chief ’s neighbors, then, still hungry, at the chief ’s own coconuts. A decision that backfires.1

Early in the morning of 17 September 1944, assault troops from the 81st Infantry Division advanced onto the beaches on the Micronesian island of Anguar. Transported to shore in amphibious landing craft, U.S. forces moved up the beaches past burned and bombed palm trees, weapons in hand. Among them was U.S. Navy Lieutenant John Useem (1910–2010), who, as the unit’s senior civil affairs officer was responsible for the local Micronesian civilians living on the island. Useem, although he had a PhD in sociology,2 had no prior civil affairs experience and no knowledge of Micronesia, but Micronesia would change his life, and the lives of many Micronesians would be changed by him. The strategy for the American offensive against Japan was to move across the central Pacific, clearing and holding Japanese-occupied islands as the precursor to an invasion of Japan itself. Much later in his life, Useem recalled that in 1945, it felt like “We were living under a death sentence … I knew I wasn’t coming back.”3 The fight in the Pacific began in late 1943 in the Marshall Islands and involved fierce combat against fortified Japanese positions on Majuro, Kwajalein, and Enewetak. After the Marshall Islands, the Northern Marianas islands of Saipan and Tinian were taken from the Japanese in June 1944. The next objective was the Palau group, which was the intended location for the forward airbases needed for the invasion of Japan.4 Seeking to establish a major air base as far west as possible, the U.S. decided to attack the lightly defended islands of Anguar and Peleliu.5 Taking these islands would also protect MacArthur’s flank when he attacked the Philippines and would remove a major source of phosphate for the Japanese.6 In August 1944, B-24s began the night bombing of Anguar and Peleliu, destroying airfields and Japanese defenses. In September 1944, the battleship USS Tennessee began bombarding the island while aircraft from the USS Wasp strafed Japanese forces.7 Shells crashing to earth threw trees into the air; fires burned out of control; and plumes of black smoke billowed across the island. Some of the local people fled into the jungles or hid in caves during the bombardment, and many had no idea what war meant. One young woman who survived the bombardment remembered that she “did not know what a bullet was, or that it could kill.”8 As Karen George notes, Having no history of modern industrial warfare, Palauans knew of war only in its traditional sense of small-scale conflicts between districts, villages, or clans. Almost all had heard rumors about war in varying forms, but no one at this time could know the actuality of large-scale mechanized war, and they therefore had no frame of reference through which to understand what was likely to happen.9

After they landed on the beaches of Anguar, troops from the 81st Infantry Division fought up the beachheads and across the island. The Japanese had no regular defensive line and had to be blasted or burned out of their positions with flame throwers and satchel charges. U.S. forces captured the phosphate plant and Saipan town and immediately began building an airstrip while under fire from Japanese snipers. After four days of constant air strikes and bombardment, the Japanese retreated to the northwest corner of the island, which the official history of the 81st Infantry Division called the “toughest terrain on the island.”10 The Japanese were using coral caves, many of which were fifteen feet deep, as fortified positions. For the next two weeks, bombardment by heavy artillery continued day and night. The caves that the Japanese were now using as strongholds were also used by local people seeking safety from the bombs. As one man who survived the attack recalled, “The Japanese and the Palauans were now at the front line together.”11 Threatened constantly by bullets and shrapnel, local people drank the water that dripped off of the rock walls, fearing for their lives and cowering in the dark.12 On 24 September 1944, U.S. forces began broadcasting messages in Japanese, encouraging enemy troops to surrender. When the Palauans heard the broadcasts, they were afraid because the Japanese had told them Americans were “fierce people” and that if they tried to surrender “the American soldiers would hurt or kill them.”13 Eventually, 183 people emerged from the caves and became the responsibility of Lieutenant Useem, the civil affairs officer in charge. Their sole possessions consisted of a few packs carried in their arms; these contained religious tracts, makeup

for the girls, handicraft implements for the artisans, native stone money and Japanese currency, tortoise-shell work (the most valued possession of the clans), some miscellaneous household utensils, prized clothing, and a few cigarettes.14

The Americans were terrifying and strange to the islanders. As one boy recalled, “Some of us were afraid because the Americans were big and it was hot and they only wore shorts. Because of the sun they were all wearing sunglasses and their skin had turned red.”15 As the people emerged from the caves, Useem recalled, “They were terribly frightened of us. They’d been told by the Japanese that we were going to rape the women and murder the men. … I decided the thing we had to do first was to take care of their bodies. … They were thirsty, they were hungry, they were injured, they were dying.”16 When they arrived back in camp, several civil affairs personnel were digging a latrine. Some of the islanders assumed it was a grave for them.17 A few days after emerging from the caves, the stress of the bombardment, starvation, and surrender was too much for one islander, who attacked several others with an axe and then killed three civil affairs personnel, “breaking their skulls.”18 Useem, who had been asleep during the attack, jumped out of bed believing that the Japanese had invaded the camp. “So in this pitch black, heavy rain, with no knowledge, no language capacity, with great turmoil and confusion, everyone extremely frightened, I had to figure out what was going on. It took me until around 6:00 in the morning and by then I was covered in blood.”19 Knowing nothing about American justice, the local people expected retaliation in response to the murder.20 That morning, a delegation of the man’s family came to see Useem and told him “we are ready to die.” Through an interpreter, they explained that “Our family has been destroyed, our household has been disgraced. Our clan no longer has a name, so please kill us, whatever way you wish. We don’t know how you kill in America.”21 Astounded, Useem told them, “I am an American and I am not going to kill you.”22 Within twenty-four hours, he had made arrangements to move the entire family off Anguar to Saipan and convinced the other Palauan families not to punish the axe murderer’s family.23 With no other major altercations, life began to return to normal in the American compound. After a month of starving in the darkness of the caves while under military bombardment, life behind the fence in the American camp felt, in the words of one boy, “something like heaven.” “Life,” he recalled, “actually began within that fence.”24 From an American perspective, however, the complications of governing a foreign society were only just becoming apparent. As Lieutenant Useem wrote in 1945, “The liberation of a primitive society proved to be a far more complex affair than anticipated.”25 Although his observations and experiences in Micronesia were remarkable, Useem is generally remembered for his academic scholarship rather than for his wartime experience. A native of California, he received his bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Los Angeles and a PhD in sociology from the University of Wisconsin in 1939. Like most sociologists, his early research concerned American society; but unlike most sociologists, this involved fieldwork in the communities he studied. With great empathy for his subjects, Useem conducted research on economic security in rural Massachusetts, noting that security concerns more than the ability to pay the bills: “it also comprehends an anchorage in the community, and a minimum of anxiety over economic hazards.”26 He also conducted research on social stratification in a prairie town in North Dakota,27 a topic that would later become critical during his wartime service. After the war broke out, Useem joined the Navy in 1942. He participated in the assault and landing, eventually becoming the ‘proconsul’ for the island of Anguar in the Palau group in Micronesia. After his Navy service in the South Pacific (1943–1945), Useem returned to his faculty position at the University of Wisconsin. Most of his later career was dedicated to the study and analysis of cross-cultural experiences, particularly in India and the Philippines. This chapter asks: what can we learn from the wartime civil affairs experience of John Useem? Specifically, what can we learn about the pitfalls and contradictions of military government?28 Useem’s experience on Anguar in 1944 stands as a microcosm of much of the U.S. experience of military government across the Pacific and in the European theater. There was no long-range foreign policy guiding governance and no real plan for daily administration. Civil affairs troops knew little about Micronesia, and what they thought they knew often turned out to be wrong, based as it was on faulty and outdated social science. Attempts to train military personnel in anthropological skills and approaches, and large scale research programs to improve socio-cultural understanding for the purposes of administration, were implemented too late to be of much use. The most important source of difficulty, however, was the contradiction inherent in a program of democratization instituted in a foreign society. While the post-World War II military governments established in Germany and Japan are often offered as examples of successful governance operations, the partially successful case of Micronesia better exemplifies the paradoxes at the heart of the military government enterprise. The issues that plagued the U.S. military government in Micronesia, and which John Useem wrote about in the 1940s and 1950s, were the same issues that plagued the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq more than half a century later. What happens when the policy of democratization is incompatible with the existing social order? What happens when American social norms conflict with the society they intend to govern? What happens when the core principle of military government—non-interference —cannot be implemented in practice and outright contradicts the imperatives of ‘nation building’?

Military government Following the debacles of the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, the trend in U.S. foreign policy circles is to eschew exporting democracy through occupation of foreign countries. While the occupation of Japan and Germany following World War II are probably the best known examples, the occupation and administration of foreign territory has been a recurring task for U.S. armed forces for the past two hundred years.29 Military governments were established in areas retaken from the British during the War of Independence; in the Louisiana territory beginning in 1803; during the American invasion and occupation of Canada during the War of 1812; in annexed territories during the War with Mexico (1847–8), including New Mexico and California (1846–50); and during the reconstruction of Texas following the Civil War (1861–5). The U.S. established military governments in Cuba (1906–09), Mexico (1914), Haiti (1915–134), the Dominican Republic (1916–1924), the German Rhineland following World War I (1918–9), and more recently in Iraq (2003–08). Since the invasion of Panama in 1989, U.S. military forces have been almost continually engaged in postconflict operations. James Dobbins of RAND points out that Iraq was “the sixth major nation building enterprise the United States has mounted in eleven years, and the fifth in a Muslim nation or province.”30 Although the U.S. military has continually engaged in governance operations, the name for these activities has changed over time. Military government, in layman’s terms, refers to the military assumption of the authorities and functions of a civilian government.31 The 1943 Manual of Military Government and Civil Affairs, which was current doctrine when the U.S. was administering Micronesia, defined military government as “the supreme authority exercised by an armed force over the lands, property and the inhabitants of enemy territory, or allied or domestic territory recovered from enemy occupation, or from rebels treated as belligerents.”32 At the present time, the term ‘military government’ does not appear in the doctrine or organization of the U.S. armed forces.33 The 2011 version of Field Manual 3–57, Civil Affairs Operations, refers to what would have previously been called military government as “support to civil administration”—the “establishment of a temporary government … to exercise executive, legislative, and judicial authority over the populace of a territory that U.S. forces have taken from an enemy by force of arms until an indigenous civil government can be established.”34 Recently, the term ‘stability operations’ has been utilized to capture some of the functions of what was earlier called military government, referring specifically to post-war stabilization and reconstruction.35 Another term that is sometimes used to refer to this particular set of activities is ‘nation building,’ defined in 2003 in a RAND study as “the use of armed force in the aftermath of a conflict to underpin an enduring transition to democracy.”36 Although the name of choice has changed over time, the mission remains the same. Stripped of the confusing terminology in which it has become entangled, it can be characterized simply as the U.S. military assuming the functions of government in a foreign territory. Nadia Schadlow, in her seminal 2003 article “War and the Art of Governance,” referred to these operations as “government operations” and identified them as a “core element of all wars” involving the “establishment of political and economic order.”37 Although the term governance has been defined in a variety of ways,38 in U.S. military doctrine it is “the set of activities conducted by a government or community organization to maintain societal order, define and enforce rights and obligations, and fairly allocate goods and services.”39 Put simply, governance is what a government does. When the U.S. military takes on the role of a government in a foreign country, whether developing institutions, building infrastructure, administering justice, providing civil security, and implementing domestic and foreign policy, or some combination thereof, it is conducting governance operations. These operations fall along a continuum of effort. On one end of the spectrum lie governance operations with a minimal footprint and entailing minimal expense, such as providing advisors to foreign governments as the U.S. did in Vietnam prior to 1965. On the other end of the spectrum are operations that involve the complete reconstruction of a foreign government, usually after collapse due to conquest or liberation—in Germany after WWII, for example. These governance operations involve a much heavier footprint and a much greater expenditure of manpower, materiel, and money. As former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates noted, “Whether in the midst of or in the aftermath of any major conflict, the requirement for the U.S. military to maintain security, provide aid and comfort, begin reconstruction, and prop up local governments and public services will not go away.”40 Although the experience of Iraq and Afghanistan have left the U.S. military with an aversion to this type of operation, there are three reasons for the continued importance of military governance operations: practical necessity, legal obligation, and consequences of disorder. Establishing a functioning government in occupied territory is often a matter of military necessity. Where a government has been removed from power or has ceased to function, establishing a temporary military government may aid in the restoration of order and the minimization of political strife in occupied territories. As F.S.V. Donnison noted in an official British history of military government during WWII, “Modern war consumes governments and administrations in its path, leaving anarchy and chaos behind. If authority and the necessary minimum order and administration are not at once re-established, disorder and subversion can all too quickly erode the victory that has been won in the field.”41 In other words, military government ensures the social and political

stability necessary to solidify military victory. Establishing a military government in the event that the local government has ceased to function as the result of military conflict also protects and aids civilians. In this sense, military government fulfills a humanitarian necessity. As Les Grau and Jacob Kipp have noted: The operational commander must prepare to deal immediately with the civilian population. If the water system breaks down or becomes polluted, an epidemic will follow. If the commander surrounds the city, the populace will quickly run out of food. … The commander does not have the luxury of claiming that military necessity precludes consideration of civilians’ survival. He must prepare to restore or provide food, water, health care, public health services, and public safety.42

The duty of care and protection passes “to the occupying forces, they having deprived the people of the protection which the former government afforded.”43Establishing a functioning government in occupied territory is not just a practical necessity but also a legal obligation if military forces have established effective control over occupied territory.44 If the invading force has displaced the existing government and achieved effective control over enemy territory, international law grants some of the rights and obligations of the displaced sovereign to the occupying power so that the occupying force can maintain order and administer the territory.45 The first articulation of this principle was General Orders 100, Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field. Written at President Lincoln’s request and issued in 1863, General Orders 100 required military commanders to treat the population of occupied territories humanely: “As Martial Law is executed by military force, it is incumbent upon those who administer it to be strictly guided by the principles of justice, honor, and humanity.”46 General Orders 100 was not just humane, it was also pragmatic: the intention was to moderate the behavior of the Union Army in order to avoid animosity among the Confederate population. Thirty years later, General Orders 100 became basis for the Geneva and Hague Conventions governing the conduct of land warfare.47 The 1907 Convention (IV) Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land, Annex to the Convention, Regulations Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land (hereafter referred to as the Hague Conventions) established the post-conflict responsibilities of occupying armies. Article 43 requires that an occupying power must restore public order; Article 55 establishes an obligation for the occupying power to safeguard public buildings, agricultural and real property in order for them to be in sufficient working condition when the occupation ends.48 Other obligations under the Hague Convention include the duty “to restore, and ensure, as far as possible, public order and safety, while respecting, unless absolutely prevented, the laws in force in the country,”49 and the obligation to respect family honor, life, property, religious practice, and permit spiritual assistance.50 The 1949 Geneva Convention IV Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War (hereafter referred to as the Geneva Convention) requires commanders to protect and provide for the civilians under his control. Under the Geneva Convention, occupying powers have an obligation to maintain institutions devoted to the care and education of children;51 the duty to provide food and medicine to the civilian population;52 and the duty to maintain hospitals, public health and hygiene services, and allow medical personnel to carry out their duties.53 According to the U.S. interpretation of the Geneva and Hague Conventions, an occupying force has the right to administer the territory through a military government or a mixed military/ civilian administration,54 and to modify (in a limited way) the local, provincial, or general government.55 Thus, under international law, nation states occupying foreign territory have a duty to establish a government to serve the needs of the population. These international obligations are also part of U.S. military law: according to the U.S. Law of Land Warfare, if a government is toppled or destroyed during the course of armed conflict, the occupying power has the responsibility to exercise “governmental authority [when] the necessity for such authority arises from the failure or inability of the legitimate government to exercise its function on account of the military occupation, or the undesirability of allowing it to do so.”56 In other words, the victor must assume responsibility for the governance of the civilian population if no other government exists. The U.S. experience in Iraq, if it demonstrates anything, is that swift and decisive establishment of military control in occupied territories is preferable to no government at all. As the Iraqi proverb puts it, “better a thousand years of tyranny than one day of anarchy.” However, when Coalition forces removed Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, the U.S. insisted that military forces were “liberating” rather than “occupying” forces.57 While liberation certainly sounds better, the Geneva and Hague Conventions do not define the term or impose any requirements on ‘liberators’. Operating under the assumption that they were ‘liberating’ Iraq, military commanders did not issue any proclamation about who was in charge of the country or a time table for government transition; did not issue a curfew; did not order a return to duty for government personnel; did not outlaw possession of firearms; and did not prevent widespread looting. In short, the executive’s characterization of the war as “liberation” rather than “occupation” prevented military commanders from using the full scope of authority afforded to an occupying power under international law to control the territory in question.58 The U.S. government’s apparent abdication of its responsibilities as an occupying power worried the international community. Shortly after the arrival of the first U.S. ground forces in Baghdad,

then United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan requested that the Coalition “accept the responsibilities of the Occupying Power for public order and safety, and the well-being of the civilian population.”59 Although U.S. officials promised to meet their obligations under international law, they caveated that “the issue of an occupying power has not yet been dealt with.”60 Even Lieutenant General (Ret) Jay Garner, the head of the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), the occupation government, denied his own authority as an occupying power, stating, “The new ruler of Iraq is going to be an Iraqi. I don’t rule anything.”61 Unfortunately, as a result of these decisions, much of the initial good will of the Iraqi people towards U.S. forces evaporated. Ironically, as Lyle W. Cayce notes, “although the United States eschewed an aggressive use of occupation authority by military forces to avoid alienating the Iraqi people, the failure to ensure order produced that very result.”62 As the example of Iraq shows, failure to govern conquered territory often results in political, economic, and social disorder that threatens to undercut the actual policy objectives of the war itself. In fact, the decisive phase of operations may be the post-conflict period where the conditions for a favorable peace are often created or squandered. In their report to the Secretary of Defense, the Defense Science Board highlighted this very point. The Board found that, “without success in the aftermath of large scale hostilities, the United States will not achieve its political goals—the reason for going to war in the first place.”63 Or to put it more succinctly, “We will be called imperialists regardless, so we might as well be competent imperialists.”64

Inconsistent focus While military government has been, and will remain, a recurring mission for the U.S. armed forces since establishing some sort of government in occupied territory is both a practical necessity and a legal obligation, it has not received consistent attention as a component of doctrine or organization. Given the frequency of governance operations in U.S. history, the lack of attention awarded to them seems surprising. Why has the military been so hesitant to embrace this mission? The idea of the military controlling government functions is disagreeable to most Americans. At best, it seems “vaguely unconstitutional;”65 at worst, it raises the specter of an assault on civil liberties by proto-fascists in combat boots. Military government seems at odds with the principle of civilian control of the military which is enshrined in Article II of the Constitution of the United States, establishing the President as Commander in Chief of the military with ultimate control over military force. As Samuel Huntington argued, “objective civilian control depends upon the virtually total exclusion of the military from political power.”66 Objective civilian control has been the reality of American political life for over two hundred years, and military government seems anathema to that principle. But what happens after a war when a foreign government has been deposed? Should the military assume control over the civil authority of a foreign territory, or should Constitutional principles of civilian control prevail even on foreign soil? While this question may seem somewhat esoteric, it has been a subject of intermittent debate in the U.S. since the 1940s. At the beginning of World War II, President Roosevelt opposed using the military to administer occupied territories. Despite Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Secretary of State Cordell Hull agreeing that “administration in foreign lands must initially be an Army responsibility,”67 President Roosevelt assigned governance responsibilities for occupied North Africa to the State Department on the grounds that the governing of occupied territories was “a civilian task.”68 As a result, very little post-war planning was done for the invasion of North Africa in November 1942.69 The U.S. military had little desire to assume responsibility for governance functions. Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff, Lieutenant General Walter Bedell Smith, for example, believed that “the American people will never take kindly to the idea of government exercised by military officers,” and advocated civilian control for the occupation of Germany.70 In late November 1942, when the Allies found themselves responsible for the administration of conquered territory in North Africa, Eisenhower, writing to General George Marshall, said: “the sooner I get rid of all these questions that are outside the military in scope, the happier I will be; sometimes I think I live ten years each week, of which at least nine are absorbed in political and economic matters.”71 In the end, the military assumed control of governance tasks because it was the only U.S. government agency with the capacity to do so. Following the invasion of Italy in 1943, it became apparent that civilian agencies lacked the manpower and logistics to handle the relief and rehabilitation needs of the country. Roosevelt reversed his position on military government, invested the theater commanders with civil authority, and informed Secretary of War Stimson that the Army would have to assume “the initial burden” of military governance and that it shall “perform this function, pending such time as civilian agencies must be prepared to carry out the longer range program.”72 Since the State Department had neither the manpower nor resources to execute the mission, the War Department established a Civil Affairs Division under Major General John Hilldring to coordinate civil affairs planning. The question of exactly who is responsible for the post-war governance of occupied territory has still not been fully resolved in the U.S. In the case of Iraq, President Bush chose a model of civilian

control (albeit under a DoD banner) for postwar administration. Before the invasion in April 2003, Bush signed National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD) No. 24, which gave control of postwar Iraq to the DoD and established the entity that would administer the country, ORHA. ORHA, which had been structured to address primarily humanitarian relief requirements, drew personnel from the Departments of State, Defense, Treasury, and Commerce, and was headed by a civilian, retired Lieutenant General Jay Garner. Senior military officials did not object to this arrangement: CENTCOM commander General Tommy Franks apparently had little interest in either postwar planning or taking control of postwar administration, and was determined to keep military and civilian domains of operations separate.73 “I don’t want to get into the business of managing bus schedules,” Franks told Garner.74 Perhaps as a result of this approach, little if any coordination took place between ORHA and CENTCOM. ORHA staff were not even allowed to enter Iraq until sixty days after the toppling of Saddam.75 The military’s disinterest in postwar administration was matched by ORHA’s lack of capacity. As George Packer observed, “Everything was going to be turned over to ORHA—a skeletal, disorganized, impecunious crew of fewer than two hundred unarmed civilians wandering around in the dust and dark of the Republican Palace searching for colleagues because they didn’t have phones to call each other.”76 ORHA was replaced a few months later by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), led by Ambassador L. Paul Bremer.77 Like ORHA, the CPA was a civilian organization with staff was drawn from across government departments, but whose authority derived from its executive agent, the Department of the Army.78 The CPA, unlike ORHA, was not just intended as a humanitarian relief organization. It was established as an occupation administration, under the authority of the laws and usages of war and United Nations Security Council Resolution 1483.79 In theory, the CPA—as the occupation authority—should have had a unified command structure with the military. In reality, as Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of Combined Joint Task Force 7 (CJTF-7), wrote in his memoirs, “details of the command relationship between CPA and the military were never clearly defined by any level of command, all the way up to the Department of Defense.”80 As a result of this poorly articulated chain of command, Bremer had no direct authority over 98 per cent of official American personnel in Iraq, who were under military command.81 In addition, although intended to be the administration for the occupation of Iraq, the CPA was chronically understaffed, lacked knowledge about the country, and possessed limited capacity to govern. As a result, the task often fell de facto to the military on the ground. Whether civilian or military control of postwar governance is preferable is often a moot point: what the U.S. ought to do, as a democratic republic rooted in civilian control, is less of a determining factor than what the U.S. military is able to do. The military, simply because of its capacity, remains the most effective organization for the administration of occupied territories.82 Governance operations remain an inconsistent focus for the U.S. military because of the organizational culture of U.S. armed forces. In the fall of 2004, I attended a conference on irregular warfare organized by the U.S. Marine Corps at which the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/ CRS) provided a briefing on their mandate and capabilities. S/CRS had just been created by the State Department in July 2004 with the mission to “lead, coordinate and institutionalize U.S. Government civilian capacity to prevent or prepare for postconflict situations, and to help stabilize and reconstruct societies in transition from conflict or civil strife, so they can reach a sustainable path toward peace, democracy and a market economy.”83 Before their briefing, the Marine Colonel sitting next to me leaned over and said, “thank God they’re here—now we don’t have to do nation building anymore.” The colonel’s blunt comment captures a core element of military culture: self-identification as ‘warfighters’ whose primary task is combat. ‘Warfighting’ is a term commonly used in military doctrine and in military journals, but is not well defined. The term came into use in the early 1970s as part of a comparison between U.S. doctrine and fighting style with that of the Soviet Union. The term entered common usage in 1989 when the U.S. Marine Corps published Fleet Marine Force Manual 1, Warfighting.84 In the preface to the 1997 revised edition, General Alfred M. Gray, the 29th Commandant of the Marine Corps, described warfighting as a “philosophy.”85 The conceptual basis of this philosophy is “rapid, flexible, and opportunistic maneuver,” and according to the manual, “the essence of maneuver is taking action to generate and exploit some kind of advantage over the enemy as a means of accomplishing our objectives as effectively as possible.”86 Warfighting, at least in the context of the Marine Corps, refers to achieving objectives regarding an enemy rather than a civilian population. Similarly, Army Field Manual 3–0, Operations, defines warfighting in relation to combat power: the six warfighting functions (movement and maneuver, intelligence, fires, sustainment, command and control, and protection) generate combat power. “Combat power is the total means of destructive, constructive, and information capabilities that a military unit/formation can apply at a given time.”87 To put it simply, warfighting is the sine qua non of the military, and combines the core functions necessary to enable military forces to generate and employ combat power.88 When the military’s function is narrowly conceived of as warfighting, other activities are perceived as beyond the military’s scope. During the 2000 second presidential debate, George W. Bush expressed this view quite clearly when he opposed using American troops in peacekeeping operations, stating, “Our military is meant to fight and win wars.”89 Bush’s comments echoed the view voiced by President Harry Truman in May 1945: “the military should not have governmental

responsibilities beyond the requirements of military operations.”90 The view that the military’s scope and purpose is warfighting is common not just among presidents, but among senior military officers as well. General Henry Shelton opined that, “the fundamental purpose of America’s armed forces is to fight and win wars. Plain and simple.”91 Anything other than warfighting, according to former CENTCOM Commander Tommy Franks, was an unglamorous and thankless burden.92 In the view of many military personnel, reconstruction and governance operations are merely peripheral to the core task of the military, which is warfighting.93 Operations other than war, such as peacekeeping, humanitarian assistance, and governance operations, are distasteful to the military in part because they appear to fall outside the scope of the U.S. armed forces’ core warfighting mission and are at odds with the institution’s warfighting culture. Such operations are also difficult for the military to conceptualize, plan, and manage because they fall outside the temporal scope of war. In other words, governance operations occur after hostilities have been concluded. In the view of many soldiers, their job should end after victory is declared; cleaning up the mess afterwards should be someone else’s job. This notion—that the war ends and we all go home—has an old intellectual pedigree. In the nineteenth century, military reformers in the U.S., frustrated with messy missions in Mexico, postCivil War Reconstruction, and the Indian Wars, discovered the writings of Prussian general and theorist Count Helmuth von Moltke the Elder (1800–91). Von Moltke’s view was that the primary role of the modern military was to achieve victory in major combat operations and then withdraw forces while diplomats resolved other issues emerging in the aftermath.94 Von Moltke’s belief that the military’s role should end when hostilities cease continues to influence U.S. military thinking today. In 1945, for example, the Joint Chiefs of Staff expressed the view that the best way to prepare for the postwar period “is to end the war quickly.”95 In 1989, General Maxwell Thurman, the combatant commander for Operation Just Cause, the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989, noted that, “I think the proclivity was to leave the fighting to the warfighter and the restoration to the people who were in country [e.g., the Department of State].”96 The conceptualization of governance operations as a postwar problem reinforces the military tendency to avoid planning for such operations. In Iraq, for example, “There was no Phase IV plan” for occupying Iraq after the combat phase, according to Colonel Isaiah Wilson, an official historian of the campaign. “While there may have been plans at the national level, and even within various agencies within the war zone, none of these plans operationalized the problem beyond regime collapse.”97 One might imagine that Von Moltke’s ghost haunts the corridors of the Pentagon, wreaking havoc with American efforts at post-war planning. As Nadia Schadlow has argued: the root of Washington’s failure to anticipate the political disorder in Iraq rests precisely in the characterization of these challenges as “postwar” problems, a characterization used by virtually all analysts inside and outside of government. The Iraq situation is only the most recent example of the reluctance of civilian and military leaders, as well as most outside experts, to consider the establishment of political and economic order as a part of war itself.98

The complexities of governance As the foregoing discussion has shown, post-war governance has not been a consistent concern of the U.S. military, mostly because of organizational culture. How did this play out in Micronesia? Because of their strategic importance in the region, the U.S. government was prepared to annex the Micronesian islands,99 and turn the Pacific region into “an American Lake.”100 After some bureaucratic infighting over which agency would assume control, President Truman issued an executive order placing their administration under the Navy Department as an interim measure,101 which only ended in 1947 when the Trust Territory of the Pacific was formally established by the United Nations.102 When the formal administrative structure shifted from military government to trusteeship, the Navy remained in control, very often with the same field personnel.103 While governance of a foreign country is always complex, Micronesia posed unique problems. Unlike Germany and Japan, where the military invested time, personnel, and resources into sociocultural research before they took possession of any territory, the military administration of Micronesia was a step into the unknown. Little information was available: during the period of Japanese trusteeship of Micronesia (1919–1945): the Japanese had concealed this area behind a bamboo curtain, providing only the required cursory information about it to the League of Nations and severely restricting access to it by foreigners. The flow of this minimal information on the Mandated Islands of Micronesia was cut off when Japan withdrew from the League in 1935.”104 The U.S. began governing Micronesia “in a virtual vacuum of knowledge of either the places or the people who were now their wards.105

From a technical standpoint, the extent of the destruction caused by the war (including buildings, gardens, and food trees) and the logistical challenges of moving equipment and supplies made rebuilding infrastructure difficult.106 From a governance standpoint, the social complexity of Micronesia was also challenging. The territory of Micronesia contained hundreds of islands spread over ten million square kilometers of ocean. While Micronesia had a relatively small population of between 60,000 to 73,000 people, the inhabitants spoke seven different languages, each with

multiple dialects.107 Moreover, in 1945, the local people did not consider themselves to be affiliated or related to other inhabitants of the islands either by origin, racial ties, or common interest.108 Because of the settlement patterns that had resulted from the colonial history of the islands, the culture was a mixture of indigenous, Spanish, German, Japanese, and American elements which varied according to location. For example, the Chamorro people of Saipan and Rota were influenced by the Spanish and Japanese, while on Guam the local culture was more heavily influenced by Spanish and American settlements.109 Furthermore, Micronesia offered no consistent patterns of social or political organization. While most of the population lived in small villages organized by clan, in some cases, such as on Palau, political power was based on caste-like social structures. In some places chiefs were a common political feature, but with varying degrees of power. While chiefs had little power in the Marshalls, they wielded considerable power in western Carolines. In some places indigenous religions predominated, in others Christianity was practiced. On Palau, a syncretic, native religion called Modekngei, which fused ancestral native religion and Christianity, was growing.110 Military personnel such as Useem who possessed formal training in cross-cultural dynamics were able to observe, and in some cases even overcome the multiple conceptual, cultural, and practical barriers in implementing its foreign policy in Micronesia. It is worth noting that by training Useem was actually a sociologist, but anthropologists generally count him as one of their own tribe.111 Indeed, throughout his career, Useem relied on the research method most associated with anthropology: participant observation of a small scale foreign society over an extended period of time. Moreover, like other anthropologists in Micronesia, Useem was “concerned not only with the study of political processes in the islands, but also with the politics of the American presence.”112 As a highly educated but relatively junior officer, Useem did not challenge U.S. government policy in Micronesia directly. Rather, he was deliberately circumspect in the questions he raised regarding the quality of education provided to civil affairs officers, the processes for selecting military officers who would become governors, the assumptions American military personnel made about indigenous people, and the effect of the media on perception. Of particular interest are Useem’s observations about the paradoxes of exporting democracy in the wake of war. “The tasks involved in creating new power patterns need to be viewed in terms of the cultural contexts,” he wrote, “taking into account the skills and resources of the foreign governors and native governed. Otherwise democracy may result in manipulative symbol rather than a human value of worth.”113 Discussed below are three such disjunctions: the fallacy of non-interference; the paradox of exporting democracy; and the challenges of ‘culture contact.’ One of the principles of military government, derived from the Hague and Geneva Conventions, is that occupying armies should strive to avoid interfering with local civilian political and social institutions. In international humanitarian law, the relationship between occupier and occupied is seen as a contract in which occupying armies provide security and relief. Local civilians, in turn, should avoid interfering with the conquering army’s mission. If these conditions are met, the army should not interfere with civilian institutions, allowing them to abide by their local laws and customs.114 (Arguably, the principle of non-interference reflects a nineteenth century concept of a distinct separation between the military and civil society, in which after a war’s end, military victory would be swiftly followed by the resumption of ordinary civil society.) This idea of non-interference is codified in U.S. military doctrine and regulations, establishing a hands-off approach to the local culture and political system. Under General Orders 100 of 1863, for example, the occupier has “a moral obligation to protect people under its control from undue hardship and to provide them with basic governmental services. … [T]he laws of war discouraged commanders from radically altering the laws and customs of an occupied territory unless military necessity mandated such changes.”115 The 1940 Field Manual 27–5, Military Government and Civil Affairs, which guided planning, training, and implementation of all American military government during and after World War II,116 perpetuated the model of noninterference with civilians: “the national and state laws and local ordinances of the occupied territory should be continued in force, the habits and customs of the people respected, and their governmental institutions continued in operation, except insofar as military necessity or other cogent reasons may require a different course.”117 Later U.S. doctrine also followed the principles established in FM 27–5.118 The principle of non-interference meant that any government established by the occupying authority should ideally conform to the pre-existing local social order. As Elihu Root, then U.S. Secretary of War, remarked in reference to the U.S. occupation of the Philippines in 1901: [B]ear in mind that the government which they are establishing is designed not for our satisfaction or for the expression of our theoretical views, but for the happiness, peace, and prosperity of the people … and the measures adopted should be made to conform to their customs, their habits, and even their prejudices, to the fullest extent consistent with the accomplishment of the indispensable requisites of just and effective government.119

In practice, however, military occupation inevitably changes the societies that experience them. The mere presence of a large group of armed foreigners—even if well-disciplined, polite to civilians, and confined to military posts—will have an impact on local people. In addition, in practice military government involves not just meeting the bare minimum of security, relief and medical aid as required by the Hague and Geneva Conventions, but also enacting the political goals of the

occupying power in order to consolidate the victory gained through military force. Meeting those political goals inevitably interferes with and changes the local society. Sometimes the social engineering agenda of the occupying power is explicitly stated as an objective for the military government, brazenly ignoring the principle of non-interference. For example, the U.S. military government in Cuba (1899–1902) had an exceptionally broad mandate to change Cuban society in accordance with the politics of the Progressive Era. Motivated in part by Spanish repression and exploitation of the Cuban population, the U.S. declared war against Spain in 1898.120 Following the Treaty of Paris, Spain surrendered all claims to Cuban territory, leaving the U.S. in control of the remnants of its empire in the Caribbean. In one of his first acts as governor of Cuba, Brigadier General Leonard Wood marginalized the “discredited ‘coffee and rum drinking’ Spanish bureaucracy.”121 He then began an almost wholesale reformation of the Cuban government, including the expansion of the water and sewage system; the administration of justice in local courts; institution of economic reforms; educational exchange; and provision of health care and sanitation.122 General Wood later summarized his governance of Cuba as “the establishment, in a little over three years in a Latin military colony, in one of the most unhealthy countries of the world, a republic modeled closely upon the lines of our own great Anglo-Saxon republic.”123 So much for the principle of non-interference. In other cases, the principle of non-interference evaporates under the actual pressure of ensuring compliance with the will of the victor. For example, despite the language of the 1945 Initial PostSurrender Policy for Japan that the Allies would not “impose upon Japan any form of government not supported by the freely expressed will of the people,”124 they did exactly that. MacArthur initially planned to govern Japan through direct rule, but the Initial Post-Surrender Policy for Japan reversed the approach at the last minute.125 Under indirect U.S. rule, American forces issued guidance through the Japanese Cabinet, Diet (parliament), and Emperor.126 The Japanese executed the reforms within their own bureaucracies, and U.S. military provided oversight at the local level to ensure compliance. By late 1945, over 430,000 troops were stationed throughout Japan, including Military Government Teams stationed in every prefecture.127 Indirect rule legitimized the reforms, which appeared to the Japanese population to come from their own government, and minimized cultural faux pas by filtering U.S. directives through Japanese leadership.128 One can see in the principle of non-interference, so often trumped by strategic concerns and practical necessity, echoes of British indirect rule in Africa (as discussed in chapter two). Ideally, in a system of indirect rule, the occupiers would neither govern directly nor act as mere puppet-masters for native chiefs.129 Theoretically, local political and social institutions would be preserved, local people would govern themselves, and local people would be educated and guided by the “tutelary power” so that their mode of government would eventually conform roughly to Western democratic models.130 Indirect rule, though intended to preserve and use preexisting social and administrative systems, inevitably changed the societies it touched. Likewise, military government, though the official policy was one of non-interference, also changed the societies it touched. How did this play out in Micronesia? U.S. military government in postwar Micronesia proceeded on paper according to the wellestablished legal and doctrinal principles of non-interference. In the words of one military officer: All in all, the interest of the inhabitants (and incidentally, the best interests of the United States) would be best served by establishing in most of these islands a strong but benevolent government—a government paternalistic in character, but one which ruled as indirectly as possible (i.e., one which had minimum interference with local family and organization and custom).131

However, in practice the national strategic objective of securing the Pacific region trumped the principle of non-interference.132 In December 1945, Admiral Raymond Spurance issued a statement that the Micronesians should be “encouraged and assisted to assume as much as possible the management of their own affairs and the conduct of their government.”133 However, strategic concerns dictated not only noninterference but political and social isolation as well. Anxious that other nations might assert territorial possession of the islands, the Navy assumed “complete control over the economy of Micronesia in 1945 as a way of eradicating Japanese influence from the islands.”134 This economic control involved the complete exclusion of foreign nationals from the islands, creation of a trade monopoly, closing the islands to private enterprise and outside investment, controlling the importexport trade, and the integration of the islands into the U.S. customs zone.135 The isolationist policy was partially an accidental result of difficulty with logistics, transportation, and communication. “In a de facto sense, it seems that the Navy simply lacked the resources for extensive rule, whether traditional or American.”136 However, the isolationist policy also reflected a deeper agenda regarding Micronesian culture. From 1945–7, the Navy strictly controlled access to and travel within Micronesia, and refused travel permission to missionaries, businessmen, and anthropologists. The Navy justified denial of access on the grounds that outsiders had “upset local conditions in native areas in the past” and believed that limiting contact with outsiders would keep the natives “unspoiled.” Military officials were also opposed “to outside influences such as magazines, movies, and money.” In the words of one admiral, “why should they be taught to want Coca-Colas?”137 While this policy may have preserved local culture, the Navy’s isolationist policy threw Micronesian peoples back on their own traditions and resources. They had no political

representation, no access to higher education, no say in the judicial process of military courts, and were dependent on leaders appointed by local military government officials. As anthropologist John Embree noted in 1945, “although the Naval Government is operating with a benevolent paternalism, this paternalism is inevitably despotic.”138 Despite the intentions of the isolationist policy, when Useem arrived in Palau he did not find a pristine unspoiled society living according to ancient folkways. Rather, he found a group of people that had been dominated and colonized by the Spanish, the Germans, and the Japanese. Colonialism had resulted in the decline of the native population which “greatly weakened native social groups for they were unable to carry on many of their traditional activities with the smaller numbers.”139 Christian missionaries had converted nearly four-fifths of the islanders to Christianity, which entailed not just a change in religion but changes in clothing, dance, education, and morality also. As Useem observed: local leadership was circumscribed in its authority, inter-island warfare was eliminated, villages were consolidated into larger communities, clans and families were stripped of their traditional functions, ceremonies were curtailed, joint ownership of land was abolished, collective enterprise was outlawed, the handicraftsubsistence economy decreed to be outmoded, the leisurely routine of living was branded wasteful, existing sanitary practices were banned, and many native folkways were proclaimed immoral. In lieu of these indigenous patterns, the governments [of the Spanish, German, British, Japanese and Americans] attempted to introduce a mixed feudalistic-capitalistic, commercial, money economy in which the acquirement of a high material scale of living and personal self-advancement were central values.140

According to the Pacific Charter of 1945, Useem’s job as the military governor of Anguar was to lead the physical rehabilitation of the island, and restoration of the educational, health, political, and economic systems.141 In the absence of policy guidance, Useem was at liberty to devise his own style of pro-consulship in order to meet the Navy’s objectives. As he wrote in 1945, because the “military government organization is too young to have developed any extensive set of rules … civil affairs officers in immediate command of an island were fairly free to act as they saw fit.”142 At one extreme were those military governors who saw the “native population as enemy nationals who were to be given the minimum aid necessary for survival. Civilians were confined to camps where they were heavily guarded. Law and order were the criteria of good government. Fraternization between the military and civilians was discouraged. No rehabilitation was attempted.”143 At the other end of the spectrum were military governors like Useem who viewed the islanders as friendly neutrals who should be restored as soon as possible to a working society. They gave native leadership a free hand in running their own society. As soon as possible the refugee camps were replaced by new native villages. All efforts were made to move from emergency relief to economic selfdependency. The revival of the indigenous social systems was encouraged.144

However, as discussed below, this plan proved problematic when it came to its execution. The eradication of Japanese influence was a significant U.S. objective in Micronesia during the postwar period.145 At a local level, civil affairs officers generally followed one of two approaches for meeting this objective: to either let the natives rot in guarded camps, or to attempt some type of social engineering. Useem appears to be the only civil affairs officer in Micronesia to have attempted a unique experiment: “the restoration of the indigenous ways of living.”146 Restoration of former patterns of life predating the period of Japanese colonialism would meet multiple policy objectives simultaneously: it would revive the economic and political system while also eradicating Japanese influence. However, while feasible in theory, the restoration of indigenous ways of life was almost impossible in reality. “Building a village literally from the ground up is an exceedingly difficult enterprise,” Useem wrote, but “the reconstruction of native society proved to be a more formidable enterprise.”147 In the course of attempting to restore Anguarian culture to its pre-Japanese form, Useem encountered a number of obstructions that any government considering intervention might wish to take note of. First, human memory is fallible and constantly contested. “Attempts to restore Palau life brought disagreements over the exact nature of old institutions. Individuals live a social pattern rather than intellectually comprehend it in all its ramifications. Hence, knowledge of former ways was uncertain and the correct procedures became the topic of debate.”148 Second, social change in one area often requires alteration of the whole system. For example: The restoration of different cultural complexes led to internal contradictions requiring further modifications. For example, succession to leadership positions … was determined by status in the three hierarchal systems. Death and the evacuation of some of these native officials by the Japanese necessitated the choice of a new island chief and several rubak. Two rivals for the headship appeared, each with legitimate claims based on two different cultural traditions. Some families and clans lacked anyone eligible for the position of rubak. In such situations improvisations were made which entailed the compromising of ancient institutions.149

Third, not all customs and practices are actually beneficial to the local from which they originate: The appraisal of former customs in order to decide whether or not they should be reinstated is an exceedingly difficult task. It brings into the fore-ground the whole question of values. Past practices must be judged in the perspective of future goals, hedonistic folkways balanced with practicalities, etc. It also entails consideration of the intrinsic merits of the modifications made during the Spanish, German and Japanese regimes.150

Fourth, not everything can be changed: It was not possible or even entirely desirable to eliminate all of the cultural modifications which had occurred in the past fifty years. Some new traits had become deeply ingrained habit patterns, and even conscious efforts by the group to change them were not very successful—such was the case of bowing, which had become a motor response. Native school teachers, habituated to Japanese martial practices, found it hard to avoid … forbidding methods and resorting to military procedure in the classroom and in organizing sports. Numerous Japanese idioms of speech as well as some Spanish and German had infiltrated into Palau, and no adequate substitutes were readily available.151

Fifth, sometimes people do not wish to return to the past: A proposal to build thatched houses elicited the reaction that they were not as healthy or as comfortable as the modern wooden type. There was no interest in returning to the earlier type of dress or sanitary practices, and rice plus canned goods was regarded as the only completely satisfying food. Children were more interested in learning American than in hearing about the former customs. The attempts of the older women to teach the ancient dances were soon abandoned for lack of interest; youth wanted to do Western dances. Moving pictures were far more popular than native festivals.152

What can Useem’s experience in Micronesia teach us about military governance? Useem’s experience in postwar Micronesia shows that military interventions always interfere with local societies, and thus the principle of non-interference is better thought of as a foreign policy aspiration rather than a genuine option. The principle of non-interference presupposes that war (and the events that lead up to it) does not cause massive upheaval in the political, economic, social structure, and culture of a society. It also assumes the existence of a pristine, smoothly functioning society floating in stasis, to which war is merely a momentary disruption, and after which everything returns to normal. Yet in reality, war causes massive social upheaval and destruction. An intervention that does nothing to reconstruct the damage caused by war interferes just as much as an intervention that attempts (and perhaps fails) at postwar reconstruction. The question for those governments considering interventions is: which is the worse evil? Is it better to let the natives remain in isolation? Or take John Useem’s approach and attempt to restore (or create) a social order? If a government chooses post-war restoration as their approach, the problems created by this process may be worse than the problems it solves. The eradication of Japanese influence in Micronesia presented few options: either the natives had to be taught to want Coca Cola and assimilated into American society, or, as Useem attempted, the society had to be restored to its preJapanese colonial form. As Useem wrote, “eliminating Japanese influences appears a sound doctrine until one seeks for alternative patterns which can be integrated into the indigenous social order.”153 The “alternative patterns” Useem sought in Anguar’s past were no longer suitable to the social environment of the time, which had been radically altered by war and occupation. Unfortunately, as Useem discovered, every society—no matter how remote or intentionally isolated as a matter of security policy—is, in fact, constantly changing, both as the result of internal pressures and shifting external forces. The past is not a suitable model for the present. As Useem noted, the successful alteration of a going social system is an exceedingly difficult task. Primary social groups can be readily altered by the actions of an outside group, but the reconstruction of a balanced social order that is capable of operating on its own within the framework of the larger society remains an unknown social technique.154

In sum, the “reconstruction of a culture brings forth at least as many societal problems as the process of destruction.”155

The paradox of exporting democracy In Micronesia, the legal principle and military doctrine of non-interference proved to be little more than an aspiration, and could not be implemented in practice. Another hindrance to postwar governance of Micronesia was that American political ideology contrasted sharply with the local power structure and social norms of the society they sought to govern. As Useem wrote in 1945, “American democratic concepts of social equality clashed with native concepts of social stratification.”156 Similarly, the introduction of democratic procedures in the form of elections conflicted with certain features of the indigenous political system, such as social stratification and hereditary chiefdoms. Anthropologists typically characterize societies as falling along a continuum from egalitarian (in which all members enjoy equal wealth, power, and prestige) to stratified (in which some members have greater access to these social goods).157 The Indian caste system provides one well-known example of social stratification.158 Characteristically, stratified societies contain: Social groups that (1) are ranked hierarchically, (2) maintain relatively permanent positions in the hierarchy, (3) have differential control of the sources of power, primarily economic and political, relative to their rankings, (4) are separated by cultural and invidious distinctions that also serve to maintain the social distance between the groups, and (5) are articulated by an overarching ideology which provides a rationale for the established hierarchical arrangements.159

Not all stratified societies necessarily include all these features, but most include some. In socially stratified societies, social inequality is enmeshed in the social order. Yet, democratic government rests on a commitment to the principle of equality, in which no citizen is is awarded greater influence than any other.160 At first glance, there appears to be an inherent contradiction between the principle of equality in democratic government and in stratified social systems. What sort of equality does democracy actually entail? Of course, democratic government does not guarantee equality of talent, wealth, or health care. For political scientist Robert Dahl, the logic of political equality lies at the core of democratic concepts and institutions. Dahl defines the logic of political equality as the belief that “all the members of the association are adequately qualified to participate on an equal footing with the others in the process of governing the association,” and that “no single member, and no minority of members, is so definitely better qualified to rule that the one or the few should be permitted to rule over the entire association.”161 In Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy, Dahl offers five criteria that characterize a democratic process: (1) equality of voting so that no one citizen is given greater influence than another; (2) citizen participation throughout the collective decision-making process with equal opportunity for expression of preferences; (3) equal opportunity for each citizen to judge preferred outcomes; (4) control over the agenda by citizens, even if some decision-making authority is delegated; (5) inclusion of all adults who are subject to the law of the polity. According to Dahl, “it is reasonable to call a process of decision-making fully democratic if and only if it meets these criteria.”162 Violation of these principles renders the process undemocratic. If socially stratified societies are inherently unequal and the conceptual foundation of democracy is political equality, can socially stratified societies ever be democratic? A socially stratified society, by its nature, would seem to preclude the achievement of many of Dahl’s five criteria, such as the ability of all citizens to participate equally and express their preferences in the political process. Equal status and equal standing are central to the democratic ideal, but are not immediately realizable in a stratified society which is by definition unequal. It would be easy to conclude that “accepting the democratic ideal of equal citizenship is inconsistent with social caste.”163 Yet many democracies around the world have flourished in societies with highly stratified social organization, such as India. One way to resolve this apparent paradox is to view democracy less as something that either exists in full or not at all, and to consider it as a process of transformation. Legal scholar and philosopher Jack M. Balkin argues that democracy should not be conceptualized as a set of procedures, or even a form of government, but rather as “a form of social organization never fully realized.” In Balkin’s view: The deepest ideals of democracy are in tension with the social world in which all democracies exist and have always existed; democracies are always begun and carried out in the shadow of older regimes, existing social structures, past misdeeds, and continuing injustices. … Because democracies are societies, they have social structures; they contain different social groups with different places in those social structures. These social groups have contrasting social identities. They compete with each other for social esteem and material resources, for privilege and prestige. They have conflicting views about society; they have conflicting views about morality. And all of their conflicts are played out against the backdrop of those social hierarchies—just and unjust—that exist in any actual democracy.164

Because democracy, as both a political form and a political ideal, always exists in the context of a given social structure, it must either mesh with the pre-existing social order or, as Balkin suggests, transform it over time. As Balkin notes, “the democratic ideal calls for a social revolution: not only a transformation in legal form but in social structure.”165 When Useem and his comrades arrived in Palau, they encountered a society in which social stratification was common, but varied in form from island to island. In the main, social position was fixed at birth, although on some islands individuals could pass from one class to another through the process of marriage, attainments in artisanship and sorcery, the performance of military feats, or the demonstration of skill in administrative tasks. Position in the hierarchy established each individual’s rights and duties with reference to other members of the group and ascribed eligibility for leadership within each social system.166

Stratification applied not just to individuals; “families, clans, villages, and islands were ranked in a social hierarchy.”167 Yap, in the Caroline Islands, for example, had both a caste and a class system. In Yap’s caste system, “a hierarchy of endogamous divisions in which membership is hereditary and permanent,”168 there were no sanctioned means for a family to change its status.169 Palau, on the other hand, lacked a caste system with hereditary and permanent social divisions between groups, but did have a class system. The class structure of Palau—the area in which Useem worked— included three broad groups. First, the upper stratum was divided into the meteet (old wealthy families from distinguished clans) and the merau (lower class with accumulated fortunes). Second, the middle class (olues-blu), which includes the majority of the population. Third, the bottom class (ebuul) was poverty-stricken.170 Although the very idea of inequality irritates Americans, in societies with a stratified social order,

such hierarchical relationships may entail certain benefits and social obligations owed from the upper strata to the lower. In Pacific chiefdoms, the highest ranking person (e.g., the chief ) typically bore significant obligations to the rest of the community.171 In Tonga, for example, the “value” of the nobility is assessed and made possible by their dependents.172 Furthermore, in many stratified societies, class differences are also fungible and ambiguous in practice.173 In Micronesia, individuals sometimes manipulated the rules of succession and reconstructed their genealogies to attain higher rank.174 When Americans assumed control of Micronesia, they encountered a stratified society ruled by hereditary chiefs. Yet, as John Useem wrote, “It would be an error … to presume that there is no real democracy in Palau’s traditional patterns.”175 Before the Americans arrived in 1944, Palau’s traditional patterns had already been substantially altered by successive colonial governments. In order to simplify the task of ruling Palau, German and Japanese colonial administrations had consolidated the power of the chiefs (much as the British did in Africa during the period of indirect rule). Useem notes that the Germans and Japanese “converted Palau from a circular to a linear type of authority and from a dispersed to a centralized structure, for they preferred to deal with a few native leaders rather than with congeries of social subdivisions, each with its own distinct leadership.”176 The Palauans adapted to the political and social changes introduced by colonial governments by creating “in-facing” and “out-facing” chiefs.177 “To shield the native leadership from foreign pressures and, in part, to carry out duties assigned by the foreigners, a dual power structure evolved. One political organization ‘faced’ the foreigners, while the other ‘faced’ the natives.”178 While in some places, the dual system resulted in conflict, in most cases, “the dual system evolved a set of divided responsibilities with an elaborate pattern of checks and balances.”179 This system ensured that the Palauan political leaders could not amass excessive power and that they were answerable to the governed. For example, the highest ranking title-holders could not act without the approval of other title holders in the community; individual and clan rank were malleable; rules that ordered succession did not actually guarantee authority; political power was dispersed between social groups; officials who violated rules could be punished with death; inheritance of title was not automatic; title holders had to demonstrate capacity to govern; and so on.180 The Palauan system of dual chiefs, whose power was circumscribed by an elaborate system of checks and balances and who held their positions by consent of the governed, actually displayed many of the fundamentals of democratic political systems. As Useem noted, “Democratic processes are an inherent part of Micronesia society, but the means of expressing the collective will and the relationship of leaders to followers do not resemble Western ways.”181 Yet, because Palau’s indigenous political system bore no resemblance to Western notions of democracy, American military governors overlooked the democratic features of the Palauan political system and assumed that hereditary chieftainships were by their nature autocratic. The persistence of local authority along family and clan lines, in the view of the Navy, precluded the possibility of “republican” forms of government.182 Ironically, much like the Germans and the Japanese before them, American military governors, in their quest to identify lines of political authority that could be utilized for governance, actually strengthened and consolidated the hereditary power of the chiefs, in the process contravening the stated policy of democratization. (The same might be said about Afghanistan, where the ostensible goal of the U.S. was to foster democracy by supporting the central government, but instead U.S. forces in many cases provided aid to warlords to guarantee security, thereby weakening the control of the central government.) The first American military governor on Palau, as Useem recalled, “asked the first natives he met who was the high chief. He was informed that there were two high chiefs who headed confederacies of districts.” Forthwith, the American military governor told them to assume the duties of heads of states. On the premise that the ancestral customs were being reestablished, the governor delegated to these two officials more authority than they had ever possessed before, and the confederations were transformed into formal political states. The heads of the confederations were eager to capitalize on this rare opportunity to strengthen their control and proceeded to do so.183

With little knowledge about the proto-democratic features of the local political system, the Navy’s objective was “to establish a degree of self-government at the local level in accordance with American conceptions of democracy.”184 Instead of a “total reorganization of the indigenous political institutions,” U.S. administrators introduced democratic procedures in the election of native officials.185 Shortly thereafter, elections for local officials at the district and village level were held. However, while they introduced a procedure associated with democracy, elections did not alter the fundamental distribution of power:186 the people of Palau continued to circumscribe the power of elected officials in accord with traditional practices.187 Democracy in Palau was, in many ways, more a matter of form than substance. As Useem noted: A military force must have security in the midst of war and could not permit the local inhabitant to reside or act in any manner they wished. … The proffered self-government under such circumstances was like that form peculiar to a student body in an American school—native society was free to decide providing it made the “right” decisions and free to act as long as its actions were confined to unimportant details or in accord with the interests of the occupying force.188

Individuals who “proved unacceptable to the foreigners for one reason or another were removed from authority and new elections staged. Persons so removed usually continued to exercise power by maintaining control over native-facing political institutions and by contriving to have elected persons subject to their orders.”189 Palauans intentionally ‘misinterpreted’ U.S. directives and modified plans. Aggravated by this subversive resistance, military officials penalized local communities by withdrawing privileges, ousting the native representatives, holding elections repeatedly, ignoring the native leadership, and issuing orders directly to each individual, “only to become involved in an infinite complexity of details.”190 On Palau, American military governors encountered a society that was highly stratified, in which certain people had significantly greater access to power and resources from birth: powerful chiefs ruled by right of inheritance. Coming into contact with a society so radically different than their own, the U.S. military made two dangerous and false assumptions: they assumed that a lack of social equality and the existence of hereditary chiefdoms precluded democracy. As Useem noted: An immediate problem that confronts any administration of a society with a hereditary system of authority is that of determining the extent to which inheritance precludes democratic processes. It cannot be premised that inheritance implies autocracy in primitive societies. The traditional lines of leadership may actually, as in the case of Palau, provide for a regular line of succession to office but permit a change in office-holder when the individual is deemed unsuitable.191

Instead of attempting to fully understand how the society of Palau actually worked, and how (as Balkin suggests) democracy might mesh with the existing social order, the U.S. policy for military government was to introduce Western style democracy, or as a Congressional committee recommended, “teach the American way of life but do not disturb native institutions.”192 Guided by this policy directive, and assuming that the inequality of stratified societies precluded democracy, the U.S. military promoted social equality to the detriment of the local social system. A concrete example may help to illustrate this point: “An attempt to ascertain who needed shoes evoked a community-wide controversy,” according to Useem. Shoes were not merely an article of wear but also a mark of status. Those who previously were without shoes insisted that everyone urgently needed them, and persons who once possessed them maintained with great feeling that only the elite were entitled to shoes. … The issue was finally resolved by the compromise provision of shoes to all workers, thereby setting up a new social category. These were thereafter worn regardless of personal comfort and correctness of fit.193

The American belief in equality (that everyone should have shoes) contradicted the Micronesian concept of status (that only the elite should wear shoes). The American solution, meant no doubt to alleviate simmering conflict and provide emergency relief, altered the existing social structure in contravention of the policy of non-interference with local social institutions. The U.S. military also introduced elections in Micronesia, but in practice this did not change the way power was exercised on Palau: the same men continued to hold office; the system of dual chiefs continued unabated; and traditional checks and balances remained in effect. U.S. military governors, when displeased with the results of elections, removed elected individuals, held new elections, or ignored the leadership entirely. Useem was keenly aware of the dangers inherent in exporting democracy. Democratic forms that enhance the control of foreign rulers rather than “strengthen[ing] the native society” alienate the population. Additionally, the election of “native officials who serve thereafter as the agents of authority by receiving support not from below but from above do not become local leaders in a movement to expand the concept of democracy. Such elected leaders may become the objects against which revolutionary movements are organized.”194 Democracy may be a noble goal, but the means used to introduce it into other societies must be equally noble: “It is essential to comprehend the means used in relation to the ends desired when introducing democracy. Otherwise, there is the very real prospect of eliminating existing democratic patterns while trying to introduce democratic forms in accordance with institutional structures.”195 The American experience on Palau raises a significant question that has continued relevance for the U.S. military, especially in light of recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan: if military forces foster changes in local societies in order to bring that society into conformity with their own democratic ideals, do they violate other principles of democracy such as self-determination in the process? “Democracy is hard enough to use as a guiding principle in American society,” wrote Useem in 1946. But: Out in the Pacific it is doubly so. To give formal recognition in governing a people to a caste system goes against our concept of the democratic way of life, yet to break up the social system without offering cultural equivalents would produce chaos within the group. Moreover, despite our verbal profession of equality of peoples, most Americans actually regard natives as innately inferior. Similarly, self-government is a nice symbol but far from simple to use as a framework of operation in a society where peoples have been subservient for nearly three centuries.196

If the military attempts to change a society to make it amenable to democracy, backed by the implicit threat of force, how democratic is that?

The challenges of culture contact Officially, the U.S. government no longer engages in military government, and a variety of factors account for its disappearance as a doctrinal concept: unresolved Constitutional questions about military control of civil authority; political distaste for military occupation; military aversion to the task itself; and so on. Yet while military government no longer exists, most of the functions of this type of operation now fall under the rubric of ‘stability operations’. DoD Directive 3000.05, Military Support for Stability, Security, Transition, and Reconstruction Operations, published in November 2005 and revised in 2009, defines stability operations as those operations conducted to establish civil security and civil control, restore essential services, repair and protect critical infrastructure, and deliver humanitarian assistance until such time as it is feasible to transition lead responsibility to other U.S. Government agencies, foreign governments and security forces, or international governmental organizations.197

DoD Directive 3000.05 should be understood not just as a prescription for what the various departments and agencies of the DoD should do during future stability operations, but also as an artifact of what went wrong in Iraq and Afghanistan. It identified the problems and prescribed solutions based on wartime experience. A significant feature of the 2005 version of DoD Directive 3000.05 was the requirement that the commanders of the geographic Combatant Commands should include in their campaign planning “information on key ethnic, cultural, religious, tribal, economic and political relationships.”198 Understanding the human terrain in which governance operations take place was critical in Iraq, but was overlooked. DoD Directive 3000.05 recaptures a lesson that was well understood by Useem and his contemporaries in the military government cohort of 1943: that first and foremost, governing a foreign society requires considerable knowledge of that society. During World War II, the U.S. government expended considerable time and resources trying to improve its understanding of the societies in occupied territory, including Micronesia. A significant component of this effort to alleviate the socio-cultural knowledge gap was the creation of schools of military government. In 1941, when it was unclear who would eventually win the war, the U.S. military began preparing for the post-war occupation of enemy territory. In May 1942, the Army established a School for Military Government at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville to train senior officers for administrative duties in occupied territory.199 The Navy also established its own school of Military Government and Administration at Columbia University,200 with additional programs at Harvard, Yale, Michigan, Northwestern, and Stanford.201 The objective was to train officers to interact with the civilian populations of the western and southwestern Pacific; to act as liaisons with other agencies; and to participate in the administration of military government.202 The Navy schools, like their Army counterparts, relied on anthropologists to provide the area studies component of the curriculum,203 inspiring one historian to claim that “American colonialism became an exercise in applied anthropology.”204 The general course in “native customs” (as the anthropology course was known) analyzed “certain basic concepts of social science which bear directly on the administration of native peoples and attempts to drive home a realization of the great divergences in culture between the Far East and the West.”205 The area studies courses were intended to develop “cultural toleration”206 and an “understanding of the colonial institutions to which the native populations of the area under study have been habituated.”207 The schools of military governance also required that the university faculty design and teach applied problem solving, a markedly different style of teaching from the lectures typical of the liberal arts and sciences. Anthropologist Felix Keesing’s approach, for example, was to use practical role-playing sessions, or as he called it “real life simulations” of actual dilemmas faced by American officers in their dealings with Pacific islanders.208 In addition to the schools of military government, considerable resources were invested in compiling existing research for use by administrators and civil affairs officers. Realizing that FM 27– 5 provided valuable checklists but no actual information, the Army determined that handbooks should be developed for each country that might potentially be occupied. Each country handbook would cover the topics listed in FM 27–5, paragraph 13: public works and utilities; fiscal matters; public health; education; public safety; legal matters; communications; public welfare; and economics. At the Army’s request, government agencies such as the Office of Strategic Services and the Board of Economic Warfare produced hundreds of civil affairs handbooks, collating the relevant socio-cultural details of occupied territories. When the war began in the Pacific theater, the Navy commissioned Yale anthropologist George Peter Murdock and a team of researchers to collect and organize the available material on Micronesia,209 which served as the basis for the military handbooks on Micronesia. As postwar governance and administration responsibilities were clarified, the Navy began to invest resources into the production of knowledge about Micronesia that would facilitate its mission.210 For example, in December 1945 an anthropologist (John Embree), a botanist, a zoologist, and a geographer were sent on a three-week tour of inspection. By the middle of 1946, the University of Hawaii had three teams of scientists at work in the territory.211 In addition, the U.S. Navy commissioned the United States Commercial Company to study Micronesia.212 In 1946, the Navy established the Pacific Science Board (PSB) to conduct research on the newly acquired

territories. The PSB initiated an extensive program called the Coordinated Investigation of Micronesian Anthropology (CIMA), partly funded by the Office of Naval Research. Led by Harvard anthropologist Douglas Oliver,213 forty-one anthropologists, geographers, and linguists from twenty American universities and museums undertook projects useful to the government.214 When CIMA concluded, a new initiative was begun: the Scientific Investigation of Micronesia (SIM).215 Despite the research efforts of the U.S. government, the conjunction of American and Micronesian cultures produced unexpected results. Writing in 1945, Malinowski noted that directed social change (such as that caused by military intervention) involves three social forces: first, “the impinging culture with its institutions, intentions, and interests”; second, “the reservoir of indigenous custom, belief, and living traditions”; and third “the processes of contact and change, where members of the two cultures cooperate, conflict, or compromise.”216 All three of these forces were at play in Micronesia. Americans, as an intervening military force, imported their own culture to the islands of Micronesia. U.S. civil affairs officers expected that Micronesians would behave just like them, given the same circumstances, which is an intellectual fallacy commonly referred to in the intelligence community as ‘mirror imaging.’ Because American cultural norms for grieving involve an outward demonstration of emotion, it is often assumed that this pattern holds true everywhere. “In the case of a death in a Truk community, there were no outward manifestations of sorrow beyond inactivity, no rites were performed at the burial and no crying occurred among the bereaved, which led the officer in charge to wonder if these natives were ‘really human’.”217 In addition to mirror imaging, American military personnel imported their own pragmatic view of social institutions. As Useem observed. “The measure of good government in American society is whether or not [it] accomplishes something. Seldom is governing conceived as an ongoing social process intrinsic to intergroup relationships.”218 In other words, Americans tend to evaluate the world in terms of whether objectives are being achieved, and in the case that they are not, to fix what appears to be broken. Americans are accustomed to think in terms of direct, quick action and presume that an undesirable social condition should be corrected. Governors viewed any social situation as controllable. Because of our skill in handling material things, we feel equally confident of our ability to order social relationships.219

Of course, in other societies, what Americans perceived as defects or inefficiencies to be corrected may have other purposes which are not immediately apparent. The U.S. military arrived in Micronesia with certain expectations about the societies they would encounter, some of which were based on images perpetuated by the media. As Useem noted, “Americans regard natives through the focus of the Hollywood movie projector and feel let down when this does not correspond to reality.”220 Some of these preconceptions also rested on faulty and outdated social science: The preconceived American notion of “primitiveness” also was quickly found to be a meaningless construct. A half century of acculturation and capitalistic industrial development had brought to the people of Angaur most of the attributes of modern civilization. It was quite a shock for military personnel to be asked if they knew about moving pictures, ice cream, and table tennis. The civil-affairs planners had been misled by the anthropological literature perused prior to invasion; it presented an antiquated picture of native life at the level of the German era, and was permeated with propagandistic stereo-types of Japanese actions. As a result, supplies were taken for an aboriginal people, whereas in reality what was needed were items of the same type as would be brought to a South Dakota rural community.221

Some of these preconceptions stemmed from the U.S. military’s schoolhouse training, which led to the expectation that Micronesian society would be homogenous. As Useem observed, “The stress on culture patterns built up an expectation of a cohesive social system. Military governors were confused when the society they encountered lacked a single, integrated native culture.”222 Of course, three centuries of acculturation under Spanish, German, and Japanese rule, had produced significant social diversity in Micronesia which defied any simple cultural generalization. Moreover, pre-deployment training articulated the general patterns of the culture, but failed to mention that those patterns may change, especially as the result of war. “American governors readily noted the significance of the physical destruction but failed to grasp the traumatic effects produced by the sudden and unexpected collapse of the social order, which was assumed to be imperishable.”223 In Malinowski’s formulation of culture contact, the “impinging culture” of the U.S. military encountered the reservoir of indigenous culture. Just as military personnel were trying to understand how Micronesia worked, local people were also trying to discover “the patterns of American behavior.”224 When understanding Americans proved impossible, the local population resigned themselves to the fact that “Americans are pro-native but beyond understanding and unpredictable.”225 The local solution on Palau for dealing with Americans was to “rely on a device they early developed for getting along with their supervisors—a dual social order; within their own group the old forms of living persist and are shielded as much as possible from outside controls, and in their inter-relationships with the rulers they adjust to each specific situation by submission.”226 Given the degree of contact between Palauan and American cultures, misunderstandings were inevitable. As Useem wrote: Attempts to check the fly, the carrier of dysentery, which was a serious menace to both civilians and armed

forces, met with unexpected opposition. The natives had been taught by the Japanese that flies were useful to the sugar cane. Hence American fly traps were surreptitiously opened and the flies released. When the public health officer built a large model fly to show the fly’s disease-carrying properties, the natives gravely examined the specimen. They then counseled the officer not to be alarmed. It was understandable why in America, where such big flies existed, there would be a serious problem, but there were no flies of that dimension on the island. When the size of the sample fly was explained and the speaker proceeded to discuss the microscopic bacteria which could not be seen, the response was that such belief in evil unseen spirits had been held prior to acceptance of Christianity and that there was no need to use fairy tales in talking with the islanders.227

As this somewhat humorous example illustrates, even the best intentions of the occupying forces may have unintended consequences when imported into a foreign society. This brings us to the third element of Malinowski’s formula: the process in which the impinging culture and the local culture “cooperate, conflict, or compromise.”228 The Micronesians, just like the Americans, possessed embedded cultural norms about appropriate behavior, good government, decent housing, and sexual relations, among other aspects of human social life. But what happens when these norms come into conflict? In Micronesia, native customs called for the male head of the household to beat his wife when she displeased him, and mothers would punish a disobedient child by forcing it to stand with arms overhead in the sun for hours at a time.… In the case of a native who ran amuck, wounding two members of his own family and a soldier and killing an M.P., the island’s traditional way of handling cases of this nature was to destroy the entire family of the criminal and burn all their personal belongings.229

From an American perspective, beating your wife, torturing your child, and collective punishment are immoral, if not illegal, in most jurisdictions. But should American norms trump local ones when the U.S. has assumed the role of occupying power, especially of operating under a policy of noninterference? There was heated debate in Washington, DC policy circles regarding whether certain social institutions of Afghanistan ought to be outlawed or tolerated, including homosexual pedophilia, oppression of women, and stoning for adultery. However, in the Micronesian case, American norms “overrode native customs even though in theory the emphasis was upon the preservation of native mores.”230 In sum, governing a foreign society requires considerable knowledge of that society. Despite the efforts made by the U.S. to train administrators and to conduct relevant research, when military personnel actually began to interact with local people, they discovered that their preconceptions were inaccurate, their training often inadequate, that the existing literature was not comprehensive, and that local Palauans had their own ideas about how their government should work. Government became, in Malinowski’s phrasing, a process of “cooperation, conflict, and compromise” that neither party found fully satisfactory.

Conclusion Following the post-war period of U.S. Navy administration (1947–51), Palau became part of the Trust Territory of the Pacific, governed by the U.S. Department of Interior (1951–94). In 1979, the citizens of Palau voted not to join the new Federated States of Micronesia and later declared their independence in 1981, becoming the Republic of Palau. Palau’s constitution was the world’s first nuclear-free constitution, and banned the use, storage, and disposal of nuclear, toxic chemical, gas, and biological weapons without approval by referendum. In 1994, the islands gained full sovereignty under a Compact of Free Association with the United States. Under this compact, Palau receives financial support, social services, and defense from the U.S., and in return allows U.S. armed forces to operate in their territory. Politically, Palau is a presidential republic, with a separation of powers between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. Despite the formal structural trappings of democracy which follow the U.S. model, Palau retains its traditional government of hamlets, chiefdoms, and federations. Once the site of bloody combat, the island where Useem was ‘proconsul’ is once again very peaceful. “Serene, low-key Angaur Island,” extolls the Lonely Planet Guidebook, “garnished with a goodly dollop of timeless South Seas charm, has plenty to offer isolationists.”231 But what about Useem himself? He left the Navy in 1946 and returned to the University of Wisconsin as a faculty member. In 1949, he joined the faculty at Michigan State University and served there until his retirement in 1981. After the war, Useem published only a handful of articles and book chapters on Micronesia. But the topic that held his interest for the rest of his career was something he had observed first-hand during his war years: cross-cultural experiences, and particularly how education shapes culture and individual identity. Useem and his wife, Dr. Ruth Hill Useem, explored this topic for thirty years as a team, conducting fieldwork at an Indian reservation in South Dakota, India, and the Philippines. Their research in India, for example, concerned the experience of people who had received a higher education in a Western country, resulting in the publication of The Western-Educated Man in India. In 1958, they went back to India a second time to study expatriate Americans. Based on these experiences, the Useems coined the term “Third Culture” and “Third Culture Kids,” referring to individuals who integrate their birth culture and the culture to which they have assimilated through education and residence. So what can we learn from Useem’s experience? His wartime experience in Palau captures, in microcosm, much of the U.S. experience of military government, across the Pacific and in the European theater. Useem observed firsthand how a lack of knowledge about the society to be

governed can have negative consequences for both the military executing the task and for the local people whose lives will be irreparably altered by even the most benevolent occupation. Despite the extensive research effort undertaken by the U.S. military to document the cultures of Micronesia, and the comprehensive training programs offered at the various Schools of Military Government, misunderstandings between U.S. forces and local people were common. From Useem’s experience, we can conclude that even the most comprehensive government socio-cultural research and training programs intended to support operational forces will fall short of their mandate. However, recognizing the inevitability of failure does not mean that ‘winging it’ (the approach apparently chosen at the beginning of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) is an acceptable alternative. Useem’s wartime experience also brings to light a contradiction in the conceptualization of governance operations in general: despite the doctrine of non-interference, military interventions always interfere with the societies upon which they intrude. An intervention that does nothing to resolve the damage caused by war interferes just as much as an intervention that attempts (and perhaps fails) at postwar reconstruction. The question for those governments considering interventions is: which is the lesser of these two evils? Is it better to let the local society remain in isolation, to acculturate them to American social and political norms, or attempt to restore (or create) a functioning social order? Useem’s answer to the policy directive of eradicating Japanese influence in Micronesia was the restoration of “indigenous ways of living.” This experiment demonstrated to Useem that not everything can be fixed, that sometimes people do not want to change, and that sometimes in changing things we only make them worse. One could easily draw the same conclusions regarding attempts at gender inclusion, rule of law, or central government in Afghanistan. Such experiments in social change under the auspices of military intervention have proved almost impossible to achieve in reality due to both human nature and complex, unfamiliar social systems. The third, and perhaps most important lesson we can learn from Useem’s experience concerns the contradiction inherent in any program of democratization instituted in a foreign society. On Palau, the U.S. military encountered a society that was highly stratified with political power concentrated in the hands of powerful chiefs who ruled by right of inheritance. Coming into contact with a society so radically different to their own, the U.S. military assumed that a lack of social equality and hereditary chiefdoms precluded democracy. Instead of attempting to fully understand how democracy might intersect with the existing system, the U.S. military equalized the social structure and held Western style elections, selectively ignoring or overturning the results in order to meet their objectives. While Western nations place great faith in the idea of democracy and want to share it, they often fail to recognize that elections do not guarantee representative government, nor does the lack of elections signify autocracy. Foreign political systems may not appear democratic in form, but may be just as effective at ensuring political participation in practice. Unfortunately, these lessons have not been learned by the U.S. military. At the professional military education institutions where U.S. military personnel are trained and educated for future missions, the most commonly used case studies pertaining to stability operations are the reconstruction of Germany and Japan. While these examples certainly have much to teach us about post-war government and the administration of occupied territories, the take away for many students is that nation building succeeded in Japan and Germany as a result of good planning and policy, and failed in Iraq as a result of poor planning and policy. The real questions that need to be asked and answered by the U.S. military concern the internal contradictions of the mission, which only become fully apparent upon execution: How can the ideal of native-self-government be coordinated with American domination? Must all Japaneseintroduced traits be removed even when they are beneficial to the islanders? How can acculturation be guided so that only selected aspects of western folkways are adopted and the integrity of native society preserved?232

Sadly, Useem’s observations (and those of his contemporaries) during World War II were not appreciated by the broader U.S. military community, and were instead consigned to the pages of obscure military journals. The schools developed to train and educate military personnel in the art of governing a foreign society were mothballed after the war; the doctrine that had been developed for military government was withdrawn from circulation; and the organizations that had been developed to support military government were dismantled or folded into other organizations with different missions. Perhaps if this had not been the case, the inherent contradictions of the mission would have been recognized in advance and alleviated before nation building was attempted again.

7

JOMO KENYATTA, LOUIS LEAKEY, AND THE COUNTER-INSURGENCY SYSTEM

Neither your unsatisfied wants Nor your difficulties will kill you. Without eyes to see the tears of the children It matters not whether one is foolish or clever… The need for a spear is gone Replaced by the need for a pen. For our enemies of today Fight with words…. This good land of ours, Kenya Was protected in the past by warriors Who carried spear and shield. Did ever cowards win cattle?

Mau Mau song1

In October 1952, Jomo Kenyatta and five other men were arrested in connection with the Mau Mau rebellion taking place in the British colony of Kenya. Kenyatta was charged with “management of an unlawful society” dangerous to the government of the Colony.2 The ostensible political objective of the Mau Mau was the restoration of ‘land and freedom’ annexed by European settlers and the colonial government. For contemporary observers in the British Empire and beyond, however, the Mau Mau had become synonymous with brutal, primitive terrorism: five year old children hacked to death with machetes; whole villages of Kikuyu loyal to the government burned alive in their huts; a police “officer found by the roadside, still alive but with his lower jaw sliced off and a hand and foot severed.”3 In the eyes of the British government, Kenyatta’s evil brilliance had spawned the primordial violence of the Mau Mau. He had begun life herding goats at the base of Mt. Kenya, later learning English and Swahili from the Church of Scotland missionaries, and eventually becoming a major political leader among Africans in Kenya in the 1920s. With notable intelligence and charisma, Kenyatta had spent over a decade living in Europe seeking redress for the political and economic grievances of his people, the Kikuyu (the largest of the twenty-seven tribal groups in Kenya, constituting approximately 20 per cent of the population).4 When he finally returned to Kenya from his sojourn in Europe, he was greeted by his fellow Africans as a hero. The British, however, looked at him with trepidation. Only Kenyatta, so the British thinking ran, had the necessary organizational skills (learned in a Soviet revolutionary academy) combined with anthropological knowledge of the Kikuyu (learned while studying at London School of Economics) to challenge white rule.5 Kenyatta’s intelligence made him dangerous, and his education made him a threat to the state. Generalizing on the basis of their own hierarchical system of military organization, the British Government assumed that somebody must be in control of the Mau Mau, and that Kenyatta was probably that person. On the contrary, the Mau Mau did not have a unified command structure; nobody was really in control. The movement comprised an aggregation of geographically separated and independently organized fighting units. Moreover, the Mau Mau had no foreign backers and no external source of arms, supplies, or money. The movement relied almost completely on its own resources, capturing weapons when they could, stealing cattle, foraging in the forests, and even manufacturing arms from random bits of metal in makeshift camps.6 The fighters in the forest were for the most part illiterate and without military experience. The Mau Mau began their fight for independence with a pathetic innocence about warfare. None of them had ever fought in a tribal battle, and only a handful had been trained for combat in the British Army. They naively believed that with their home-made guns and pangas [machetes] they could drive the whites out of Kenya.7

The colonial government believed that the solution was simple: arrest Kenyatta and other presumed Mau Mau leaders and Kenya would return to a state of peace, allowing white settlers to return to drinking gin on their verandas, farming coffee on their plantations, and hunting lions in the veld. To prevent the Mau Mau from attempting to rescue Kenyatta,8 and to limit attention from the international press, the government conducted the trial in one of the most remote locations in Kenya—Kapenguria, near the border of Uganda. Rolls of barbed wire encircled the make-shift courthouse, armored cars patrolled outside,9 constables guarded the door with fixed bayonets,10 and the defendants sat in chains. From a legal standpoint, the trial was plagued by irregularities: the government had questionable

jurisdiction in their choice of venue; no committal hearing had been held (thereby restricting the defendants knowledge of the charges against them); crown witnesses were held in police protective custody and paid for their testimony; and the judge was specially selected and paid an enormous sum of money to hear the case.11 When the defense team complained, they were cited with contempt of court.12 Lacking any real evidence, the prosecution tried to build a cumulative case against Kenyatta and the other defendants. As the prosecutor later recalled, “It was a question of how many stones make a heap.”13 The British legal strategy at the Kapenguria trial was to characterize Mau Mau as a source of political instability, bloodshed, and violence in Kenya. In the words of the prosecution, Mau Mau was “a religious cult,” “a barbarous movement … of revolting savagery” whose aim was to rid Kenya of Europeans.14 When Kenyatta attempted to explain the political and economic reasons for the emergence of Mau Mau, the judge told the court that “grievances have nothing whatever to do with Mau Mau, and Mau Mau has nothing whatever to do with grievances.”15 Blinded by their own conceptual bias, neither the white settler community, nor the colonial government, could recognize the political nature of the enemy they faced. Despite the truck load of documents seized from Kenyatta’s house, the prosecution had scant evidence that he was their leader. The written and testimonial evidence they did have was often incomprehensible to the court, hinging on interpretations of Kikuyu culture and language. At one point, the judge sighed in frustration, “I cannot follow the African mind.”16 Louis Leakey had been specially appointed as a court interpreter on the grounds that he was one of the few white Africans who understood Kikuyu culture and Kikuyu language, and so might be able to provide some basic understanding of the “African mind.” Already famous in 1952 for his archeological excavations in British East Africa, Leakey—though he was of European origin—was, like Kenyatta, an elder of the Kikuyu tribe. Like Kenyatta, Leakey had also written anthropological books about the people of Kenya. Leakey and Kenyatta, while never friends, had known each other long before the Emergency (Mau Mau rebellion).17 The result of the trial was a foregone conclusion: Kenyatta was sentenced to seven years hard labor, imprisoned “behind barbed wire in the remote and desolate Northern Frontier Province.”18 But Kenyatta’s imprisonment did not return Kenya to peace and stability; instead, the violence escalated. During the course of the Emergency, according to official statistics, 11,500 Mau Mau fighters, 170 African members of the security forces and 1,800 Kenyans loyal to the government were killed.19 Repressing the Mau Mau rebellion required 30,000 British troops, involved the internment of 25 per cent of the adult male Kikuyu population, and entailed Operation Anvil, “the largest urban cordon and clear action ever mounted.”20 Despite a number of recent military histories of the rebellion and the British response,21 the Mau Mau rebellion remains something of a forgotten war, often overlooked as a case study in staff college lesson plans, which is surprising considering the lethality of the intervention, the ingenuity of the adversary, and the implicit lessons for any government intervening in a complex political conflict. In the end, Kenya won its independence and—after many years breaking rocks in the hot sun— Kenyatta became the newly-decolonized country’s first president. Imprisoned from 1952 to 1961, Kenyatta’s physical isolation transformed him from a political leader into a hero in the eyes of the African people. “A whole generation had grown to manhood without ever seeing Jomo Kenyatta, but they accepted him as the leader of the country.”22 Kenyatta—to my knowledge—is the first anthropologist to foment an insurgency and also the first anthropologist to become a head of state. Kenyatta, who once described himself as “a rabbit turned poacher,”23 successfully employed his knowledge of anthropology—the so-called ‘handmaiden of colonialism’—against a colonial regime, using that knowledge to pinpoint British political weaknesses, unify the Kikuyu and other tribes of Kenya, and construct an ethnographic Trojan Horse that undermined the British edifice upon which colonial law had been built. As this chapter will discuss, Kenyatta’s education and training as an anthropologist at the London School of Economics influenced the political strategy of the insurgency. On the other side, the British counterinsurgency effort against the Mau Mau also utilized anthropology, both in theory and practice. While Leakey’s discoveries of ancient human fossil remains at Olduvai Gorge are frequently the subjects of books and documentaries, his contributions to British counterinsurgency remain obscure. As this chapter describes, Leakey’s conceptualization of Kikuyu culture influenced how the British fought the war and demonstrates how elements of the host nation culture—in this case, the Kikuyu practice of oathing and counter-oathing—may be employed in a security strategy. In this intersection of two lives—Jomo Kenyatta and Louis Leakey— many of the themes of this book become apparent, including the danger of fantasy ideologies, the limits of anthropological knowledge, and the asymmetry of cultural knowledge.

Fantasy ideology of empire In March 1952, His Excellency Sir Philip Mitchell, the colonial Governor of Kenya, took a fishing trip. On his visit to the central province, he saw “smiling faces and happy cheerful people delighted to see one and to pass the time of day.”24 Meanwhile, the Mau Mau—apparently unbeknownst to Sir Philip—were expanding their control over the Kikuyu population through an accelerated campaign of oathing and murder. Despite settler demands to declare a state of emergency, Sir Philip dismissed

all reports concerning political unrest as alarmist, stating that the government had determined that the “Kikuyu were an unwarlike tribe and could be crushed in a matter of a few weeks if they really started violence in earnest.”25 In March 1952, Sir Philip instructed his private secretary to notify the district commissioners that he would no longer read intelligence reports and requested that they should please desist from sending them. In Sir Philip’s mind there was nothing to be concerned about; the Mau Mau were just another local prophetic sect, the product of a culture of “a forest and mountain dwelling people” who are “particularly given to black and foul mysteries, to ritual murder, to ordeals by oath and poison and cults of terror, in which murder is the central feature.”26 Blinded by a fantasy of Kenya and the Kikuyu, the government did little as the security situation spiraled out of control. As observed throughout this book, many barriers exist to the military execution of foreign policy, including complexity, limits to human knowledge, and time. During the Mau Mau Emergency in Kenya, both the settler community and the British colonial government suffered from a particular conceptual barrier, what Lee Harris—in the context of Al Qaeda—has identified as a “fantasy ideology.”27 In a 2002 essay, Harris argues that human beings, when confronted with something strange and seemingly inexplicable, will impose their own inadequate categories to explain it. Americans interpreted the 9–11 attacks, Harris writes, on the basis of deep unquestioned assumptions: “An act of violence on the magnitude of 9–11 can only have been intended to further some kind of political objective.”28 On the contrary, argues Harris, the 9–11 attacks lacked a rational, instrumental Clausewitzian political objective. They were not designed to force the U.S. to alter its policy in the Arab world, nor were the targets chosen for their military importance. Rather, the twin towers of the World Trade Center were “gigantic props in a grandiose spectacle in which the collective fantasy of radical Islam was brought vividly to life: a mere handful of Muslims, men whose will was absolutely pure, as proven by their martyrdom, brought down the haughty towers erected by the Great Satan.”29 The British colonial government in Kenya held a fantasy ideology of the colonial enterprise in which Africans were merely “smiling faces” delighted to receive the benefits of civilization. Similarly, the white settlers had a collective fantasy of Africa,30 “beautiful, open, sun-drenched—a golden land that preserves ways of life now but a memory in Britain—a nostalgic fantasy that, born of a distaste for the present, glorifies the past.”31 In this collective fantasy, the Africans were merely “props,” as Harris would say, forced to play a pre-determined role in a British fantasy of empire. During the halcyon days of the 1920s and 1930s, the ascribed role for Africans was smiling obedience. But when the Emergency began in the 1950s, the Mau Mau became a new kind of prop: “a barbarous, atavistic, and anti-European tribal culture whose leaders planned to turn Kenya into a land of ‘darkness and death.’”32 Unfortunately for the British, developing a strategy to fight a chimerical enemy proved difficult; indeed, fantasy ideology always provides a weak basis for sound strategy. The British first encountered the Kikuyu in 1890 when Captain Frederick Lugard (discussed in the introduction to this volume) established a fortified depot in southern Kikuyuland. During the “scramble for Africa,” the doctrine of “effective occupation” obliged European states to do more than plant the flag; they had to constructively and permanently use the land they claimed.33 Consequently, the British planned to build a railroad from the coast of Kenya to Uganda connecting their protectorates, right through the lands of the Kikuyu. Initially, the Kikuyu traded peacefully with the British, but sexual violation of women and theft of crops provoked the Kikuyu to attack the caravans and burn the fort. To teach the Kikuyu a lesson, the British abducted their goats and deported their chief, who died under mysterious circumstances on the way to Mombasa. This reciprocal violence continued for years. Despite the fact that the Kikuyu had no centralized tribal authority or traditional standing military—a disadvantage against their traditional enemy, the Masai —the Kikuyu successfully limited British access to their territory for more than a decade.34 When the railroad was completed, not enough potential passengers lived along the route to make it profitable. Believing that settlers would solve the problem, in 1902, the Secretary of the Colonies offered the Zionist Congress a portion of Kenya as a national homeland. The visiting commission rejected the proposal after they encountered lions prowling in their camp, were almost trampled by elephants, and were menaced by spear-wielding Masai.35 Following the failure of the ‘Zion plan,’ land grants were offered to British settlers. Settlers had to demonstrate financial means, and government land grants for retired military officers, promulgated in 1918 and 1945, ensured Kenya had “the greatest proportion among its inhabitants of ex-soldiers, generals, colonels, majors, of any country in the world.”36 Down-at-heel aristocrats and graduates of English public schools like Eton absconded to Kenya, escaping “from the constricting dullness of an overcrowded and dreary little island.”37 Industrialization and urbanization in England had destroyed the aristocratic lifestyle of the landed gentry; but Kenya offered cheap land, cheap labor, and abundant sunshine. Here, “every white man who disembarked from the boat at Mombasa became an instant aristocrat.”38 Settler society was only possible because of cheap, fertile land and abundant, cheap labor. British colonial legislation had created the legal basis for this semi-feudal society, annexing the most fertile land for sale to white settlers.39 In 1926, the colonial government established “native reserves,” setting aside “fifty thousand square miles of inferior waterless country … for the accommodation of five and a half million Africans.”40 Dispossessed Kikuyu, unable to find land on these grim, dry “native reserves,” became squatters on the plantations of the white settlers.41 The squatters were

tied through service contracts to the landlord’s property, forced to work for very low wages and denied the right to cultivate commercial crops such as coffee and tea.42 While the Kikuyu had many legitimate grievances, foremost among them was land. As Sir Charles Eliot, High Commissioner of British East Africa, observed wryly in April 1904: “No doubt on platforms and in reports we declare we have no intention of depriving natives of their lands, but this has never prevented us from taking whatever land we want.”43 The Kikuyu attempted for decades through political and legal channels to force the British to address their grievances concerning land, labor, political representation, taxation, and schooling. The East African Association, formed in 1922, was suppressed; the Kikuyu Central Association, formed in 1928 with Jomo Kenyatta as Secretary General, was declared a subversive organization at the outbreak of World War II and banned in 1948. Next, the Kenya Africa Union, formed in 1944 with Jomo Kenyatta as President, unsuccessfully sought to use constitutional means to achieve economic, social, and political reform. Although historians (and even first-hand accounts written by Mau Mau fighers) offer conflicting accounts concerning the origins and character of the movement,44 all agree that Mau Mau resulted from simmering unaddressed grievances concerning land. The Mau Mau promised ithaka na wiathi (land and freedom) to their followers.45 Most of the settlers and colonial administrators had only a superficial understanding of the history, politics, and customs of the land upon which they had built their homes. Europeans had infrequent contact with Africans except in their role as farm laborers, domestic servants, and office boys. As John Lonsdale has written about the Emergency, “whites knew little of Kikuyu society. Few spoke Kikuyu. Most were content to know ‘what everybody knew,’ the stereotypes that explained the daily uncertainties of Africa.”46 Unaware of the feelings and experiences Africans who nursed their children, cleaned their houses, and tended their crops, the white settlers of Kenya had no basis from which to make sense of the Mau Mau. The earliest attacks completely surprised the European settlers, who had discounted the well-articulated political and economic grievances of the Kikuyu, believing the land question was ‘settled.’ Sunsets on the verandas of white settlers were ruptured when Mau Mau came unexpectedly out of the forest, with shocking violence: Most victims died as the result of multiple blade wounds, the bodies being hacked and mutilated even after death. The severing of limbs, and the seemingly frenzied nature of the attacks, added to the terror induced by this violence. This was a messy, undignified and painful death. For Europeans, such brutal, physical violence recalled the killing of an earlier era and seemed very distant from the remoteness of modern violence inflicted by a bullet or a bomb.47

Mau Mau bloodshed was made even more shocking because the perpetrators were often trusted farm workers or household servants. Moreover, the killers wielding machetes were not noble ‘warlike’ Masai, but the commercially astute, industrious, God-fearing, and responsible Kikuyu of British stereotype. Neither the white settlers nor the colonial administration believed the Kikuyu were capable of armed revolt, having dismissed them as “cowards” because of their “traditional distaste for warfare.”48 (The fact that the Kikuyu had fought the British from 1890 to 1904 had been conveniently forgotten.49) “When the revolt came,” wrote Graham Greene on a visit to Kenya in 1953: it was to the English colonist like a revolt of the domestic staff. The Kikuyu were not savage, they made good clerks and stewards. It was as though Jeeves had taken to the jungle. Even worse, Jeeves had been seen crawling through an arch to drink on his knees from a banana trough of blood; Jeeves had transfixed a sheep’s eye with seven kie-apple thorns; Jeeves had had sexual connection with a goat; Jeeves had sworn, however unwillingly, to kill Bertie Wooster “Or this oath will kill me and all my seed will die.”50

Locked in their own fantasy ideology of progressive liberal gin-drinking paternalism, British settlers could not understand the quick transition from trusted servant to bloodthirsty savage. To the European mind in search of an explanation for this shocking transformation, the Mau Mau must be “in some way possessed or controlled by dreadful forces they could not defy,”51 forces assumed to be either psychological or religious in nature (or some combination thereof). “Mau Mau is a conspiracy,” stated Alan Lennox Boyd, Secretary of State for the Colonies in a 1954 debate, “based on the total perversion of the human spirit by means of the power of the oath and by witchcraft and intimidation, all of which combined to place its followers mentally almost in another world.”52 The centerpiece of the psycho-religious explanation for Mau Mau violence was the oath. As discussed in greater detail below, the Kikuyu, like many other African societies, utilized oaths as part of their political, legal, and religious systems. Like the oath that Americans take in a court of law, the oath in traditional Kikuyu jurisprudence called upon supernatural forces (God) to insure the speaker’s veracity. The Mau Mau oath drew on this Kikuyu tradition, with ritual additions (such as stabbing the eyeball of a dead goat seven times) which had meaning to the Kikuyu, but which Europeans found both inexplicable and distasteful. To the European mind, the Mau Mau oath provided evidence that the Kikuyu “had now shrunk back into the darker recesses of the past, seeing security and comfort in barbaric superstition. The wicked perversion of the Mau Mau oath was evidence enough of this atavistic reversion.”53 To Europeans, the oath exerted a powerful form of psychological control over the Kikuyu. Even worse was the psychological control exerted over the Kikuyu by Kenyatta himself. “Kenyatta came

from a line of witchdoctors; Africans looked on him with dread; none would dare face him in open court, however much they hated what he stood for.”54 Indeed, Kenyatta’s paternal grandfather had once led southern Kikuyu warriors in battle against the Masai, and in his old age he was a magician who made rain, removed evil spells, and communicated with dead ancestors. “In traveling about with him and carrying his bag of equipment, I served a kind of apprenticeship in the principles of the art,”55 Kenyatta wrote. Although the Mau Mau fought the government with ‘primitive’ weapons—machetes, poisoned arrows, and short swords—and believed in supernatural forces, they subscribed to a nationalist political ideology and pursued a classic Clausewitzian military objective—territory. Yet, instead of viewing the Mau Mau as “an integral part of an ongoing, rationally conceived nationalist movement,” the British colonial regime viewed the Mau Mau “as the apotheosis of unreason.”56 This myth of the Mau Mau formed the basis for the government’s security strategy. Myth, of course, is never a good basis for strategy, and in this case resulted in three unintended consequences: the unnecessary escalation of violence; failure to obtain a political solution; and underestimation of the adversary. As noted above, the British saw Kenyatta as the malignant, controlling force behind Mau Mau violence, the premise for his arrest and trial. After all, the government wondered, hadn’t Africans obeyed his commands before? During a speech in 1952, Kenyatta called for Africans to boycott European beer, causing a steep drop in consumption. If he could get the Africans to stop drinking beer, so government thinking went, no doubt he could stop the Mau Mau. “Your word is law among your people,” Sir Charles Mortimer told Kenyatta. “When you told them to boycott British beer, they stopped drinking British beer. When you told them to stop wearing British hats, they did. Tell them to stop taking or obeying Mau Mau oaths—and they will stop!”57 Thus, after considerable government pressure, Kenyatta publically denounced Mau Mau, calling upon them to “disappear— down to the roots of the mikongoe tree underneath the ground.”58 In Kikuyu mythology, the mikongoe was a mythical underworld tree, and so the statement could be interpreted as a curse banishing Mau Mau forever, or—because Kikuyu is a complex language full of double entendre, puns and contextual meaning—alternatively interpreted as a coded signal to the Mau Mau to go underground.59 When the denunciation proved ineffective, the government concluded that this was proof of Kenyatta’s perfidious linguistic trickery, declared the Emergency, and arrested Kenyatta.60 In reality, Kenyatta’s authority approximated the traditional Kikuyu model of the moral leadership of the tribal elders.61 He “lacked the authority to control the men of violence,”62 but he did have the power of persuasion. Unfortunately, the British government assumed that Kenyatta had control over the Mau Mau and arrested him for failing to exert that control, thereby limiting his persuasive power, decisions which finally resulted in an undesired escalation of violence. Second, conceptualizing the Mau Mau as a primitive, bloodthirsty cult negated the development of a strategy to resolve the core political issues driving the insurgency. Although not well-designed at the campaign level and often counterproductive tactically, the Mau Mau decision to employ military force in order to obtain their political and economic strategic objectives followed a Clausewitzian military logic. As Mau Mau leader Josiah Mwangi Kariuki observed in his post-war memoires: Although the situation was dangerous, even in October 1952, it was not so dangerous that it could not have been put right by a few political concessions. … The movement could always have been extinguished in this way but the Government chose to answer it with a series of the harshest and most brutal measures ever taken against a native people in the British Empire in the twentieth century, and so the movement developed by action and reaction into a full-scale rebellion involving the souls of my people.63

Outsiders, not bound by the fantasy ideology of the colonizers, quickly recognized the political nature of the conflict. When Lieutenant General Sir George Erskine came from Britain to command the East African Command in June 1953, he immediately recognized that Kenya’s problems were mostly due to “rotten administration.” “In my opinion,” he noted, “they want a new set of civil servants and some decent police.”64 In Erskine’s mind, the problem was “purely political—how Europeans, Africans and Asians can live in harmony on a long-term basis. If the people of Kenya could address themselves to this problem and find a solution they would have achieved far more than I could do with security forces.”65 Third, the myth of the Mau Mau as depraved, primordial, and primitive terrorists caused the government to initially underestimate their enemy. In the fall of 1953, British forces staged multiple sweeps at the edge of the forests, which contained an estimated 15,000 Mau Mau fighters.66 Untrained in operating in the steep terrain covered by giant bamboo, “British troops were slow to adapt: the altitude fatigued them, they made every imaginable noise, shot at phantoms, and fell into pits dug by the Mau Mau. Worse, they accidentally shot one another, were panicked by elephants, rhinos, and buffaloes, and in sum did little harm to the rebels.”67 With limited manpower, few weapons, and no external resources, Mau Mau fighters managed to tie down a whole division of British troops.68 External observers—whose perception was not befuddled by the colonial fantasy ideology—recognized the strength of the adversary.69 Lieutenant General Erskine, for example, after his initial miscalculation, revised his campaign plan to restrict Mau Mau freedom of movement and cut their supply lines, and replaced the British troops in the forests with King’s African Rifle battalions, who knew something about the local geography.70 In sum, 18,000 Mau Mau squatting in the forest, armed with pangas and living off wild honey and

game animals, held off a 30,000-strong British force for seven years. While from a military standpoint, the Mau Mau may have lost the war, the British lost Kenya. The fantasy ideology of colonial Kenya provided a weak basis for a strategy to defeat Mau Mau, resulting in false assumptions, missed opportunities, and severe underestimation of the enemy.

Asymmetry of cultural knowledge How did Kenyatta come to understand the culture, legal system, and political ideology of the British colonial government so clearly? Kenyatta was born in a thatched hut village near Mount Kenya, whose 17,000-foot snowcapped peaks rise above the lowlands of the country. As a child, he tended a garden of yams and sugarcane, herded his family’s goats, and played at fighting with a wooden spear in mock battles. After being bitten by chiggers around the age of ten, Kenyatta became ill with a spinal disease. When the local witchdoctor was unable to cure him by placating the offended ancestral spirits, Kenyatta’s mother insisted he be taken to the Church of Scotland mission station. There, he was cured by the mission doctor and stayed to learn to read and write. While at the Fort Hall mission, Kenyatta worked as a kitchen boy and carpenter, learning Swahili and English. Eventually, Kenyatta returned to his village in 1908 to take part in the coming of age ceremony which would make him a full member of the Kikuyu tribe. Finding the village too constraining, Kenyatta left for Nairobi, and became a meter reader at the Public Works Department. “He was the first African in Kenya to own a motor bike, which he rode everywhere.”71 While living in Nairobi, he became involved in formal politics for the first time, joining the Young Kikuyu Association, which in 1925 became the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA). The KCA published a monthly journal in Kikuyu language called Muigwithania (The Reconciler), which was the first newspaper produced by Africans in Kenya. Kenyatta was its first editor.72 Because of his English language ability, the KCA asked Kenyatta to go to London to further the cause of African nationalism. “The idea that one man,” writes Edgerton, “could make a difference for Kenya’s future was preposterous; but Kenyatta’s magnetic presence, his great, resonant voice, his riveting eyes and his masterful sense of showmanship quickly made him friends and supporters in left-wing circles.”73 In London, Kenyatta became friends with Kwame Nkrumah (later President of Ghana) and Paul Robeson (the famous actor), with whom he shared a flat. At Robeson’s suggestion, Kenyatta acted as a native chief in Robeson’s film Sanders of the River. After filming was finished, Kenyatta kept the chief ’s costume and wore it to London cocktail parties.74 During his years in London, the Special Branch of Scotland Yard had Kenyatta under surveillance, keeping track of his radical political contacts and his relations with white women. One of Kenyatta’s left wing associates was the West Indian Communist George Padmore, then the highest ranking black official of the Communist International (Comintern), who took him on a trip to the Soviet Union from August–October 1929.75 With Padmore’s encouragement Kenyatta won a Soviet scholarship to study at KUTVU (University of the Toilers of the East), the Comintern school for students from Asian and African colonies for the academic year of 1932–3. The Comintern archives note that he complained about the poor food, unsatisfactory housing, and the instructors’ feeble command of the English language. Kenyatta’s openly anti-Marxist views made him a poor prospect for recruitment in the eyes of the Comintern. A black South African Communist at the school called Kenyatta a petty-bourgeois nationalist, to which Kenyatta indignantly retorted, “why petty?”76 When he returned to London, Kenyatta got a job at the School of Oriental and African Studies assisting faculty members with research on African linguistics. In the spring of 1935, Kenyatta— despite the fact that he lacked a university degree—began post-secondary studies with Bronislaw Malinowski at the London School of Economics. In November 1935, Kenyatta and Leakey entered into a heated debate in one of Malinowski’s seminars.77 Since they were arguing in Kikuyu, nobody else in the classroom understood anything beyond the general topic of the discussion, which concerned female genital mutilation. This encounter set the tone for their subsequent rivalry. Less than three years later, before Leakey had finished his own book about the Kikuyu, Kenyatta published Facing Mount Kenya, acknowledged as “one of the first modern anthropological monographs by an African.”78 Kenyatta committed “the intellectual affront of publishing first” and included “large passages from Leakey’s own paper on female circumcision without attribution.”79 This long-standing “intellectual and political rivalry between the two men” informed their respective roles and actions during the Emergency.80 Although Kenyatta intended to return home in 1938, WWII made it impossible. Kenyatta took a job as a farm laborer in the village of Storrington, where he met and married a schoolteacher named Edna Grace Clark. “He lectured for over five years on African Affairs to the British Army in various searchlight units and military barracks. Thus the KCA’s representative in England, far from being detained under Defence Regulations, was allowed to educate the British Army about Africa.”81 Frustrated by restrictive life at Storrington, Kenyatta remarked to his wife, “I feel like a general separated by 5,000 miles from his troops.”82 In 1946, Kenyatta returned to Kenya where the Kikuyu greeted him as a hero, hopeful that he could resolve the mounting political crisis. Kenyatta’s prominence in African politics was partially due to the fact that he was the first Kikuyu to go to London, and also perhaps because this distance allowed him to “remain aloof from controversies in Kikuyuland between 1929–1945.”83 In the eyes of his fellow Africans, living in England transformed Kenyatta from a local political leader into an

international statesman. Living in Europe also matured Kenyatta politically: he “absorbed a great deal of the British approach to politics: pragmatism, only dealing with problems when they become crises, tolerance so long as the other side is talking, and the sense, despite everything that might be wrong, of living in a fundamentally settled society.”84 But perhaps the most important thing living in England did for Kenyatta was to help him understand the English and their views of Africans. Sun Tzu’s prescription for success in warfare—“know your enemy”—has become a taken-for-granted adage among American military officers. While we strive for knowledge of the enemy, the enemy also seeks to understand us. From the perspective of an insurgent fighting a government, knowledge of the order of battle or command and control system confers an obvious military advantage. But knowledge of that government’s culture and society may confer an even greater strategic advantage. The Viet Minh, for example, understood how the French intolerance for casualties (magnified by the power of print media) would undermine national resolve to prosecute the war in Indochina. “If we have to fight, we will fight,” Ho Chi Minh told the French in September 1946. “You will kill ten of our men and we will kill one of yours. In the end it will be you who tire of it.”85 Like the French in Indochina, the U.S. has also suffered from what the 9/11 Commission referred to as “cultural asymmetry” over the past decade of conflict. At the most basic level, cultural asymmetry means that our adversaries possess more knowledge about our society than we have about theirs,86 which creates a significant strategic, and sometimes tactical, disadvantage. Mahmud Abouhalima, now serving a life sentence for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, understood the secular West because he had lived in Germany and the United States for seventeen years. “I lived their life,” said Abouhalima, “but they didn’t live my life, so they will never understand the way I live or the way I think.”87 Beyond a simple differential in knowledge between adversaries, cultural asymmetry may also involve applying systems of knowledge, technology, or even governmental processes against the originator in a manner unintended (and often unimagined). The insurgency against the British in Kenya—and Kenyatta’s leadership—provides a powerful example of such cultural asymmetry. Although few British understood the Kikuyu, Kenyatta had lived the British way of life and had acquired in-depth knowledge of British politics and people. However, Kenyatta also acquired a type of meta-knowledge of how the British gained knowledge about subject peoples, namely anthropology. Kenyatta, in the words of Victor Davis Hanson, had not only “mastered the knowledge of the Western mind,”88 but also employed that knowledge in a manner which had neither been imagined nor intended. Before the arrival of British missionaries, the Kikuyu were illiterate and lacked a written language. The history and culture of the tribe was transmitted orally between generations,89 and twigs, stones, or bodily inscriptions were employed as memory aids. Thus, according to Kenyatta, without the initiation ceremonies that marked the transition to adulthood, “a tribe which had no written records would not have been able to keep a record of important events and happenings in the life of the Gikuyu.”90 For Africans such as Kenyatta who had journeyed beyond the confines of the village, the power of literacy and writing were demonstrated everywhere in daily life: Africans confronted [the power of the written word] not only at such focal sites as schools, courthouses, hospitals, police stations, prisons, and the workplace (spaces where documentary records and procedures for subject identification were particularly salient) but in such quotidian activities as letter writing and newspaper reading as well.91

The written word itself also had a kind of magical power. As one Mau Mau general recollected from his childhood: Before I learned how to read and write, I thought that reading was a great miracle in which a person could repeat exactly the words said by another at a distant place, recording his words on a white sheet of paper. I very much admired reading. One day, on my way from school, I collected a piece of printed paper on the road and ate it so that I may have the knowledge of reading within me.92

The written word held this power in British colonial Kenya in part because very few African children attended school beyond the elementary level. In the 1940s, only three high schools served the needs of five million Africans.93 The majority of children were denied advanced education—in Kenyatta’s view, to ensure that “the mzungu farms had enough unskilled laborers.”94 “Education was the magic through which the mzungu managed to rule Africans in Kenya. As soon as Africans learned this magic, they would be able to rule themselves. … So we must get this magic by all means and at all costs. … We must all realize the value of schooling.”95 Kenyatta recognized that formal education was the single most important source of power for Europeans, and therefore also for Africans. When he returned from Britain in 1946, he became the director of Kenya Teachers’ Training College at Githunguri and the Kikuyu Independent Schools Association. Both institutions were nationalist and pro-African, established after many years of conflict with the missionary school system regarding polygamous marriage and female circumcision. Many of the schools were built by hand by the communities they served. In these schools, “ragged children, many in cutdown versions of their fathers’ old army uniforms, would pore over their books

studiously, even when unmonitored. Hungry to learn, they would carry home the day’s lessons to teach their parents at night.”96 The Nation described these 300 schools built to educate 60,000 children, “one of the greatest educational movements of history.”97 For Kikuyu nationalists, education was “the source of the Europeans’ riches and power, a kind of magical property that bestowed positive social value on its possessor.”98 If it could be captured, many Kikuyu believed, that power could be used as a weapon in the fight against British domination. In the development of African nationalism in Kenya, no factor was as important to Africans as the attainment of literacy. The organization of African protest to colonial policies shifted from the warriors to literate Africans. They understood the ways of white people; they spoke their language, and they were expected by other Africans to know how to protest colonial policies without arousing brutal physical response. In effect, literate Africans became the new “warriors.”99

Indeed, as one Mau Mau song intoned, “The need for a spear is gone replaced by the need for a pen. For our enemies of today fight with words.”100 Most Mau Mau forest fighters were illiterate; military orders, intelligence reports, and supply requisition were transmitted verbally. Some commanders, such as Stanley Mathenge, found “the bureaucratic authority of the written word” offensive and frightening, and believed their illiteracy could be used to exclude them from power. Other illiterate commanders saw the value of documentation and had staff members whose primary job was to take notes at the meetings of the forest fighters.101 In the Aberdare Mountains, each Mau Mau camp kept ten record books, including a register of fighters, a hymn book, an accounting book, a supply book, and accounts of military engagements.102 One Mau Mau general corresponded with the government using the Aberdares forest ‘post office’—a hole in a specific tree—on his letterhead.103 (Incidentally, UNESCO lists the post office tree as part of its “justification of outstanding universal value” for declaring the Aberdares a world heritage site.104) At first glance, Mau Mau appropriation and utilization of bureaucracy seems to contradict the image of Mau Mau as practitioners of primordial, bestial violence—why would men who emerge from the forest at night to kill children with machetes document their logistics discussions? Mau Mau record-keeping was a means of memorializing their sacrifices for posterity,105 and also signified “a captured colonialbureaucratic power that could be possessed by individual subjects who used it to assert and validate their authority.”106 The Kikuyu and many other African people viewed education as a means of entry into professional positions in business, teaching, government, and the ministry. But in the eyes of Kenyatta and his fellow militant nationalists, education also provided the means to acquire knowledge about the British in order to fight them more effectively. Oginga Odinga, a Luo chieftain and comrade of Kenyatta, recounted the words of the elders: We should never, never try to fight them because their weapons were better than ours … we should give whatever they requested. But we should study their lives and their minds to know exactly what they wanted. We should never fight them. But we knew that when we had studied them our children would probably be able to get rid of them.107

The years Kenyatta had spent living in Europe had given him unparalleled knowledge of British lives and minds, and was certainly one of the reasons why Kenyatta was so deeply respected as a leader among Africans. But Kenyatta’s task in Europe went beyond acquiring a prestigious formal education at the London School of Economics. His objective was to represent the political interests of the Kikuyu to the British government, thereby obtaining redress for grievances pertaining to land tenure, access to education, fair labor practices, and political representation. In order to accomplish this, Kenyatta had to learn how to effectively articulate the ‘native point of view’ to a skeptical and sometimes hostile audience. In Kenyatta’s words: We are a primitive race having come in contact with what is called civilization for not more than half-a-century and yet we are confronted with the task of having to prepare a case in a manner which should be worth the consideration of a body composed entirely of gentlemen whose methods of thinking, experience based on books or years of government service are entirely alien to the community on whom they are sitting in judgment. We therefore have to borrow means and methods and ape the manner in which the case may appeal to you from your point of view and according to your standards of measuring the requirements of a people who from the alien point of view are a species of living being which was hardly known to them about fifty years ago.108

As Bruce Berman has pointed out, Kenyatta’s first strategy, “to address a Western public and its men of power in an idiom they respected,” employed Christianity.109 In part, the means and methods of Christianity failed because liberation theology did not yet exist and because the Presbyterian missionaries from the Church of Scotland saw Kikuyu customs (particularly polygamy and female circumcision) as something evil to be eradicated. Kenyatta’s next attempt at using European means and methods to obtain redress for grievances was to investigate Marxism. “The Marxists offered what appeared to be a far more systematic and rigorous analysis of the colonial situation in the context of their theories of capitalist imperialism, and their political line on colonialism was not reformist, but revolutionary.”110 The Marxists, however, wanted to create a panAfrican proletariat in, demanding “in effect, the dissolution of a Kikuyu consciousness and existence into the undifferentiated African ‘masses’ pursuing a socialist future antithetic to the Kikuyu notions of property, community, and moral responsibility that Kenyatta struggled to preserve.”111

Kenyatta’s third attempt to further Kikuyu nationalism using British “means and methods” involved anthropology. Kenyatta, in the words of Wendy James, “saw in social anthropology something that could be turned to use as part of the growing nationalist challenge to colonial rule.”112 In the 1930s, the idea that anthropology could be used as a tool against colonialism signified a radical departure from the British government’s view of the discipline as the intellectual bastion of empire. Malinowski, who became Kenyatta’s thesis advisor and mentor, had excelled at promoting the practical value of anthropology for colonial administration. Whereas prior generations of British anthropologists had focused on the minutia of material culture and conducted interviews in local languages (so called ‘verandah ethnography’), Malinowski was developing a methodology for ethnographic fieldwork “based on participant observation and framed within the context of functionalist theory.”113 Understanding the internal organization of non-Western societies and the functional integration of their component parts (such as law, ritual, and economy) based on direct experience and observation would in theory enable colonial administrators to rule more effectively.114 But anthropology—like all intellectual tools—was inherently neutral, and could be employed in the service of anti-colonialism just as easily as by colonial administrators. At this unique moment in time when anthropology found favor with colonial administrators, Kenyatta enrolled as a postgraduate student in the Department of Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics. As a postulant anthropologist, Kenyatta was something entirely new: a scholar qualified to study his own society. “Anthropology begins at home,” wrote Malinowski in the introduction to Facing Mt. Kenya, noting that mass-observation (in the vein of Tom Harrisson, discussed earlier in this volume) is “directing the technique, method, and aims of anthropology on to our own civilization.”115 For Malinowski, Kenyatta presented a rare opportunity: “If he could be trained in Malinowski’s scientific anthropology to express that point of view in a systematic functional ethnography of his own society, the rigor and authenticity of Malinowski’s approach would be powerfully validated.”116 Moreover, what Kenyatta intended to do with anthropology was also entirely new: instead of employing social science in the service of the colonial state, “in anthropology Kenyatta had found the weapon he needed to answer the philosophy of colonialism.”117 The British colonial regime rested on three main pillars, all of which Kenyatta had to destabilize in order to challenge the system itself. First and foremost, Kenyatta had to demonstrate the existence of a Kikuyu civilization distinct from colonial impositions. In the 1930s, even British progressives such as Sir Philip Mitchell rejected the concept of African pre-colonial civilization. Prior to the 1890s, Mitchell said, the people of east and central Africa had no wheeled transport (and apart from the camels and donkeys of the pastoral nomads) no animal transport either; they had no roads or towns; no tools except small hand hoes, axes, wooden digging sticks and the like; no manufactures, and no industrial products except the simplest domestic handiwork, no commerce as we understand it and no currency … they had never heard of working for wages.118

Africans, said Mitchell, “are a people … without a history, culture or religion of their own, and in that they are, as far as I know, unique in the modern world.”119 Contrary to Sir Philip’s view, in Facing Mt. Kenya, Kenyatta presents Kikuyu society as a complex, interrelated system with welldeveloped customary laws, monotheistic religion, advanced agricultural practices suited to the environment, a division of labor, an educational system, and a variety of cottage industries. “No single part is detachable,” wrote Kenyatta; “each has its context and is fully understandable only in relation to the whole.”120 Second, Kenyatta had to show—contrary to the accepted British view—that the Kikuyu had governed themselves in the past and were fully capable of doing so in the future. As early as the 1920s, Kenyatta began articulating the view that “discontent has always been rife among the natives … and will be so until they govern themselves.”121 In this regard, Kenyatta’s political vision in the early 1930s was far more radical than any of his contemporaries in Kenya, calling for total independence and not just token reforms.122 In Facing Mt. Kenya, Kenyatta makes the case that long before the British arrived in Kenya, the Kikuyu had overthrown a despotic king in a revolution known as itwika, establishing universal (male) representation in government under an elected council of elders who served limited terms in office.123 Not only was Kikuyu government democratic, but the British had actually introduced a system of government very similar to the autocratic government which the Gikuyu people had discarded many centuries ago. The present system of rule by the Government Officials supported by appointed chiefs, and even what is called ‘indirect rule,’ are incompatible with the democratic spirit of the Gikuyu people.124

Yet again, as recounted so often in this book, in the interests of improving an indigenous system, a Western government had destroyed the very thing it hoped to create. Third, Kenyatta had to demonstrate that Kikuyu society functioned as an integrated system, in which each part (in accordance with functionalist theory) meshed and reinforced every other. Thus, land was not only the basis of the economy, but also the resting place of the ancestors. Family groups communed with the spirits of the ancestors, and upon death became ancestors themselves. Marriage was the basis of the family, requiring initiation into the tribe. Anthropologists have often made the argument that functionalism accorded with and contributed to the worldview of

colonialism, which saw African societies as static, undeveloped, and unchanged by the forces of history. While this may very well be true, it is equally true that Kenyatta’s presentation of Kikuyu society as an integrated system provided a counterargument to this colonial discourse. If the society was complete, integrated, and effective as it was, substitution or removal of the morally unacceptable elements of the system (clitoridectomy, polygamy, and animal sacrifice, for example) would either not work or would destroy the system itself. When the European comes to the Gikuyu country and robs the people of their land, he is taking away not only their livelihood, but the material symbol that holds family and tribe together. In doing this he gives one blow which cuts away the foundations from the whole of the Gikuyu life, social, moral, and economic.125

In one sense, Kenyatta’s attempt to use anthropology to establish his credentials as the interlocutor between the British government and the tribe failed. The first edition of Facing Mt. Kenya sold only 517 copies before the remaining stock was destroyed in a 1941 air raid.126 Academic reviews were generally positive, although one reviewer noted that Kenyatta “strikes one as sometimes unscientific and even naive in his explanations.”127 In the eyes of his own people, however, the book established him as the de facto leader of the Kikuyu. As Mau Mau general Dedan Kimathi once said, “Kenyatta is a very wise man, in fact he had predicted many of the emergency events. He is a prophet chosen by God just like Moses, who God chose to deliver the Israelite nation out of the Egyptian slavery; so is Kenyatta chosen to deliver the Kenya people out of the colonial slavery.”128 Perhaps most importantly, in writing Facing Mt. Kenya, Kenyatta formulated a brilliant rhetorical riposte to the British (mis)understanding of the Kikuyu, undercutting the architecture of assumptions upon which colonialism was based. Although Kenyatta’s education and training as an anthropologist gave him the knowledge and credibility to articulate the insurgency’s political grievances, the British counterinsurgency program against the Mau Mau also utilized anthropology as a military tool. Both sides sought a cultural knowledge advantage: Kenyatta had lived the British way of life and had ‘mastered the knowledge of the Western mind,’ but his rival Louis Leakey had lived the Kikuyu way of life and had ‘mastered the knowledge of the African mind.’

The value of cultural knowledge In 1954, Louis Leakey took a break from examining prehistoric rock art to publish a short book called Defeating Mau Mau. “The means of defeating it,” he wrote, are not only the use of arms, manpower and physical warfare. Much more depends upon a full understanding of the reason why Mau Mau obtained such a hold on the people, how it was organized, and what must be done to alter the minds of the people who have been seduced by its false promises, and upon removing genuine grievances and causes of discontent.129

In short, the stated goal of the book was to provide the anthropological baseline for the British counterinsurgency campaign. While Leakey never held an official appointment that would empower him to make policy decisions, his ‘subject matter expertise’ (as we would now call it) deeply influenced British colonial security policy. Leakey had a direct channel to Governor Evelyn Baring,130 and his two books on the Mau Mau “were widely disseminated by the Kenya Government, which supplied copies to all of its administrative and police officers.”131 Moreover, he served on an official enquiry into Kikuyu land tenure as the sole Kikuyu-speaker,132 and was frequently asked to offer the ‘African view’ to various government committees and international affairs bodies.133 He gave advice on the security policy of “villagization,” helped police study the forest diet of the insurgent, and wrote a primer on the Kikuyu language for teaching administrators and police.134 By the time of his death, he had published 216 titles, including books, monographs, academic papers, reviews, and magazine articles.135 His discoveries of ancient hominid fossils (such as the skull discovered in 1959 at Olduvai Gorge) led to widespread media coverage by National Geographic, various newspaper articles, and even children’s books.136 Less well known are Leakey’s contributions to the theory and practice of counterinsurgency. How was Leakey—known almost exclusively for his archeological discoveries—able to provide the ethnographic knowledge necessary for British counterinsurgency in Kenya? Leakey was born and raised in Kenya among the Kikuyu, the son of missionaries who sailed from England in 1901 to set up a mission station in a village called Kabete. As a child, Leakey learned traditional skills such as beekeeping, hunting game, and building huts. When he was thirteen, Leakey was initiated into the tribe and became a member of the mukanda age grade,137 the same as Kenyatta. In his 1937 autobiography, White African, he wrote, “In language and in mental outlook I was more Kikuyu than English, and it never occurred to me to act other than as a Kikuyu.”138 In 1920, Leakey left Kenya to attend a public school in Dorset, England, which turned out to be a traumatic and confusing experience for a Kikuyu boy raised in the bush. “During the preceding seven years I had hardly seen more than three or four English boys of my own age and all my friends were Kikuyus.”139 Accustomed to a “remarkably free and independent life” as a Kikuyu junior warrior, Leakey had no idea how to write an essay or play football. Leakey’s life improved at Cambridge University, where he was able to study African languages, anthropology, and

archaeology. In 1924, as an undergraduate, Leakey joined the British Museum East African Expedition to collect dinosaur fossils in Tanganyika. Subsequently, he led East African Archaeological Research Expeditions in 1926–7, 1928–9, 1931–2, and 1934–5.140 As a result of the research conducted on these expeditions, Leakey devised a classification of the archaeological sequence, which he published as Stone Age Cultures of Kenya Colony (1931).141 Leakey’s promising academic career in England was cut short by controversy regarding the dating and identification of the fossil skulls found during the third expedition (1931–2). In typically dramatic style, Leakey claimed that the fossil hominid mandible he discovered north-east of Lake Victoria, was “not only the oldest known human fragment from Africa, but the most ancient fragment of true Homo yet discovered anywhere in the world.”142 In 1935, Nature published an article alleging inconsistent evidence, geological incompetence, and sloppy methodology.143 As a result of this controversy (and the divorce of his first wife, considered socially unacceptable at the time), Leakey’s fellowship at Cambridge was not renewed and the funds to support a further expedition to East Africa were denied. As his career foundered in England, anthropologists at Oxford suggested that “since [he] was born and bred among the Kikuyu and claimed to speak their language better than English, [he] really should devote some time to writing a complete and detailed study of the tribe,”144 and so, supported by the Rhodes Trust, Leakey returned to Kenya in 1937 to study the Kikuyu.145 His 1000-page report was considered too esoteric even for academic publication, but was eventually released posthumously as the Southern Kikuyu Before 1903.146 The controversy which ended Leakey’s career in Britain forced him back to his roots among the Kikuyu. The controversy also changed him markedly: as Berman and Lonsdale note, for a decade, “he was essentially in the scientific wilderness without position or research grants.”147 With no job security or institutional affiliation, Leakey became “a classic intellectual maverick, with a distinctly ambivalent relationship to the academic establishment and a notoriously touchy combativeness.”148 Free from the constraints of an institutional position, Leakey pursued his hunch that humankind originated in sub-Saharan Africa. At a time when prehistorians viewed the hominid discoveries in Java as proof positive of the emergence of man in Asia, ‘Leakey’s luck’ (as it came to be known) eventually enabled him to conclusively prove his theory about the African origin of Homo Sapiens. Growing up Kikuyu, Leakey claimed, had taught him: patience—especially patience—and observation. In Africa, survival depends upon your reaction to irregularities in your surroundings. A torn leaf, a paw print, a bush that rustles when there is no breeze, a sudden quiet—these are the signals that spell the difference between life and death. The same instant recognition of something different—a glint of white in the face of a cliff, an odd-shaped pebble, a tiny fragment of bone—leads to the discovery of fossils.149

Intellectual freedom, however, does not pay the bills. Having finished his study of the Kikuyu, Leakey began looking for a more regular job. As a native Kikuyu speaker, he had unique qualifications in the eyes of the government. In 1939, he was appointed as officer-in-charge of Special Branch 6 of the Nairobi Criminal Investigation Department,150 “with responsibility for surveillance of the southern Kikuyu, a post he held for the duration.”151 As a civil intelligence officer, Leakey’s main task was to investigate Kikuyu anti-British propaganda and counteract it when possible.152 At the outbreak of World War II, Leakey’s intelligence work became “more regular and intense” due to the presence of Italian forces in Ethiopia and Somalia. Leakey ran guns to the Ethiopian border for local guerilla groups fighting the Italians. According to his wife at the time, Mary Leakey, he “rather fostered the ‘cloak and dagger’ aura that he acquired.”153 When the Emergency began, Leakey not only had the requisite experience in intelligence, but “was one of the few people with local knowledge and understanding of the Kikuyu, plus fluency in their language, who could perhaps combat the trouble from inside.”154 Using his knowledge of the Kikuyu, as discussed below, Leakey made three significant contributions to British counterinsurgency against the Mau Mau with continued relevance to contemporary military theory and practice. First, Leakey clearly articulated how political grievances when misunderstood and mismanaged can fester into a full-scale insurgency. Second, Leakey demonstrated through the use of indigenous cultural practices (in this case, counter-oathing) that the best counterinsurgency tools are those provided by the culture of the insurgent. Third, Leakey provides evidence for the proposition that all insurgency is local, drawing its organization, tools, techniques, and concepts from local cultural systems. The knowledge actually required for administration has always been pragmatic rather than abstract, partial rather than encyclopedic. As Terence Ranger has observed, “For much of the time and in many parts of Africa this rough and ready pragmatism often did ‘work.’ It was based on a handful of imperial slogans and a working knowledge of the surfaces of African societies.”155 With some notable exceptions (such as R. S. Rattray or John Useem, covered in this volume), district officers and military administrators made do with working knowledge of their ‘subjects,’ content with understanding the superficial patterns of local life. Such knowledge was ‘good enough for government work,’ as the U.S. military expression goes.156 Anthropology would, in theory, reduce the “working misunderstandings” occurring so commonly in the “symbiosis” between a foreign government and an indigenous society subject to its jurisdiction.157 In this case, however, the rise of the Mau Mau resulted in part from British misunderstanding of a

simple ethnographic fact: in Kikuyu society, collective extended kinship groups (mbari) lacked chiefs but owned land. As an anthropologist and a member of the Kikuyu tribe, Leakey could see this error quite clearly. His 1952 book, Mau Mau and Kikuyu, attempted to point out the mistake so that the British colonial government could rectify it. “The misunderstandings on the part of the European and the distrust on the part of the Kikuyu,” Leakey wrote, “have reached a point where evil people have been able to bring into existence the present Mau Mau troubles, which I feel sure could have been avoided and need never have happened.”158 At the time when the British arrived in Kenya, Leakey noted, the Kikuyu had no chiefs. Rather, Kikuyu social organization was based on extended patriarchal sub-clans called mbari. Each mbari territorial unit was administered by a council of senior elders, the leader of which was known as muthanmaki (spokesman), a term frequently misinterpreted as ‘chief’ … Such a spokesman was not a chief in our English sense at all … he had no personal authority and was only the spokesman of the senior council, which in turn only owed its authority to the powers vested in it by subsidiary councils further down the scale.159

Lacking chiefs, the Kikuyu governed themselves through hierarchically nested consensus-based councils of elders. In Leakey’s words, “this simple and yet highly effective organized system of decentralized control of religious, judicial, and secular affairs was not in the least understood by the British when they came to the country.”160 Finding that the Kikuyu lacked titular heads in whom political authority was vested, the British believed it was necessary to create them for the purposes of administration. Thus, in 1895, the British Foreign Office began appointing ‘chiefs’ as local territorial agents, a process that was regularized under the Native Authority Ordinance of 1902 and then intensified under the Colonial Office, with 100 new chiefs appointed in 1908 alone.161 To the British mind, appointing chiefs was both indispensable and expedient. In the word of Sir Charles Eliot, Commissioner of British East Africa in 1900–04, “We are not destroying any old or interesting system but simply introducing order into blank, brutal barbarism. In any event, the interests of Africans cannot be admitted to be paramount over the interests of Europeans.”162 Compounding the British misapprehension that all African political systems included chiefs was a misunderstanding of the Kikuyu customary law of land ownership. The first European settlers, who arrived in 1902, believed that the Kikuyu (like other Bantu tribes) had no concept of individual ownership of land: all an African member of a tribe had to do was to go into any uncultivated part of the tribal lands and proceed to clear it and plant his crops on it and build his home, and that none would say nay. The idea that there was any part of Africa whether land was privately owned, where in fact it had actually been purchased, was unthought of.163

Actual ownership of land, to the British mind, signified a more advanced step on the ladder of social evolution.164 In reality, among the Kikuyu, the titular head of each mbari owned large tracts of territory. According to Leakey, “all the male descendants were part-owners and had absolute right to their own share of it.”165 Because of the joint ownership rights of all male descendants, no individual could sell land unless certain conditions were met. Permanent transfer of land from one party to another required the right of first refusal extended to the entire mbari; ritual marking of boundaries accompanied by sacrifices to the spirits; and “mutual adoption” into the Kikuyu family.166 When British settlers arrived in Kenya following the construction of the railroad, the British government did not legally recognize African ownership of land, “only the occupation and use of land. While land ‘in actual occupation’ could not be sold or leased to settlers, the Crown Lands Ordinance, 1902, did not clearly define the meaning of actual occupation.”167 Occupation was consequently a matter of interpretation, determined not by policy but by the eye of the beholder. To British settlers, the wild, fertile land of Kenya appeared to be unoccupied, and therefore unclaimed. The land appeared unoccupied because, shortly before the settlers arrived, the Kikuyu had been beset by a series of natural disasters: a smallpox epidemic had reduced the population significantly; a rinderpest outbreak had killed thousands of cattle; severe drought had destroyed crops; an invasion of locusts had caused famine. Somewhere between 50 to 95 per cent of the human population died.168 Even apparently unoccupied and overgrown land played an important role in Kikuyu pastoralism. Over the course of an individual Kikuyu’s life, more than one hundred occasions required the slaughter and sacrifice of either a goat or a sheep.169 Large flocks were required to sustain the ritual cycle, and the ideal grazing for goats and native sheep was bushland and not grassland. … To the British, whose ideas of animal husbandry were based on conditions in Great Britain, bushland looked as though it was lying idle when in fact much of it was specifically being kept as grazing land for the goats and sheep and was just as much in beneficial use as English pasture meadows.170

Certainly the British misunderstood (or perhaps ignored) Kikuyu customary law for ownership of land, but the Kikuyu also misunderstood British concepts of land ownership. When the British established forts to support the construction of the railroad, according to Kenyatta, the Kikuyu assumed “that naturally the white wanderers … could not settle for good in a foreign land, that they

would feel homesick and … would go back to live in their homesteads with parents and relatives,” believing that “that one day all the Europeans in Africa would pack up bag and baggage and return to their own country.”171 British payment for territory “did not and could not ever rank as purchase of the land; at best they could only rank as payment for the right to cultivate, subject always to the real owner being allowed—at some future date—to evict the occupier.”172 British misunderstanding of Kikuyu social organization and law created the preconditions for the emergence of the Mau Mau in three significant ways. First, by introducing ‘chiefs’ into a consensusbased political system, the British replaced a proto–democratic system with an autocracy of petty chiefs eager to amass individual power and money with little concern for the wellbeing of the collective. Removal of the legitimate Kikuyu system of governance had a very significant downstream effect: unlike other African societies whose “traditional chiefly offices were incorporated within the colonial administrate structure,” the Kikuyu found themselves with no traditionally acknowledged or legitimate institutions through which to speak or express their discontents … when they felt need to express themselves politically … there was a structural tendency for the Kikuyu to by-pass ‘approved’ institutions, such as that of the ‘chief’, and seek to form others more in line with the traditional pattern and principles of leadership and organization.173

Second, the alienation of Kikuyu land through questionable payments and official government expropriation eventually created a population of hundreds of thousands of angry Kikuyu. “When someone steals your ox,” ex-Senior Chief Koinange explained, “it is killed and roasted and eaten. One can forget. When someone steals your land, especially if nearby, one can never forget. It is always there, its trees which were dear friends, its little streams. It is a bitter presence.”174 Third, with their political system destroyed and their lands appropriated, Kikuyu society experienced a variety of social problems, including prostitution, thievery, drunkenness, disease, and famine.175 As John Middleton observed, when mbari lost their land, mbari members lost their identification as members of kinship units and mbari became aggregates of individuals.176 Kikuyu society per se ceased to exist. In 1952, Leakey’s objective in writing Mau Mau and Kikuyu was “to bring understanding of the problems of the tribe and, in due course, peace to all the people of Kenya.”177 Unfortunately, Leakey’s optimistic rhetorical strategy failed. Explaining the political grievances and misunderstandings of marginalized ethnic groups to the government after policy decisions have already been made has no effect. Scholars, including the author, who seek to influence government policy ought to remember this simple lesson. Leakey once wrote that “the Kikuyu were a deeply religious people for whom life without religion was unthinkable.”178 Before the arrival of the missionaries, Kikuyu religious beliefs centered on the supreme deity Ngai, who lived on Mt. Kenya and whose presence was manifest with the rising sun. Ngai was worshipped communally at special fig trees in sacred groves, where the sacrifice of goats and cattle was performed on important occasions. Much of daily life was governed by the ancestral spirits, who resided in the hearth-stones of huts and the courtyards of homesteads, and who required both placation and propitiation. The complex Kikuyu world of gods and spirits created a strong moral order, with highly specific sanctified behavior and religions injunctions. Violations of taboos (whether deliberate or involuntary) resulted in a state of spiritual uncleanliness, “from which a person could only be freed by an act of ‘ceremonial purification.’”179 The Kikuyu had two types of specialized interlocutors for interaction with the spirit world. The first was a mundo mugo (medicine man) who diagnosed and treated disease using rites, ceremonies, and herbal medicine, and determined propitious dates and locations for marriages, journeys, and initiations. Whereas a medicine man conducted his art openly by day, the murogi (black magician) worked secretly at night to cause harm. The murogi was expert at the use of poison, and more importantly the “psychology of fear, which owed its power to the same absolute belief in magic that made it possible for the medicine man to do so much good.”180 Charms of unclean materials placed around the hut of the victim or spells made from spittle, toenails, or hair could—through the power of belief—kill the intended victim. In Kikuyu society, supernatural forces were woven throughout the fabric of everyday life, integrated into medicine, family, and agriculture. The “most serious ritual in all Kikuyu life,” connecting the individual to the supernatural world of gods and ancestors, was the blood oath.181 Disputes that could not be settled between the parties were brought before a Kikuyu judge, who would render a decision on the evidence presented. However, if the parties were not satisfied with the judgment, they could submit to a blood oath. During the ritual, the oath-taker called upon supernatural forces to punish his family with death, should his testimony be false. The Kikuyu believed that if a man “perjured himself at a githathi oath ceremony, the supernatural powers residing in the githathi stone might exact their punishment, not by causing the death of the individual, but rather of this father or his wife or his brother.”182 The first death to occur in either family served as evidence of perjury, and the judge would sustain or reverse his decision on this basis. Because families paid the price, oathing was considered a collective rather than individual matter, and could only be undertaken during daytime by adult males in front of witnesses after approval by the extended family.183 Oaths could also be taken to end feuds, to try witches and magicians by ordeal, and to bind enemies in a truce.184 Thus, even before the Mau Mau, oath-taking had been used periodically by a

variety of Kikuyu political and social organizations, including the KCA and the Kenya African Union (KAU),185 to create unity by binding the parties to each other and to the collective. When the Mau Mau began the practice of oathing, the intention was to build a unified political organization. “We decided that the movement could not succeed unless it was a mass organization,” Mau Mau commander Fred Kaggia noted, and so they “ordered the oath to be administered to as many people as possible. All means were to be used to get people to come over: persuasion, bribes, and even force, where necessary.”186 From a Western perspective, one might think that an oath follows allegiance; only after one joins the Boy Scouts does one take the pledge. However, among the Kikuyu, the supernatural power of the oath could actually create allegiance to the Mau Mau, even when the individual taking the oath was ignorant, drunk or unwilling.187 “Although administering an oath by force might at first sight appear meaningless, it did not prove so in practice,” wrote General China. “The explanations which we gave, as well as the effect of the oath itself, bound the people to us.”188 Those who refused to take the oath were strangled and their bodies dumped, which likely served as another type of incentive. To the Kikuyu, once the oath was spoken (even if spoken unwillingly or unwittingly), it was binding. In linguistics, this type of speech act is called a “performative utterance.” As John Austin notes, uttering certain sentences in certain contexts constitutes “doing something rather than merely saying something,”189 such as “I do” in a marriage ceremony or “I name this ship Queen Elizabeth” at a christening. In certain contexts, the words themselves create the state of being. The British government correctly recognized the Mau Mau oath as a performative utterance that created a supernatural bond the instant it was spoken. “What is clear,” said British Secretary of State for the Colonies Alan Lennox Boyd, “is that the taking of the oaths had such a tremendous effect on the Kikuyu mind as to turn quite intelligent young Africans into entirely different human beings, into sub-human creatures without hope and with death as their only deliverance.”190 Mau Mau oaths changed over time, different levels of oaths were used for different organizational ranks, and the oath might vary by tribe or locality.191 The most basic ‘unity’ oath required an individual to swear to render assistance, raise subscriptions, assist fellow members, and keep the association secret. Mau Mau forest fighters took the ‘action oath’ (muma wa ngero), promising to protect comrades in danger, steal the enemy’s weapons, and refrain from murdering military superiors. Forest fighters also had to swear that “if I am sent to cut off the head of a European or any of our enemies and I return without doing it, due to fear or cowardice, let this oath turn against me.”192 Although it differed according to time and unit, the ‘action oath’ ceremony generally involved the slaughter and dismemberment of a male goat; symbolic entry through an arch of banana leaves; drinking from a gourd mixed with milk, millet, liquid from the eyes, and bile from the stomach of the dead goat; and swearing to Ngai while holding a small ball of soil or clay. In some cases (and for higher levels of oaths given to commanders), the initiate inserted his penis into the body of a dead animal or drank the blood of dead enemies.193 According to Leakey, the Kikuyu are a very puritanical people, and the sexual acts of the oaths were “calculated violations of acknowledged taboos.”194 According to Kikuyu belief “the more vile or repulsive were the acts performed while swearing an oath—i.e., the more highly tabooed such acts would be in everyday life—the stronger and more binding did such an oath become.”195 The ‘action oath’ was so vile and debasing that it put those who took it outside of Kikuyu society, thereby creating an irrevocable bond to the movement.196 The oath, while possessing great supernatural power to bind initiates, also had weaknesses. In appropriating the traditional Kikuyu oath for their own political purposes, the Mau Mau violated its traditional legal forms. Because Mau Mau oaths were conducted at night, often under duress, in the presence of strangers, and without the consent of families, the oaths were, in Leakey’s opinion, “illegal from the point of view of Native Law and Custom.”197 Moreover, the oath’s supernatural power could be invalidated by counter-magic. As both a member of the Kikuyu tribe and an anthropologist, Leakey understood that the oath’s power could be destroyed by a ritual counteroath, a type of “ceremonial purification.” “Under certain circumstances,” Leakey wrote, “the taking of some types of oath could cause a state of spiritual uncleanness and when this was so, a person could be ‘cleansed’ from the effects of the oath by an act of ceremonial purification.”198 Leakey began to ponder whether this element of Kikuyu religion could be used to counter the Mau Mau: “if a man had taken a Mau Mau oath against his will, why could he not then arrange for an immediate ‘cleansing ceremony’?” Doing so would allow him to be “cleansed and absolved from the effects of his oath.”199 In April 1952, the government implemented Leakey’s advice and began a counter-oathing campaign.200 In a letter to the Colonial Office on 14 May 1952, the Secretariat in Nairobi explained that “We may have to fight this African excursion into magic with similar weapons if those indeed are the only ones that the African understands.”201 Government funds were used to hire Kikuyu and Akamaba witchdoctors and purchase sacrificial goats for the cleansing ceremonies.202 For the next few months, “goats were ceremonially battered to death all over Kikuyu reserve by a travelling circus of the government-sponsored medical men, who were jocularly known among Europeans as ‘Her Majesty’s witch doctors.’”203 The colonial administration broke “with its longstanding de facto policy of not officially combating supernatural challenges to state authority with supernatural means.”204 A close friend of Leakey’s, Chief Waruhiu wa Kunga, the government’s Paramount Chief for

Central Province and the senior African official of the colonial administration, took a leading role in the counter-oathing campaign. Some of the ceremonies he conducted were attended by more than 600 people. These counter-oathing ceremonies “posed the first real challenge to the authority of the militants in the Kikuyu countryside. In the wake of the githathi ceremonies, all the elders involved were threatened and their families harassed. Leakey himself went in fear of attack. It was now that the killings began.”205 By early September, twenty-three government servants, policemen, informers, and witnesses had been assassinated.206 On 7 October 1952, the Mau Mau assassinated Chief Waruhiu, which led directly to the declaration of Emergency.207 The British Secretary of State for the Colonies, Oliver Lyttleton, once described the Mau Mau as “an unholy union between ancient witchcraft and modern gangsterism.”208 Although the trend among scholars since the 1960s has been to focus on the political rationality of the Mau Mau, Lyttleton’s observation holds a grain of truth. Most insurgencies, the Mau Mau included, utilize their own culture as a resource from which they can draw narratives to mobilize a population, norms regarding the use of force, death and burial rituals, ‘warrior ethos,’ concepts and standards of military leadership, and so on. In the case of the Mau Mau, witchcraft and magic formed an important part of traditional Kikuyu culture, and by developing the counter-oathing campaign, Leakey was essentially fighting the Mau Mau insurgency using cultural forms native to Kikuyu society. Although some scholars question the efficacy of this campaign,209 the assassinations immediately following the counter-oathing, particularly that of Chief Waruhiu, demonstrate that—at the very least—the Mau Mau felt it delegitimated their own efforts.210 Leakey was a prime target for the Mau Mau, “the supreme example of a prominent European working against Mau Mau in spite of his own Kikuyu connection.”211 During the Emergency, Leakey had a bodyguard and carried a revolver at all times—commonly referred to as “European national dress.”212 Because he was both well-protected and well-armed, Leakey proved a difficult target. After a failed attempt to sabotage the family car,213 the Mau Mau kidnapped Leakey’s elderly cousin, Gray Arundel Leakey. After strangling his wife and disemboweling the family’s cook, the Mau Mau marched Gray Leakey to the top of Mount Kenya. There, he was tortured and apparently buried alive as a human sacrifice. The murder was ordered by General Tanganyika, who: had taken to consulting Kikuyu female prophets for guidance on the conduct of the campaign. One such prophet … instructed that a European should be sacrificed in the manner of a Kikuyu leader who had died in British custody before the end of the nineteenth century. That leader, named Waiyaki, was popularly believed to have been buried alive by the British.214

His uncle’s ritual murder may well have changed Leakey’s view of the Mau Mau. Although his 1952 book had presented the Mau Mau primarily as a political movement, Leakey subsequently came to view the Mau Mau as a religion. What I did not realise then, and in fact have only come to appreciate fully in the past few months, was that Mau Mau, while to some extent synonymous with these political organisations, was in fact a religion …. which was turning thousands of peace-loving Kikuyu into murderous fanatics.215

As I have written elsewhere, all insurgencies draw upon their own culture to craft information campaigns, memorialize the dead, develop strategies, and mobilize members.216 The same argument can be made regarding social structures, which often “carry over into the society’s military organizations.”217 Thus, in many cases, “the organizational structure of any insurgency will reflect the indigenous social organization of the host nation.”218 In Iraq, for example, tribes were a significant component of the social structure of the country and affected how the insurgency was organized and how it operated. Similarly, in Kenya, both Kikuyu social organization and Kikuyu culture influenced how the Mau Mau were organized and how they operated. When the Emergency was declared in 1952, Nairobi was ‘secured’ through the massive internment of Mau Mau suspects, driving “semi-educated or illiterate, local leaders … into the forests which would become their future bases of operation.”219 Covering almost 900 square miles, these mountains were swathed by dense forests, cut by deep ravines and swift rivers. Rising up to 13,000 feet, the Aberdares were capped with moorland plateaus of swamps, lakes, marshes, mist, and icy wind. Below the moorland grew 60-foot tall bamboo with razor sharp leaves.220 When Mau Mau fighters began moving into the forests, carrying their meager possessions with them, “few even realized that groups similar to their own existed or were being formed in other areas.”221 The leaders of these early ad hoc forest fighting units “were selected on the basis of their demonstrated abilities. …The process of selection was informal, much as in precolonial times, and was usually accomplished through simple consensus.”222 Early Mau Mau leadership thus replicated the traditional Kikuyu political process wherein leadership positions were “achieved, on the basis of demonstrated skills and wisdom, rather than inherited or determined by one’s status at birth.”223 Eventually, these early forest groups spontaneously integrated, forming large, semi-permanent camps. However, “no single individual or organization in the forest had directed the entry of the various groups to the mountains, and therefore no one among the leaders could claim automatic preeminence over the others.”224 Consequently, each territory had a different leader: General China controlled Mt. Kenya, while Stanley Mathenge and Dedan Kimathi commanded in the Aberdares. As Governor Evelyn Baring noted after the declaration of emergency, “Mau Mau organization was

decentralized to fit the equally decentralized tribal organization of the Kikuyu.”225 Recognizing the military limitations of disaggregated fighting forces, individual Mau Mau commanders attempted many times to improve their organization. Although a handful of Mau Mau leaders had served in the British Army during WWII, the most familiar model of military organization came from their own society. The basic structure of Kikuyu military units, in Kenyatta’s words, was the unification of age grade groups “under the leadership of njama ya ita (council of war) composed of several athamaki (leaders) of the various age-grades. At the head of this council was a mondo mogo wa ita (war magician or priest), whose duty was to advise the council as to the best time of waging war.”226 Thus, when Mau Mau leaders sought to reorganize their forces, they replicated “traditional patterns,” which were “based largely on the principle of lower-level representation on higher level councils.”227 In 1953, for example, the Mau Mau units in the Aberdares created the Ituma Trinity Council, transferring much of the decision-making power previously held by individual camp leaders to a council that, “approximating the pattern of traditional Kikuyu elders’ councils, was to meet as the occasion required in order to hear cases, formulate rules and policies, and coordinate military planning and tactics.”228 However, much as in the pre-colonial Kikuyu political system, Mau Mau councils had no power to compel or command policy or action. “We lack a central organization,” said Mau Mau General Njama, and he was correct.229 In the absence of a unified command, Mau Mau units operated almost independently, conducting uncoordinated raids and isolated hit-and-run attacks. The raid was, in fact, the most common form of military operation between the Kikuyu and their traditional enemy, the Masai. “The motive of fighting,” Kenyatta notes, “was merely to capture the livestock of the enemy and to kill those who offered resistance. In other words, it was a form of stealing by force of arms.”230 Traditionally, raiding parties attacked at night, capturing cattle by stealth and perhaps burning a few huts. The intent of the raids was not “annexation of territory or subjection of one tribe to another,” but primarily economic gain.231 Like traditional Kikuyu/Masai raiding, Mau Mau units frequently conducted raids against local farms bordering the forest with the objective of obtaining cattle for food.232 Mau Mau raiding was in part a necessity—as the war dragged on, the government’s tight control of villages on the forest fringe forced the Mau Mau forest fighters to “utilize their dwindling supplies of arms and ammunition exclusively for food raids and, where absolutely necessary, defense.”233 But Mau Mau cattle raids also reflected the Kikuyu ‘way of war,’ in which stealthy operations were conducted as quickly as possible with the objective of capturing materials and munitions, demonstrating the bravery of individual fighters, and memorialized in warrior songs. Mau Mau attempts at other types of operations, such as concerted attacks against stationary targets, were rarely attempted and often unsuccessful.234 While the Mau Mau largely drew from their traditional political patterns to organize their forces and conduct operations, it is worth noting that they also “imposed what was for the Kikuyu an entirely alien form of military discipline,” derived from the British military, including drilling, calisthenics, and cleaning weapons.235 Similarly, they also combined their traditional religion with Christianity in the context of war. Mau Mau fighters prayed to the Kikuyu god Ngai as they faced toward Mt. Kenya,236 performed cleansing rituals after enemy blood was spilled,237 and shook their blankets every morning to remove “evil spirits.” They saw omens in falling stars, strange sounds, and unusual animal behavior. They believed dreams had prophetic power: when Mau Mau commander Dedan Kimathi dreamed that one of his men was a traitor, he executed him.238 The Mau Mau held fast to traditional taboos, convinced that British bombing was “the punishment for our intercourse with women inside our camp.”239 Mau Mau forest fighters also relied on witchdoctors (mundo mugo) to predict impending enemy attacks, the best routes of travel, and actions to confuse the enemy.240 Witchdoctors played a role in traditional Kikuyu warfare because of their ability to hear the word of Ngai in their dreams. In one forest camp, for example, “a boy eleven years old had been made a general by their witchdoctors and they all obeyed him.”241 Kikuyu traditional religion “formed an indispensable part of the composite ideology of war.”242 But so did Christianity. Mau Mau fighters read from the Bible, calling upon the Christian God to bless their activities.243 Many of their fighting songs were sung to the tune of Christian hymns while the words reflected their indigenous beliefs. The Mau Mau also drew upon European mysticism to guide their actions. Kimati and his men often consulted Napoleon’s Book of Fate,244 an oracle originally discovered in an Egyptian tomb during the French military expedition of 1801 and found among Napoleon’s personal possessions after his defeat at Leipzig in 1813.245 (Although the Mau Mau had confidence in magic as a weapon of war, their beliefs also had unfortunate operational consequences. As Maloba points out, the absence of a sabotage campaign “is attributable to Mau Mau’s reliance on seers, prophets, and witch doctors for strategic calculation and planning. These seers failed to realize the military significance of electricity, railways, and roads, and since the guerrillas relied on the seers for guidance they could not embark on unsanctioned exploits.”246) Insofar as the Mau Mau mixed animism, traditional Kikuyu beliefs, and Christianity together in a unique syncretic blend, Leakey was correct that Mau Mau was a religion, and this theory of the Mau Mau became the intellectual cornerstone of the government’s screening and detention program. In 1954, a Committee to Enquire into the Sociological Causes and Remedies for Mau Mau was established, on which Leakey was the “moving force.”247 The Committee’s classified report reprised

Leakey’s view that Mau Mau was a religion, and that oathing was an aberration from Kikuyu culture.248 If this analysis was correct, and the oath initiated new believers, then the logical solution in the Government’s view was a screening process, followed by a process of confession and cleaning. The Committee’s recommendations became “the mantra of rehabilitation, the process by which Mau Mau adherents were treated for their sickness in the many detention camps.”249 During the Emergency, over 70,000 Kikuyu were subjected to detention and rehabilitation,250 and at least one in four Kikuyu men were imprisoned or detained between 1952 and 1958.251 The bar for detention was set very low: suspicion that an individual had taken an oath, sympathized with the Mau Mau, or had been accused by anonymous informants was sufficient.252 Mau Mau suspects were subject to the use of excessive force during interrogation.253 “Women were choked and held under water; gun barrels, beer bottles, and even knives were thrust into their vaginas. Men had beer bottles thrust up their rectum[s], were dragged behind Land Rovers, whipped, burned, and bayonetted. Their fingers were chopped off, and sometimes their testicles were crushed with pliers.”254 Home guards often castrated male prisoners.255 The British military commander, Lieutenant General Erskine, expressed his disgust at this gratuitous violence in a public letter to all army officers and police: “I will not tolerate breaches of discipline leading to unfair treatment of anybody.… I most strongly disapproved of ‘beating up’ the inhabitants of this country just because they are the inhabitants.”256 The so-called “Governor’s Directive on Beating Up” was “widely ridiculed and universally ignored.”257 While Mau Mau may very well have been a new religion combining elements of traditional Kikuyu beliefs and Christianity, the screening and rehabilitation process as enacted by the British military ultimately failed to ‘de-program’ the movement’s adherents. The question is: why did it fail? Leakey viewed the Mau Mau not only as a religion, but as a political movement growing out of Kikuyu grievances. To be fully effective at countering the Mau Mau, both aspects—the religious and political—had to be addressed as part of a comprehensive strategy. However, the screening and rehabilitation process enacted by the British military bore little resemblance to Leakey’s actual recommendations: stop imposing British social customs in the name of Christianity; overhaul the education system; resolve the land problem; improve wages and housing for urban workers; create an old age pension scheme; abolish the squatter system in the White Highlands; provide birth control education; create job opportunities for African women; remove the color bar; provide English language education in the schools; encourage African political organizations; provide journalism education for African newspaper editors; and reorganize the government to ensure African political participation.258 In the end, the screening and rehabilitation process only increased Kikuyu grievances against the government, treating only the symptoms of the insurgency rather than the causes. Policy implementation, as noted in the first chapter of this volume, often looks remarkably different from the policy as it is put into practice. Although Leakey may have correctly identified the Mau Mau as both a religion and political movement grounded in Kikuyu culture and society, the “innumerable intersecting forces,” in the words of Friedrich Engels, of the colonial administration, international media, blood-thirsty European settlers, loyalist Kikuyu, the Kenyan security forces, and the British military, ensured that Leakey’s complex understanding would be brutally simplified in practice. The story of Louis Leakey should remind social scientists who wish to influence government policy that while outside experts may have comprehensive knowledge of a topic, their status as outsiders often limits their effectiveness.

Conclusion On 12 December 1963, the day that Kenyatta became the first President of Kenya, a ceremony was held in the Nairobi stadium. Representing Britain was the Duke of Edinburgh, wearing his admiral’s white dress uniform. Turkana and Samburu dancers wielded spears in mock battle, followed by obligatory speeches. Later that night, the Union Jack was lowered and Kenya’s new flag was raised. Watching the flag unfurl, the Duke of Edinburgh asked Kenyatta, “Do you want to change your mind?” Kenyatta smiled but said nothing.259 At this time, some 1,000 Mau Mau fighters still remained in the forests with their families. Additionally, there were 90,000 former combatants and detainees demanding land, reparations, and absorption into Kenya’s armed forces.260 The Mau Mau forest fighters were given a blanket amnesty, but for pragmatic reasons most of their demands could not be met. Some of the educated Mau Mau attained high positions in the new government,261 but the forest fighters received neither land nor medals.262 In Kenyatta’s view, victory was enough. “Now we have got our freedom. … Is it not what we have struggled for? Now you must help the government, because it is not a European or Asian who is ruling you but an African government.”263 The British military won the battle, but the British government lost the war. From the history of British counterinsurgency in Kenya, one could easily derive the standard lessons found in military text books: excessive force alienates the civilian population; home guard units raised from local minority groups tend towards brutality; air operations against unidentified targets are often counterproductive, and so on. However, the stories of Kenyatta and Leakey add a different dimension which remain pertinent to understanding the socio-cultural dynamics of insurgency and counterinsurgency.

First, conceptual bias (“fantasy ideology”) often blinds us to the realities of the situation, and thereby prevents the creation of an effective strategy. The colonial administration and the white settlers of Kenya were content to amuse themselves on the verandah with gin and adultery, convinced that their suzerainty offered the benefits of civilization to the local heathens. In the words of one of the most prominent white settlers in Kenya, “Years of peaceful administration and their own friendly avuncular relationship with the people had blunted their perception.”264 Possessing only a “working misunderstanding” of the Kikuyu, settlers and administrators had failed to understand the political nature of the Mau Mau and were therefore unable to develop a coherent, workable strategy. Kenya shows us that a fantasy ideology may blind combatants to the reality of the adversary they face, just as recent events in the Middle East show us that our own Clausewitzian logic may blind us to the fantasy ideology of our adversary. Second, the story of Kenyatta’s life—from the little boy herding goats to president of Kenya— demonstrates that cultural knowledge has great efficacy for combatants, no matter which side of the conflict they are on. Enemies always seek knowledge of their opponent. “The first step in any war,” as General China recalled telling new Mau Mau recruits, “is to know your enemy and to know his weapons. I shall teach you the tactics of the British so that we can know in advance what to expect from them, and how we can defeat them.”265 Knowledge is fundamentally neutral and can be used as both a sword and a shield. Kenyatta lived the British way of life, and acquired knowledge of British people, politics and—importantly—anthropology. The British possessed only a “working misunderstanding” of the Kikuyu and never deigned to live the African way of life, ultimately resulting in a cultural asymmetry that ended their rule. The third point relevant to contemporary counterinsurgency theory and practice emerges from Leakey’s role in Kenya. Counterinsurgency (especially the ‘population centric’ variety) benefits considerably from knowledge of the local society, politics, culture, and economic system. Leakey clearly articulated how political grievances, when misunderstood and mismanaged, can fester into a full-scale insurgency. “I do not believe it is an exaggeration,” wrote Leakey “to say that the chief cause of friction between the African natives and the Government in Kenya lies in the fact that the members of the administration do not really understand the African point of view.”266 Once that friction has erupted into full-scale violence, insurgents will draw their organization, tactics, and concepts from local cultural systems. Therefore, the most efficacious counterinsurgency tools are those provided by the culture of the insurgent. Very often, however, complex understandings are followed by simplistic execution. Unlike many of the white settlers who fled the newly-independent and multi-racial Kenya, Leakey chose to stay after Independence. From 1941–61, he served as Curator of the Coryndon Memorial Museum in Nairobi, and later established and directed the Centre for Prehistory and Paleontology at the Kenya National Museum, which remains one of the most important repositories of original hominid fossils in the world.267 Kenyatta and Leakey, while never close friends, overcame their differences. Leakey’s wife Mary wrote that “Kenyatta went out of his way to be friendly to Louis and thereafter remained an admirer of his work.”268 Although they had been intellectual, political, and legal rivals, their views about Kikuyu culture and the future of Kenya were not so different.269 In 1936, Leakey predicted that “the cultural differences between the black and white and brown races which inhabit the colony will grow less and less, while the interests of the three communities will become more and more interdependent and similar.”270

8

DON MARSHALL AND THE STRATEGIC OBJECTIVE

O ye dying breed! O dark Goddess of the abyss! Alas, for your offspring in this World-of-light, Ever-disappearing in the Twilight-realm, dimly illuminated by the low-hanging Sun. Now thou hast sunk, O Sun! Vanished in they wreath of blood-red streamers crowning the sunset. Traditional song of Ra’ivavae1

In 1964, Lieutenant Colonel Don Marshall—a Harvard trained PhD anthropologist—visited Vietnam for the first time. It was a far cry from my field studies in Polynesia, where I had walked through the taro fields by day, talked with old men about the distant past and danced the ura-piani at night. Here the sun was blazing, and the sand around our feet was being kicked up in puffs—it took a few seconds to realize that they were bullets landing.2

Marshall had recently been selected by General Harold K. Johnson to work on a study entitled the “Program for the Pacification and Long-Term Development of Vietnam” (PROVN). General Johnson, who had been appointed as U.S. Army Chief of Staff in 1964, doubted the efficacy of large scale search-and-destroy operations against the North Vietnamese Army, seeing a mismatch between the strategic objective in Vietnam3 and the lethal means being employed to try and achieve it:4 “military force,” he noted, “should be committed with the object beyond war in mind … broadly speaking, the object beyond war should be the restoration of stability with the minimum of destruction, so that society and lawful government might proceed in an atmosphere of justice and order.”5 In June 1965, General Johnson organized a team of smart mid-grade officers and tasked them with developing “new sources of action to be taken in South Vietnam by the United States and its allies, which will, in conjunction with current actions, lead in due time to successful accomplishment of U.S. aims and objectives.”6 In addition to Don Marshall, the authors of the PROVN study included a historian, a political scientist, an economist, and military specialists in intelligence, military operations, psychological operations, and economic assistance.7 The big questions that the U.S. military was asking in 1965 (and which PROVN was intended to answer) included: what is the “object beyond war” in Vietnam? How does the U.S. attain that objective? What are the most effective means to do so? And what are the risks inherent in doing so? As Clausewitz once wrote, “The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish by that test the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into something that is alien to its nature.”8 The goal of PROVN was to identify what kind of war was taking place in Vietnam and to align military means with the policy ends. Marshall’s contribution was to ensure that the culture and society of Vietnam were included in this mid-war strategic reconsideration. As an anthropologist committed to fieldwork as a research method, Lieutenant Colonel Marshall wanted to investigate what kind of war was happening in Vietnam for himself, and his findings and recommendations would be based on ground truth rather than second hand reports. The purpose of Marshall’s first field visit to Vietnam was to “bring a sense of reality to our study of Vietnam … the place that would be my social science ‘laboratory’ for the next ten years—though I did not realize it at the time.”9 Over the next few years, in order to understand the situation in Vietnam, Marshall sought out dangerous and difficult situations and participated in naval support operations and U.S. company ground attacks, visited remote Special Forces camps, and slept in hamlets rated as “VC.”10 After his plane landed in Saigon, Marshall went to the Ambassador’s office “to find out which was the toughest problem district in the most difficult province in Vietnam.”11 Their destination was to be Cu Chi, later identified as the heart of the tunnel complex that the Viet Cong used during the Tet Offensive in 1968. Located just outside of Saigon, Cu Chi was too dangerous to reach by ground transportation, so a helicopter dropped Marshall at the advisory compound. Upon arrival, the local Vietnamese regimental commander told him that they were planning to visit a small outpost that had not been relieved for weeks, where the dead and wounded were stacked up inside the sandbagged position. The commander “tucked my collar with its silver” so it would not show his rank and exchanged his cap for a helmet. As Marshall walked with the Vietnamese major, conversing in broken French, he realized:

my U.S. military training had not prepared me for this: at the command and general staff college at Ft. Leavenworth I had learned to maneuver divisions and battle groups against enemy ‘lines’. At the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle Barracks we had studied the political problems of the world. … I would be of no real military assistance, so could concentrate on what I came for: observing as I participated.12

After the dead bodies were removed from the sandbagged positions, the wounded evacuated and the men paid, the troops began forming a column for the return march. “Then occurred the most significant event of the day: I saw men turn, fire their weapons until the magazines were empty; reload, and fire again.”13 They were not repulsing an attack, but lightening the load for the return home. What shocked Marshall was not the lack of discipline, the waste of ammunition, or the destruction of their only means of defense, but the lack of awareness of the social consequences of their actions. “Here were men firing everything they had directly at the hamlet which the outpost that they had just relieved and replenished was located and manned to protect! What was this war about? Why were we here—and what were we doing here? What were our objectives?”14 Marshall’s background as an anthropologist and a soldier gave him a unique perspective on these questions. He had enlisted in the Army at the age of twenty-three when the U.S. entered World War II after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. After initial training in electronics, he was selected for officer candidate school and commissioned as a second lieutenant. While serving in the 516th Signal Aircraft Warning Regiment in Panama, Marshall became interested in the San Blas Cuna Indians and gravitated to anthropology as the best method to study non-Western societies. When the war ended, Marshall used the GI Bill to attend Harvard as an undergraduate, and eventually got his doctorate in anthropology in 1956. He continued serving in the Army Reserve while he was at Harvard, assigned as an operations officer in the 357th Civil Affairs Brigade in Boston. He spent a year as a Fulbright Scholar in New Zealand, and then conducted fieldwork for his PhD in Central Polynesia, living for more than a year on the island of Mangaia, which lies in the southernmost part the Cook Islands, 650 miles southwest of Tahiti.15 Much of his early anthropological research involved craniology, linguistics, population settlement patterns, and human sexuality.16 From 1951–8, he served as a member of the staff of the Peabody Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, and as a teaching and research fellow at Harvard University. Marshall’s intense personality irritated his academic colleagues, for which he was given an “ominous warning” to “slow down, get in line.”17 Frustrated by their lack of teaching ability, he provided the faculty with a copy of a World War II-era U.S. Army manual on teaching methods, “urging that the Harvard anthropology faculty use it!”18 When Marshall was offered a permanent appointment in the Department of Linguistics, anthropology professor Clyde Kluckholn told the president of Harvard that he would resign if Marshall were hired.19 Called in to speak with Dean McGeorge Bundy, who had just been asked to become President Kennedy’s Assistant for National Security, Marshall saw the situation for what it was: an academic power play. “I didn’t have enough guns of my own to buck the Department of Anthropology: No patron with power; not enough of my own books and papers yet published to swing my own weight.”20 Then and there, Marshall made the decision to quit academia, “dust off my uniform, shine my brass, and move into the full-time military; there, it then seemed, ‘power’ was more simply reflected than in the towers of academia.”21 The Army offered Marshall the opportunity to attend the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, as a reservist, followed by a tour in the Pentagon. Marshall joined the Army Staff in 1963, which proved to be a fateful choice. Under the fluorescent lights of the Pentagon and in the villages of Vietnam, he brought an anthropological perspective to bear on the most pressing national security issue of his day—the determination of the “kind of war” upon which the U.S. had embarked, and the most expedient way to fight it. In the PROVN report, and later in the Long Range Planning Task Group, Marshall outlined a “whole society” approach to warfare, with a focus on directed social change as an element of strategy. Marshall also invented the concept for “Area Security”22 which tailored military forces to specific geographic settlement patterns to focus on the objective of population security from the NVA and VC, resulting in significant improvement to rural security by 1970 in the I Corps area.23 As John Paul Vann noted, “it is a conservative judgment to state that, in broad measure, LTC Marshall’s gifted efforts directly influenced many of the major policy decisions regarding the United States commitment in Vietnam.”24 (To my mind, one of Marshall’s greatest unrecognized achievements was that he was first author to mention Clausewitz in an anthropological journal.25) Despite his achievements, Don Marshall’s intellectual legacy has been largely forgotten by both the military and his own discipline of anthropology. His work is not assigned in graduate seminars, his books are sold at a discount online, and even critics of the military’s use of anthropology seem to have overlooked Marshall as a target for their wrath. When he is remembered, it is mostly for his research on sexuality in Polynesia, which merits a few amusing pages in books such as The Intimate History of the Orgasm.26 Marshall’s name sometimes arises in conjunction with the PROVN study, but usually only as a minor character in the story. Although PROVN’s observations about U.S. strategy (and the unintended consequences of getting it wrong) remain relevant today, the report has for the most part been consigned to the proverbial dustbin of history, occasionally thrown back and forth between historians debating the Army’s role in Vietnam. John Nagl, in Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, calls the PROVN study a “remarkable document, demonstrating the spirit of dispassionate appraisal.”27 On the other hand, Andrew Birtle contends that the PROVN study has been used as a

“cudgel to bludgeon Westmoreland.”28 This chapter asks: what can we learn from the life experiences and intellectual legacy of Don Marshall? Marshall’s most significant contribution as a military anthropologist was his approach to Vietnam, viewing local culture and social structure not as an externality of war but as a crucial factor. Marshall’s concern in this regard was uncommon; very infrequently does the military actually consider the wellbeing of the host nation society as the “object beyond war.” But why not, one might ask? This chapter begins by making the case that though war always involves social change, the post-war condition of the host nation society is generally omitted from the end state envisioned by policy makers, and is thus absent from military planning. This was true in Vietnam until 1965, when Marshall and his co-authors re-conceptualized the war in the PROVN study, and has been equally true in more recent conflicts.

Fuzzy end states When Marshall began his work in Vietnam, the conceptual landscape of the war—its policies, strategies, and tactics—had shifted significantly over time. From 1954–61, U.S. military advisors had assisted the Vietnamese military, which was conventionally structured and trained to repel an “overt armed invasion” from the Chinese in the north, but ill prepared for counterinsurgency against the Vietcong. In 1961, the U.S. began covert operations in North Vietnam and U.S. Army Special Forces began foreign internal defense training of Vietnamese soldiers. From 1963, with the fall of the Diem government, U.S. military assistance steadily increased, and in 1965, the U.S. began strategic bombing of the North and an offensive ground war against the Vietcong, marginalizing the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). At the time PROVN was being written in 1964–5, there was no agreement regarding the overall objective in Vietnam. During the course of conducting research for the study, the PROVN authors surveyed various agencies of the U.S. government and discovered that “no two agencies of the U.S. government viewed our objectives in the same manner.”29 For example, the DoD Military Assistance Plan for 1966 included reunification of North and South Vietnam by military force as an objective, which at that point was not White House policy. Similarly, some members of the Vietnam Working Group at the Department of State had never heard of National Security Action Memorandum 288, dated 17 March 1964. Signed by the President, this document articulated the U.S. objective as an “independent, non-communist South Vietnam.”30 When the PROVN team explained to State Department officials what NSAM 288 said, one suggested in reply that “the ‘independent, noncommunist South Vietnam’ objective statement had long been superseded; it was no longer basic that SVN remain non-communist.”31 (State Department officials have no authority to countermand Presidential security policy.) As the PROVN authors concluded: “The U.S. ultimate national objective in SVN is not yet clearly understood by the American public, by the Vietnamese, by our overt and covert enemies, or by desk officers in the U.S. agencies that are involved.”32 While variations in military strategy over time should be expected in any war, conflicting interpretations of official policy, misunderstanding of basic precepts, and disagreement regarding terminology within the government itself had a detrimental effect on the war effort, hindering “effective interagency coordination and the integrated application of U.S. support efforts.”33 Specifically, in the view of the PROVN authors, disagreement and/or misunderstanding regarding the national objective of the war prevented the creation of a plan for long term development and placed the military focus on combat: The U.S. effort in SVN continues to lack an agreed upon, interrelated program for the support of pacification or Rural Construction as of this date; there is no adequate, agreed plan or program for the longterm [sic] development of a nation. The American combat effort has escalated dramatically—and at the expense of providing advisory support to the GVN. Our advisory effort lacks continuity and is receiving diminishing command supervision as the MACV staff is absorbed with the operations of U.S. combat units. Lack of effective interagency coordination, compounded by unilateral direction from separate agency heads in Washington— together with the absence of an agreed, disciplined approach to problem solving and sense of urgent purpose— characterize U.S. incountry [sic] operating policy and procedures. Duplication of effort and overmanning, complicated by a widening gulf between headquarters and the field, are examples set for GVN emulation in Saigon. A plethora of U.S. short-range and nonintegrated plans, representing an almost equal number of failures, have tended to perpetuate themselves in renamed and refunded versions.34

Without agreement on the basic objective of the Vietnam War, interagency coordination was impossible, duplication of effort was inevitable, and an escalation of force was the natural response from a military organization whose core competence was putting ‘lead on target.’ But for Marshall and the other authors of PROVN, the most significant result of the failure to understand the objective was the lack of an “adequate, agreed plan or program for the longterm [sic] development of a nation.”35 They recognized that the U.S. intervention was altering the entire social fabric of Vietnam, yet none of the change was directed or planned with a long-term future in mind. Before discussing why social change is so frequently omitted from military planning, it might be beneficial to briefly describe the meaning and types of social change, especially vis-à-vis war. What is social change? The paradox of human societies everywhere on earth is that they are stable, and yet constantly changing. A child enters into a family having a constellation of social

relationships with parents, siblings, and extended kinship of clan or tribe, where her behavior is shaped according to the norms of her group. Embedded in the web of family from the moment of birth, people experience the patterns of life as relatively continuous and stable. Yet, this social structure is not static. The child is caught in the ebb and flow of change, even though it may not be perceptible or immediately manifest. Political changes in the central government may neutralize the authority of the extended kinship network (as in Iraq under Saddam Hussein),36 or abolish the nuclear family entirely (as in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge).37 As the child grows into an adult, she will move beyond the family and engage with other institutions in her society. She will discover that her place in the world is not always of her own choosing, and that constraints and opportunities are imposed by her class, her caste, her ethnicity, her race, her religion, her place of residence, and other factors. These elements of her society will influence her behavior, contribute to her self-identity, and organize her experience. But she is not just the passive vessel of social forces. As she grows, she will also contribute to the constant figuring and reconfiguring of social life around her. The changes that individuals make within the context and parameters of their own community have the potential for enormous cascading effects beyond their immediate social sphere. From this discussion, we can see that social change is created by individuals and groups within social systems who are both constrained and empowered by the social environment around them.38 Lucy Mair, a British anthropologist who worked in colonial Africa, wrote in Anthropology and Social Change that: “when we speak of changes in society, we mean changes in the rules that govern social relationships—rules about the ownership and transmission of property, the right to exercise authority, the duty to co-operate with particular people in particular circumstances.”39 Social change therefore means more than shifts in fashion or food preferences; it refers to a change in social organization.40 Social change involves a reorganization or reconfiguration of the social institutions that structure the lives of individuals and groups in a given society. What are the causes of social change? Internal forces such as the invention of new ideas and new technology may result in social change. Social scientists refer to this process of change as “innovation,” which means the non-directed, voluntary change that occurs through invention or discovery by someone within the human group.41 The invention of writing in Mesopotamia, circa 3200BC, made it possible to create tax records and enabled other administrative transactions. In turn, the ability to record and store data created the possibility for surplus production for trade and the centralization of the state. Other forms of internal change include “diffusion,” which refers to the spread of a trait within a group through copying or borrowing,42 and “evolution,” meaning “a kind of change whereby what is now, is a product of what has preceded it.”43 External forces of social change involve contact between different cultures, whether through trade, tourism, conquest, or missionary activity. Social scientists refer to change which results from culture contact as “acculturation.” Acculturation “occurs when a culture undergoes drastic alteration in the direction of conformity to another culture, through borrowing ideas, behaviors, or things from that other culture.”44 For example, the introduction of wage labor (combined with alcohol and other commodities) to the Inuit communities of North America resulted in the abandonment of traditional hunting practices, in turn bringing significant changes to family structure.45 When we talk about social change as the result of war, we are primarily referring to acculturation. Social change may be either voluntary or directed. Voluntary change involves an innovator who generates an idea (through invention, discovery, borrowing) in response to a perceived need, followed by informal and nondirected interactions (associations) by which others also responding to some felt need, simply copy a new belief, behavior, or product in a continually widening circle until the new trait is spread throughout the group.46

An example of voluntary change—which might better be called unplanned change—is the invention of the stirrup in medieval warfare, an unplanned innovation that changed the conduct of war by enabling the use of weapons while mounted on horseback.47 Directed social change involves action rather than just accident as a causal mechanism. Broadly, directed change “involves an idea or plan for change, a design for accomplishing it, and specific steps to bring it about.”48 Behavioral scientists engaged in programs of directed social change often focus on changing specific behaviors that have a harmful effect, whether individually or socially (obesity, teenage pregnancy, and drug use, for example).49 Anthropologists, on the other hand, have historically approached directed social change not as merely a behavioral alteration, but more broadly as the alteration of social structure and/or culture.50 Malinowski noted that directed social change “covers the more or less rapid processes of modification in the political constitution of a society; in its domestic institutions and its modes of territorial settlement; in its beliefs and systems of knowledge; in its education and law; as well as in its material tools and their use, and the consumption of goods on which its social economy is based.”51 When we discuss social change in war, it is directed social change to which we refer. Directed change, even when undertaken with noble intentions, can have unintended destructive consequences. During the era of British colonialism, European political and economic expansion caused rapid and often unpredictable changes to the societies of indigenous people. Often lacking socio-cultural knowledge but convinced of the benefits of ‘civilization,’ British district officers in the colonies of the Crown (with the occasional input of anthropologists) instituted changes to local

societies that they believed were beneficial to the indigenous people and that corresponded to government policy. This type of “progressive imperialism” often had unintended consequences, in some cases leading to the total destruction of indigenous societies, such as the British government’s abolition of head-hunting in Melanesia that led to societal collapse on at least two islands.52 Because of this dark history, directed change—in the eyes of many contemporary anthropologists— has sinister connotations involving the explicit or implicit coercion of the target group. Among the examples of directed social change that we might identify with the potential for unintended, destructive consequences, war is the most profound and traumatic. War always involves social change, and at its most extreme, it may result in the total destruction of a society.53 At the end of the Third Punic War, for example, the Romans killed or enslaved the inhabitants of Carthage, laid waste to the city, and effectively destroyed the civilization.54 The wars of western expansion in the United States destroyed many Native American tribes, often through the introduction of diseases such as small pox.55 Even when it does not destroy a society, war may have disintegrative or degenerative effects. For example, a society’s capacity to sustain itself may be diminished through the loss of life (such as the death of young men during WWI, leading to a reduced birthrate in Europe) or through the loss of territory (such as Poland following the 1794 rebellion).56 The changes caused by war—taken together, beyond the experience of the individual—may involve the destruction of existing social forms, but also the creation of new ones.57 Bruce D. Porter, in his book War and the Rise of the State, notes the “formative and organizing effects of war,” which include territorial coalescence in which powerful states forcefully incorporate weaker communities; centralization of state power in order to wage war; and the bureaucratization and rationalization of state institutions.58 War may destroy states and societies, but it may also create them. In Charles Tilly’s phrase, “war made the state, and the state made war.”59 War causes deep and powerful change within any society in which it occurs, yet as a number of chapters in this book demonstrate, Western militaries often approach conflict and its aftermath as if the battlespace was a blank slate, to be rebuilt and reconstructed at will. Unsurprisingly, no operational environment is tabula rasa; every group of people has a history, stories about the heroic deeds of their ancestors, a means of resolving disputes, practices for memorializing the dead, political processes that work for them, and a kinship system that formalizes who is related to who and what their rights and duties are. What exists, even in so-called ‘ungoverned spaces’ is not ‘savage pre-modernity’ but imperceptible order. Afghans have law, just not what the West may perceive the ‘rule of law’ to be. In short, every intervention enters into a social and cultural context which predates it, and that will endure after troops depart. Similarly, militaries carry with them a particular social and cultural context too. They come bearing unspoken cultural truths and assumptions, things that to them are so obvious that they do not need to be expressed: that church and state should be separate; that representative government is superior to other sorts; that the nuclear family is the ‘natural’ form of kinship; that government officials should (and do) serve the people; that their government’s use of force is legitimate; that the military profession is an honorable one; that scientific progress is good, and so on. These unquestioned cultural truths often have the weight of moral obligation for Americans, for whom it is often not enough to simply believe that these truths are self-evident; some sense of duty demands that these truths be exported. We are convinced that vaccinations against childhood diseases, septic systems, improved agricultural technology, and so on will improve the lives of other people and that they should wholeheartedly welcome these improvements. Going into Vietnam, the U.S. imported not just the machinery of government, but its culture as well.60 In 1964, the CIA representative to South Vietnam summed up the challenges that the U.S. would face, should they wish to function effectively as agents of change: This effort will not be a painless one. Americans will have to give up some deeply-ingrained habits of thought and operation. Where we are accustomed to dealing in broad principles and their equal application, we shall have to be willing to start instead with the particular, the concrete and the local and deal with these as we find them. Where we are accustomed to treating everyone alike, we shall have to apply ourselves to the formation of cadres, with special training, special responsibilities, and special privileges. Where we are used to dealing with a homogeneous soldiery, mobile and interchangeable, we must begin thinking of regional and religious ties. Where we are accustomed to communicating through mass media, we must think instead in terms of personal contact. And where we are accustomed to thinking in terms of groups of people in functional or professional units, we must instead think of them in terms of land and the locality to which they are bound—as villages and districts.61

In sum, all military interventions produce social change in the host nation society, and soldiers— whether they embrace the role or not—become the agents of that change. Insofar as war is the causal mechanism, the resultant social change can be considered directed rather than voluntary. The irony, however, is that while war might be considered as an example par excellence of directed social change, it is rarely planned for in war. Despite the fact that war always results in massive social change, the well-being of the host nation society is rarely included as a desired strategic end state. To use a fairly recent example, the goals for Iraq, as envisioned by the Bush administration in a 29 October 2002 paper entitled “Goals, Objectives, and Strategy” drafted by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and provided to CENTCOM and the Joint Staff, were: an Iraq that: does not threaten its neighbors; renounces support for, and sponsorship of, international terrorism;

continues to be a single, unitary state; is free of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), their means of delivery, and associated programs; no longer oppresses or tyrannizes its people; respects the basic rights of all Iraqis— including women and minorities; adheres to the rule of law and respects fundamental human rights, including freedom of speech and worship; and encourages the building of democratic institutions.62

From this memo, it is clear that civilian policy makers were thinking about political change in Iraq, and specifically changing the government. However, these goals were based on a number of arguably faulty assumptions about the political regime of Saddam Hussein and its military apparatus, including the belief that Iraq was supporting terrorism and possessed large amounts of WMD;63 that Iraqi flag-waving crowds would greet Coalition forces; that the population would support Ahmed Chalabi; that the Iraqi Army, police, and civil government would still function; that reconstruction support would arrive immediately; and that reconstruction tasks would be controlled by an Iraqi interim government with minimum support required by the Coalition.64 As then Secretary of the Army Thomas E. White noted, “we had this mind-set that this would be a relatively straight-forward, manageable task, because this would be a war of liberation and therefore the reconstruction would be short-lived.”65 The most interesting assumptions made by the Bush administration, however, pertain to the culture and society of Iraq, and to the relationship between the state and civil society. First, there was the assumption that Iraq was a “single, unitary state.”66 In one sense this was true, since Iraq exerted a monopoly on violence within its borders. In another sense, looking below the level of the formal government system (the ministries, police, and judiciary) at the social structure of the country, it becomes clear that Iraq was a fragmented, dis-unified state. Divisions existed between and among ethnic groups such as the Kurds, Turkmen, Yezedi, and Arabs; between religious groups such as Shia, Sunni, Jewish, and Christian communities; and between powerful tribal groups such as the Dulaim and Shammar. Divisions also existed between the center and the periphery, and resources and power were concentrated in Baghdad and not distributed equally to the provinces. As former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice noted in 2010, “we didn’t understand how broken Iraq was as a society and we tried to rebuild Iraq from Baghdad out. And we really should have rebuilt Iraq outside Baghdad in.”67 Another significant assumption of the Bush Administration was that Iraq was capable of encouraging “the building of democratic institutions.”68 Although everybody seems to have different items on their list of pre-conditions for democracy, most would probably agree that a functioning economy and state bureaucracy are necessary. Iraq had neither of these: after more than a decade of sanctions, it had been reduced to a “pre-industrial state,” according to a UN delegation.69 Child mortality rates had doubled, malnutrition became widespread, an embargo on chlorine halted sewage treatment, and the government had become a kleptocracy.70 The 2002 Bush goals for the Iraq War mostly concerned regime change, with little attention paid to how the war might affect (or should affect) Iraqi society. Because the goals involved a host of inadequately-examined implicit assumptions about the society of Iraq, they were never addressed during the military planning phase.71 (Assumptions provided by one’s superiors, for military planning purposes, are generally treated as facts.) Social cleavages, social institutions, and social structure were all ignored. The conceptual model in the minds of Bush administration officials was that of a coup, in which Saddam Hussein would be swept from power and replaced by a designated, pre-ordained successor (Chalabi); meanwhile the government and economy would continue to function as normal. Iraqi society did not figure in this equation. As George Packer notes in Assassin’s Gate, “What had been left out of the planning were the Iraqis themselves.”72 As the example of Iraq demonstrates, despite the massive social change caused by war, the wellbeing of the host nation society is rarely included as an end state. “Culture, comprised of all that is vague and intangible,” as Paul Belbutowski notes, “is not generally integrated into strategic planning except at the most superficial level.”73 Why does American war planning ignore society? At the highest strategic level, planning for war begins with a policy objective, and use of the military instrument—and therefore any change that occurs—is driven by policy. War, if we accept the basic premise of Clausewitz, is not violence for its own sake. Rather, war should be conducted to achieve political aims. In the words of Clausewitz, “No one starts a war—or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so—without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it.”74 The notion that the purpose of war is to achieve policy objectives is also the cornerstone of U.S. military doctrine. U.S. War Department General Orders 100 of 1863, signed by President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, states that “modern wars are not internecine wars in which the killing of the enemy is the object. The destruction of the enemy in modern war, and, indeed, modern war itself, are means to obtain that object of the belligerent which lies beyond the war.”75 In current U.S. military doctrine, the “object beyond the war” envisioned by General Orders 100 of 1863 is called the strategic end state.76 Put simply, the desired strategic end state envisions what the environment will look like after the war is concluded. (Joint Publication 5–0, Joint Operation Planning, defines the strategic end state as “the broadly expressed conditions that should exist after the conclusion of a campaign or operation.”77) The desired strategic end state is determined not by the military, but by civilians in the Executive Branch. The President provides strategic guidance through the National Security Strategy (NSS), Presidential Policy Directives (PPDs), executive orders, and other strategic documents in

conjunction with additional guidance and refinement from the National Security Council (NSC).78 On paper, the policymaking machinery seems somewhat rational and streamlined. However, in reality, the NSC is a small, highly politicized bureaucracy that functions less through standardized processes than through person-to-person communication and sub rosa loyalties. This policymaking system may result in vexatious disputes over strategy (such as the disagreements between Vice President Dick Cheney and Prime Minister Tony Blair regarding whether the objective in Iraq should be regime change or disarmament),79 and hinder consensus building among a small group of intelligent, determined individuals who are deeply convinced of the rightness of their own positions. As General Eisenhower once complained, “the struggle to secure the adoption by all concerned of a common concept of strategical [sic] objectives is wearing me down.”80 Ideally, strategic guidance provided by the executive branch should identify “assumptions, conclusions about the strategic and operational environment (nature of the problem), strategic and military end states, and the supported commander’s approved mission statement.”81 In practice, however, as William Flavin notes, “Military forces will rarely receive political objectives that contain the clarity they desire.”82 Strategic guidance, as articulated by policy makers in the executive branch, is often vague and ill-defined (if it is defined at all). Sometimes strategic end states are known to the members of the NSC, but are not articulated publically.83 At other times, instead of identifying a strategic end state, policy makers will list the actions they intend to take in order to achieve it.84 Further befuddlement arises as a result of language: when the military receives guidance from the executive branch, they must interpret the meaning of the words. Words may have vastly divergent meanings within different policy communities in Washington, DC. General Anthony Zinni, when he commanded the mission in Somalia, was told to marginalize, isolate and minimalize the ‘warlords’. Now, I can go to my JTF Pub-1 and look up marginalize, isolate and minimalize. Does that mean I shoot them? Does that mean I capture them? Does that mean I chase them out of town? But what does that mean? In effect, it never got translated into military action.85

Lack of consensus on the meaning of words like “marginalize,” “neutralize,” or “monitor heavy weapons” prevented adequate planning and implementation in Somalia. What this example shows is that if end states or objectives are fuzzy, the final military results may be inchoate. Although there is some debate about whether the military is a learning institution, there can be no doubt that it is a planning one. Once the civilian policy makers provide strategic guidance, U.S. military planning begins, proceeding backward from the end state. As Joint Publication 5–0 notes, “Planning begins with the end state in mind, providing a unifying purpose around which actions and resources are focused.”86 Because strategic guidance regarding desired strategic end states are in theory provided to the military by the executive branch,87 the military has little opportunity to redefine the terms. For the most part, they must work with what they are given. If the strategic guidance omits regime change in the target country, the military will generally abide by the directives of policymakers (as was the case during Operation Desert Storm when Saddam Hussein’s removal from power was omitted from the list of strategic objectives). If the strategic guidance provided by the President or the NSC omits any reference to the society of the target country, social conditions will generally not be included as a planning factor. As we have established, the state of the host nation society is often omitted from military planning. But should social change be an objective of military operations? The idea of incorporating social conditions into strategic planning is bound to strike some members of the military as yet another requirement for more unnecessary ‘armed social work.’ In the bowels of the Pentagon and in tactical operations centers on forward operating bases, I have often heard the rhetorical refrain: “Who cares about local Afghan society? What we want is for them to stop the Taliban operating out of their villages.” The military’s perspective often focuses on achieving military objectives through the most direct and effective means, and a very effective means of stopping the Taliban from operating out of a given village would be an aerial strike, wiping the village from the map entirely. That would certainly solve the Taliban problem, but would involve significant legal, diplomatic, and military consequences. Sometimes the most direct means are the least effective, and at others the most indirect means are the most effective. Thinking about how to prevent Afghan villagers from abetting the enemy requires consideration of the reasons why they might do so in the first place. Some of these reasons are political (such as lack of confidence in the government’s ability to provide security), some are economic (such as access to markets for poppy crops), and some are social (such as extended kinship network loyalties to Taliban members). In this case, the indirect means for preventing the Taliban from operating out of a particular village might include provision of a security guarantee, alternative sources of income, and encouraging the creation of alternative loyalties to khel, village, or state. Where the U.S. government deploys forces into a foreign country, considering the social conditions is likely to produce a better result than not considering them at all. One could certainly make the case that directed social change during wartime is pure hubris and amounts to little more than liberal imperialism at the level of policy, and armed social work at the level of practice. In reality, however, the U.S. military is already in the business of directed social change as soon as it puts boots on the ground. The real question, then, is: is it better to have a plan for the host nation society in advance, or to just hope for the best? Old soldiers often say that no

plan is implemented in precisely the way it was drawn, and even the most enlightened policy will produce unintended consequences—particularly when implemented in a complex adaptive system such as a human society.88 As JP 5–0 notes, “the proximate cause of effects in complex situations can be difficult to predict. Even direct effects in these situations can be more difficult to create, predict, and measure, particularly when they relate to moral and cognitive issues (such as religion and the ‘mind of the adversary,’ respectively).”89 Chance and unintended consequences will deliver bad results some of the time, but the absence of planning altogether guarantees bad results almost all of the time.

The complexities of war and social change War creates massive social change, and yet the executive branch and the military tend to avoid consideration of the social conditions of the host nation society in their vision of the strategic end state. Moreover, very little consideration is given to the actual process of social change, which is frequently left to happenstance and accident. This was true in Vietnam, and also sadly in more recent wars. In his recent memoire, Battle for Peace, General (Ret) Anthony Zinni recounts his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in February 2003, shortly before the beginning of the Iraq War. In response to a question from Senator Norman Coleman of Minnesota, Zinni tried to explain that toppling Saddam Hussein would not automatically put Iraq on course for stability and would require more effort and time than expected: Starting a war unleashes a lot of kinetic energy. When you do that, you have to monitor that energy; you have to control it; you have to look hard at the effects you’re going to generate in many different dimensions; and you have to look to the end result you want to achieve and how to get there. … When you pull the plug on a tyrant who controls all facts of life in a society, you have to be prepared to fill the vacuum. It doesn’t neatly self-order. When you knock things out of balance, you’ve got to be prepared to put them back into balance; you have to know what it’s going to take to put them back into balance.90

Zinni’s view was that the military and the executive branch had to take responsibility for the changes that would be unleashed by intervention, and had to plan for them. “If you want to change a society or influence its direction and choices, you must do it with an understanding of its culture, within the context of its culture, and with an understanding of the plight of its people.”91 Yet in Iraq, as in Vietnam, the society of the target country was not taken into account in the formation of objectives or during the initial planning phases. Society, in effect, was treated as a residual category. So much of this volume has been concerned with negative examples of military operations gone wrong. But in Vietnam, the PROVN study provides an example of what military planners ought to do vis-à-vis local societies. Marshall and his colleagues placed the social well-being of Vietnam front and center. “U.S. planning has failed to realize that the prize in this war is the people,” Marshall wrote, “not only taking terrain or killing enemy forces.”92 Planning for the “object beyond war” in Vietnam really began in 1965, when Don Marshall and the other authors of PROVN were given the mandate to re-think the war. They began with the strategic end state: the creation of an independent, non-communist nation.93 However, the means by which to reach that end state were open to debate in the mid-1960s, and depended on how one answered the question: what “kind of war” is the U.S. fighting in Vietnam? At that time, the U.S. military was wrestling with two distinctly different paradigms. First, if the source of the conflict was external Communist aggression from North Vietnam, then the appropriate U.S. counter-strategy was to focus on the elimination of North Vietnamese military assets. This was the U.S. military strategy from approximately 1954–61, in which U.S. military advisors first “nurtured a conventional GVN [Government of South Vietnam] military force structure designed to repel overt armed invasion.”94 This strategy was continued in slightly different form from 1961–6, when U.S. forces conducted “large-scale ‘seek out and destroy’ operations to destroy the main force VC/ NVA [Viet Cong/North Vietnamese Army] units.”95 In this scenario, the Viet Cong were merely a symptom of external North Vietnamese aggression.96 The obvious means to defeat a bellicose state on the northern border was through the application of firepower, which was the dominant military paradigm during the early years of the war: when asked at a press conference his views about the answer to insurgency, General Westmoreland offered one word in reply: “firepower.”97 If the source of the problem was North Vietnam, then the appropriate solution was military in nature. Thus, General Earle Wheeler, who later became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared that “It is fashionable in some quarters to say that the problems in Southeast Asia are primarily political and economic rather than military. I do not agree. The essence of the problem in Vietnam is military.”98 How the problem is framed in turn shapes the solutions that can be imagined. Framing the war as a fight against Communist aggression meant that South Vietnamese political and economic issues were of only marginal concern to the U.S. military. If this was a military problem with a lethal solution, the social context in which the war took place was irrelevant, and the effects of U.S. military operations on Vietnamese society were unimportant. This had been the dominant paradigm in the early part of the war, and it had certain consequences. By 1965, ignoring conditions in South Vietnam and disregarding the effect of U.S. activities on Vietnamese society had proved counterproductive. As Sir Robert Thompson, head of the British Advisory Mission to South Vietnam,

observed in 1968, “the build-up of a large conventional military force, the proliferation of paramilitary forces, the indiscriminate issue of arms and the conscription of all able young Vietnamese into the forces could not have been better designed to create both instability and a lack of unity.”99 The alternative answer to the question “what kind of war is this?” framed the conflict not as a high-intensity conventional war against the forces of North Vietnam, but as a counterinsurgency campaign to be fought at the local level. In this scenario, the Viet Cong are also a symptom, but in this case not of external Communist aggression, but of unaddressed political and social grievances among the Vietnamese population. If the source of the problem in Vietnam was ineffective government, lack of rule of law, and economic inequality, then firepower was not the only answer— in fact, conventional tactics designed to fight the Soviets in Poland may actually make the situation worse as bombing, napalm, and artillery fire tend to terrify, kill, and alienate the people whose support is needed.100 If the conflict was an insurgency against the government of South Vietnam— albeit resourced by North Vietnam—then the U.S. counter-strategy should include three prongs: destruction of Viet Cong support networks; containment of the North Vietnamese main force; and governmental reform in South Vietnam.101 Framing the war as a counterinsurgency underscored political, social, and economic conditions (not just military conditions) in South Vietnam as critical factors rather than extraneous details. Marshall and the other authors of the PROVN report, completed in 1966, took the latter approach. The report begins with the observation that: The situation in South Vietnam (SVN) has seriously deteriorated. 1966 may well be the last chance to ensure eventual success. “Victory” can only be achieved through bringing the individual Vietnamese, typically a rural peasant, to support willingly the Government of South Vietnam (GVN). The critical actions are those that occur at the village, district and provincial levels. This is where the war must be fought; this is where that war and the object which lies beyond it must be won.102

PROVN saw the strength of the Viet Cong in South Vietnam not as a symptom of North Vietnamese aggression, but rather as a symptom of South Vietnamese failures. In reframing the problem, PROVN shifted U.S. objectives. If the problem in Vietnam was an inefficient, corrupt and non-representative government, then the answer was not just firepower, but redress of political grievances, provision of security, and propagation of social justice. But the question arises, how should ‘security’ and ‘social justice’ be defined? Does ‘security’ mean the same thing to the U.S. military as it does to a Vietnamese peasant? As noted in the introduction to this volume, policy implementation frequently involves exporting Western social, economic, and political frameworks and concepts into societies that do not possess them. This was certainly the case in Vietnam. On 12 June 1969, Marshall briefed the senior U.S. military personnel responsible for conducting the war in Vietnam. This critical, high-level meeting required some finesse. General Creighton Abrams, Jr. had recently replaced General William Westmoreland as the commander of the Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) and this meeting was the forum to present his new “One War” strategy. The room was full of serious brass, many of whom believed wholeheartedly in the unrestrained use of firepower in Vietnam.103 Westmoreland’s approach had focused on large-scale conventional operations, but Abrams was going to try something different: a strategy that mixed major combat operations with counterinsurgency. (There was no doctrinal name for this mixed strategy in 1969, but the U.S. would now probably refer to it as “full spectrum operations.”104) Abrams had chosen Marshall to draft the strategy, and he now had to stand up and explain it to a skeptical audience of men who outranked him. Marshall began by clarifying that the purpose of the briefing was to provide details about the “principles for area security.”105 He noted that for the North Vietnamese to attain political control of South Vietnam, the enemy must demonstrate that the government cannot provide security. Marshall then described “two military approaches to defeat the enemy ambitions and accomplish U.S. objectives in Vietnam. The first approach focuses on destruction of the enemy’s main forces in the belief that, by destroying the enemy’s combat units, the ultimate security of the people is assured.”106 While Marshall doesn’t say it directly, the destruction of the enemy main force (the North Vietnamese Army) was the approach favored by Westmoreland. The second approach is to focus on providing security for the people. If the people are secure, the government will be able to expand its authority and strengthen itself. Thus operations should be focused on destruction of the VC infrastructure and local forces while preventing main forces from reaching the population centers.107

Marshall then expresses the cornerstone of Abrams’ “One War” strategy: “Neither approach in itself is appropriate at all times countrywide. Neither is exclusive of the other. But a careful mixture of the two strategic approaches is appropriate.”108 Marshall’s well-crafted, delicately phrased points are exactly what one would expect from a junior officer briefing a group of very senior officers on behalf of his boss. What was unusual was what happened next: Marshall interjected insights from the realm of anthropology into a discussion of military strategy. What is perceived to be a threat is a variable. A military commander’s definition of threat, for example, may

differ from that of a villager. The rural Vietnamese farmer, even one leaning toward the government of Vietnam, who is in a military commander’s tactical area of responsibility may regard both the enemy forces and the friendly forces as a threat to his security, that is to his safety, his well-being and that of his family.109

In short, Marshall was articulating the worldview of a Vietnamese peasant—not from an objective, scientific Western perspective, but from the subjective perspective of the local people. He is asking the men responsible for conducting the war to consider what ‘security’ means to someone who lives in a village in the Delta to whom the war was everyday life. While a PF [Popular Forces, equivalent of the South Vietnamese National Guard] soldier and a U.S. commander normally would fear artillery fire only from the enemy, a villager fears our artillery and air strikes as much as he fears the enemy rockets or mortars. Thus actions taken by one element to ensure security may constitute a threat to another element in whose name the action is taken.110

Under the fluorescent lights of the Pentagon, Marshall raised a significant but heretofore ignored question: what does security actually mean to the Vietnamese, in whose name the U.S. is fighting this war? Did the Vietnamese actually want or need the U.S. government’s security assistance? In truth, wants and needs—including the need for security—are culturally contingent. Wants refer to a desired state of affairs; needs refer to the means for achieving or maintaining them.111 If a community wants a reliable water supply, what they need is a dam, aqueduct, or well to provide the water. If an individual wants to gratify her hunger, what she needs is food.112 The tricky part in this seemingly simple distinction between wants and needs is that how they are defined depends on the host nation culture. For example, the food an individual or a community wants depends, to a great degree, on their culture of origin. In Korea and Finland, pine bark soup is considered a treat, but you will not find it on the menu in Germany or Japan. The methods that an individual or community chooses to meet their needs is also culturally contingent. Sometime around the 6th millennium BC, farmers in Mesopotamia invented the plough as a means to cultivate the soil to meet their need for food crops. The Baiga of Central India, however, rejected the introduction of the plough, seeing the earth as a generous mother that they would not cut “with knives.”113 When a government or NGO embarks on a development project, they have to distinguish between the wants and needs of the local community and assess the most effective means for meeting them. The development agent and the community may actually want the same thing, such as improved health, but the means they consider appropriate to the situation may be vastly different. The change agent may believe that the most effective means to improve health is to encourage the community to use latrines and go to the doctor regularly, while the community may believe that the most effective means to reduce sickness is to identify the witches who are causing it and find more effective charms against them.114 In other cases, the community and the change agent may also want very different things, requiring different means to achieve them.115 In Vietnam, the U.S. assumed that the Vietnamese wanted government and security, and that democracy was the best means to achieve it. Assuming that other people are ‘just like us,’ we import our models and methods to solve their problems. In Vietnam, Western style democracy was introduced without any real understanding of local models of political representation. As Seymour J. Deitchman notes in his classic book, The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Science Research and Bureaucracy, village councils comprised a venerable form of local government, predating the French in Vietnam, to which respected village elders were “elected” by approbation. Although the village-council system had been corrupted and emasculated by the French and by Ngo Dinh Diem, who appointed his loyal followers to the council, it was still more or less respected by the village populace. … A system of representation in which village councils were elected, and they in turn elected representatives to higher bodies through district and province until representatives were sent to the national government, would have been congenial to Vietnamese from ancient times.

Given the indigenous Vietnamese system, Deitchman relates that he was “astonished to hear the White House call for national elections in the American style in Vietnam. To our knowledge, no one familiar with Vietnamese history had been consulted before that proposal was made.”116 The U.S. offered democracy and assumed that the Vietnamese people wanted it. “Not until 25 January 1966, has there been a concerted U.S. attempt at Washington level to collate and report on the primary needs and attitudes of rural population throughout SVN.”117 What did the Vietnamese actually want? Nhan Dao, which translates roughly as “humanity and social justice.”118 According to the authors of PROVN: after a generation of witnessing death and desolation and of experiencing the physical tugs and hauls of strange protagonists who enforce listening to alien thoughts that appear divorced from his sense of reality, the Vietnamese wants security from fear and pressure. He must hope for the chance to live his life as he sees fit. But, being “left alone” is not enough. For the Vietnamese wants social justice—though being left alone may equate with social justice, in that it eliminates oppression.119

The government of South Vietnam was unable to provide social justice, and was in fact perceived as a source of injustice by many Vietnamese. The Viet Cong offered the peasantry an alternative means of attaining what they wanted—armed struggle.120 In sum, by reframing South Vietnamese failures rather than North Vietnamese aggression as the root of the conflict, PROVN shifted U.S. objectives. If the problem in Vietnam was an inefficient, corrupt, and non-representative government, then the answer was not just firepower but redress of

political grievances and provision of social justice. However, exporting Western models of government and ‘security’—specifically military security obtained through control of territory and use of force—was counterproductive. In fact, as Marshall later wrote, it may actually be impossible: “How do you plan ‘liberty’ for somebody else? Or can we only assist in its achievement or preservation?”121 Before Marshall quit academia and returned to the Army, he conducted fieldwork on two Polynesian islands: Ra’ivavae, the most puritanical of the islands, and Mangaia, the most sex-obsessed. Both of these research projects indirectly involved the same broad themes he was later called upon to consider in Vietnam: social cohesion and social change. Living on the Polynesia island of Mangaia, Marshall experienced a cohesive society first-hand. Once known for its prowess in war, Mangaia was one the few islands in eastern Polynesia to retain their indigenous leadership and resist complete European domination. When Marshall conducted fieldwork there in the 1950s, “the once chronic battles and continuous bloodshed” had been replaced by “bland, though peaceful, concepts of puritanism. Ceremonial sexual copulation on the temple grounds by warriors and their wives has been replaced, in part, by taking Holy Communion.”122 Despite the encroachment of Christianity and the infiltration of capitalism, Mangaian society was still cohesive; shared norms and behaviors governed people’s lives. What Americans might consider to be ‘socially destruction’ or ‘sexually excessive’ practices, such as birth of children out of wedlock, lingual manipulation of an infant’s genitalia, public sexual encounters, forcible abduction of young women, and competitions for the most sexual partners, did not (in Marshall’s view) damage Mangaian society because they were part of an integrated social whole. But behavior adapted to social life on Mangaia might not work everywhere. As Marshall noted, Mangaian women have learned how to universally achieve orgasm during sex. Theoretically, women in other societies could learn Mangaian techniques as well. “Whether this general achievement of the climax would—in the long run—be socially cohesive or socially disruptive is a problem that must be left to another discussion.”123 After Marshall finished his research on libertine Mangaia, he visited puritanical Ra’ivavae. The purpose of the 1957 expedition to Ra’ivavae was to discover whether earlier ethnological reports could be validated: was it true that this peaceful Christian, coffee-growing island had once been the home to a warrior civilization that practiced human sacrifice and ritual copulation? On Ra’ivavae, so it had been reported, the young men were brought up as warriors, trained to use the spear and the club.124 The girl children were pampered and fattened, their bodies shaded from sunlight, and their clitorises manipulated and stretched until they became enlarged. Inside the marae—temples built of volcanic slabs, decorated with stone phalluses and lined with representations of women in various stages of copulation, pregnancy, and childbirth—the girls were displayed to the young warriors who would then chose them as brides. Prayers for abundance and fertility were spoken, and group copulation took place under the watchful eyes of the priests.125 What Marshall found during the 1957 expedition was that, based on archaeological excavation, interviewing of informants, and analysis of cultural artifacts, Ra’ivavae had indeed once been “caught between the twin poles of procreation and destruction, between love and death.”126 Marshall, who grew up in puritanical New England in the 1920s and 1930s, does not offer any moral judgment about the sexual practices of the ancient R’aivaveans. What interests him is the question: why did the ancient Polynesians practice sexual rites? Marshall’s answer was that a significant function of the sexual religion on Ra’ivavae was social cohesion: “this binding together, that is, the binding of those of the past and present with those of the future, is a major function of the Polynesian marae.”127 But what exactly is a cohesive society? The idea of social cohesion comes from the father of sociology, Emile Durkheim. In his 1893 book, Division of Labour in Society, Durkheim argued that in small-scale societies lacking a division of labor, individuals were bound to each other through similarities in belief and through bonds of affinity (“mechanical solidarity”). In more complex societies, the division of labor necessitated a mutual dependence between individuals (“organic solidarity”).128 Durkheim’s work was translated into English in 1933,129 and found its way into anthropology. Anthropologists studying small societies that lacked formal law or government were fascinated by what Evans-Pritchard called “ordered anarchy”—namely, what social forces prevented a society from the whirling gyre of lawless chaos? In Crime and Custom in Savage Society, Malinowski argued that “primitive” societies were not held together by “group sentiment” or “collective responsibility” but rather by “a definite social machinery of binding force, based … upon mutual dependence, and realized in the equivalent arrangement of reciprocal services.”130 But the ties that bind also sever: customary allegiances may cause men to quarrel, while at the same time other allegiances may act to restrain violence.131 Reciprocity, dependence, and allegiances created shared bonds between people that were, in the view of many anthropologists, the basis of a “cohesive society.”132 A society may be more or less cohesive, but no society is static and immune from the forces of change. How does a cohesive society test, accept, and utilize new patterns and innovations without being destroyed in the process? On Ra’ivavae, French colonialism, the plague epidemic of 1820, and Christian missionaries destroyed the old religion, and knowledge of canoe building, wet taro cultivation, turtle hunting, drumming, dancing, and stone carving were lost along with it.133 The world changed around them, but the people of Ra’ivavae were not able to adapt to the changes

wrought by pestilence, colonialism, and Christianity. What internal cultural mechanisms or patterns enable a cohesive society to live, or conversely, cause it to die? Marshall ends his book by addressing this question: Stable societies are usually able to meet the challenge of changing geographic and social situations. However, if cultural patterns become so rigid that they cannot be changed by some individuals within the culture, then the group’s way of life will be shattered if it comes up against a situation where the ready-made answer does not apply. The shattering effect of near extermination and the loss of the old ways of life without an adequate substitute for them is what caused the death of ancient Ra’ivavae. … The lack of a suitable mechanism to test, accept, and utilize what is good of the changes which history inevitably brings seems to be the death warrant of a culture. And an unwillingness to accept unorthodox individuals sounds the death knell of a society.134

Five years later in Vietnam, Marshall was still thinking about the interrelated problem of social cohesion and social change, and in 1965, Marshall and the authors of PROVN came to the conclusion that a “cohesive society” was the “the real basis for Western democracy” in Vietnam.135 In other words, in Marshall’s view, social cohesion was the precondition for democracy. (Of course, a variety of social pre-conditions must exist to support democratic institutions in a given society. In 1762, Rousseau posited that democracy required a “great simplicity of mores, to prevent business from multiplying and raising thorny problems,” “a large measure of equality in rank and fortune,” and “little or no luxury.”136 Since the publication of The Social Contract, other authors have proposed additional pre-conditions to democracy, including literacy, urbanization, and basic capitalism,137 shared values (“civic culture”) within the population,138 and concentration of political power in the hands of the state.139) Volume II of PROVN, which contains an entire appendix on cohesive societies, defines it as “one that is reasonably attuned to member expectations and aspirations and one whose members are committed to the purposes of that society,” noting that “Vietnam, at present, is not a cohesive society.”140 Vietnamese society, like Ra’ivavean society, had not been able to adapt to the social changes produced by French colonialism. “Vietnamese institutions, long dominated by the French, were unable to change and produce change rapidly enough to cope with the society’s needs.”141 The French had successfully blocked or limited the ability of Vietnamese institutions—such as the family, economy, political system, and religion—to change to fit the new circumstances.142 When the nationalists finally ended the French mandate through force, the lid came off the proverbial pot, and the social stew boiled over. The Vietnamese found themselves in “a social revolution even they themselves cannot fully understand.”143 In 1965, the conflicts and contradictions between peasants and intellectuals; between Buddhists and Catholics; between the revolutionaries and the government; between urban and rural; between minority groups and ethnic Vietnamese had atomized society. In effect, there was no “Vietnamese society” but only an array of groups at war with each other—in some cases literally. For Marshall and his colleagues, not only was a cohesive society a precondition to democracy, it was also a counterstrategy. The conflict that had been taking place in Vietnam since 1959 (and perhaps earlier) was not a conventional war fought with heavy armor and artillery but a “fully integrated social assault” by the Viet Cong.144 One prong of this assault was exploitation of the social discontinuities and conflicts noted above: class conflicts between rich and poor; sectarian conflict between Catholic and Buddhist; ethnic conflict between Cochin-Chinese and Tonkinese; and so on. The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were able to manipulate “existing Vietnamese dissatisfactions and magnify long standing social differences” to their advantage.145 Marshall and his co-authors called this new type of international confrontation “nonwar”—“a confrontation of ideologies” in which “successful attainment of immediate military objectives still will leave political, economic and social-psychological conflicts … unresolved.”146 In a “nonwar,” the “objectives ‘beyond the war’ imply the need for a social revolution achieved through U.S. assistance (a strategy for peace and not war).” In other words, orthodox techniques were inadequate to combat this type of “social assault.” The counterstrategy required a “broad-gauge application of national power” exceeding “the purview of any single U.S. executive agency,”147 and involving directed social change within the host nation society. Development of a cohesive society would inoculate Vietnam from the disintegrative effects of “social assault” by the Viet Cong. If a cohesive society was the pre-condition for democracy, how could it be built? In Appendix I of Volume II, the PROVN authors provide a map of the ‘human terrain’ of Vietnam, including what intelligence analysts would now recognize as a node and link chart for the whole society. Embedded in an analysis of the Vietnamese social system are concrete suggestions for building a cohesive society, including using education efforts to weaken family and clan loyalty; using military service to create nationalist sentiment; using rural economic development to create ties to the government; decentralizing political authority to reduce cleavages; facilitating inter-faith activities to reduce antagonism; supporting talented junior ARVN officers to reduce institutional stagnation; involving intellectuals in active social reform programs; and so on. None of this could be easily achieved. As the PROVN authors note, “The decision to assist in establishing cohesion within an alien society is momentous; the task would be fraught with difficulties even when undertaken in an environment of peace.”148 The barriers to change were significant, both because of Vietnamese and American culture. “Change, when it occurs, will be difficult to root deeply in SVN. The belief that all in life is transitory has many followers, and it will require a massive effort to convince the Vietnamese that substantive positive change has occurred in their version of reality.”149 On the U.S. side, “The effort

to break the chain of reorganize, rename, refund and fail on a yearly basis presents, perhaps, the greatest motivational challenge to the U.S. presence.”150 The concept of social cohesion—both the social pre-condition and counter-strategy necessary to reach the objective—was not considered during the initial war planning process, and perhaps not even considered relevant until 1965 when Marshall began working on PROVN. The U.S. assumed that the Vietnamese government would solve Vietnamese social problems, somehow reconciling the interests and agendas of these warring groups. What it failed to realize was that the Vietnamese government itself was the problem. The government of South Vietnam did not represent the interests of the people, except perhaps for well-educated Catholic elites. According to the PROVN authors, “Thus far, the U.S. appears unwilling to regard Vietnam as a society in trouble. We have attempted to force both advice and tangibles into that society with the expectance that they would survive imperfections of the governing system.”151 Providing support to the corrupt and inefficient South Vietnamese government in the hope that it would ameliorate the social divisions in the country was simply fuel poured on the fire. The U.S. provides over 200,000 troops, millions of dollars’ worth of equipment and 75 percent of the GVN budget. It is naïve to think that the U.S. is not now influencing politics….But this presence is an unplanned political force with counterproductive impact. The Vietnamese often believe that failure of the U.S. to take a stand on political issues means that the U.S. totally supports GVN, including its arbitrary decisions, its corruption and its inefficiency. For example, in Vietnamese eyes the awarding of business and import licenses on the basis of nepotism, bribes and political favoritism appears to be sanctioned by the U.S. Apparently unequivocal support of GVN practices by the U.S. discourages reform from within.152

Aiding the South Vietnamese Government, as PROVN noted, undermined U.S. efforts and often reproduced the conditions that led to the war in the first place: “the very imperfections of the GVN we are assisting have produced the social conditions that require our presence.”153 Confident that the Government of Vietnam would address the social, political, and economic facets of the war, the U.S. was “preoccupied with purely military activities.”154 While agreeing in theory that attaining the population’s allegiance was the goal, Americans appear to draw back from its complexity in practice and gravitate toward a faulty premise for its resolution—military destruction of the VC. Frustrated by our inability to find “the method” to cope with conflict of this nature, we have resorted to methods employed in wars of the past to address almost exclusively the battle’s military dimension. Remaining aloof from what “we consider” to be areas strictly of Vietnamese concern —political and social reforms—may well constitute a tragic blunder.155

In the view of the PROVN authors, a purely military strategy was inadequate for achieving the U.S. objective in Vietnam because it did not address the underlying causes of the war. “This narrowly based response has failed to address the social-political-psychological-economic facets of South Vietnamese aspirations and grievances which constitute the crux of the problem.”156 A narrow focus on a single element of a problem—such as attrition of the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War—might be inadequate as a solution, but is not unusual. Just as the military tends to focus on their core competency—the elimination of ‘bad actors’—so NGOs tend to focus on the lever they understand best, economic development. As soldiers sometimes say, “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Even social scientists with formal training make such mistakes. Certain anthropologists in the 1950s, for example, viewed kinship as the central feature of social systems, discounting other elements such as religion or ecology. This approach segregates these parts of a social system and treats them as isolated phenomena rather than parts of an integrated, interdependent whole. Similar to omitted-variable bias (the omission of one or more causal factors) and the synecdochic fallacy (the substitution of part for whole, genus for species or vice versa), this type of fallacy in the analysis of other cultures might be called the decontextualization fallacy. Marshall’s approach toward Vietnam—and indeed his intellectual approach in general—was to view society as a unified system composed of interrelated component parts in which “the factor of interdependence among all facets of the society … precludes the development of one sector without concurrent advances in most of the others.”157 Indeed, the smallest village in Afghanistan, the most remote hamlet in Vietnam, and the largest city in Iraq, all have something in common: they are complex, integrated systems of social order.158 Their kinship systems are related to their economic systems; their economic systems are related to their educational systems; their educational systems are related to their religious systems; and so on. Because these social elements are related and integrated, a change in one part of the system will be followed by changes in others, often in a series of cascading effects. Marshall and other PROVN authors believed that strategy and operations had to conceptualize Vietnamese society as a whole society—an integrated system composed of interrelated, interdependent elements. (This is not a new idea in military thinking: Clausewitz once wrote that “in war more than in any other subject we must begin by looking at the nature of the whole: for here more than elsewhere the part and the whole must always be thought of together.”159) These elements, diagrammed in minute detail in the PROVN study, include: natural resources, social classes, government structures, religions, justice system, ethnic groups, and food production, all of which were “inextricably interrelated; to vary the intensity or the nature of one factor cannot help

but impinge upon the intensity and the nature of other factors.”160 The whole society approach to warfare had a number of significant military implications. First, envisioning Vietnamese society as a complex system meant that the solution had to be equally complex. The integration of Vietnamese society, as the PROVN authors noted: negates simplistic arguments by those who contend that “the solution” to the problem of Vietnam lies only in “killing VC,” “more combat divisions,” “negotiations,” or in “leave[ing] the country to the obvious regional power, China.… Varying a single factor may influence some of the other factors, but such manipulation cannot assure control over sufficient numbers of them to achieve an objective.161

The second military implication of a whole society approach was a shift in how the enemy was perceived. Recognizing that the Viet Cong were “encouraged, materially supported and—at least in some very significant respects—directed by Hanoi,” the PROVN authors nevertheless viewed the Viet Cong as part of South Vietnamese society, not external to it.162 Indeed, the Viet Cong’s roots in Vietnamese society actually made their military success possible. Radiating from most individual VC are webs of kinship responsibility and neighborhood preferences that bind together a larger proportion of the South Vietnamese citizenry than could ever be deduced via traditional intelligence methods. This interrelated set of webs of responsibility and preference accounts as much for insurgent successes as does VC resolve in battle.163

Third, if the Viet Cong were indeed part of the society and rooted in South Vietnamese traditions of kinship and community, a strategy of attrition would not only create cascading grievances within kinship networks, but would also remove some of the most competent individuals within the society. To that end, the PROVN authors cautioned that the government: Eventually must make use of the VC and their kinsmen; most especially their leadership potential must be exploited. To “kill them off,” as U.S. proponents of simple solutions contend and as is practiced today by GVN, will prevent attainment of our basic national objective with respect to SVN. For a country cannot be free if it lacks sufficient leaders; it cannot be independent if its human resources have been destroyed; it cannot be noncommunist to the exclusion of being pro-something.164

Finally, conceptualizing Vietnamese society as an integrated whole implied that the U.S. military should “treat social change as a major item.”165 Vietnam had been destabilized by French colonialism, nepotistic government, rapid economic development, urbanization, U.S. military intervention, and internal social divisions, among other factors. The Viet Cong “social assault” had further eroded connections and interdependencies in the social fabric, exacerbating the lack of social cohesion. The U.S. military could rely neither on firepower nor the Government of South Vietnam to reach the long term goal of an “independent, non-Communist” Vietnam (of which a cohesive society was a precondition). Rather, the U.S. military would have to rescind “the long standing U.S. policy of ‘nonintervention’ in internal affairs,”166 and become more directly involved in order “to assist the passage of the Vietnamese people through a social revolution even they themselves cannot fully understand.”167 The U.S. military would have to act as “agents of social change”168 in order to reach their long-term goals by 2016, which included, “a society that enjoys inner social cohesion; a viable government; a diversified, maturing economy; and an adequate security posture.”169 PROVN reframed the war, moving Vietnamese society into the foreground. The “object beyond war” was not defeat of the adversary, but instead a set of social, economic, and political conditions. Acknowledging that the war was taking place inside Vietnamese society and recognizing that U.S. operations had an impact on it would make it possible to plan for the desired end state. To this end, PROVN made hundreds of observations and recommendations, many of which focus on the society itself and the effect of the U.S. military on Vietnamese society. In so doing, PROVN challenged the military’s dominant paradigm of the war in Vietnam, but not all embraced this shift. General Westmoreland and senior personnel in the MACV took issue with a number of PROVN’s findings, and recommended that the study be “reduced primarily to a conceptual document” and presented to the National Security Council for review.170 The man responsible for initiating the study, Army Chief of Staff General Johnson, was initially reluctant to distribute a document that appeared to be critical of the conduct of the war and which might interfere with a field commander,171 and embargoed its distribution outside the Army staff.172 However, PROVN was briefed widely inside the Pentagon. Perhaps the most important person on the briefing schedule was the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara. Unfortunately, he “didn’t like what he heard,” as one of the PROVN authors, Volney Warner, (who retired as a four star general) recalled, “and didn’t want to hear it.”173 However, by mid-November 1966, McNamara had reconsidered his initial reaction. In a Draft Presidential Memorandum, he laid out two approaches to the threat of regular VC/NVA forces. The first approach (used by General Westmoreland) would involve increasing U.S. forces, using them “primarily in large-scale ‘seek out and destroy’ operations to destroy the main force VC/NVA units.”174 The second approach would involve using U.S. forces “to neutralize the large enemy units and prevent them from interfering with the pacification program,” while concurrently using U.S. forces to “give priority to improving the pacification effort.”175 McNamara concluded by saying: “I believe it is time to adopt the second approach.”176 Success, McNamara noted, “depends on the

interrelated functions of providing physical security, destroying the VC organization and presence, motivating the villager to cooperate, and establishing responsive local government.”177 Security was the paramount concern: Physical security must come first and is the essential prerequisite to a successful revolutionary development effort. The security must be permanent or it is meaningless to the villager, and it must be … conducted by competent military forces who have been trained to show respect for the villager and his problems.178

This approach was exactly what PROVN had advocated. Shortly thereafter, Robert Komer deployed to Vietnam as a deputy to the COMUSMACV for pacification support, and as PROVN had recommended, the formerly disparate elements of American support for pacification were assembled into a unified command structure.179 PROVN shifted the discourse about the war, but the “Blueprint for National Action” it proposed was not implemented. Significant strategic change only occurred after General Creighton Abrams, Jr. replaced Westmoreland as commander of MACV in the spring of 1968. From that point, “PROVN became the touchstone for the entirety of operations there, operations reconfigured for the conduct of ‘one war’ with population security as its goal.”180 Abrams, like General Johnson, intended to shift the Army from search-and-destroy operations towards an indirect approach, focused on providing security to the local population. General Abrams subsequently selected Marshall to head the Long-Range Planning Task Group, tasked with conducting an appraisal of American strategy in Vietnam and developing future strategies based on historical, economic, and socio-psychological perspectives.181 Marshall was thus the “connecting link” between the conceptual reframing of the war, and its implementation.182 Marshall’s report, submitted to Abrams in November 1968, concluded that “security was critical to victory,” and recommended that “U.S. resources should be devoted to three main functions: population security, … support of pacification, and national development.”183 The Long-Range Planning Task Group laid the foundation for the MACV strategic plan, which was approved in March 1969. Thus, significant elements of the American policy in Vietnam—“creating an ARVN in the image of the U.S. army, equipping it with heavy weapons and helicopter support, using American troops on firepower-based search and destroy missions”184—changed because of Marshall’s research and recommendations. However, it was too little, too late.

Conclusion Marshall left Vietnam in March 1970 after twenty-one months in the country. Back in Washington, he went to work for General Blanchard on the Vietnam Task Force in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. After the Vietnam War ended, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were determined never again to fight another low-intensity counterinsurgency in a faraway country and turned their attention to peer competitors. Nuclear issues loomed large in the Pentagon in the early 1970s, and Marshall found that his earlier specialty in tactical nuclear weapons was again highly relevant. He served as deputy director of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) task force at the Pentagon and as director of strategy and assessment for the Defense Nuclear Agency.185 He retired from the military as a colonel in 1976, and then fully retired from government service in 1980.186 As he was leaving Vietnam in 1970, he wrote General Abrams a “Personal End-of-Tour Report and Appraisal.” In this remarkably honest document, Marshall notes a few of his own accomplishments (“codification of a detailed set of Area Security Principles and Applications”) and a few failures (“incomplete analysis of combat tactics”).187 The final portion of the letter to Abrams lays out the “fundamental, unresolved problems of the war in Vietnam.”188 Of particular interest is Marshall’s observation that the U.S. lacked the requisite knowledge of the processes and mechanisms of social change: “Much of what we now spend our resources on does not necessarily contribute to national development, or even to political loyalty or to national defense. We simply do not have the fundamental academic or real-world knowledge of how to do certain things which will change human behavior, especially in a ‘foreign’ milieu.”189 At the heart of Marshall’s letter is the same concern he expressed throughout the PROVN study: that “a lack of agreed [upon] national objectives, and the lack of an overall long range national plan to focus the country’s resources upon achieving the objectives” hinders attainment of the “object beyond war.”190 Abrams, to his great credit, accepted (and perhaps even agreed with) Marshall’s comments. In his letter for Marshall’s selection board to colonel (which Marshall referred to as “my most treasured accolade”), he noted that his work in the Long-Range Planning Task Group was “of incomparable value to me and to this command.” Abrams continued: I feel that Lieutenant Colonel Marshall possesses extraordinary talent seldom encountered in the Armed Forces. He combines in one man a brilliant and a tough mind. His pursuit of truth is comprehensive, vigorous and patient. His intellectual and moral honesty is absolute. A brilliant intellectual who is also comfortable with ordinary mortals.191

By the time PROVN’s reframing of the war was actually implemented in May 1968, the North Vietnamese had rejected a proposal for a simultaneous withdrawal; domestic American political will had evaporated following the massacre at Mai Lai and the senseless casualties at Hamburger Hill; troop numbers were sharply drawn down; and the Viet Cong began a new offensive. The war as

good as lost. Almost fifty years later, historians continue to debate the reasons why the U.S. lost the war in Vietnam. On one side of the debate is Harry Summers, arguing (roughly) that if only we had used more bombs, more napalm, and brought the war back to the North Vietnamese who were the real source of the problem, the U.S. would have won. On the other side of the debate is Lewis Sorley, arguing (roughly) that the U.S. could have won the war (and almost did) using a pacification strategy, if only national will had not been lost. Regardless of the reasons, the Vietnam War remains an important part of the narrative America holds about itself. Vietnam represents a loss of innocent confidence in the power of good intentions; it represents the dark side of naïve hubris. In fact, the ghost of Vietnam is so persistent that President Obama asked the NSC to cease and desist from referring to Vietnam in discussions of ongoing conflicts in 2011.192 Although Vietnam is now officially exorcised as an analogy, it is still true that military actions have social consequences. Governments around the world will inevitably continue to wage war, and with that comes social chaos. Yet social conditions are generally not included in policy maker’s strategic guidance, do not appear on the list of publicly acknowledged strategic objectives, and are often subsequently omitted in military planning. That is to say, only rarely does the U.S. government consider how its activities (whether lethal, economic, social, or environmental) will affect the civil society of the host nation. In theory, if we take Clausewitz seriously and do not ignore the tenets of U.S. joint doctrine, conceptualization of the strategic end state should occur before the war begins. Yet, this type of foresight in planning is often the exception, not the rule. Military planning tends to focus solely on military objectives, such as the destruction of enemy forces, with the assumption that everything else will fall into place (as PROVN observed). Instead of being treated as part of an integrated element of war—in the way that disease or infrastructure is considered—social change remains a by-product of military objectives, and as a result, the social change produced by war is unplanned, random, and arbitrary. Often these unplanned changes threaten to undercut the strategic and military objectives of the war itself. Intended consequences presumably follow strategic objectives, but what happens if your strategic objectives omit the social foundation on which the rest of the edifice rests? The central argument in this chapter has been that social conditions should be considered along with other political, military, and economic strategic objectives in the military planning process. The reason is simple. “The object beyond war,” as General Johnson noted, should be “the restoration of stability with the minimum of destruction, so that society and lawful government might proceed in an atmosphere of justice and order.”193 Stability, justice, and order are social conditions that do not result from the application of firepower, from good intentions, or from sheer luck. The social conditions which are the “object beyond war” result from planning.

9

CONCLUSION DAVID PRESCOTT BARROWS AND THE MILITARY EXECUTION OF FOREIGN POLICY

Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion? (How serious people’s faces have become.) Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly, everyone going home lost in thought? Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come. And some of our men just in from the border say there are no barbarians any longer. Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? They were, those people, a kind of solution. Waiting for the Barbarians, Constantine P. Cavafy, 19041

In 1918, Lieutenant Colonel David Prescott Barrows deployed with the American Expeditionary Force bound for Siberia following the Bolshevik coup d’etat. As an anthropologist, he had been trained to carefully observe and record everything, skills that would serve him well as the Assistant Chief of Staff G2 of the expedition. When Barrows arrived in Vladivostok harbor with a “full supply of escort wagons and nearly 400 horses,” he found the country in a state of “indescribable confusion.”2 Vladivostok was at the end of the Trans-Siberian Railway, and trains were rolling into the city filled with refugees fleeing the Bolsheviks. With them also came the defeated remnants of the Czar’s Army and the Czechoslovak Legion, hoping to escape Russia in order to rejoin the war effort on the Western Front. A division of Japanese Imperial Army troops also landed there, eager to block any Russian incursion into the Sea of Japan. Meanwhile, just north of Vladivostok, Czech soldiers (assisted by Cossacks) were fighting Bolshevik infantry units. As Barrows observed, “outside of the relative security of army posts, anarchy and civil war prevailed.”3 Although the Siberian expedition is sometimes remembered as the first exchange of hostile fire between the U.S. military and Russian communist forces, it is also important as a historical case study of failed military intervention. After the Russian Empire crumbled during the October Revolution of 1917, the new Bolshevik government seized power. In 1918, Britain and France requested that the U.S. join a combined allied military expedition to aide White Russian forces against the Bolsheviks. President Wilson sent almost 9,000 troops to Russia, but no policy existed to guide their action.4 As Barrows remarked in a letter to his friend General Marlborough Churchill, head of Military Intelligence at the War Department: the President has never disclosed a Siberian policy and consequently no clear and concerted effort to attain any position in Siberia has yet been made. The attempt at neutrality between the Bolsheviki and the Anti-Bolsheviki has resulted, as such neutrality always must result, in our being detested and distrusted by both sides.5

Barrows was enormously frustrated by the passive and neutral role of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF), as dictated by the national executive in Washington, DC. Witnessing the brutality of the Bolsheviks in Siberia first hand, Barrows yearned for U.S. forces to take decisive action against them. His impatience with U.S. neutrality brought him into conflict with the AEF commander, General Graves, who reprimanded him twice and finally sent him on a special mission in December 1918 to assess the fighting strength of Grigory Semenof, the Ataman of the Trans-Baikal Cossacks (a task which conveniently removed Barrows from the headquarters building).6 Barrows was quite taken with the romantic, exotic figure of Semenof, accompanying him as he fought the Bolsheviks with a rag-tag force of 2,000 soldiers, including Cossacks, Serbs, Mongolians, Buryats, and Georgians from the Caucasus,7 wearing “long coats ornamented with cartridges across the breasts.”8 Despite Semenof ’s brutality and raw ambition, Barrows felt that the Cossack leader was the best chance to counter—or even defeat—the Bolsheviks.9 In Barrows’ view, the passive neutrality of the U.S. in Siberia led to a lost opportunity. Reflecting on the issue some years later, Barrows wrote, we had good cards in our hands for a while and if our own and the allied governments could have made up their minds to treat the Bolsheviks as they deserved we could have furnished enough support to have re-captured Moscow and overthrown the Red despotism which has destroyed Russia and still continues to plague the rest of Europe.10

As the U.S. struggles with the direction of foreign policy in the Middle East—should it send ground

troops to defeat the Islamic State; is the situation in Syria an insurgency or a civil war; what will the geo-political consequences of a Russian proxy war be; will military intervention require the U.S. to rebuild the country post-conflict—one can imagine Barrows’ ghost demanding that the U.S. take decisive action before its adversaries up the ante and force its hand. The location may be different, but the strategic concerns regarding intervention or non-intervention (and the likely aftermath) remain strikingly similar a century later. The story of David Prescott Barrows provides a felicitous conclusion to this book as many of his life experiences and ideas aptly capture the points I have made. Specifically, that military intervention always interferes with the local society; that strategic objectives must take social conditions into account; that problem framing determines problem solution; and that the instrumentalism of national security often negates the objective. Moreover, he is—to my knowledge —the only U.S. Army general to have a PhD in anthropology. Sadly, no biography of Barrows has yet been written and his accomplishments are almost entirely forgotten (as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, some of my classes took place in Barrows Hall, yet I had no idea of the legacy of the man in whose honor the building was named). Barrows—if he is remembered at all—is held up by scholars as a horrid, shameful example of American scientific colonialism in the Philippines, characterized as a believer in “racialized ideology”11 who was “paternalistic and condescending” towards his subjects.12 It is easy to demonize our anthropological ancestors, to strip them of their historical context and judge them by contemporary ethical standards. In doing so, however, we learn nothing about them—their beliefs, their challenges, or their achievements—and only confirm our own self-referential prejudices and justifications. As anthropologist Ira Bashkow has noted, “we should do more than treat the past as a repository of errors; rather, we should engage with what is worthiest in the genealogy of our ideas.”13 So, let us step back for a moment and try to see Barrows on his own terms. Barrows grew up on a ranch in California “in an era before the automobile had supplanted the horse.”14 Schooled in a one-room cabin, he spent his time breaking broncos, keeping bees, reading Sir Walter Scott novels, and hunting quail. “We were murderous little savages,” he wrote in an unpublished memoir.15 Barrows entered Pomona College in 1888, studying ancient Greek while working as a zanjero on the California aqueduct system. With characteristic humor, his graduation speech (titled “Modern Civilization and Savagery”) “espoused the free anarchist life of the savage.”16 Barrows spent his summers visiting the Cahuilla Indians,17 racing horses, dancing, and drinking. After obtaining an MA from UC Berkeley, he was awarded a PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago at the age of twenty-four. His dissertation, “The Ethno-Botany of the Coahuilla Indians,” was published in 1900. A.L. Kroeber, the distinguished American anthropologist, praised it as “one of the most human[e] [sic] doctor’s dissertations ever written.”18 Barrows spent two years teaching at San Diego State College, but “became depressed with the idea that in that beautiful locality I was out of the world. … Great things were happening in the Western Pacific and I was seeing none of it.”19 Barrows was offered the opportunity to accompany William Howard Taft’s Philippine Commission to the islands. The Philippine Commission had been appointed by President McKinley during the Philippine-American War (1899–1902), with a mandate to establish rule of law, organize a civil service, restore infrastructure, build a school system, and complete other tasks of government. Barrows was first appointed as Superintendent of Schools in Manila, responsible for building a modern, secular, English-language education system to replace the mostly non-existent Spanish parochial schools. Then, in 1901, he became the first director of the Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes. Barrows spent the next two years “in reconnaissance and negotiation with wild and uncivilized Malays,”20 traveling through the unknown parts of Philippines. In 1903, Barrows was appointed General Superintendent of Education and worked to reform the school system of the entire Philippines, a post he held until 1909. During this time, he visited every province in the country and published A History of the Philippines.21 Characteristically modest, Barrows observed wryly, “just how I wrote this in the midst of other duties and much travel I am unable to say.”22 As a result of philosophical disagreements about the U.S. government’s role in protecting the Philippine nation from economic exploitation, Barrows resigned his post and returned to University of California to teach anthropology.23 He became a Professor of Education in 1910, and then Professor of Political Science, eventually becoming Dean of the Graduate School in 1911, Dean of the Faculties in 1912, and Acting President of the University in 1912–13. He never lost his yearning for adventure and spent the summer of 1915 with Pancho Villa’s troops in northern Mexico.24 When World War I broke out, Barrows wrote, “I had been greatly moved by the war. I felt that I could not remain a mere observer at my distant California station. I had formed a wild project of going to Spain, where the warfare would be closer at hand.”25 Instead, at the personal request of Herbert Hoover, Barrows spent several months managing a relief section with the American Service effort in Belgium. Providing humanitarian relief did not satisfy Barrows’ desire to make a difference in the war, however, and he decided to give up his position as Acting President of the University of California and join the Army at age 43.26 First commissioned in the U.S. Army supply corps in 1916 as a major, Barrows then requested a transfer to the cavalry. His unit deployed to the Philippines in 1917, where he briefly commanded the African American 9th Cavalry Regiment before being promoted to Assistant Chief of Staff G2. Tasked with ridding the islands of enemy aliens, Barrows was “very unhappy at losing my participation in the World War” and requested to be sent to

Manchuria and Siberia.27 “Here was a field for real intelligence work, particularly as a preliminary to military action that our government might take.”28 How does the life experience of David Prescott Barrows resonate with the major themes of this book? What can we learn from the life of a soldier-anthropologist who deployed to Siberia a century ago? I will circle back to a number of the themes raised in the introduction to this volume, including the way of war problem, exporting Western models, self-defeating praxis, the social theory problem, and errors of perception. In a book so full of obstacles and vexation, I have also highlighted a few of the positive elements of cross-cultural foreign policy implementation, such as adaptation to the local environment and making use of pre-existing social forms.

Way of war problem “The whole country was in anarchy,” Barrows wrote about Russia in 1918.29 “Crime and murderous outbreaks went unrestrained. Men were lined up and shot in the very presence of Allied officers. Nothing was done to make the inhabitants of the country more secure.”30 After the Bolshevik seizure of power, thousands of Russian families fled east towards Vladivostok, the only free city remaining in Russia. These refugees spent the winter—the temperature was 68 below 0—living in railway cars.31 Barrows took it upon himself to raise money for Russian refugees, and described the situation to a friend in London in 1919 as follows: When we went up by car from Vaigi to Yalutorovsk, a distance of only 40 miles, the General asked me to count the number of refugee carts. These, about the end of August, numbered about 4000 on that one little bit of track. I cannot describe what one feels when they see these wretched persons … driven by the fear that their experience of Bolshevism has instilled, and taking with them on their wretched little country carts every bit of moveable property they most value. I really cannot express to you my sympathy with these people. … Prince Golitzin, who was lunching with us yesterday, told us that a few hours before he had been talking to a woman in a miserable sort of tent, and the body of one of her children was in the tent. He asked her why it was not buried, and she replied “what is the good of burying it, another will die tomorrow and I can bury them both together.”32

Because of operational orders, the AEF did not establish a military government in Siberia and very little was done to relieve the suffering of Russian civilians. Standing by and doing nothing left Barrows with a deep sense of sorrow and frustration. Reflecting on his experiences in Siberia many years later, he wrote that the necessity for military government exists plainly in the character of war itself and in the consequences of the occupation of foreign territory by an invading army. For the protection of this army itself, as well as for the protection, security, and well-being of the inhabitants of the territory which it occupies, the establishment of government, at least of some provisional kind, is imperative.33

The catastrophe of the American intervention in Siberia should be taken as a warning that American forces anyway should never enter foreign territory or extend the sphere of an original landing or invasion without taking full responsibility for the government of this territory and its people, and creating an administration under military authority adequate both for the protection of itself and the wellbeing of its inhabitants.34

In writing this book, I’ve deliberately focused on the difficulties and dangers inherent in the military execution of foreign policy, while avoiding prescriptive statements about the direction of U.S. foreign policy itself. But here at the end, the question arises: what, if anything, do the messy challenges of implementation suggest regarding the direction of U.S. foreign policy? General Colin Powell once restated a principle of international humanitarian law that he called “the Pottery Barn rule”: if you destroy a government, you become responsible for repairing or replacing it. Similarly, writing in 1942, Barrows noted: We expect to win the war and victory in war creates responsibilities, frequently responsibilities unanticipated and unprepared for. With the commitments which our government has made to eject the offender from a great number of unfortunate countries, both European and non-European, there will be an imperative necessity of creating political authority for at least the emergency period. Such action, in my definition, is imperialism. There may be no alternative to it. It may be the most unexpected and extraordinary aspect of the peace period following the war, so far as we ourselves are concerned.35

Indeed, where is the line between humanitarian restoration of order and imperialism? For political reasons, the U.S. government was unwilling to declare martial law and impose military government in Siberia. Nearly a century later, when then-Lieutenant General David McKiernan attempted to declare martial law during the initial entry operations in Iraq, the Pentagon prevented him from doing so.36 Presumably, declaring martial law would have undercut the narrative that U.S. forces were in Iraq to liberate rather than occupy the country. The consequences of the Coalition’s failure to reestablish order in Iraq included widespread looting, theft of military materiel, and lack of trust among a population the U.S. had intended to reassure. As I argued in the introduction to this volume, this unwillingness to impose military government post-war grows out of the American ‘way of war,’ which exalts rapid, decisive victory and disparages post-conflict operations. While military victory might be necessary for peace, it is often not sufficient to sustain it. The first insight that readers of this book may rightly draw is that victory creates grave

responsibilities, and thus the victor must be entirely sure that the cost of winning can be justified.

Exporting western models When American forces deployed to Siberia in 1918, the orders for the mission were vague and selfcontradictory. As Barrows recalled, so far as the American expedition was concerned, it went in without any orders at all. Its commanders were furnished only with War Department directions to take the station at Vladivostok and with a copy of an ‘aide memoire’ written by President Woodrow Wilson himself, without date or signature, and without being addressed to any person or commander.37

The aide memoire explicitly prohibited “interference” and “intervention” in Russian internal affairs, forcing U.S. soldiers into a posture of passive neutrality.38 The Chief of Staff told Barrows and other officers in the Intelligence branch that “the less we did the better he would be pleased…. Officers were reproved for a display of zeal.”39 At its core, the aide memoire contained a conundrum: how could U.S. forces in Siberia contribute to Russian efforts at self-governance without interfering in Russia’s internal affairs? Logically, any form of military intervention (including humanitarian aid) constitutes interference. As John Useem’s wartime experience demonstrated, all governance operations contain an inherent contradiction: despite the doctrine of non-interference, military interventions always interfere with the societies upon which they intrude. This is the second insight to be drawn from this book. An intervention that does nothing to reconstruct the damage caused by war interferes just as much as one that attempts (and perhaps fails) at postwar reconstruction. The question for those governments considering interventions is: which is the worse evil? Is it better to do nothing or to attempt to restore (or create) a functioning social order? Readers may recall that Useem’s answer to the policy directive of eradicating Japanese influence in Micronesia was the restoration of “indigenous ways of living.” Restoration of “indigenous ways of living” seems—in retrospect—to be a somewhat naïve proposition. Indeed, Useem concluded based on his experiences that not everything can be fixed, that sometimes people do not want to change, and that in changing things we also may only make them worse (recent attempts at gender inclusion, rule of law, and central government in Afghanistan come to mind). But if we are to reject the restoration of “indigenous ways of living” as a postintervention approach, what then is the alternative? The alternative would be the approach that the U.S. initially employed post-conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq: the imposition of Western models of governance. In 2003, for example, the Coalition Provisional Authority issued a statement which said that “tribes are a part of the past” and “have no place in the new democratic Iraq.”40 As a matter of policy, the U.S. ignored one of the most powerful social structures in Iraq, and spent years “carefully building up and supporting an Iraqi political system based on no tribal institutions.”41 Not surprisingly, this plan did not work.42 While restoration of “indigenous ways of living” might be naïve, implausible, expensive, and time consuming, it generally works better than exporting Western models. As many of the chapters in this book show, transposition of Western social, economic, and political frameworks and concepts into societies that do not possess them in some form already may reflect a benevolent “missionary impulse in American foreign relations,”43 but are often counterproductive upon implementation. Post-World War II Micronesia, for example, showed that introducing democratic institutions (such as elections) may risk eliminating existing democratic patterns. Holding elections in Vietnam, as noted in the chapter on Don S. Marshall, demonstrated that democracy may erode local systems of representation while failing to address the real issue: a lack of social justice.44 For both pragmatic and ethical reasons, then, military interventions generally ought to rely on pre-existing socio-political structures when possible as the basis upon which to (re)build governance and rule of law. This is the third broad insight contained in this book. In certain cases, however, preexisting socio-political structures may not support the type of democratic governance that Western policy makers have in mind. Societies based on the institution of slavery, ruled by autocrats, or in which one class of people lack civil rights, for example, must be fundamentally altered before democracy might work as a political system (if that is the policy). In those cases, as discussed below, the social conditions of the host nation must be considered as part of national strategic objectives.

Self-defeating praxis Long before he deployed to Siberia, Barrows spent 1903–9 as the General Superintendent of Education in the Philippines. During this period, there was a great deal of debate regarding the annexation of the Philippines and the role of the U.S. as an imperial power: should the U.S. annex the Philippines in order to ensure maritime supremacy? Should the Philippines immediately be granted sovereignty? Could the Filipinos govern themselves? Barrows believed that conditions in the Philippines in 1903 indicated that the country—if granted self-government—could not support a democracy. The social structure of the archipelago retained the exclusionary, hierarchical class system instilled by the Spanish, which systematically disempowered the majority of the peasantry. Granting self-government to the Philippines would ensure that the Spanish-speaking aristocrats of the island would continue to own the means of production and control the majority of the population

through debt-bondage and indentured servitude, hardly an effective basis for democracy. To meet the objective of building a “new social order for the archipelago,”45 Barrows believed that the underlying structure of the society had to be changed. Social change on such a massive scale, Barrows recognized, is a slow and complex process. “You cannot affect the moral regeneration of the people and fit it in character to conduct an independent self-government in ten years’ time.”46 To prepare the Philippines for independent self-government, Barrows believed that the first step was destruction of the remnants of Spanish feudalism, a traditional form of patronage known as caciquismo.47 Such a deeply entrenched form of social organization where wealthy aristocrats dominated the peasantry with a system of threatened violence and material rewards could not simply be declared illegal by the new government. Law is unenforceable when it contravenes social practice. In his first report as general superintendent, Barrows wrote that the only way to destroy caciquismo was by “educating the child of the peasant.”48 Thus, the goal of the Bureau of Education became “universal primary instruction for the Filipinos of all classes and every community.”49 To cut the power of the Spanish-speaking Filipino elites, Barrows believed the curriculum should be taught in English,50 and should emphasize arithmetic to provide the student with “enough knowledge of numbers and arithmetical computations to avoid being swindled and outdone in every commercial transaction in which he has a part.”51 Geography, included in the third year of the primary course, would help the Filipino student become “a person of far different possibilities from the man whose education never arises beyond that of the routine toil that constitutes a peasant’s life and whose range of vision scarcely passes beyond the confines of his barrio.”52 The objective was not to train Filipinos as an industrial proletariat able to perform factory labor, but rather to promote the “development of both men and women as leaders among their own people.”53 Barrows’ emphasis of literacy and liberal arts over technical education was “in a Philippine context, revolutionary.”54 While Barrows’ achievements in the field of Philippine education may indeed be impressive, how is this relevant to contemporary foreign policy issues? At least since the Cold War, U.S. foreign policy has arguably been based on encouraging democracy and market economies in countries that receive foreign aid and whose governments it has overthrown by force. A totalitarian dictatorship like Iraq or a theocracy like Afghanistan cannot be transformed into a democracy overnight—the structure of the society must be able to support a democratic government if democratization is the goal. But what social pre-conditions must exist to support democratic institutions in a given society? And how can these pre-conditions be achieved? Barrows’ answer to these questions involved the transformation of the Philippine social structure through education, yet these questions are rarely asked by policy makers in relation to more recent interventions. As the chapter on Donald S. Marshall in this volume observed, strategic objectives tend to be political and military in nature and either exclude social conditions of the host nation from consideration, or treat them as a residual category. Rarely, and only in the most exceptional circumstances, is the society of the target country taken into account. Taking the society into account should not be dismissed as a purely liberal and humanistic approach to warfare that wastes valuable military time and resources; including the long-term stability and well-being of the local society in the strategic objectives may actually produce a better outcome. (Though not always. Arguably, in the long run British colonial meddling among the Ibo and the Kikuyu established the pre-conditions for the Biafran War and the Mau Mau rebellion.55) The fourth take-away from this book is that, because military intervention always interferes with local societies, strategy must take local society into account or it runs the risk of undercutting the conditions it is meant to attain.

The social theory problem In 1901, Barrows became the first director of the newly-formed Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes, an organization tasked with investigating the “the pagan and Mohammedan tribes of the Philippines” of about “a million or a million and a half of souls.”56 Very little was known about the inhabitants of the far-flung islands of the archipelago; if the United States was to govern them wisely and well then it was necessary to understand something about their cultures and societies. Following his inauguration as the first American civilian governor of the Philippines, William Howard Taft observed in July 1901: “It is evident that if we are not to fail in our duty toward the savage or halfcivilized people of these islands, active measures must be taken for the gathering of reliable information concerning them as a basis for legislation.”57 Taft’s mention of “duty” to the “savages” smacks of the historical injustices of American imperialism, and is therefore easy to dismiss as political antiquity. Yet, if we look beyond the language to the meaning of Taft’s statement, the fundamental policy is sound: if the U.S. government intervenes in a foreign society with the intention of establishing or reconstructing civil authority, socio-cultural knowledge should be an operational prerequisite. If socio-cultural knowledge is an operational prerequisite, three questions must be answered: What type of information is necessary? How should this information be collected? And who should conduct this research? What type of information is necessary? Recognizing that the U.S. government lacked the manpower to conduct a complete ethnographic survey, Barrows drafted Instructions for Volunteer

Fieldworkers (1901) in the hope that “an interest in the subject may be awakened among a large number of Filipinos and Americans whose stations and acquaintanceships in various parts of the Archipelago will enable them to supply the needed information.”58 The nineteenth century fashion in physical anthropology for measuring the various body parts of different races (“Are there unusual deposits of fat or adipose tissue in the body especially about the hips or buttocks? Are the breasts of women long and pendent or rounded and erect?”59) makes it easy for contemporary observers to dismiss Barrows’ Instructions as “racialized methodology for colonial policy.”60 Yet, despite the antiquated language and focus on anthropometric data, the purpose of the Instructions was to obtain the knowledge required to govern the Philippines, and—perhaps more importantly—to enable the Filipinos to eventually govern themselves. To that end, Barrows specified that fieldworkers should collect information about tribal organization; language; territorial claims; body art; ceremonials; religious beliefs; industry and manufacturing; morality and crime; and ethnobotany. Concerning social organization, Barrows instructed fieldworkers to identify: Who are the controlling element in the tribe; who are the leaders in peace and war; through whom property descends, etc.? Be careful not to use misleading terms or designations. When describing officials give their native names, and then detail their functions. Their duties and station will probably not be found to correspond with those of any officials whose names we might apply to them from our own language or the Spanish.61

It is worth noting that the socio-cultural information about the Philippines that Barrows requested from volunteer fieldworkers in 1901 bears a great resemblance to the socio-cultural knowledge that the U.S. continues to seek in contemporary theaters of operation.62 How should this information be collected? Barrows and his team spent more than a year traveling with pack mules through wild rugged mountain terrain, often sick with fever and occasionally attacked by spear-wielding Igorot, in order to study “the amazing life of these thousands of head hunters, their house building, tattooing, smith-working and weapons manufacture, their curious social organization and religious belief.”63 The type of information Barrows sought concerned how the indigenous people of the Philippines actually lived—information that remains a baseline requirement for governance, counterinsurgency, and other population-centric operations, as discussed in the chapter on Tom Harrisson. No matter how precise a satellite may be, this information cannot be obtained through SIGINT. Nor, despite the views of many U.S. government agencies to the contrary, can ethnographic information be obtained through OSINT. Anthropological knowledge of the diverse cultures of humanity is not encyclopedic, and cannot simply be cobbled together from existing sources. This is especially true when the societies of interest do not permit research because they are totalitarian dictatorships (Iraq), theocracies (Afghanistan), or failed states (Somalia). Scholars cannot easily conduct field research in the non-permissive hinterlands; thus, there is often limited or no recent data to aggregate into an OSINT picture. On-the-ground fieldwork has proven to be the only reliable method for obtaining relevant socio-cultural information in non-permissive environments, as Tom Harrisson’s experience attests. Who should conduct this research? If Harrisson was able to conduct ethnography in Borneo while simultaneously fighting the Japanese, why can’t soldiers also perform the role of anthropologists (as many Pentagon officials concerned about budget and manpower have no doubt wondered)? After all, they are already present in the area of operations, accustomed to hardship, and equipped to deal with danger. Leave them in place long enough and they will become subject matter experts. Consider, for example, the depth of knowledge of British colonial officers stationed in Africa, India, or on the Afghan Frontier. Many of these men—such as R. S. Rattray—produced enormous tomes of information, often containing highly detailed studies of the daily life of “native tribes.”64 If soldiers can be trained as competent observers, is there any need for anthropologists? As David Edwards argues, during the era of British colonialism: British military and civilian officers did not need to hire anthropologists, because they themselves were the experts who would spend their entire careers in one geographical area, in the process learning the languages and customs of the people they governed. Their families accompanied them, and they set up homes and raised families in their part of the Raj … They were there for the duration, in other words, as was the government they represented, and the result was that they had no choice but to get it right.65

Although combining the function of anthropologist and district officer may be feasible for an imperial power intending to exert political control over a foreign territory for decades or even centuries, for large-scale but short duration expeditionary operations this model falls short. Developing ethnographic knowledge takes time, and most of the military operations conducted by U.S. forces intentionally lack longevity. Moreover, soldiers—as perceptive, confident, and intelligent as they may be—often lack formal training in social science. As Patrick James Christian writes in A Combat Advisor’s Guide to Tribal Engagement: History, Law and War as Operational Elements, “An important part of the combat ethnography process is to discover (or uncover) the existing social ordering forces within the tribe. … Unfortunately many combat advisors do not understand what is meant by the social ordering, other than ‘who is in charge here?’”66 As discussed in the introduction to this volume, different types of operations, levels of war, and phases of conflict generate different kinds of sociocultural knowledge requirements. Barrows’ experience in the Philippines demonstrates that the socio-cultural knowledge requirement for military operations—especially those that place uniformed personnel in close contact with local nationals—has not changed much over the past one hundred years. Then as now, the same problems

exist. Thus, the fifth insight to be drawn from this book: the military intelligence system was not designed to process sociocultural information, and the social sciences lack a scalable, transportable model of society below the level of the state. Consequently, the military must cobble together do-ityourself social models and theories.

Errors of perception By the time Spain ceded the Philippine archipelago to the U.S. in 1898–9, Spanish missionaries had already spent 300 years spreading the gospel in the islands north of Mindanao.67 The mountainous regions of northern Luzon, however, remained free from Spanish influence. As director of the Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes, Barrows explored these mountains on horseback, living among the ‘pagan’ inhabitants and learning about their culture and political organization. In his words, within these rugged mountains there was a definite separation of this highland people into large groups but no group could properly be called a ‘tribe’ because this term properly denotes some form of political unification and among them there was nothing of this kind. They were highly individualistic and there was no political grouping. In this sense they were anarchists.68

Barrows’ view was somewhat radical for the time: “tribe” was then commonly understood by anthropologists (many of whom were most familiar with Native American societies) as a racial division, defined by physical and cultural characteristics.69 In Barrows’ view, however, the differences (language, agricultural practices, kinship systems, and religion) that existed between Filipinos were not racial but cultural.70 The “tribe itself as a body politic is unknown in this archipelago,”71 wrote Barrows. The concept of a ‘tribe’ is a frame, which (as discussed in the chapter on Gregory Bateson) is a cognitive map that organizes an individual’s experience of reality and which can be shifted and changed through intentional processes. Frames, once they come into existence, exert a certain amount of control on how an individual perceives reality: they become the premise from which further interpretation is generated. In the words of Robert Jervis, “decision-makers tend to fit incoming information into their existing theories and images. Indeed, their theories and images play a large part in determining what they notice. In other words, actors tend to perceive what they expect.”72 We perceive the world according to our own frame of reference, while our counterparts across the cultural divide perceive us according to theirs. Only rarely do these perceptions align. Malinowski, while conducting research in the South Seas in the early 1920s, was asked by the locals what kind of magic he used to grow yams in England. The local people (whose economy was based on yam farming) naturally assumed that Malinowski farmed, that when he farmed he naturally grew yams, and that he naturally cast magic spells over them. The questions that the Trobriand Islanders asked Malinowski are probably just as irrelevant as the questions Malinowski asked them.73 “Our own acts, our own motivations,” observed Dorothy Lee in 1959, “are usually perceived not as we see them but according to the cultural framework of those who see us.”74 How policy makers understand the internal socio-cultural dynamics of other societies contributes to the strategies they employ to address those problems and crises. In other words, how we frame the problem often determines the solution. This is the sixth insight to be gained from this book. In 1900, President McKinley gave instructions to the Philippine Commission that in dealing with the uncivilized tribes of the islands the commission should adopt the same course followed by Congress in permitting the tribes of our North American Indians to maintain their tribal organization and government, and under which many of those tribes are now living in peace and contentment, surrounded by a civilization to which they are unable or unwilling to conform.75

As this quote from President McKinley makes clear, the governance of the Philippines was often approached through a Native American frame. Barrows, however, had a different view of the situation. Following his appointment as director of the Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes, the Philippine Commission sent Barrows to visit Native American reservations in the U.S. to determine whether a reservation system could be introduced in the Philippines. Barrows met with officials at the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, finding himself “deeply skeptical” about transplanting U.S. Native American policy to the Philippines.76 “My belief,” he wrote in 1902, “is that we will not find in the policy of the Government in treating with Indians a model which can be generally followed in handling the wild tribes of the Philippines.”77 Barrows believed that creating exclusive reservations for the Moros and the pagan tribes would isolate the populations;78 prevent assimilation into a unified nation, which (right or wrong) was the U.S. goal in the Philippines; and subject them to potentially hostile Christian political domination.79 Contrary to President McKinley’s directive to establish reservations on the U.S. model,80 Barrows recommended the creation of two “special provinces”: Moro Province, created in 1903, and Mountain Province, created in 1908.81 In the introduction, I identified errors of perception as a key danger in foreign policy implementation. The operative perceptual error here is the assumption that the ‘uncivilized’ people of the Philippines are the same as the ‘uncivilized’ people of America, and that therefore the policy employed successfully in one case will surely work in the other. Mistaken analogies naturally fail

because they elide local context and suppress the nuances of local culture. Yet, even though the past one hundred years offer numerous examples of this type of failed reasoning in policy making and warfare, flawed analogies still persist. For example, the surge in Iraq in 2006 relied in part on employing Iraqi Sunni tribes to defeat Al Qaeda. Tribal sheikhs (after having been systematically ignored and disempowered during the early years of the occupation) became the cornerstone of a new policy. This policy was so successful that senior military commanders recommended that it be employed in Afghanistan. During a speech at the U.S. Institute for Peace in Washington, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates opined that “the only solution in Afghanistan is to work with the tribes and provincial leaders in terms of trying to create a backlash … against the Taliban.”82 However, as my colleagues and I in the U.S. Army Human Terrain System frequently pointed out to SOCOM, CENTCOM, the DIA, and anybody else who might listen, Pashtun ‘tribes’ are nothing like Arab tribes: they are neither rigidly hierarchical nor segmentary,83 and they do not engage in patronclient relationships with the state.84 Afghans engage in collective action through solidarity groups at the community level rather than through tribes.85 For those reasons, they cannot be employed against the Taliban in the same way that Sunni tribes were mobilized in Iraq. Tribes offer a seductive frame for understanding non-Western societies, but unfortunately the analogy often fails in practice. In sum, readers of this book draw a seventh conclusion: that framing a problem incorrectly will frequently result in an unworkable policy.

Adaptation (and its limits) In 1891, Barrows went camping with his family in the San Jacinto Mountains of Southern California. Having heard that some Native Americans were having a tribal gathering, Barrows drove up the mountain in a buggy to join their powwow. Watching the fire dance, he admired the “proud independence” of the Cahuilla, who had never fallen under the influence of the Catholic missions. Thereafter, Barrows returned to visit the Cahuilla every year, becoming so close to them that in 1895, he and his bride Anna spent their honeymoon as guests in a Cahuilla village on Santa Rosa Mountain.86 The Cahuilla people also felt a deep connection to Barrows. Many years after Barrows died, the President of the American Indian Historical Society, Rupert Costo, remembered him as follows: We called him “The General” in later years, because of his military service. But in the early years, when he came to live with us and learn our ways, he was closer to our hearts than any white man before or since. The General was a marvelous student who absorbed the information given to him so freely by my people.… We accepted him whole heartedly as a member of the family. In turn, he taught us the ways of another society, gave us an appetite for the best of another culture, and took young Martin into his home for a year. He never phonied up any part of the information given to him; he never attempted to embellish or color any fact or custom. He believed that the facts, in themselves, were interesting enough and accepted the truth as it was revealed to him. I think this is the reason his work was so well accepted by the Cahuilla Indians themselves.87

In the years he spent with the Cahuilla Indians, Barrows entered into their community, their worldview, and even their ecological relationship with the harsh terrain of the central California desert. Barrows’ conduct exemplified the eighth theme of this book: military personnel conducing operations in close proximity to local nationals—whether as partners, advisors, trainers, or civil administrators—should adapt to the social context in which they find themselves. As the chapter on Ursula Graham Bower pointed out, successfully working with foreign forces requires an ability to adapt one’s behavior and cognitive framework to a different cultural context. She never demanded that they replace animist magic with Christianity, nor organize their operations according to British notions of command and control. Rather, she accepted them as they were, and adapted herself to them. However, even Bower encountered her moral, legal, and cultural limit to adaptation, beyond which she could or would not force herself to change. Military personnel must also remember that adaptation has its limits. Since the colonial era, military forces operating in non-Western societies have often encountered local customs, rituals, and practices which they found horrible and disgusting, including twin infanticide, slavery, widow burning, clitoridectomy, headhunting, cannibalism, and the murder of ‘witches.’ The solution to unsavory and disturbing native practices was generally eradication by force, justified by the humanitarian requirement to protect the victim. In the 1840s, for example, Hindu widows were customarily burned alive on the funeral pyre of their husband, a cultural practice known as suttee. Despite the fact that the East India Company had a policy of nonintervention in the religious affairs of subject populations, Sir Charles James Napier (then Commander-in-Chief of British forces in India) believed that Indian women were not mere chattels to be slaughtered at will and banned the practice. To the Hindus who complained about the ban on suttee, Napier replied: Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.88

The British had the power, backed by force of arms, to bring indigenous customs into conformity with their own European cultural norms. However, with the arrival of anthropologists as

participants in colonized countries, Napier’s solution of eradicating suttee by hanging the perpetrators becomes less tenable. In the early 1900s, anthropologists such as R. S. Rattray began to wonder why local people practiced such abhorrent customs. Perhaps each society is an integrated whole, and in removing one part we disturb the whole? After all, society is a totality, not just a sum of its parts. As Rattray noted: It is not possible to pick and choose from his culture and say, “I will retain this and this,” if at the same time we destroy that which gave the whole its dynamic force; or realizing this, is the administrator to say to the Missionary Bodies, “We are compelled to restrict your activities in the best interests of tribal authority; we find that the development of this people along their national lines is wholly incompatible with the tenets which you preach”?89

The introduction of anthropology to the colonial enterprise raised the specter of socio-cultural tinkering as a danger to imperial governance, as well as to indigenous societies in their own right.90 As Rattray observed, replacing Ashanti religion with Christianity unintentionally destroyed the Ashanti system of government, reducing the effectiveness of indirect rule. Meddlesome anthropologists brought a different perspective. Unlike colonial administrators whose clear cut moral code enabled them to condemn headhunting, cannibalism, wife burning, and infanticide, among other non-Western social practices, anthropologists arrived with a different imperative. Their training as scientists allowed them to suspend their own value judgements and understand exotic cultural practices as elements of the “complex whole” of other societies (as Tylor phrased it in 1871).91 Taking things on their own terms and understanding them in context constitutes the core of cultural relativism as a scientific methodology.92 Ursula Graham Bower, for example, probably did not agree with the practice of headhunting (nor wish to partake in it herself), but she did have to recognize as a scientist that it held political, military, and religious importance among the Naga. More recently, U.S. forces operating in Afghanistan encountered a form of homosexual pedophilia called bacha bazi, which involves older men using “dancing boys” for sexual pleasure.93 In the view of many soldiers, journalists, and members of the American public, something ought to be done about this horrific and intolerable cultural practice. Can’t we just arrest the Afghan men who are forcing these young boys into sexual servitude? Unfortunately, because the U.S. has never declared a military occupation in Afghanistan, homosexual pedophilia conducted by Afghan nationals does not fall under the jurisdiction of the U.S. unless it occurs on U.S. or NATO bases. Rather, criminal acts of Afghan nationals committed on Afghan soil fall under the jurisdiction of the Afghan government. Although homosexual pedophilia may be technically illegal in Afghanistan—along with discrimination against women—to my knowledge, the Afghan government has never prosecuted anyone for this crime.94 The fact that bacha bazi has never been prosecuted, is commonly practiced by many influential and powerful male members of Afghan civil society, and has been commonly practiced for hundreds of years tends to indicate that—reprehensible as Americans may find it— homosexual pedophilia constitutes a customary cultural practice in Afghanistan.95 When being interviewed by the BBC some years ago, I was asked “what can anthropology provide to the U.S. military in Afghanistan?” My answer was “cultural relativism,” and I went on to explain that attempts to outlaw bachi bazi and arrest the perpetrators would likely be unsuccessful, in part because homosexual pedophilia constitutes a customary cultural practice in Afghanistan.96 My point —perhaps a bit too subtle for radio—was that bacha bazi had to be understood as part of the totality of Afghan culture, and would therefore be resistant to directed social change, just like the Pashtun tribal structure, the practice of child marriage, or religious belief in Islam. This provoked a flurry of misplaced outrage in the blogosphere and accusations that I approved of these disturbing practices. However, an argument for cultural relativism as a methodology should be carefully distinguished from cultural relativism as a philosophy. Understanding a custom such as cannibalism within its total social context (a scientific methodology) should not be mistaken for the belief that no universal standard exists by which a culture can be measured, thereby precluding condemnation of cannibalism (a philosophical position).97 My personal view is that we can and should condemn cannibalism, twin infanticide, bachi bazi, slavery, and suttee on the grounds that these practices violate the human rights of the individual to life, to bodily integrity, and to equal protection.98 My view as a military anthropologist, however, is that intentional social change is easier said than done. Could U.S. forces have ended this disgusting practice in Afghanistan? To eradicate homosexual pedophilia from a society like Afghanistan would require a substantial commitment of resources, including overwhelming military force to assert territorial and social control; a multi-generational timeline to enable social change to occur; and an almost unlimited budget for education and social reform. Most importantly, enforcing U.S. criminal law in a foreign country with markedly different legal norms, judicial procedures, and philosophy of punishment would require a complete overhaul of the judicial and penal systems. All of this would take a long time, underscoring the point that cultural practices are very difficult to change. It is worth remembering that before Sir Charles Napier banned suttee, it had been a customary practice in Hindu society for at least 1300 years.99 Even hundreds of years after the custom was banned, it continued. In 1987, an eighteen year old bride, Roop Kanwar, burned on her husband’s pyre as a crowd cheered.100 The Taliban outlawed bacha bazi during their six year reign in Afghanistan, but as soon as the U.S. overthrew the Taliban, newly-empowered mujahedeen warlords rekindled the practice of bacha bazi.101 A much harder question is: should the U.S. military (or some other agency of the U.S. government)

be responsible for the eradication of cultural practices that offend our laws and morals? Should the U.S. military interfere in the cultural practice of other nations? Should the military be in the business of massive projects of cultural change? Those on the left of the political spectrum would presumably object to the U.S. military acting as the enforcer of a Western moral imperialism, while those on the right would presumably object to the U.S. military acting without objectives directly pertaining to national security. However disturbing the customary practices of a particular society may be, the notion that we should—and can—bring other societies into conformity with our own values and norms is essentially well-intentioned arrogance. As Barrows wrote in 1944, “however you look at arrogance, between nations and races, or between individuals of the same society, it is the thing that embitters human relations; that turns well-meant efforts into ashes. Arrogance is the real enemy of what we really and properly mean by ‘democracy.’”102

Epistemology problem Barrows provides a suitable conclusion for this book on military anthropology as his career provides a remarkable example of anthropology combined with military service in equal measure. This book presents a picture of anthropology as a discipline perpetually joined to the military execution of foreign policy. Writing about the participation of anthropologists during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, David Price asserts that the military aimed to “enmesh the military industrial state with anthropology” and “harness social science for their own ends,” including using “culturally appropriate manipulation” as a means to further “subjugation or occupation.”103 This “enmeshing” of the military and anthropology is nothing new. On the contrary, the stories told in this book indicate that anthropology has always played a role—for better or worse—in the military execution of foreign policy. Sometimes the connection between the military and anthropology has been immediate and direct, involving an anthropologist in uniform such as Tom Harrisson leading indigenous soldiers in combat. In other cases, the relationship has been more ambiguous, such as Jomo Kenyatta’s use of anthropology to challenge British colonialism. In Anthropologists in Arms: The Ethics of Military Anthropology, George Lucas offers a taxonomy of military anthropology. His first category is anthropology of the military, specifically the anthropological study of military culture. Because the military can be difficult to study for reasons of access and security, the literature in this area is sparse and sometimes leaves much to be desired in terms of description and analysis.104 Lucas’ second category is anthropology for the military, “encompassing anthropologists who work for the government or military in a routine capacity (for example, as language educators and behavioral science faculty members in federal educational institutions).”105 A variety of edited books published in the past few years offer first-hand accounts by anthropologists of their careers in the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity, U.S. Naval Academy, and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.106 Lucas’ third category is best described as applied military anthropology, meaning anthropology conducted with the purpose of executing the government’s national security policy. The episodes narrated in the chapters of this book fall into this final category. Many anthropologists object to the direct use of anthropology for military purposes in the ways described in this book. These objections are often couched as ethical issues—deception of research subjects regarding the aims of the research; potential harm to fieldworkers who might be mistaken for spies; subordination of science to political goals; and potential harm to ethnographic informants.107 These contemporary objections have their foundation in a philosophical strand of American anthropology originating with Franz Boas, whose intellectual adherents believed that anthropologists should not work for government lest they risk the loss of scientific impartiality.108 In the minds of many anthropologists, the government is corrupt and likely to taint the purity of anthropology.109 Anthropologist Jeremy Keenan, for example, warned that anthropologists should “remain located outside the corrupting sphere of intelligence agencies and government bodies.”110 Most anthropologists prefer to take cover in the Ivory Tower, where research can remain ‘pure’ from the toxic influence of the ‘State.’ Contemporary anthropologists worry that their research may be employed in ways that they did not intend, and for purposes that they deem unethical, by government agencies of which they disapprove. For example, Roberto Gonzalez expressed the view that “history tells us that such information can easily be misused when put into the wrong hands. That is why we, as scholars, must make a continuing effort to speak out against the misappropriation of our work.”111 This is a troubling view for a number of reasons. First, the notion that there is a single anthropology (“our work”) is problematic given the many intellectual trajectories in the discipline, which by no means form a unified theoretical or ethical whole. Second, the idea that knowledge can be “misappropriated” suggests epistemological censorship. Once published or otherwise disseminated, ethnographic information becomes freely available to the general public and the government to use as they see fit. To believe differently is to persist in a supreme naivety about the nature of knowledge production and distribution. Third, nobody owns anthropology. The view that anthropology is about peace, love, and understanding (“a tool for building bridges between peoples”112) represents only one possible truth about the meaning and purpose of the discipline. Finally, the ninth insight that may be drawn from this book is that adversaries always seek knowledge of their opponent, and in certain contexts (such as those described in this book)

anthropological knowledge has great efficacy to combatants. Louis Leakey, for example, used his understanding of Kikuyu society to aid the British colonial government. On the other side, Kenyatta used anthropology to destroy the sociological underpinnings of colonialism.113 Insurgent or counterinsurgent—neither had a legitimate claim of ownership of anthropology.

Conclusion In 1919, the Red Army captured and executed Admiral Kolchak, the leader of the anti-Bolshevik government of Siberia. Recognizing the hopelessness of the situation, the American, British, and Czech forces withdrew. The Japanese, fearing the spread of Communism across the Manchurian border, remained in support of Semenof until 1920 when they were also forced to withdraw. Semenof, hoping to secure aid for a continued fight against the Bolsheviks, traveled to the U.S. in 1922. He was immediately arrested for immigration violation and ordered deported as an “undesirable alien.” Presumably because of the political nature of the case, the Senate held hearings during which Semenof was accused of massacring both civilians and American troops.114 In the end, Semenof was deported from the U.S., went into hiding in China, and was eventually captured in 1945 during the Soviet invasion of Manchuria. He was executed in 1946.115 Unlike Semenof, Barrows had a long and fulfilling life. He returned from Siberia in 1919 and accepted the position of President of the University of California. As President, Barrows expanded the university’s student capacity to accommodate veterans returning from the war; increased faculty salaries; and watched many football games. Stepping down in 1923 to pursue personal interests, Barrows traveled alone to the French port of Dakar in Senegal. “My mind was set upon temporarily losing contact with our own civilization and living and traveling among the native people in their own ways.”116 By boat, horse, and foot, Barrows traveled over 2,500 miles across the French Sudan, later publishing his observations as Berbers and Blacks (1926).117 When Barrows returned to California, he accepted a commission with the newly-federalized U.S. National Guard. Promoted to brigadier in 1936, and major general in 1938, Barrows commanded, successively, the 159th Infantry, the 79th Infantry Brigade, and finally the 40th Division, which included the states of California, Nevada, and Utah. The interwar years were a period of innovation under the influence of Elihu Root in which the Army transitioned from a force “based on the war knowledge of the civil war and of the Indian frontier campaigns” to a modern, professional force.118 Barrows supported this process of innovation, particularly the use of amphibious manoeuver exercises, which were rarely performed at the time.119 When WWII broke out, Barrows wrote to a friend in the Army: It is a miserable thing, but one which has to be accepted cheerfully, to be a retired soldier at such a time as this. In June 1940, after the fall of France, I wrote to General Marshall, volunteering for duty with troops with any rank, anywhere, any time. Would my age permit, I would accept the command of a battalion, or squad, with exaltation, but I have realized very clearly that there is no possibility of such a call to duty.120

Instead of leading troops, General George C. Marshall hired Barrows as a consultant on topics such as North Africa and officer reclassification. In 1942, Barrows became the West Coast Coordinator for the Coordinator of Information, which was subsequently reorganized as the OSS. Barrows corresponded frequently with William J. Donovan, offering insight and expressing concern on a variety of topics, such as the unconstitutionality of evacuating Japanese civilians from the California coast,121 Japanese strategy on the Kamchatka Peninsula,122 and the need for an intelligence school which could provide colloquial language training and lessons “in the character and culture of the native peoples.”123 In 1945, Barrows traveled at the invitation of General Douglas MacArthur to the Far Eastern Theater of Operation, visiting the Philippines, Okinawa, and Japan. Barrows believed in the value of knowledge, and as his biography demonstrates, he sought out new experiences, new knowledge, and new ideas until he died. But it is also worth noting that Barrows was not just an adventurer looking for intellectual plunder; he was interested in the preservation of knowledge, both traditional ethnobotanical knowledge of dying Native American societies and military knowledge of wars past. In his words: There is a common academic maxim that all knowledge is valuable and its pursuit deserving of respect and encouragement. Too many academic minds in America, however, would limit “all knowledge” by the exclusion of one subject: military knowledge. This is an attitude usually born of the misapprehension that to limit military knowledge is to advance the prospects of peace. Truth, however, does not appear to be the teaching of experience. Rather, does history affirm the contrary. At any rate, no knowledge is acquired at greater cost, nor is more easily lost, than is military knowledge. At the conclusion of the Civil War in America there was more real knowledge of warfare, and of the policies that may prevent war as well as of the technique of its conduct, than existed anywhere in the world. This knowledge the American people threw away. It was lost—lost as completely, for all practical purposes, as the priceless heritage of the Classical knowledge lost of the Dark Ages. The main reason that it was lost was because the American people did not organize out of the leaders of the Civil War a professional class furnished with the means to preserve it.124

My hope is that the lives and experiences of the military anthropologists in this book will not be forgotten, and that in capturing these stories I have helped to prevent some of this knowledge from being lost.

NOTES

1. INTRODUCTION: GERALD HICKEY AND THE DANGERS INHERENT 1. Quoted in Paul N. Edward, Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 127–8. 2. Gerald C. Hickey, Window on a War: An Anthropologist in the Vietnam Conflict (Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press, 2002), 127. 3. Ibid., 128. 4. Ibid., 129. 5. Ibid., 130. 6. Ibid., 130–1. 7. Gerald C. Hickey, American Military Advisor and His Foreign Counterpart: The Case of Vietnam, Report RM4482-ARPA (Santa Monica: RAND, 1965). 8. Hickey, Window on a War, 12. 9. Gerald Hickey & John C. Donnell, Vietnamese “Strategic Hamlets”: A Preliminary Report (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1962). 10. Hickey, Window on a War, 93. 11. Ibid., 99. 12. John A. Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2005), 132. 13. Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), 339–40. 14. Hickey, Window on a War, 86. 15. Ian F. W. Beckett, Modern Insurgencies and Counterinsurgencies (New York: Routledge, 2001), 184–5. 16. Hickey, Window on a War, 91. 17. Ibid., 297–305. 18. Seymour J. Deitchman, Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and the Bureaucracy (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1976), 272. 19. Ibid., 204. 20. Ibid., 308. 21. David W. Barno, “Military Adaptation in Complex Operations,” PRISM 1 no. 1 (December 2009). See also David Fastabend, “The Categorization of Conflict,” Parameters (Summer 1997). 22. Anne Scott Tyson, “A General of Nuance and Candor; Abizaid Brings New Tenor to Mideast Post,” Christian Science Monitor, 5 March 2004, 1. 23. Michael Howard, “Use and Abuse of Military History,” Parameters (March 1981), 14. 24. James Redfield, “Herodotus the Tourist,” Classical Philology 80, no. 2 (April 1985). 25. David Petraeus, quoted in Julian E. Barnes, “Hard-Learned Lessons,” US News & World Report, 27 March 2006, 42–6. 26. Ruth F. Benedict, Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946; 2005 reprint), 4–5. 27. In general, see Stanley Sandler, Glad To See Them Come And Sorry To See Them Go: A History Of U.S. Army Civil Affairs And Military Government (Ft. Bragg, NC: US Army Special Operations Command History and Archives Division, 1994), 146–7; 229–31. 28. Joint Publication 2–01.3, Joint Intelligence Preparation of the Operational Environment (Washington, DC: Joint Chiefs of Staff, 16 June 2009), IV-2. This concept is also recognized in British doctrine: “Culture is of particular significance to security and stabilization where the human dimension is critical.” Joint Doctrine Note 1/09, Significance of Culture To The Military (Shrivenham: Assistant Chief of the Defence Staff for Development, Concepts and Doctrine, January 2009), I-3. 29. Conversation with author, 2011. 30. Of course in the Clausewitzian tradition, all wars are fought to achieve a political objective and should therefore in theory have a strategic objective that is more than just destruction of enemy forces. Yet, sometimes it appears that the short-term benefits of Carthaginian destruction tend to override the long-term strategic objective. 31. Jeffrey Goldberg, “A Little Learning,” New Yorker, 9 May 2005, 41. 32. S. F. Nadel, Foundations of Social Anthropology (London: Cohen & West, 1951), 55. 33. Officer Professional Military Education Policy (OPMEP), CJCSI 1800.01D (Washington, DC: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 15 July 2009), E-B-2. At the National War College, senior officers must “analyze the major geographic, regional/cultural, historical, religious, political, economic, legal, military, security, technological, and social issues and trends that shape pertinent groups’ world view or philosophy in selected states and regions.” E-F-3. 34. The latest guidance is the Officer Professional Military Education Policy (OPMEP), CJCSI 1800.01D (Washington, DC: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 29 May 2015). It contains no mention of ‘culture’ whatsoever.

35. Edward Evans-Pritchard, “Operations on the Akobo and Gila Rivers 1940–41,” Army Quarterly 103, no. 4 (July 1973): 470–9. Other anthropologists who would have made good subjects for chapters on leadership include William Edward Hanley Stanner (1905–1981), an Australian anthropologist who led Aboriginal volunteers in the North Australia Observer Unite during WWII, and Richard Noone, who organized Malayan tribes against the Japanese. See Richard Noone, In Search of the Dream People (New York: William Morrow, 1972). On counterinsurgency, another anthropologist who I would have liked to write about was Charles Bohannan, who played an important role during the Huk Rebellion in the Philippines and Vietnam. See Jason S. Ridler, “Lost Work of El Lobo: Lieutenant-Colonel Charles T. R. Bohannan’s Unpublished Study of Guerrilla Warfare and Counterinsurgency in the Philippines, 1899–1955,” Small Wars & Insurgencies 26, no. 2 (2015). If I had included a chapter on military intelligence, I would have enjoyed writing about Carleton S. Coon, an OSS operative in North Africa. See Carleton S. Coon, North Africa Story: The Anthropologist as OSS Agent 1941– 1943 (Ipswitch, MA: Gambit Publications, 1980). Or, alternatively, Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje who advised the Dutch government in Indonesia regarding the dangers of political (vice religious) Islam. See Dietrich Jung, “‘Islam As A Problem’: Dutch Religious Politics in the East Indies,” Review of Religious Research 51, no. 3 (March 2010). 36. For example, Roberto Gonzalez asserted that anthropology used in counterinsurgency operations “appears as just another weapon to be used on the battlefield—not as a tool for building bridges between peoples, much less as a mirror that we might use to reflect upon the nature of our own society.” Roberto J. Gonzalez, “Why We Must Fight the Militarization of Anthropology,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 2 February 2007. 37. George Lucas, Anthropologists in Arms: The Ethics of Military Anthropology (Lanham, MD: Altamira Press, 2009); Robert Albro et al., editors, Anthropologists in the Security Scape: Ethics, Practice and Professional Identity (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2012). 38. Lieutenant General Charles T. Cleveland, Remarks at the U.S. Naval War College Center for Irregular Warfare and Armed Groups Conference, 2012. Used with permission of LTG Cleveland. 39. Elisabeth Bumiller, “We Have Met the Enemy and He is PowerPoint,” New York Times, 26 April 2010. 40. Leonard Wong, Developing Adaptive Leaders: The Crucible Experience of Operation Iraqi Freedom (Carlisle, PA: Army War College, July 2004), 7–8. 41. The U.S. Army even has an acronym to describe this type of operating environment: Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous (VUCA). Thomas E. Ricks, “Military Acronyms: All VUCA’d up,” Foreign Policy, 6 December 2012. 42. Greg Jaffe, “Years in Iraq Change U.S. Military’s Understanding of War,” Washington Post, 22 October 2011. 43. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, edited by Michael E. Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 101. 44. Paul Virilio, Grey Ecology, translated by Drew Burk, and edited by Hubertus von Amelunxen (New York, NY: Atropos Press, 2009), 137. 45. As Chris Demchak notes, military organizations seek equipment, structures and procedures that reduce uncertainty in combat units. The desire for more and more complex machines capable of reducing uncertainty actually raises the uncertainty of operations for the entire organization. Chris Demchak, Military Organizations and Complex Machines: Modernization in the US Armed Services (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 163. 46. W. Bechtel and R. C. Richardson, Discovering Complexity: Decomposition and Localization as Strategies in Scientific Research (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 27. 47. Michael Herr, Dispatches (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1991), 48. 48. Thanks to Dr. Jari Rantapelkonen for the reference to Herr. 49. Many additional forms of control exist in a military system, including prospective (such as strategic intelligence, simulations, and wargames), retrospective (such as measures of effectiveness, lessons learned, and AARs), or current (sensors, cybernetic feedback loops, and intelligence). Similarly, there are many means to achieve control (or the illusion thereof ) including regulations, orders, TTPs, and so on. A discussion of all forms of control is well beyond the scope of this chapter. 50. Joint Intelligence Preparation of the Operational Environment, xi. 51. Ibid., II-5. 52. T. S. Eliot, “Choruses from the Rock,” in Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991), 147. 53. Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky and Paul Slovic (eds), Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics & Biases (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 54. Stephen Nachmanovitch, “Gregory Bateson: Old Men Ought to Be Explorers,” Leonardo 17, no. 2 (1984): 114. 55. Ibid. 56. For example, Sidney B. Fay, Origins of the World War (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1928); Ole R. Holsti and Robert G. North, “The History of Human Conflict,” in Nature of Human Conflict, edited by Elton B. McNeil (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1965); Ralph K. White, “Misperception and the Vietnam War,” Journal of Social Issues 22, no. 3 (1966); Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976); Jack S. Levy, “Misperception and the Causes of War: Theoretical Linkages and Analytical Problems,” World Politics 36, no. 1 (Oct. 1983); Betty M. Bayer and Lloyd H. Strickland, “Gustav Ichheiser on Sociopsychological Misperception in International Relations,” Political Psychology 11, no. 4 (December 1990); Charles A. Duelfer and Stephen Benedict Dyson, “Chronic Misperception and International Conflict: The U.S.-Iraq Experience,” International Security 36, no. 1 (Summer 2011). 57. Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1962); Wilfrid G. Burchett, Vietnam: Inside Story of the Guerrilla War (New York, NY: International Publishers, 1965); Avi Shlaim, “Failures in National Intelligence Estimates: The Case of the Yom Kippur War,” World Politics 28, no. 3 (April 1976); Abraham Ben-Zvi, “Hindsight and Foresight: A Conceptual Framework for the Analysis of Surprise Attacks,” World Politics 28, no. 3 (April 1976); Richard K. Betts, “Analysis, War, and Decision: Why Intelligence Failures Are Inevitable,” World Politics 31, no. 1 (October 1978); James A. Aho, This Thing of Darkness: A Sociology of the Enemy (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1994); Keith Brown, “‘All They Understand Is Force’: Debating Culture in Operation Iraqi Freedom,” American Anthropologist 110, no.

4 (December 2008); Patrick Porter, Military Orientalism (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2009); Erich Wagner, “Bones of the British Lying in Maiwand are Lonely,” Marine Corps University Journal 3, no. 1 (Spring 2012). 58. D. C. Dorward, “Ethnography and Administration: A Study of Anglo-Tiv ‘Working Misunderstanding’,” Journal of African History 15, no. 3 (1974); George Packer, Assassin’s Gate: America in Iraq (New York, NY: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2005); George W. Smith, “Avoiding a Napoleonic Ulcer: Bridging the Gap of Cultural Intelligence (Or, Have We Focused on the Wrong Transformation?),” in Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Strategy Essay Competition Essays 2004 (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 2004); Montgomery McFate, “The Military Utility of Understanding Adversary Culture,” Joint Forces Quarterly 38 (2005); Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006); Lawrence Rosen, “Anthropological Assumptions and the Afghan War,” Anthropological Quarterly 84, no. 2 (2011). 59. One interesting example, beyond the scope of this chapter is hubris. See, for example, Loren Baritz, Backfire: A History of How American Culture Led Us into Vietnam and Made Us Fight the Way We Did (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); Michael Scheuer, Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror (Lincoln, NE: Potomac Books, 2007). 60. Cited in Ken Booth, Strategy and Ethnocentrism (New York, NY: Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1979), 15. Ethnocentrism can also refer to a fallacy in social science research involving the projection of one’s own biased frame of reference onto other cultures. 61. As one U.S. Army officer noted: “What I observed emphasized what I had learned during my two years as an advisor to the Joint Staff J3, Saudi Arabian Ministry of Defense and Aviation as well as extensive travels throughout the Middle East; as Americans, we tend to have an ethnocentric belief that we are superior.” LTC William Wunderle, “Through the Lens of Cultural Awareness: Planning Requirement in Wielding the Instruments of National Power” (PowerPoint presentation, U.S. Army, Fort Bragg, N.C., 2005), slide 1. 62. Booth, Strategy and Ethnocentrism, 98. Booth notes that individuals attracted to the profession of arms may have a psychological disposition toward ethnocentrism, exacerbated by the military environment, which is professionally committed to preserving a particular national posture and involves group pressure towards conformity. Ibid.: 24–30. 63. Michael P. Fischerkeller, “David Versus Goliath: Cultural Judgments in Asymmetric Wars,” Security Studies 7, no. 4 (1998): 3. 64. Ibid., 5. 65. Edward Saïd, Orientalism (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1978), 2. 66. Thus, as Saïd noted, “Orientalism is fundamentally a political doctrine.” Ibid., 204. Bernard Lewis has criticized Saïd on the grounds that orientalism actually arose from humanism which was often a countervailing ideology to imperialism. As Lewis asks, “What imperial purpose was served by deciphering the ancient Egyptian language, for example, and then restoring to the Egyptians knowledge of and pride in their forgotten, ancient past?” Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 126. 67. Porter, Military Orientalism, 12. Despite an interesting thesis, Porter misconstrues certain sources, including the author of this volume. He claims that I “defended the U.S. miltary’s use of Raphael Patai’s The Arab Mind in its teaching curriculum.” Porter, Military Orientalism, 60. Actually what I said was: “If Patai’s book had been used correctly, they would never have [humiliated prisoners at Abu Ghraib]. Because they would have understood that … you’re not going to get intelligence information out of these people, you’re going to get them and their families attacking you.” My point was that interrogators misused Patai’s book, which hardly constitutes a defense of the use of the material. Quoted in Matthew B. Stannard, “Montgomery McFate’s Mission / Can one anthropologist possibly steer the course in Iraq?” San Francisco Chronicle, 29 April 2007. Available at: http://www.sfgate.com/magazine/article/Montgomery-McFate-s-Mission-Can-one-2562681.php. 68. Porter, Military Orientalism, 143. 69. Ibid., 144. 70. Following Anne Swidler, Porter views culture as a repertoire of potential strategies, concepts and resources that actors can pull from at will. Ann Swidler, “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies,” American Sociological Review 51, no. 2 (April 1986). In his book, he objects (on the grounds of cultural essentialism) to my statement that Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Iraq “neither think nor act like nation-states. Rather, their form of warfare, organizational structure, and motivations are determined by the society and the culture from which they come.” Montgomery McFate, “Does Culture Matter? The Military Utility of Cultural Knowledge,” Joint Forces Quarterly 38 (2005): 43. Ironically, Porter appears to agrees with my basic point: Al Qaeda and the Taliban draw from the repertoire of Islamic history and narratives to position themselves and legitimize their actions. My argument, which Porter misconstrues, is that Al Qaeda and the Taliban cannot be analyzed in the same way as a state actor—which was the tendency in the Pentagon in 2005—because the culture they draw from is different than the anodyne political culture of nation state. 71. Adda Bozeman, Strategic Intelligence and Statecraft (New York, NY: Brassey’s, 1992), 119. 72. Francis Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 116. 73. Michael Aung-Thwin, “Parochial Universalism, Democracy Jihad and the Orientalist Image of Burma,” Pacific Affairs 74, no. 4 (Winter 2001/2002); Shashi Tharoor, “Are Human Rights Universal?” World Policy Journal 16, no. 4 (Winter 1999/2000); Fareda Banda, “Global Standards: Local Values,” International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family 17, no. 1 (April 2003). 74. U. S. National Security Strategy (Washington, DC: White House, 2010), 35. 75. Bozeman, Strategic Intelligence, 85. 76. An early example of this approach can be found in the writings of Austrian social psychologist Gustav Ichheiser who observed in the 1940s that nations were constrained in their foreign policy by the “limits of insight,” meaning their ability to understand symbols. Ichheiser distinguished between understanding (for example, the ability to identify and understand the meaning of symbols or the ability to identify the symbols without understanding meaning while at the same time remaining aware of one’s lack of understanding), nonunderstanding (for example, the failure both to identify symbols and to understand-that-one-does-notunderstand) and misunderstanding (for example, the ability to identify the symbols but misinterpret their meaning). Bayer and Strickland, “Gustav Ichheiser.”

77. Aidan Hehir, “Impact of Analogical Reasoning on US Foreign Policy towards Kosovo,” Journal of Peace Research 43, no. 1 (January 2006). 78. Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 10; Michael Schafer, Deadly Paradigms: The Failure of U.S. Counterinsurgency Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). 79. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “On the Psychology of Prediction,” Psychological Review 80, no. 4 (1973); Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “Availability: A Heuristic for Judging Frequency and Probability,” Cognitive Psychology 5, no. 2 (1973). 80. See, for example, Doug Feith, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism (New York, NY: Harper, 2009), 240; Don Eberly, Liberate and Leave: Fatal Flaws in the Early Strategy for Postwar Iraq (Minneapolis, MN: Zenith Press, 2009), 27. 81. W. Andrew Terrill, Lessons of The Iraqi De-Ba’athification Program for Iraq’s Future and the Arab Revolutions (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, May 2012), 14. 82. Michael V. Bhatia, “Fighting Words: Naming Terrorists, Bandits, Rebels and Other Violent Actors,” Third World Quarterly 26 no. 1 (2005): 8. 83. Mona Harb and Reinoud Leenders, “Know Thy Enemy: Hizbullah, ‘Terrorism’ and the Politics of Perception,” Third World Quarterly 26 no. 1 (2005). 84. “Rarely have the critics of Hizbullah’s ‘terrorism’ produced thorough analyses of the organisation in its domestic settings or in a historical perspective, not even in an attempt to contextualise their accusations regarding its terrorist agenda….The mounting allegations about Hizbullah’s internationalist efforts in general —and its ties or similarities with al-Qaeda in particular—systematically do injustice to historical facts and the political stances taken by the organisation, or completely ignore them. For instance, the accusation regarding the supposedly cosy relations between Hizbullah and al-Qaeda conceals the outrage expressed by the party over atrocities jointly committed by the Taliban and its Arab allies in Afghanistan years before the Twin Towers collapsed… [T]errorism experts never explained or substantiated their claims that this past of clear animosity has been miraculously overcome, to the extent that the two now perceive their struggle as a unified Jihad against a common enemy.” Harb and Leenders, “Know Thy Enemy,” 178. 85. Bhatia, “Fighting Words,” 16. 86. Ibid., 18. 87. Russell F. Weigley, American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1973), xxi. 88. Ibid., xviii-xix. 89. Barno, “Military Adaptation.” 90. For a critique, see Brian M. Linn, “The American Way of War Revisited,” Journal of Military History 66, no. 2 (April 2002): 501–533; Max Boot, Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2002). 91. Thomas G. Mahnken, “United States Strategic Culture” (Washington, DC: Defense Threat Reduction Agency Advanced Systems and Concepts Office, 13 November 2006), 5. 92. Andrew J. Birtle, US Army Counterinsurgency and Contingency Operations Doctrine, 1860–1941 (Washington, DC: U.S. Army Center of Military History 2001), 10–11. 93. Robert M. Utley, “Cultural Clash on the Frontier,” in Military and the Conflict Between Cultures: Soldiers at the Interface, edited by James C. Bradford (College Station, TX: Texas A&M Press, 1997), 93. This contradicts Emory Upton’s thesis that the U.S. Army was unprepared for a ‘real war’ because it had been structured to fight Indians. See Brian M. Linn, Echo of Battle: The Army’s Way Of War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 69. The focus on conventional war at the expense of other types of military operations has not just been a problem in the U.S. Regarding the mentality of the French Army after the defeat in Indochina, Roger Trinquier wrote that “We still persist in studying a type of warfare that no longer exists and that we shall never fight again, while we pay only passing attention to the war we lost in Indochina.” Roger Trinquier, Modern Warfare: A French View of Counterinsurgency, translated by Daniel Lee (New York, NY: Praeger, 1964), 3. 94. James Fallow, “Blind into Baghdad,” Atlantic Monthly, January/February 2004. 95. For example, Operation Uphold Democracy, a 1994 operation to restore the democratically elected government of Haiti, brought the U.S. military’s lack of socio-cultural knowledge into sharp relief. According to a U.S. Army report, “Uphold Democracy introduced U.S. forces into a culture vastly different from their own. Yet, in planning for the Haiti operation, the Army, in general, had little appreciation of Haitian history and culture. Few planners knew anything about Haiti, other than its basic geography… In peace operations such as Uphold Democracy, however, knowledge of how a people think and act, and how they might react to military intervention arguably becomes paramount. The U.S. military culture, in general, focuses on training warriors to use fire and maneuver and tends to resist the notion of cultural awareness.” Walter B. Kretchik, Robert F. Baumann & John T. Fishel, Invasion, Intervention, Intervasion: A Concise History of the U.S. Army Operation Uphold Democracy (Fort Leavenworth, KS: U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, 1998), 188. 96. Colin S. Gray, Irregular Enemies and The Essence Of Strategy: Can The American Way Of War Adapt? (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, March 2006). The other characteristics of the U.S. way of war according to Gray are: Apolitical, Astrategic, Ahistorical, Problem-Solving and Optimistic, Culturally Challenged, Technology Dependent, Focused on Firepower, Large-Scale, Aggressive and Offensive, Profoundly Regular, Impatient, Logistically Excellent, and Highly Sensitive to Casualties. 97. Gray, Irregular Enemies, 34. 98. Interview, 2011. Notes in possession of the author. 99. Brian Michael Jenkins, “Safer, But Not Safe,” San Diego Union-Tribune, 10 September 2006. Available at: http://www.rand.org/commentary/2006/09/10/SDUT.html. 100. Interview, 2011. Notes in possession of the author. 101. USNA 2011–2012 Catalog, 58. Available at: http://www.usna.edu/Catalog/. 102. Interview, 2006. Notes in possession of the author.

103. Lawrence Freedman, Transformation of Strategic Affairs (New York:, NY Routledge, 2006), 8. 104. Quadrennial Defense Review (Washington, DC: Secretary of Defense, 2006), 78. 105. Derek Harvey, “‘Red Team’ Perspective on the Insurgency in Iraq,” in An Army at War: Change in the Midst of Conflict, edited by John J. McGrath (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute, 2005), 195. 106. Amy Coplan, “Understanding Empathy: Its Features and Effects,” in Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, edited by Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 5. 107. Interview, September 2006, notes in possession of author. 108. Bertrand Russell, Problems of Philosophy (New York, NY: H. Holt, 1912); Gilbert Ryle, Concept of Mind (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012 [1949]); Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012 [1958]). 109. Maryam Alavi and Dorothy E. Leidner, “Knowledge Management and Knowledge Management Systems: Conceptual Foundations and Research Issues,” MIS Quarterly 25, no. 1 (March 2001), 110. 110. Ibid. 111. See discussion in Harry Prosch, “Polanyi’s Ethics,” Ethics 82, no. 2 (January 1972), 97. 112. Kevin Burke, “Civil Reconnaissance; Seperating [sic] the Insurgent from the Population” (master’s thesis, Naval Postgraduate School, December 2007), 5. 113. Brian R. Selmeski, Military Cross-Cultural Competence: Core Concepts and Individual Development (Kingston, Ontario: Royal Military College of Canada, 2007), 12. 114. Brigadier General Ferdinand Irrizarry, Remarks (Best Practices in Directed Social Change Programs Conference, University of Southern Mississippi International Development Program, Washington, DC, October 10, 2012). 115. Aki Huhtinen and Jari Rantapelkonen, “Perception Management in the Art of War—A Review of Finnish War Propaganda and Present-Day Information Warfare,” Journal of Information Warfare 2, no. 1 (2002): 50–58. 116. W. H. Reinhart, “Taking Culture to the Next Level: Understanding and Using Culture at the Operational Level of War” (master’s thesis, Naval War College, 27 October 2010), 12. 117. Fleet Marine Force Reference Publication (FMFRP) 12–15, Small Wars Manual (Washington, DC: Headquarters U.S. Marine Corps, 1940), 75, cited in Reinhart, 16. 118. Joint Publication 3–0, Joint Operations (Washington, DC: Joint Chiefs of Staff, 11 August 2011), V-7–9. 119. Joint Operations, V-8. 120. Defense Science Board, Understanding Human Dynamics (Washington, DC: Defense Science Board, March 2009), ix. 121. Directive 3000.05, Military Support for Stability, Security, Transition, and Reconstruction (SSTR) Operations (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, November 2005). 122. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940), 262. 123. Commander’s Critical Information Requirements are defined as “elements of friendly and enemy information the commander identifies as critical to timely decision making.” Joint Operations, II-8. 124. ISAF Joint Command, “Host Nation Information Requirements” (2009). 125. Ironically, the military was, in fact, grappling with the same issues that social scientist have been struggling with for hundreds of years: structure, process, agency, function, power, culture, and authority. 126. Brigadier General Benjamin C. Freakley, “Cultural Awareness and Combat Power,” Infantry 94, no. 2 (March/April 2005), 1–2. 127. Lieutenant General James R. Clapper, Jr., “The Worldwide Threat to the United States and Its Interests Abroad,” Statement for the Senate Committee on Armed Services, 17 January 1995. Available at http://infomanage.com/international/intelligence/clapper.html. 128. Anthony C. Zinni, “Non-Traditional Military Missions: Their Nature, and the Need for Cultural Awareness and Flexible Thinking,” in Capital “W” War: A Case for Strategic Principles of War, edited by Joe Strange (Quantico, VA: Marine Corps University, 1998), 266. 129. Andrew Exum, “Cultural Intelligence and the American Experience in Iraq” (master’s thesis, American University of Beirut, 2005), 12. 130. George Franz, David Pendall and Jeffrey Steffen, “Host Nation Information Requirements: Achieving Unity of Understanding in Counterinsurgency,” Small Wars Journal (2009). Available at: smallwarsjournal.com/blog/journal/docs-temp/348-franz.pdf 131. Ibid. 132. Interview, 2011. Notes in possession of the author. 133. Zinni, “Non-Traditional Military Missions,” 267. 134. Major General Michael T. Flynn, Captain Matt Pottinger, Paul D. Batchelor, “Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan” (Washington, DC: Center for New American Security, January 2010), 7. 135. Although culture is a key epistemological concept of anthropology, there is no agreement as to the meaning of the term. In 1952, for example, A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn offered 164 definitions of culture (plus another hundred or so “fragmentary” ones). A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum, 1952). The number of definitions has mushroomed since then. 136. One could make the case that historical materialism and cultural ecology do meet these criteria. 137. Herbert S. Lewis, “The Misrepresentation of Anthropology and Its Consequences,” American Anthropologist 100, no. 3 (September 1998): 717. 138. Ibid. 139. Edmund Leach, Social Anthropology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 52. 140. Stephan Feuchtwang, “The Discipline and its Sponsors,” in Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, edited by Talal Asad (London: Ithaca Press, 1973), 82.

141. Lord Hailey, African Survey, Revised 1956 (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), 54; Darryl Forde, “Applied Anthropology in Government: British Africa,” in Anthropology Today: An Encyclopedic Inventory, edited by A. L. Kroeber (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 845; George M. Foster, Applied Anthropology (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1969), 187; Lord Hailey, African Survey, 55; Foster, Applied Anthropology, 188. 142. Bronislaw Malinowski, “Practical Anthropology,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 2 (1929): 22–23. 143. Kjetil Tronvoll, “Meret Shehena, ‘Brothers’ Land’ S. F. Nadel’s Land Tenure on the Eritrean Plateau Revisited,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 70, no. 4 (2000). 144. In some cases, anthropologists (in the words of Lord Hailey) were “of great assistance in providing Government with knowledge which must be the basis of administrative policy.” Feuchtwang, “The Discipline,” 85. In other cases, anthropologists were merely annoying. “Anthropologists busied themselves,” as Sir Philip Mitchell observed in 1951 “about all the minutiae of obscure trial and personal practices, especially if they were agreeably associated with sex or flavoured with obscenity. There resulted a large number of painstaking and often accurate records of interesting habits and practices, of such length that no one had time to read them and [which were] often, in any case, irrelevant…” Philip E. Mitchell, “Review of Native Administration in the British Territories in Africa,” Journal of African Administration 3 (1951): 56–57. 145. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, “Applied Anthropology,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 16 (1946): 93. 146. Jack Goody, Expansive Moment: Anthropology in Britain and Africa 1918–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 73. 147. Evans-Pritchard, “Applied Anthropology,” 93. 148. John Keegan, History of Warfare (New York, NY: Knopf, 1993), 89; Anthony Mockler, Haile Selassie’s War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 219. 149. H. G. Barnett, Anthropology in Administration (New York, NY: Rois, Peterson & Co., 1956). Most anthropologists seemed to believe that the requirements of the nation as a whole trumped disciplinary concerns with scientific purity and contributed to the war effort. Anthropologists held jobs in the Army’s Military Intelligence branch, the U.S. Department of State, OSS, the Board of Economic Warfare, Strategic Bombing Survey, Military Government, the Selective Service Organization, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Office of War Information, the War Relocation Authority, and the Chemical Warfare Division, among other assignments. At the end of WWII, nearly a sixth of the anthropologists in the U.S. had worked in government. Thomas C. Patterson, A Social History of Anthropology in the United States (Oxford and New York, NY: Berg, 2001), 105. 150. National Security Action Memorandum No. 162, “Development of US and Indigenous Police, Paramilitary and Military Resources,” 19 June 1962, quoted in Senator Michael Gravel (ed.), Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decisionmaking on Vietnam (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1971), 2: 681–4. 151. Eric Wakin, Anthropology Goes to War: Professional Ethics and Counterinsurgency in Thailand (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 85. 152. In 1963, the Smithsonian Institution produced a study entitled Social Science Research and National Security, which noted that “the problems posed by such forms of warfare and violence are intimately related to questions about the social structure, culture, and behavior patterns of populations involved in such conflicts. Without question, social science research is in a strong position to contribute useful knowledge in designing and developing internal security forces.” Ithiel de Sola Pool, A. J. Coale, W. P. Davison, H. Ecktein, K. Knorr, V. V. McRae, L. W. Pye, T. C. Schelling, W. Schramm, Social Science Research and National Security: A Report Prepared by the Research Group in Psychology and the Social Sciences (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, March 5, 1963), 34. The DSB, tasked with evaluating existing research and development programs related to causation of small wars in Southeast Asia, reviewed all of the social science programs taking place across the DoD and concluded, “The overall level of effort is seriously inadequate to meet the DoD’s need for knowledge about incipient and active insurgency…. Specifically, there is a great need for up-to-date basic information about the major cultural and political groups within the developing countries that are of special significance to the United States. The ethnic, religious, economic and political conditions conducive to social conflict can be adequately understood only through intensive, systematic research performed within each country…” Defense Science Board, Research in the Department of Defense on Internal Conflict and Insurgency in Developing Countries, 1965, quoted in Deitchman, Best-Laid Schemes, 109. 153. Irving Louis Horowitz (ed.), Rise and Fall of Project Camelot: Studies in the Relationship Between Social Science and Practical Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967), 47–49. 154. Deitchman, Best-Laid Schemes, 143. 155. Irving Louis Horowitz, “The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot,” in Rise and Fall of Project Camelot: Studies in the Relationship Between Social Science and Practical Politics, edited by Irving Louis Horowitz (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967), 32. 156. Ibid. 157. Deitchman, Best-Laid Schemes, 166. 158. Janice H. Laurence, “Behavioral Science in the Military,” in Handbook on Communicating and Disseminating Behavioral Science, edited by M. K. Welch-Ross and L. G. Fasig (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2007), 398. 159. Kathleen Gough Aberle, “Correspondence,” Anthropology News 8, no. 6 (June 1967): 11. 160. See, for example, Kathleen Gough, “Anthropology and Imperialism,” Monthly Review 19, no. 11 (1968); Kathleen Gough, “New Proposals For Anthropologists,” Current Anthropology 9, no. 5 (1968); Dell Hymes, editor, Reinventing Anthropology (New York, NY: Pantheon, 1972); Eric R. Wolf and Joseph G. Jorgensen, “Anthropology on the Warpath in Thailand,” New York Review of Books, November 19, 1970. 161. Wolf and Jorgensen, “Anthropology on the Warpath.” 162. Some anthropologists still regard their role as one of advocacy: for example, Nancy Scheper-Hughes has called for a “militant anthropology” in which anthropologists intervene and take sides instead of merely observing. Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology,” Current Anthropology 36, no. 3 (June 1995). 163. Hugh Gusterson, “Remarks” (Production of Cultural Knowledge in the United States Military Workshop,

Watson Institute, Brown University, 2006). 164. Margaret Mead, “Discussion,” in Anthropology and Society, edited by Bela C. Maday (Washington, DC: The Anthropological Society of Washington, 1975), 15. 165. Mead, “Discussion,” 14–15. 166. Saïd, Orientalism, 95. 167. Peter Pels, “The Anthropology of Colonialism: Culture, History, and the Emergence of Western Governmentality,” Annual Review of Anthropology 26 (October 1997). 168. Wolf and Jorgensen, “Anthropology on the Warpath.” 169. Dan Berrett, “Anthropology Without Science,” Inside Higher Ed, November 30, 2010. Available at: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/11/30/anthroscience. 170. Berrett, “Anthropology Without Science.” 171. Lila Abu-Lughod, “Writing against Culture,” in Recapturing Anthropology, edited by Richard Fox (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research, 1991), 150–151. 172. Scott Jaschik, “A Pentagon Olive Branch to Academe,” Inside Higher Ed, 16 April 2008. Available at: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/04/16/minerva. 173. Harry Holbert Turney-High, Primitive War: Its Practices and Concepts (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1949), 5. 174. Network of Concerned Anthropologists, “Pledge of Non-participation in Counter-insurgency.” Available at: http://concerned.anthropologists.googlepages.com. 175. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1977), 38. 176. Dan G. Cox, “Human Terrain Systems and the Moral Prosecution of Warfare,” Parameters 41, no. 3 (Autumn 2011); Derek Suchard, “Human Shields: Social Scientists on Point in Modern Asymmetrical Conflicts,” in Cultural Heritage, Ethics and the Military, edited by Peter G. Stone (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2011). 177. Email 2005, in possession of author. 178. Barak A. Salmoni and Paula Holmes-Eber, Operational Culture for the Warfighter: Principles and Applications (Quantico, VA: Marine Corps University, 2008). 179. Major General Barbara G. Fast, “Open Source Intelligence,” Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin 31, no. 4 (October—December 2005): 2. 180. See, for example, on the consequences of arming the mujahedeen in Afghanistan, Ted Galen Carpenter, “The Unintended Consequences of Afghanistan,” World Policy Journal 11, no. 1 (Spring 1994). 181. Michael Clarke, “Foreign Policy Implementation: Problems and Approaches,” British Journal of International Studies 5, no. 2 (July 1979): 123. 182. Ibid., 128. 183. Friedrich Engels, “Letter to Joseph Bloch,” in Marx-Engels Reader, edited by R. C. Tucker (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 1972), 641. 184. Clarke, “Foreign Policy Implementation,” 128. 185. Ibid., 114. 186. During the British colonial administration of Fiji, for example, the indigenous prestige economy (in which a chief ’s prestige and power was linked to his generosity in distributing food and goods) was replaced with a small peasant production, monetization, and thrifty habits modeled on British cultural norms. The result was near destruction of Fiji’s social structure. Clyde Kluckhohn, Mirror for Man: The Relation of the Anthropology to Modern Life (New York, NY: Whittlesey House, 1949), 190. 187. The rationale for U.S. democracy promotion efforts has been the purported correlation between democracy and peace. Presidents from both the Democratic and the Republican Parties have used the ‘democratic peace theory’ as the theoretical basis of foreign policy. In the words of President Bill Clinton: “Ultimately the best strategy to insure our security and to build a durable peace is to support the advance of democracy elsewhere. Democracies don’t attack each other; they make better trading partners and partners in diplomacy.” Editors, “Excerpts from President Clinton’s State of the Union Message,” New York Times, 26 January 1994, A17. President George W. Bush made similar claims about democracy and peace: “And the reason why I’m so strong on democracy is democracies don’t go to war with each other.…I’ve got great faith in democracies to promote peace. And that’s why I’m such a strong believer that the way forward in the Middle East, the broader Middle East, is to promote democracy.” Office of the Press Secretary, “President and Prime Minister Blair Discussed Iraq, Middle East,” November 12, 2004. Available at: https://georgewbushwhitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2004/11/20041112–5.html. Yet, as a diverse group of skeptical scholars have shown, democracy did not reduce the likelihood of international conflict (war or violent interstate disputes) during the Cold War era. Errol A. Henderson, Democracy and War: The End of an Illusion? (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2002); Christopher Layne, “Kant or Cant: The Myth of the Democratic Peace,” International Security 19, no. 2 (Autumn 1994); Sebastian Rosato, “The Flawed Logic of Democratic Peace Theory,” American Political Science Review 97, no. 4 (November 2003); Errol A. Henderson, “Mistaken Identity: Testing the Clash of Civilizations Thesis in Light of Democratic Peace Claims,” British Journal of Political Science 34, no. 3 (July 2004). In fact, political distance, trade interdependence, economic growth, relative material capabilities, alliance membership and contiguity are much better predictors of international conflict than a country’s political system. 188. John Useem, “Democracy in Process: The Development of Democratic Leadership in the Micronesia Islands,” in Human Problems in Technological Change, edited by Edward H. Spicer (New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 1952), 279. 189. Packer, Assassin’s Gate, 302. 190. Jesse Singal, Christine Lim and M. J. Stephey, “June 2003 Dead Enders,” Time, March 19, 2010. 191. “The administrator from republican France, particularly in the inter-war period, had little time for the notion of chiefs holding power other than that derived from the administration itself. This provides a marked contrast with the average British administrator, who believed sincerely that for Africans their own traditional methods of government were the most suitable, provided they were shorn of certain features that did not correspond to his sense of justice. Coming from a country which still maintained a monarchy that had done little to

democratize itself on the lines of the Scandinavian monarchies, he had a basic respect for the institution of kingship and the panoply of ritual that surrounded it.” Michael Crowder, “Indirect Rule: French and British Style,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 34, no. 3 (July 1964), 204. 192. C. K. Meek, Land and Authority in a Nigerian Tribe (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), xi. M. M. Green who was sent by the British in the early 1930s to study the Igbo socio-political organization concluded that since the Igbo had “no paramount chief or other organ of government common to them all, they lack what to other peoples may be powerful symbols of unity.” M. M. Green, Igbo Village Affairs (London: Frank Cass, 1964 [1947]), xiii, 6. 193. R. S. Rattray, “Present Tendencies of African Colonial Government,” Journal of the Royal African Society 33, no. 130 (January 1934): 29. Rattray’s view, in a nutshell, was that despotic chiefs were not necessary for indirect rule to work, that local democratic institutions could be preserved and utilized for administration, and that these African institutions were discoverable through research. Similarly, Margery Perham’s view was “that despotism was the rare exception; that many chiefs were ‘constitutional’ in a sense not so far removed from that in which we employ the word to describe our own king; that they were largely dependent upon popular approval; that they acted with and through councilors, and that, as an additional check, authority was widely diffused among the constituent family-cells of which society was constituted.” Margery Perham, “Some Problems of Indirect Rule in Africa,” Journal of the Royal African Society 34, no. 135 (April 1935): 12. Historians have questioned Rattray’s view that “decentralization was the dominant feature of the Ashanti Constitution.” R. S. Rattray, Ashanti Law and Constitution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929), 80. On the contrary, it has been posited that “throughout much of its eighteenth and nineteenth-century history, Asante was a highly centralised state with the locus of government firmly rooted in Kumase.” T. C. McCaskie, “R. S. Rattray and the Construction of Asante History: An Appraisal,” History in Africa 10 (1983): 194. 194. Of course, governance was not just an end in itself, but was the primary means to enable instrumental goals, such as resource extraction and exploitation of labor. 195. See Barbara W. Tuchman, March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984). 196. For example, the 1953 coup in Iran that deposed Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq was arguably intended to prevent a communist takeover in Iran and ensure the balance of power and geostrategic stability in the Middle East. However, the coup resulted in a repressive absolute monarchy under the hands of the Shah, until he was deposed during the 1979 Iranian Revolution and replaced with the Islamic Republic, a regime which arguably has not been beneficial for geostrategic stability in the region. The strategy of a coup defeated the overall strategic objective. Mark J. Gasiorowski, “The 1953 Coup de’Etat Against Mosaddeq,” in Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran, edited by Mark J. Gasiorowski and Malcolm Byrne (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004), 274. In March of 2003, the former U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright apologized for the coup in suitably understated diplomatic language: “The Eisenhower administration believed its actions were justified for strategic reasons. But the coup was clearly a setback for Iran’s political development and it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America.” Quoted in Zachary Shore, Blunder: Why Smart People Make Bad Decisions (New York, NY: Bloomsbury USA, 2009), 79. 197. Richard K. Dembowski, III, “Eating Dinner with a Fork, Spoon, and Knife: How A Corps Executed MACV’s One War Strategy U.S. Army” (master’s thesis, School of Advanced Military Studies, 2009). 198. National Security Action Memorandum 288, 17 March 1964. One of the tasks that the PROVN authors undertook was the identification of a strategic objective for the war, amidst the rubble of ex post facto rationalizations for the U.S. military presence in Vietnam. Of course, one could make the case that the notion of a “free, democratic” Vietnam was pernicious hogwash designed to do little more than sell the war to Congress and the American public. Regardless, the fundamental recognition in PROVN—that excessive military force is counterproductive if the object beyond war involves more than defeat of the adversary—still holds true. 199. Lewis Sorley, Vietnam Chronicles: The Abrams Tapes, 1968–1972 (Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press, 2004), 202. 2. ROBERT SUTHERLAND RATTRAY AND INDIRECT RULE 1. R. S. Rattray, Ashanti (New York: Negro University Press, 1969 [1923]), 89. 2. Beginning in 1806, British economic penetration of West Africa in the form of the African Company of Merchants resulted in conflict with the Ashanti Empire. Between 1823 and 1831, in what is now known as the First Anglo-Asante War, the British initiated a war against the Ashanti nominally to stop the slave trade, but also to defend coastal territory belonging to the Fante, with whom they were allied. This war ended with a British withdrawal and thirty years of peace. The Second Anglo-Asante War (1863–1864) erupted when the Ashanti made incursions into British territory in pursuit of a fugitive, ending in a stalemate after both sides were decimated by sickness. The Third Anglo-Asante War (1873–1874) was initiated by the Ashanti who wanted to protect their coastal access after the British purchased the Dutch Gold Coast from the Netherlands, including territory that was claimed by the Ashanti. The Treaty of Fomena, which ended the war in July 1874, mandated that the Asante pay reparations, give up territorial claims, terminate various alliances, withdraw troops from the coast, keep trade routes open, and end human sacrifice. The Fourth Anglo-Ashanti War (1894– 1896) was initiated by the British after the Asanti refused to become a British protectorate. The Asanti were defeated and their King was exiled to the Seychelles. See Robert B. Edgerton, Fall of the Asante Empire: The Hundred-Year War for Africa’s Gold Coast (New York, NY: Free Press, 2010). 3. Rattray, Ashanti, 292. Sir Frederick Hodgson’s wife claimed that this was an error of translation and that he never said these words. 4. Historians have subsequently claimed that the stool was not just an “an object of sacred veneration”—it was also “a political weapon.” Possession of the Golden Stool conferred political legitimacy on the individual who controlled it and “helped deliver into the outstretched hand the reins of power and government.” T. C. McCaskie, “R. S. Rattray and the Construction of Asante History: An Appraisal,” History in Africa 10 (1983): 198–9. 5. Rattray, Ashanti, 289. 6. Ibid., 289–90. 7. Ibid., 292. 8. Theodore H. von Laue, “Anthropology and Power: R. S. Rattray among the Ashanti,” African Affairs, 75, no.

298 (January 1976): 36. Rattray believed that the Siege of Coomassie was a direct result of the insult to the Golden Stool: “I am sure that if the Government of that day had ever known what is here very briefly described it would never have asked for the stool ‘to sit upon’, and possibly would not have asked for it at all, and there would have been no siege of Coomassie in 1900.” Rattray, Ashanti, 292. 9. Rattray, Ashanti, 9. 10. Noel Machin, Government Anthropologist: A Life of R. S. Rattray (University of Kent at Canterbury: Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing, 1998), 62. Available at: http://lucy.ukc.ac.uk/Machin/machin_TOC.html. 11. The memorandum is reprinted in Rattray, Ashanti. Noel Machin believed that the chief credit for British discretion over the desecration of the Golden Stool in 1920 should go to C. H. Harper, the Chief Commissioner in Ashanti. Machin, Government Anthropologist, 76–77. See also E. W. Smith, Golden Stool: Some Aspects of the Conflict of Cultures in Modern Africa (London: Edinburgh House Press, 1926). 12. Rattray, Ashanti, 288. 13. Ibid., 293. 14. Raymond Firth, Human Types: An Introduction to Social Anthropology (New York, NY: The New American Library, 1958), 161–162. 15. Quoted in Rattray, Ashanti, 9–10. According to Edwin Smith, writing in 1926, “In earlier days the authorities blundered through sheer ignorance. But recently they had appointed an anthropologist whose business it was to study Ashanti customs and beliefs, and this officer, Captain Rattray, a man of conspicuous ability and long experience, endowed with much tact and wholly sympathetic in his attitude towards the people, had investigated and reported on the history of the Stool. What he said enlightened the Government as to the true nature of the reverence in which the Ashantis held this ancient shrine—the shrine of the nation’s soul …. From such a conflict the timely researches of Captain Rattray saved Britain and Ashanti.” Smith, Golden Stool, qouted in Machin, Government Anthropologist, 79–80. 16. Machin, Government Anthropologist, 108. 17. Richmond Palmer, “Some Observations on Capt. R. S. Rattray’s Paper, ‘Present Tendencies of African Colonial Government’,” Journal of the Royal African Society 33, no. 130 (January 1934): 38. 18. McCaskie, “R. S. Rattray,” 191. 19. A. F. Robertson, “Anthropology and Government in Ghana,” African Affairs 74, no. 294 (January 1975): 55. 20. von Laue, “Anthropology and Power,” 33. 21. Ibid., 36. 22. Ibid., 4. 23. Ibid., 10. Rattray fought in five engagements, during both the conventional and guerilla phases of the war. 24. Ibid., 12. 25. Ibid., 21. 26. Ibid., 22. 27. Ibid., 23. 28. Ibid., 26. 29. Ibid., 27. 30. Ibid., 37. 31. Ibid., 38. 32. Ibid., 40. 33. Ibid., 45. 34. Ibid., 34. 35. Ibid. 36. Robertson, “Anthropology and Government,” 54. 37. R. S. Rattray, Ashanti Law and Constitution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929), xii. He observed that “the success of work of this especially difficult scientific nature lies—at least in my experience—on its freedom as far as possible from the fetters and trammels of Departmental interference.” 38. Robertson, “Anthropology and Government,” 54. 39. Ibid. Rather than promoting him further, the Governor of the Gold Coast, Sir Frederick Gordon Guggisberg on the initiative of Mr. C. H. Harper, the Civil Commissioner of Ashanti, created a position for Rattray. Had Rattray had his way, he would have given more autonomy to the traditional authorities with greater deference to their wisdom. In the official perspective such views made him seem to be overtly Asantephile and partisan. von Laue, “Anthropology and Power,” 42. 40. Sir Charles Harper, quoted in Machin, Government Anthropologist, 15–16. 41. Annual Confidential Report, quoted in Machin, Government Anthropologist, 125. 42. Rattray, Ashanti, 7. 43. Ibid., 8. 44. von Laue, “Anthropology and Power,” 35. 45. Compare the National Security Strategy (2002) which made export of democracy an explicit goal with the National Security Strategy (2010), which creates an objective of “growing the ranks of prosperous, capable, and democratic states” by “expanding our civilian development capability; engaging with international financial institutions that leverage our resources and advance our objectives; pursuing a development budget that more deliberately reflects our policies and our strategy, not sector earmarks; and ensuring that our policy instruments are aligned in support of development objectives.” National Security Strategy (Washington, DC: White House, 2010), 14. 46. For a general history, see Stig Förster, Wolfgang J. Mommsen, and Ronald Edward Robinson, Bismarck, Europe, and Africa: The Berlin Africa Conference 1884–1885 and the Onset of Partition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Lord Frederick Lugard, Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (London: Archon Books, 1965), 12–15. 47. For a history of this period, see Thomas Pakenham, Scramble for Africa, 1876–1912 (New York, NY: Random

House, 1991). 48. Territorial claims were generally based on treaties signed with indigenous rulers. These treaties were vague and broad and would be considered illegitimate and unenforceable under current international law. The Nyasa treaties, for example, gave “sovereign rights and all and every other claim absolutely” over all their country to the Queen for all time. European powers accepted these treaties prima facie, with no concern that tribal chiefs might have lacked the power to dispose of communal rights or that there was a mutual understanding between the parties. The Sultan of Sokoto, for example, regarded the subsidy paid by the chartered company as tribute from a vassal. Lugard, Dual Mandate, 15. 49. Ibid., 16–7. 50. Mahmood Mamdani, “Indirect Rule, Civil Society, and Ethnicity: The Africa Dilemma,” Social Justice 23, no. 1– 2 (1996): 145. 51. Diane Elizabeth Kirkby and Catharine Coleborne, Law, History, Colonialism: The Reach of Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). 52. Although policies of assimilation were part of the French intent for direct rule, the cost of implementation and the resistance from the indigenous populations prevented full-scale assimilation. Michael Crowder, “History of French West Africa until Independence,” in Africa South of the Sahara 1991 (London: Europa Publications, 1990), 77. 53. Mamdani, “Indirect Rule,” 146. For an account of direct rule in the Belgian Congo, see Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1998). 54. Born in India in 1858, the child of upper class Anglican parents, Lugard graduated from Sandhurst, served in the Afghan war (1879–80) and in the third Anglo-Burmese War (1885), becoming an expert in frontier warfare. As a general officer in the British Army, he created the West African Frontier Force and conducted a campaign against the French in Niger. In 1900, Lugard was appointed High Commissioner of Northern Nigeria, a territory that had never been controlled by the Royal Niger Company. “Having created a military force Lugard now had to recruit, train and direct an administration, devise a system of government which could handle both large and historic Muslim emirates with their walled cities and naked pagans in their hills and forests.” This had to be built with an inexperienced skeleton staff and almost no revenue. Margery Perham, “Introduction to the Fifth Edition,” in Lugard, Dual Mandate, xxxv. 55. Lugard did not invent indirect rule. As early as 1830, for example, Governor of the Gold Coast, George Maclean, was trying cases in concert with native chiefs, according to native law. Sir George Goldie, one of the founders of the Royal Niger Company, held that “if the welfare of the native races is to be considered, the general policy of ruling on African principles through native rulers must be followed.” R. S. Rattray, “Present Tendencies of African Colonial Government,” Journal of the Royal African Society 33, no. 130 (January 1934): 24–25. 56. Perham, “Introduction,” xl. 57. Ibid., xlii. 58. In 1922, the League of Nations mandated British government in the Cameroons, and indirect rule was extended there. In 1925, Sir Donald Cameron implemented indirect rule in Tanganyika (the current territory of Rwanda, Burundi, and Tanzania, excluding Zanzibar), adapting the system to the local conditions of East Africa. In 1929, Sir James Maxwell introduced a system of native courts and authorities in Northern Rhodesia. In 1930 the Governor of Nyasaland, Sir Shenton Thomas introduced indirect rule, and so on. Margery Perham, “Some Problems of Indirect Rule in Africa,” Journal of the Royal African Society 34, no. 135 (April 1935): 5–6. 59. Perham, “Some Problems,” 4. 60. Rattray, “Present Tendencies,” 22. 61. A. G. Hopkins, Economic History of West Africa (London: Longman, 1973), 189. 62. The British administrative superstructure of indirect rule was fairly simple in theory. British West Africa, which consisted of four territories (the Gambia, Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, and Nigeria), was administered by a governor who was appointed by the Crown. Each governor was advised by an executive council with parliamentary representation provided by a legislative council, composed of permanent civil servants and African representatives. K. A. Korsah, “Indirect Rule: A Means to an End,” African Affairs 43, no. 173 (October 1944): 178. The lieutenant governor coordinated the administration of a group of provinces and was responsible for budget and policy matters. The resident of a province was, in the words of Lord Lugard, “the backbone of the administration,” posed with a formidable task: in West Africa, the average province was 16,000 square miles with a population of over 800,000. Lugard, Dual Mandate, 128. The resident performed a variety of duties, including acting as judge of the provincial court and adviser to the native administration. Each province was divided into three or four districts, with each headed by a district officer. District officers performed a variety of duties, including running the postal system, collecting customs revenues, conducting police work, supervising courts, assessing and collecting taxes, and resolving disputes. Within the system of indirect rule, the district officers who worked most closely with local people required the greatest degree of socio-cultural knowledge. After a probationary period, they were required to pass an examination in native law, judicial procedure, and ordinances of the local government, in addition to demonstrating a proficiency in at least one local language. In Islamic areas, they were also required to know Islamic law. Lugard, Dual Mandate, 133–136. 63. A Native Administration was a formally recognized governmental structure composed of three parts: native courts, native authorities, and native treasuries. Perham, “Some Problems,” 4. 64. Korsah, “Indirect Rule,” 178. 65. Ibid. 66. Crowder, “Indirect Rule: French and British Style,” 198. 67. Lugard, Dual Mandate, 199, fn. 3. 68. Ibid., 200–1. 69. Ibid., 203. 70. Korsah, “Indirect Rule,” 178. Of course, as discussed below, not all of these local circumstances conformed to model of the paramount chief, who ruled over subordinate chiefs with the support of a well-developed judicial system and revenue derived from customs and taxation.

71. Perham, “Some Problems,” 4. 72. Ibid., 3. “The French divided the country up administratively into cantons which frequently cut across precolonial political boundaries. While the British were scrupulous in their respect for traditional methods of selection of chiefs, the French, conceiving of them as agents of the administration, were more concerned with their potential efficiency than their legitimacy.” Crowder, “Indirect Rule,” 199. 73. In French colonies, the Minister for the Colonies drafted all laws which were then signed and approved by the President of the Republic. These laws were put into effect by the Governor-General and the Governors of Colonies. Furthermore, the reports of Colonial Inspectors were made to the Minister in Paris. In effect, control was exercised in part by means of an inspectorate independent of the local government. In the British system, the local Governor could enact legislation for the colony, subject only to the supervision of the Colonial Minister in London who ensured continuity of policy and with the king retaining the power to disallow any law if need be. Lord Frederick Lugard, “Colonial Administration,” Economica 41 (August 1933): 252. 74. Perham, “Some Problems,” 10. 75. Helen Lackner, “Colonial Administration and Social Anthropology: Eastern Nigeria 1920–1940,” in Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, edited by Talal Asad (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1988), 147. Certainly, the implementation of foreign policy always creates knowledge imperatives. Like indirect rule in Africa, counterinsurgency and stability operations in Iraq and Afghanistan created a new knowledge imperative about local political, social, and legal systems. It also created a similar demand for anthropologists. 76. W. H. R. Rivers, “Government of Subject Peoples,” in Science and the Nation: Essays by Cambridge Graduates, edited by A. C. Seward (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1917), 111. In 1913, a British Royal Commission on University Education observed that “an accurate acquaintance with the nature, habits and customs of alien populations is necessary to all who have to live and work amongst them in any official capacity, whether administrators, executive officers, missionaries, or merchants, because in order to deal effectively with any group of mankind it is essential to have that cultural sympathy with them which comes of sure knowledge.” These admonitions eventually led to the creation of the School of Oriental Studies at the University of London in 1917, which began including African Studies in 1938. von Laue, “Anthropology and Power,” 35. 77. Lord Hailey, “Role of Anthropology in Colonial Development,” Man 44, no. 5 (1944): 12. 78. C. K. Meek, Land and Authority in a Nigerian Tribe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937), 88. 79. “Report by the Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies on his Visit to West Africa in 1926”, cited in J. H. Driberg, “Anthropology in Colonial Administration,” Economic 20 (June 1927): 156–157. 80. T. O. Ranger, “From Humanism to the Science of Man: Colonialism in Africa and the Understanding of Alien Societies,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 26 (1976): 119. 81. Alfred Cort Haddon, Practical Value of Ethnology (London: Watts & Company, 1921), 50. 82. Sir Richard Temple, Anthropology as a Practical Science (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1914), 39, 40. 83. Well into the 1930s, colonial officers were not provided adequate training. In the words of Lord Lugard, “Cambridge University has special courses in anthropology, African law, culture contacts and kindred subjects, and there are twelve-month Tropical Service Courses for probationers at both Oxford and Cambridge, but no regular school of instruction in colonial administration exists in London.” Lugard, “Colonial Administration,” 248. 84. As a former district officer noted in 1927, “anthropological research work cannot be done by administrative officials however highly trained in anthropology” because “The administrative official has not the time for research work, which should be a whole time occupation; (2) his other official functions, whether police or magisterial, create an atmosphere inamicable to that complete trust and mutual confidence which anthropological research requires; (3) his duties compel him to take official cognisance of rites or actions which, thanks to an alien legal system, are technical offences, but are still secretly practised by the people whom as an anthropologist he should study with indulgent forbearance, if not with expressed approval; (4) his duties and position prevent that intimate association with the people in his charge which is essential to any anthropological work.” Driberg, “Anthropology,” 158. 85. Perham, “Some Problems,” 6–7. 86. Richard Brown, “Anthropology and Colonial Rule: Godfrey Wilson and the Rhodes-Livingston Institute, Northern Rhodesia,” in Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, edited by Talal Asad (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1988), 178. The first attempt at the scientific study of Northern Rhodesia was by anthropologist Audrey Richards among the Bemba in 1930–31 and 1933–34. Godfrey Wilson notes that “it is not necessary to emphasize in Africa our ignorance of the traditional cultures of the African continent. For instance, in the protectorate of Northern Rhodesia, with about 1,400,000 Native inhabitants, over 70 tribes are officially recognized; and of only three or four of them have we any systematic knowledge. Experienced missionaries, compound managers and administrators all too rarely commit to paper that understanding of African institutions which they have acquired; while the frequent transfers of the latter from station to station often make it impossible for them to acquire very much. And further it is now widely recognized that systematic and detailed knowledge cannot in any case be easily picked up in his spare time by a busy man who has no special training in research; even when he is stationed for years in one spot it is only an exceptionally gifted man who can attain it under such conditions. We do not expect technical veterinary or medical knowledge in a District Commissioner, and we are now realizing that it is just as unreasonable to expect technical sociological knowledge either.” Godfrey Wilson, “Anthropology as a Public Service,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 13, no. 1 (January 1940): 47. 87. F. H. Ruxton, “An Anthropological No-Man’s-Land,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 3, no. 1 (January 1930): 2–3. 88. Hailey, “Role of Anthropology.” 89. Lord Frederick Lugard, “Problems of Equatorial Africa,” Journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs 6, no. 4 (July 1927): 215. 90. In a military context, doctrine offers a generally accepted, comprehensive conceptual model of a variety of complex systems. This model is both descriptive (insofar as it describes how things work, whether that thing is material, such as a rifle, or abstract, such as an insurgency). The model is also proscriptive (insofar as it provides guidance or rules for successful operation).

91. Other disciplines offered theories of general applicability. The economic model of production, distribution and consumption, for example, generally works in most economies whether the medium of exchange is clam shells or rupees. On the impossibility of models in the social sciences, see Mattei Dogan, “Paradigms in the Social Sciences,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, vol. 16 (New York, NY: Pergamon, 2001). 92. Ranger, “From Humanism,” 130. 93. This view was the result of a “politicization, vulgarization and diffusion” of anthropology into popular consciousness. R. Jaulin, quoted in Ranger, “From Humanism,” 119. 94. Ruxton, “An Anthropological No-Man’s-Land,” 8. 95. Only Lord Lugard appears to have recognized the need not just for socio-cultural knowledge, but for a systemic approach to the production of that knowledge. Lugard observed in 1927 that not only was it necessary to conduct research, the knowledge obtained had to be managed so that it was available to those who needed it: “The keynote of the new policy in research is centralisation and co-ordination. The central research department’s task will be to co-ordinate the work already done by district officers and others, to stimulate further inquiry on uniform lines, and to deduce there from reliable data as the basis of executive policy and of legislation.” Lugard, “Problems of Equatorial Africa,” 215. 96. Driberg, “Anthropology,” 168–170. Arguably, in the long run British meddling among the Ibo and the Kikuyu established the pre-conditions for the Biafran War and the Mau Mau rebellion. For example, T. O. Ranger argues that “the Mau Mau upheaval was founded in reality upon the agonizing experience of the social and economic transformations of colonialism by thousands of unlearned men.” Ranger, “From Humanism,” 124. 97. The 1896 risings in Rhodesia by the Matabele and the Shona, for example, shocked the Resident Magistrate. The uprising, he wrote, was “the greatest surprise to those who from long residence in the country thought they understood the character of these savages.” Ranger, “From Humanism,” 120. 98. The Ibo disliked the warrant chiefs introduced by the British, but they disliked taxation even more. In 1929, following the introduction of direct taxation, Ibo women objected on the grounds that they were traditionally not taxed in Ibo society. This resulted in a series of non-violent protests and “sitting” on the warrant chiefs until they resigned. John N. Oriji, “Igbo Women from 1929—1960,” West Africa Review 2, no. 1 (2000); Judith van Allen, “‘Sitting on a Man’: Colonialism and the Lost Political Institutions of Igbo Women,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 6, no. 2 (1972). 99. “In the heyday of colonialism,” the Nigerian novelist of Ibo descent Chinua Achebe wrote, “any serious incident of native unrest, carrying as it did disquieting intimations of slipping control was an occasion not only for pacification by soldiers but also [afterwards] for a royal commission of inquiry’, for an attempt to restore self confidence in knowledge by a further exploration of ‘native psychology and institutions.” Chinua Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day (New York, NY: Anchor Books, 1975), 5. 100. Lackner, “Colonial Administration,” 132. 101. H. Ling Roth, quoted in A. Werner, “Anthropology and Administration,” Journal of the Royal African Society 6, no. 23 (April 1907): 281. 102. Audrey Richards, “Practical Anthropology in the Lifetime of the International African Institute,” Africa 14, no, 6 (1944): 295. 103. Northcote W. Thomas, Anthropological Report on the Ibo-speaking Peoples of Nigeria (London: Harrison, 1913). 104. Lackner, “Colonial Administration,” 143. 105. Stephan Feuchtwang, “The Discipline and its Sponsors,” in Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, edited by Talal Asad (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1988), 97. He continues: “An anthropology which could produce such knowledge—and the pre-1950 pride of social anthropology was the knowledge of political systems of kinship in which societies with little or no central administrative handles were ordered—did in fact replace the diffusionist anthropology between the 1920s and 1940s.” 106. John W. Bennett, “Applied and Action Anthropology: Ideological and Conceptual Aspects,” Current Anthropology 37, no. 1 (February 1996): 29. 107. See Paul A. Erickson and Liam D. Murphy, History of Anthropological Theory, 4th edition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 91–94. 108. One exception was S. F. Nadel, who applied a functionalist approach to solving the “pressing problems” of governance in the Sudan, Eritrea and Nigeria. S. F. Nadel, Nuba: An Anthropological Study of the Hill Tribes in Kordofan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947), xi. His study of the Nuba tribes of Kordofan was undertaken to provide the Sudan Government with general information on their political system and civil law. Nadel prioritized his research on the basis of administrative knowledge requirements: “tribes whose administration presented imperative problems were considered before others.” Nadel, Nuba, 7. Nadel advised on setting up “pagan courts” alongside Islamic courts in the Nupe area of Nigeria. S. F. Nadel, Black Byzantium: Kingdom of Nupe in Nigeria (Oxford University Press, 1942), 367–8. He convinced the British government not to impose collective punishment on certain Somali tribes. Lucy P. Mair, “Applied Anthropology and Development Policies,” British Journal of Sociology 7, no. 2 (June 1956). Nadel was appointed in 1941 to the British Military Administration in Eritrea as Secretary for Native Affairs. Later he lectured at London School of Economics and Australia National University. Another exception was C. K. Meek, who replaced Northcote Thomas as anthropological officer in Nigeria in 1929. Meek, who had formerly been an administrative officer, noted how the Ibo women’s war shook the British government out of its apathy and promoted anthropology as a solution to administrative problems. Meek, Land and Authority, xii. Anthropology “should serve as the handmaiden to administration by throwing light on the history, relationships, organization, and thoughts of the people.” Meek, Land and Authority, xv. 109. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, “Applied Anthropology,” Africa 16 (1946): 93. Even now, applied anthropology is generally dismissed by academics who view it as polluted by the agenda of the sponsor, corrupted by external financing, and so on. The result is that there are a limited number of anthropologists who are willing to risk their colleagues’ scorn to work in applied research, and an even fewer number willing to work in a military domain. 110. J. Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1983). 111. Since the 1960s, anthropologists have debated the epistemology of functionalism. The commonly held view is

that “Functionalist theory in social anthropology is the type of analysis of colonial communities that answers best the questions asked by the ideologies of Indirect Rule.” Lackner, “Colonial Administration,” 148. Similarly, Gerard Leclerc in Anthropologie et Colonialisme (Paris: Fayard, 1972) suggested that functionalism arose because indirect rule demanded this type of knowledge. And this did not take place in France because government did not require anthropologists. The less commonly held view among anthropologists is that functionalism was “not peculiarly apt as a theory for colonial anthropology” because “the theory which most British colonial administrators accepted more or less without question was an evolutionist one.” Adam Kuper, Anthropology and Anthropologists: The British School 1922–1972 (London: Allen Lane, 1973), 145. 112. James Faris, “S. F. Nadel and the Sudan,” in Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, edited by Talal Asad (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1988), 164. 113. Faris, “S. F. Nadel,” 166. 114. Is anthropology itself the scientific expression or product of colonialism? This is a subject of endless fascination to anthropologists, among others. See, for example, V. Y. Mudimbe, Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988); Andrew Apter, “Africa, Empire, and Anthropology: A Philological Exploration of Anthropology’s Heart of Darkness,” Annual Review of Anthropology 28 (1999). As Claude Levi-Strauss once noted, “if colonialism had not existed, the elaboration of anthropology would have been less belated.” Claude Levi-Strauss, Scope of Anthropology (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), 51–2. While anthropology may not have influenced colonialism, colonialism certainly influenced anthropology. 115. Dogan, “Paradigms.” 116. Lacking a conceptual model provided by the social sciences of social organization and social structure, in the past few years the military has devised their own. Although these models are informed by social science, for the most part they are conceived and implemented without the assistance or input of social scientists. Some of these models attempt to explain the whole of a society and the interrelationship between the component parts. PMESII, for example, offers a simple model of social organization based on Parsonian functionalism. Other models, such as the Tactical Conflict Assessment Framework, seek to represent the level and type of grievances in a population that may lead to conflict. Taxonomies and ontologies used in knowledge management in a military domain contain an implicit conceptual model of society, which often neglects social structure. For example, until 2008, the DCGS-A data model did not include a category for ‘tribe,’ reflecting a Western social model that was unsuitable for many Middle Eastern societies. 117. P. E. Mitchell, “Anthropologist and the Practical Man: A Reply and a Question,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 3, no. 2 (1930): 217–218. 118. Bronislaw Malinowski, “Practical Anthropology,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 2, no. 1 (January 1929): 22–38, 27: “We know much more about the so-called anomalous forms of marriage or classificatory exaggerations of kinship than we know about the organization of the family.” 119. Malinowski, “Practical Anthropology,” 25. “The institution of primitive kingship, for instance, has been studied by the circular route via classical antiquity. Current anthropology has been interested in savage monarchies through the interest which centered around the priestly king of Nemi. The ritual mythological aspect of savage monarchies, the dim quaint superstitions concerning the king’s vitality; connexions between this and magical potentialities; these have been studied, and problems of paramount theoretical importance they certainly are. But our information as to the actual way in which primitive politics are worked, the question, what forces underlie the obedience to the king, to his ministers; the mere descriptive and analytical study of what might be called the political constitution of primitive tribes, of these we are largely ignorant.” 120. Ibid., 22. 121. Lackner, “Colonial Administration,” 134. 122. P. E. Mitchell, “Review of Lord Hailey’s ‘Native Administration’,” 56–7, cited in Wendy James, “The Anthropologist as Reluctant Imperialist,” in Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, edited by Talal Asad (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1988), 65. 123. Lackner, “Colonial Administration,” 135. 124. Rattray, Ashanti, 11. 125. For example, in 1922 he made a pilgrimage to the temple of Great God of the Ashanti, Ta Kora, where he met with the elders and high priests. During a ceremony in which the high priest went into a deep trance, Rattray requested to become a “child of the God.” Through the priestly intermediary, the God spoke: “The man who loves me comes to me, and when he goes away I shall stand behind him and accompany him on a good path that he may go his way.” Permission was granted by Ta Kora to behold the sacred rock where the God resides and to touch the sacred water. Machin, Government Anthropologist, 90. 126. Quoted in Brown, “Anthropology and Colonial Rule,” 176. 127. Lucy P. Mair, “Anthropology and Colonial Policy,” African Affairs 74, no. 295 (April 1975): 194. 128. See, for example, the experiment conducted by anthropologist G. G. Brown and colonial administrator A. B. Hutt in Tanganyika which tried to limit the tendency of anthropologists to question policy and the tendency of administrators to question scientific research in order to demonstrate the overall value of anthropology. G. G. Brown and A. B. Hutt, Anthropology in Action: An Experiment in the Iringa District of the Iringa Province, Tanganyika Territory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935). 129. Kuper, Anthropology and Anthropologists, 140. 130. Malinowski, “Practical Anthropology,” 23. Godfrey Wilson similarly wrote that the anthropologist “cannot, as a scientist, judge of good and evil … He can never either approve or condemn any policy as such.” Wilson, “Anthropology as a Public Service,” 45. 131. Richards, “Practical Anthropology,” 289–301. 132. Evans-Pritchard, “Applied Anthropology,” 97. 133. Perham, “Some Problems,” 10. 134. Perham, “Introduction,” xlii. 135. Ibid., xl. 136. Perham, “Some Problems,” 11. 137. Machin, Government Anthropologist, 189–90. Following Hausaland, Lugard extended to the Yoruba in

southwestern Nigeria. Among the Yoruba, power was dispersed among a number of persons and groups. “It was almost impossible for British administrators, most of whom had not mastered the difficult tonal language of the people, still less their complex and varying sociology, to find where to locate the executive agency which their newly imposed administrative system required.” Perham, “Introduction,” xliii. 138. Machin, Government Anthropologist, 65. 139. Ibid., 64–65. 140. Ibid., 133. Historians have questioned Rattray’s views, positing that “throughout much of its eighteenth and nineteenth-century history, Asante was a highly centralised state with the locus of government firmly rooted in Kumase.” McCaskie, “R. S. Rattray,” 194. 141. Rattray, Ashanti Law, 80. 142. Machin, Government Anthropologist, 134. 143. Ibid., 77. 144. Ibid., 79. 145. Ibid., 82–84. 146. Ibid., 82. 147. Machin, Government Anthropologist, 83. 148. Rattray, Ashanti, 84–85. 149. Ibid., 85. 150. Margery Perham, Native Administration in Nigeria (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), 219. 151. Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, who is himself Ibo, argues that Ibo should be understood as a nation. Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 4. 152. M. Angulu Onwuejeogwu, Igbo Civilization: Nri Kingdom & Hegemony (London: Ethnographica, 1981), 22–25. 153. Richard Henderson, King in Every Man: Evolutionary Trends in Onitsha Ibo Society and Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972), 29–102. 154. George Thomas Basden, Among the Ibos of Nigeria: An Account of the Curious & Interesting Habits, Customs & Beliefs of a Little Known African People, by One who Has for Many Years Lived Amongst Them on Close & Intimate Terms (London: Seeley, Service, 1921), 184; Sylvia Leith-Ross, African Women: A Study of the Ibo of Nigeria (London: Faber and Faber, 1939). 155. The word acephalous comes from the Greek for ‘headless.’ Acephalous groups, commonly hunter-gatherer societies, are also known as egalitarian or non-stratified societies. Typically these societies are small-scale, organized into bands or tribes that make decisions through consensus. 156. April A. Gordon, Nigeria’s Diverse Peoples: A Reference Sourcebook (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2003), 37. 157. D. R. Smock, “Changing Political Processes Among the Abaja Ibo,” Africa 38, no. 3 (July 1968): 281. 158. Ruxton, “An Anthropological No-Man’s-Land,” 3. 159. Rattray, “Present Tendencies,” 27. 160. E. Isichei, A History of the Igbo People (London: Macmillan, 1976), 142–143. 161. Perham, “Some Problems,” 11. Perham continues: “executive power in our sense seldom exists except where, in faint anticipation of the conditions we impose, one people has subjected and centralised another and has introduced a distinction between the political control of the overlords and the traditional, spiritual authority of the indigenous leaders.” 162. Perham, “Introduction,” xliii. 163. Perham, “Some Problems,” 8–9. 164. Ntienyong Ekpan, Epitaph to Indirect Rule (London: Frank Cass, 1967), 34. 165. R. T. P. Fitzgerald (District Officer, Nigeria), quoted in Korsah, “Indirect Rule,” 178. 166. Andrew Clarno and Toyin Falola, “Patriarchy, Patronage and Power: Corruption in Nigeria,” in Corruption and the Crisis of Institutional Reforms in Africa, edited by J. M. Mbaku (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1998), 170. 167. Crowder, “Indirect Rule,” 198. 168. Rattray, “Present Tendencies,” 29. Margery Perham’s view was “that despotism was the rare exception; that many chiefs were ‘constitutional’ in a sense not so far removed from that in which we employ the word to describe our own king; that they were largely dependent upon popular approval; that they acted with and through councillors, and that, as an additional check, authority was widely diffused among the constituent family-cells of which society was constituted.” Perham, “Some Problems,” 12. 169. “However, where chiefs governed small political units, and in particular where their traditional executive authority was questionable, the political officer found himself interfering in native authority affairs more frequently than ideally he should.” Crowder, “Indirect Rule,” 198. 170. Michael Crowder, West Africa Under Colonial Rule (London: Hutchinson, 1968), 169. 171. Lugard, Dual Mandate, 58. The idea of a moral obligation to “subject races” had a legal basis in the Mandate system, which was established by the Treaty of Versailles, after Germany forfeited its colonies following the end of WWI. In short, “to those colonies … which are inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world, there should be applied the principle that the wellbeing and development of such peoples form a sacred trust of civilization … [and] the tutelage of such peoples should be entrusted to advanced nations…” This sort of well-meaning paternalism was not an uncommon view among the liberal, educated classes. As R. S. Rattray wrote: “Does Indirect Rule mean that we are to build up states, which, while perhaps being Arcadian for the anthropologist and possibly a model for barbaric or medieval sovereignties, would nevertheless be greatly handicapped were their sheltered privacy to be rudely invaded, and were they suddenly called upon to stand alone and unprotected amid the rough forces of the ever-changing world around them.” Rattray, “Present Tendencies,” 22–3. 172. The concept of “social evolution” was analogous to Darwin’s concept of natural evolution and emerged out of nineteenth century anthropology. A commonly held view was that while societies could progress over time up the ladder of social evolution, the “races of mankind” were fixed and immutable categories. Race, whether

“African,” “Asian,” or “White” determined character, temperament, religious belief (deism vice animism), susceptibility to pain, sexual behavior, clothing preference, organizational ability, concept of time, and so on. See Lugard, Dual Mandate, 68–70. 173. Lugard, Dual Mandate, 76–78. 174. As Margery Perham has noted, “the attitude of the nineteenth-century humanitarian to native culture arose from his absolute confidence in his own civilization as a substitute.” Margery Perham, “Re-Statement of Indirect Rule,” Africa 7, no. 3 (July 1934): 325. 175. “The real difference between ‘direct rule’ and ‘indirect or dependent rule’ consists in the fact that direct rule assumes that you can create at one go an entirely new order, that you can transform Africans into semicivilized pseudo-European citizens within a few years. In-direct rule, on the other hand, recognizes that no such magical rapid transformation can take place, that in reality all social development is very slow, and that it is infinitely preferable to achieve it by a slow and gradual change coming from within.” Malinowski, “Practical Anthropology,” 23. 176. Sir Donald Cameron, My Tanganyika Service and Some Nigeria (London: Allen and Unwin, 1939), quoted in Perham, “Introduction,” xlvii. 177. Fulani bin Fulani, “The African Mandates,” New Europe (7 and 14 July 1919), quoted in Lugard, Dual Mandate, 216. 178. Sir P. Girouard, quoted in Lugard, Dual Mandate, 216. 179. “The first step is to hasten the transition from the patriarchal to the tribal stage, and to induce those who acknowledge no other authority than the head of the family to recognize a common chief. Where this stage has already been reached, the object is to group together small tribes … so as to form a single administrative unit…” Lugard, Dual Mandate, 217. 180. Lugard, “Problems of Equatorial Africa,” 219. 181. “The District Commissioner’s job—‘native administration’—was concerned with the preservation of peace, the settlement of disputes, the introduction of improved seeds and agricultural techniques, measures of sanitation, and so forth; also with ‘civilization’ in the crude sense of making ‘them’ more like ‘us’ by suppressing institutions thought to be incompatible with our standards of morals.” Mair, “Anthropology and Colonial Policy,” 191. 182. Ruxton, “An Anthropological No-Man’s-Land,” 7. 183. Perham, “Re-Statement,” 332. 184. Cameron, My Tanganyika Service, quoted in Perham, “Introduction,” xlvii. 185. Malinowski, for example, argued that indirect rule means “the maintenance of as much as is possible of the Native authority instead of its destruction.” Bronislaw Malinowski, Dynamics of Culture Change: An Inquiry into Race Relations in Africa (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1945), 138–139. 186. The promise of anthropology is “the salvaging of distinct cultural forms of life from a process of apparent global Westernization” and “the refusal to accept this conventional perception of homogenization toward a dominant Western model.” George Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique: The Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 1. 187. Driberg, “Anthropology,” 156. Other anthropologists, as they witnessed the destruction of African societies, desired to record these societies as they existed at the moment of ‘contact’ before they were changed or destroyed. As Malinowski noted, “we are witnessing one of the greatest crises in human history, namely that of the gradual expansion of one form of civilization over the whole world, the recording of that event is an essential duty of those competent to do it.” Malinowski, “Practical Anthropology,” 36. 188. Perham, “Re-Statement,” 325. 189. Franz Boas, “Museums of Ethnology and Their Classification,” Science 9 (1887): 589. 190. Franz Boas, “Principles of Ethnological Classification,” in Franz Boas Reader, edited by George W. Stocking Jr. (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1974), 62. In the words of Franz Boas (arguing against the common museum practice of nineteenth century naturalists of taxonomic organization of material objects): “We have to study each ethnological specimen individually in its history and in its medium …. By regarding a single implement outside of its surroundings, outside of other inventions of the people to whom it belongs, and outside of other phenomena affecting that people and its productions, we cannot understand its meanings …. Our objection … is, that classification is not explanation.” Later, cultural relativism came to be seen as a methodological tool, in which an anthropologist conducting fieldwork temporarily suspends judgment in order to develop empathy with other societies. 191. Mair, “Anthropology and Colonial Policy,” 192. She continues “Of course, there is a difference between correcting ethnocentric judgments of alien institutions and insisting that they should at all costs be preserved…” Perhaps surprisingly, even colonial administrators sometimes articulated the belief that there was no universal standard. In the words of Lord Lugard: “the blessings of civilisation need not necessarily be limited to our civilization, and of religion to our religion, without giving a thought to the value of other civilizations, older than and perhaps as admirable in practice as our own, and to other religions in which men have lived and died with comfort and hope for centuries before we ourselves emerged from the rude barbarism.” The Times (25 January 1907), quoted in Lugard, Dual Mandate, 91. He continues: “We are somewhat too apt to take it for granted that the introduction of civilization must add to the happiness of the natives of Africa.” 192. In his view, there were two main schools of thought regarding the “progress” of West Africans (the Ashanti among them). “The older school would relegate all that curious spiritual past which it has been my endeavour to set forth, if not to the African’s own kitchen middens (suminaso), at least to the shelves and glass cases which have become accepted as the mausolea of dead or dying cultures, where—if I may draw another analogy which my Ashanti friends will understand—the souls of the peoples whom our civilization has robbed of these heritages, now seek a lonely and unhonoured refuge. This school, working by what seems to me a standard of purely material and economic prosperity, argues that because the African’s beliefs appear to have served him but indifferently well in the past as stepping-stones to real progress, his culture has been tried and found wanting. For these beliefs this school would therefore substitute European civilization and thought. There is much, of course, to be said for the supporters of such logic and of methods which are frank and clear cut; they would prefer a tabula rasa on which to start afresh; they are free from sentimentalism; and are purely materialistic.” R. S. Rattray, “Anthropology and Christian Missions: their Mutual Bearing on the

Problems of Colonial Administration,” Africa 1, no. 1 (January 1928): 100. 193. Annual Colonial Report: Ashanti 1921, quoted in Machin, Government Anthropologist, 105. 194. Rattray, “Anthropology and Christian Missions,” 101. 195. For a comparison of British and French rule in Africa in 1925–26, see R. L. Buell, Native Problem in Africa (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1928). 196. Dr. T. Drummond-Shiels quoted in Perham, “Some Problems,” 22. 197. Korsah, “Indirect Rule,” 179. 198. Perham, “Some Problems,” 12–13. 199. George Stocking summarized this view with the observation that “Cultural relativism, which had buttressed the attack against racialism, [can] be perceived as a sort of neo-racialism justifying the backward technoeconomic status of once colonized peoples.” George W. Stocking, Jr., “Afterward: A View from the Center,” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 47 (1982): 176. 200. “The most far-reaching inventions of tradition in colonial Africa took place when the Europeans believed themselves to be respecting age-old African custom. What was called customary law, customary land-rights, customary political structure, and so on, were in fact all invented by colonial codification.” Terence Ranger, “Invention Of Tradition In Colonial Africa,” in Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 250. 201. Perham, “Re-Statement,” 325. 202. Machin, Government Anthropologist, 100–101. 203. Ibid., 102. “These few words the present writer has felt in duty bound to say, lest the reader, astonished at the words of wisdom which are now to follow, refuse to credit that a ‘savage’ or ‘primitive’ people could possibly have possessed the rude philosophers, theologians, moralists, naturalists, and even, it will be seen, philologists, which many of these proverbs prove them to have had among them.” R. S. Rattray, Ashanti Proverbs: Primitive Ethics of a Savage People (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1916), 33. 204. Furthermore, the statues and bags of hair that Western colonialists had interpreted as mere fetishism were, according to Rattray, sacred objects that possessed magical efficacy derived from their relationship to the Ashanti gods. Rattray, Ashanti, 141; see also Machin, Government Anthropologist, 103. 205. Rattray, Ashanti Law, ix. 206. Ibid., vi. 207. Annual Colonial Report: Ashanti 1921, quoted in Machin, Government Anthropologist, 106. 208. Basil Thomson, Fijians: A Study of the Decay of Custom (London: William Heinemann, 1908), xii. 209. Ernest William Pearson Chinnery, “The Application of Anthropological Methods to Tribal Development in New Guinea,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 49 (1919): 36. E. W. P. Chinnery served in the territories of Papua and New Guinea as a Patrol Officer, Government Anthropologist, and Director of the Department of District Services and Native Affairs, and a Director of Native Affairs and Commonwealth Advisor on Native Affairs in Australia. 210. Perham, “Re-Statement,” 322. 211. Rattray, “Anthropology and Christian Missions,” 103. Italics added. 212. “The administrator from republican France, particularly in the inter-war period, had little time for the notion of chiefs holding power other than that derived from the administration itself. This provides a marked contrast with the average British administrator, who believed sincerely that for Africans their own traditional methods of government were the most suitable, provided they were shorn of certain features that did not correspond to his sense of justice. Coming from a country which still maintained a monarchy that had done little to democratize itself on the lines of the Scandinavian monarchies, he had a basic respect for the institution of kingship and the panoply of ritual that surrounded it.” Crowder, “Indirect Rule,” 204. 213. David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 121. 214. Perham, “Some Problems,” 12. 215. There is also an argument that could be made here that centralized states conformed to the requirements of indirect rule as a system, therefore the British recognized these states first because they were the easiest to implement. 216. Rattray, “Present Tendencies,” 28. According to Rattray, the Hausa political order was actually not indigenous, but was a product of the Fulani conquest of Northern Nigeria in the eighteenth century. The Fulani, an Islamic cattle-herding ethnolinguistic group, themselves imposed a form of indirect rule on the Hausa. Not all of his contemporaries agreed with Rattray’s view: “the so-called Fulani or Falbe conquest of Northern Nigeria (with the exception of Bornu) was in fact and in effect a revolution in which the vast majority of the Hausa subjects of the old Hausa kings were either neutral or sided with the Fulani cattle-men, whom they welcomed as their deliverers from oppressive monarchs.” Palmer, “Some Observations,” 38. 217. He goes on: “Disputes were settled by the Elders of each family group. The priestly ruler was appealed to only in cases affecting a breach of the tribal taboos, or in matters of wider than family import. Fear of the anger of ancestral or other spirits moulded every action to a degree far surpassing anything found even among the ancestor-worshipping Ashanti-ancestral spirits moved between God and man and man and God—a link which is missing or less obvious in the South; men and women spent a considerable part of their lives at the soothsayers’ shrines.” R. S. Rattray, Tribes of the Ashanti Hinterland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), 1:xiv. 218. Rattray, Tribes, 1: xii; Machin, Government Anthropologist, 187. 219. Rattray, Tribes, 1: xv. 220. Ibid., 1: xvii. 221. Perham, “Some Problems,” 7. 222. Ibid., 7. 223. Among the Kikuyu in Kenya, for example, the British also failed to recognize the correct political authority: in this case, because the Kikuyu form of genealogical organization by clan was completely alien to the British paradigm of government. As Margery Perham explained, “Among the Kikuyu and Kamba groups there seems

to have been a clan organization in which functions were distributed among age-grades, and which might have proved a very workable basis for local government.… Unfortunately, but very naturally, the early administration looked for chiefs and encouraged them into existence.” The real Kikuyu institutions were never researched or recognized. Rather, the administration imported a model of chiefdoms from Fiji which naturally had a disruptive social effect. The Chief Native Commissioner, in his evidence before the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Closer Union in East Africa, admitted “that a great many wrong head-men have been appointed through ignorance of what was really the native custom.” He also explained that the “official head-man really owes most of his authority to his government position and not to his personal influence.” Perham, “Some Problems,” 9. She continues: “Kenya, though a system of native courts was established fairly early, has never adopted indirect rule in the sense that I have been using it here. Its administration can therefore hardly be judged by the same standards. The main feature of Kenya native administration in the last ten years has been the introduction of local native councils upon a model imported from Fiji. Yet the general claim is made of building upon native institutions.” 224. “If Rattray suggests that Tingdamas in Dagomba should be chiefs,” the local D. C. wrote after reading Rattray’s report, “I must with all due deference disagree with him. It has repeatedly proved a failure here even when they have been made into small headmen.” Machin, Government Anthropologist, 182–3. 225. R. S. Rattray, Leopard Priestess (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1934), 25. Rattray claimed that his novel was based on a true story he heard about a hunter who had a love affair prohibited by blood-relation and its tragic consequences. Rattray “used all his anthropological knowledge in telling it, but he could not prevent it from reading too much like an Edwardian romance about black nudists.” Machin, Government Anthropologist, 191. 226. Machin, Government Anthropologist, 158. 227. Ibid., 193. 228. Lugard, Dual Mandate, 92. 229. Whether indirect rule would have succeeded better or longer had they had more socio-cultural knowledge is a counter-factual proposition that is very difficult to prove either way. Whether U.S. intervention in Iraq or Afghanistan would have succeeded better or longer with more cultural knowledge is also open to debate. And there are those who would argue that the lack of knowledge is actually a good thing because British colonialism and U.S. intervention in the Middle East were bad politically, and the faster they failed, the better. 230. Of course, it is never actually possible for a government to have enough of the right knowledge beforehand. History is driven by events, and even the most proactive government must scramble to keep up with requirements as they emerge. One cannot expect governments to have perfect knowledge beforehand, only to gain it as they go. 231. Ruxton, “An Anthropological No-Man’s-Land,” 2–3. 232. Haddon, Practical Value, 56. 3. URSULA GRAHAM BOWER AND MILITARY LEADERSHIP 1. Ursula Graham Bower, Naga Path (London: John Murray, 1951), 248. 2. Fergal Keane, Road of Bones: The Epic Siege of Kohima (London: Harper Press, 2010), 51–2. 3. In Ursula’s own words: “It was no good spending money on me because I wouldn’t want a career—while my brother would … but of course that isn’t so. It was purely the social attitude of the time, that women didn’t have careers.” Vicky Thomas, Naga Queen: Ursula Graham Bower and her Jungle Warriors, 1939–45 (Stroud: History Press, 2012), 22. 4. Thomas, Naga Queen, 172. 5. Ibid., 20. 6. Ibid., 22. 7. Ibid., 24. 8. Ibid., 59. 9. Keane, Road of Bones, 36–37. 10. M. M. Clark, Corner of India (Philadelphia, PA: American Baptist Publication Society, 1907), 4. 11. Thomas, Naga Queen, 42. 12. Ibid., 68–69. 13. Ibid., 34. 14. Ibid., 32. 15. Ibid., 33. This policy also allowed the British to rule the Naga Hills for more than sixty years with only two British officers at a time, a battalion of military police (Third Assam Rifles), and civil police provided by a small armed guard. 16. Ibid., 34. 17. Ibid., 83. 18. Ursula Graham Bower, Naga Path (London: John Murray, 1951), 8. 19. Thomas, Naga Queen, 49. Medical treatment included some serious diseases, but also included dispensing Carter’s Little Liver Pills for an old man who had been “severely attacked by a vampire.” Thomas, Naga Queen, 55. 20. Ursula Graham Bower, quoted in Thomas, Naga Queen, 83. 21. When she reported this back, the government official told her “if they must have a goddess they might as well have a government one.” Keane, Road of Bones, 53. 22. Keane, Road of Bones, 47 note. 23. Graham Bower, Naga Path, 181–2. 24. Keane, Road of Bones, 46. 25. “Note on civil and military intelligence on the Arakan front,” 27 June 1944, and in private secretary to viceroy’s letter to secretary of state, 27 June 1944, L/PandO/4/z4, OIOC, cited in http://www.world-newsresearch.com/nagaland-burma.html.

26. Graham Bower, Naga Path, 182. 27. Keane, Road of Bones, 54–55. 28. Graham Bower, Naga Path, 193. 29. Ibid., 207. 30. Ibid., 206. 31. The siege—The battle of Kohima, the “Stalingrad of the East”—went on for another six weeks. This was the worst defeat in Japanese military history. 32. Graham Bower, Naga Path, 210. Other V Force units were betrayed by Kuki scouts who openly joined the Japanese. Graham Bower, Naga Path, 146. 33. Keane, Road of Bones, 296. 34. Graham Bower, Naga Path, 145–6. 35. Ibid., 215. 36. Filed Marshal Viscount Slim, Defeat into Victory: Battling Japan in Burma and India, 1942–1945 (New York, NY: Cooper Square Press, 2000 [1956]), 341–42. 37. Thomas, Naga Queen, 160. 38. Ibid., 162. 39. James MacGregor Burns, Leadership (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1978), 4. 40. Burns, Leadership, 4. 41. Bernard Bass, Leadership and Performance Beyond Expectations (New York, NY: Free Press, 1985), 27. 42. Ibid., 17. 43. There is a large literature on this topic. See, for example, Jay Alden Conger and Rabindra Nath Kanungo, “Behavioral Dimensions of Charismatic Leadership,” in Charismatic Leadership: The Elusive Factor in Organizational Effectiveness, edited by Jay Alden Conger and Rabindra Nath Kanungo (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1988); M. Sashkin and W. Burke, “Understanding and Assessing Organizational Leadership,” in Measures of Leadership, edited by K. Clark and M. Clark (West Orange, NJ: Leadership Library of America, 1990). 44. Bernard M. Bass and Bruce J. Avolio, “Developing Transformation Leadership: 1992 and Beyond,” Journal of European Industrial Training 14 (1992): 22. 45. Thomas, Naga Queen, 133. 46. Graham Bower, Naga Path, 176. 47. Ibid., 179. 48. Richard Wilhelm and Cary F. Baynes, translators, I Ching: Or, Book of Changes, third edition (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967, 1st ed. 1950)], 162. 49. Ibid., 167–8. 50. Ibid. 51. Sally A. Carless, “Gender Differences in Transformational Leadership: An Examination of Superior, Leader, and Subordinate Perspectives,” Sex Roles 39, no. 11/12 (December 1998). For examples of the gendercentered perspective see: Nancy E. Betz and L.F. Fitzgerald, Career Psychology of Women (Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1987); Jenny Fisher, Feminine Side of Leadership (New York, NY: Author House, 2008). 52. Alice H. Eagly, Mona G. Makhijani and Bruce G. Klonsky, “Gender and the Evaluation of Leaders: A MetaAnalysis,” Psychological Bulletin 111, no.1 (1992). Social-role theory proposes that individuals conform their behavior to cultural expectations about their gender role. See Alice H. Eagly, Sex Differences in Social Behaviour: A Social-Role Interpretation (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1987). 53. Carless, “Gender Differences.” 54. Rosabeth Kanter, Men and Women of The Corporation (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1993). 55. Carless, “Gender Differences,” 890. 56. Eagly, et al., “Gender and the Effectiveness of Leaders,” 129. 57. Carless, “Gender Differences,” 891. 58. Judy B. Rosener, “Ways Women Lead,” Harvard Business Review 68 (November/ December 1990). 59. Carless, “Gender Differences,” 898. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid. 62. Martin Pugh, Women and the Women’s Movement in Britain, 1914–1999 (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 209–234. 63. Thomas, Naga Queen, 17. 64. Ibid., 23. 65. Keane, Road of Bones, 51. 66. Graham Bower, Naga Path, 85–86. 67. Ibid., 86. 68. Ibid. 69. While in certain ways, Bower was treated as an ‘honorary male,’ in other ways the Naga accorded her the treatment reserved for women. In particular, the Naga were quite protective of her welfare. In 1942, she volunteered to run a canteen at the Lumding railway junction, serving tea to the two thousand British and Indian soldiers being evacuated from the front lines every day. The local headmen came to her camp “to protest against the governor’s orders to send Ursula to Lumding. The country was in a disturbed state and if invasion was indeed imminent, this was no time for a young woman to be out there alone. The administration was failing in its duties—and if they were not willing to look after her, the Zemi would.” Thomas, Naga Queen, 119. Ursula went to work at the canteen regardless, but a group of Zemi came with her to run the canteen. “What really moved them were the wounded—the British wounded. Once they saw the wounded train come out—a train full of them—and they saw what their wounds were and how they were suffering and how

courageous they were—the Naga just looked at each other and they went into that job like furies.” Thomas, Naga Queen, 125. 70. Thomas, Naga Queen, 90. 71. For gender role flexibility and immunities see Hannah Papanek, “The Woman Fieldworker in Purdah Society,” Human Organization 12, no. 2 (Summer 1953); Laura Nader, “From Anguish to Exultation,” Women in the Field, edited by Golde (Chicago, IL: Aldine Publishing 1970); Judith Okely, “The Self and Scientism,” Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford 6, no. 3 (1975); Carol M. Pastner, “Rethinking the Role of Woman Fieldwork in Purdah Societies,” Human Organization 21, no. 3 (Fall 1982); Jennifer Hunt, “The Development of Rapport Through The Negotiation Of Gender In Fieldwork Among The Police,” Human Organisation 43 (1984); Carolyn Fleuhr-Lobban and Richard Lobban, “Families, Gender, and Methodology in the Sudan,” in Self, Sex, and Gender in Cross-Cultural Fieldwork, edited by T.L. Whitehead and M.E. Commoway (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press 1986). 72. Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, quoted in Okely, “The Self and Scientism,” 27. 73. Thomas, Naga Queen, 83. 74. Graham Bower, Naga Path, 194. 75. Ibid., 195. 76. Thomas, Naga Queen, 153–4. 77. In the case of the Army, the purpose more specifically is “preserving the peace and security and providing for the defense of the United States, the Commonwealths and possessions and any areas occupied by the United States; supporting the national policies; implementing the national objectives; [and] overcoming any nations responsible for aggressive acts that imperil the peace and security of the United States.” §3062 of Title 10, U.S. Code. 78. Samuel Huntington, Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1972), 61. Strictly speaking, Huntington was referring to the particular expertise of military officers rather than the purpose of the institution. 79. R. Osborn, J. G. Hunt and L. R. Jauch, “Toward a Contextual Theory of Leadership,” Leadership Quarterly 13, no. 6 (2002): 797–8. 80. L. Wong, P. Bliese and D. McGurk, “Military Leadership: A Context Specific Review,” Leadership Quarterly 14, no. 6 (2003); J. G. Hunt and R. Phillips, “Leadership in Battle and Garrison: A Framework for Understanding the Differences and Preparing for Both,” in Handbook of Military Psychology, edited by R. Gal and A. D. Mangelsdorff (New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, 1991). 81. Thomas E. Ricks, “Lose a General, Win a War,” New York Times, Op-Ed, 23 June 2010. 82. J. P. Kotter, “What Leaders Really Do,” Harvard Business Review 68, no. 3 (1990): 104. 83. Thomas Kolditz and D. M. Brazil, “Authentic Leadership In In Extremis Settings: A Concept For Extraordinary Leaders In Exceptional Situations,” in Authentic Leadership Theory And Practice: Origins, Effects And Development, edited by W. L. Gardner, B. J. Avolio and F. W. Walumbwa (San Diego, CA: Elsevier, 2005), 3:347. On the distinction from crisis, see Sean T. Hannah, Mary Uhl-Bien, Bruce J. Avolio and Fabrice L. Cavarretta, “A Framework for Examining Leadership in Extreme Contexts,” Leadership Quarterly 20, no. 6 (December 2009): 899. 84. H. Prince and G. Tumlin, “Military,” in Encyclopedia of Leadership, edited by G. Goethals, G. Sorensen and J. M. Burns (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004). 85. Thomas A. Kolditz, In Extremis Leadership: Leading As If Your Life Depended On It (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2007). 86. Kolditz, In Extremis Leadership. Scholars later criticized Kolditz’s study on the grounds that it was too broad, and that combat and extreme sports were different in purpose and context. See J. G. Hunt and R. Phillips, “Leadership in Battle.” 87. C. Brower and G. Dardis, “Teaching Combat Leadership at West Point: Closing the Gap Between Expectation and Experience,” in Leadership: The Warrior’s Art, edited by C. Kolenda (Carlisle, PA: Army War College Press, 2001), 35. 88. J. G. Hunt and R. Phillips, “Leadership in Battle,” 423. 89. J. G. Hunt and R. Phillips, “Leadership in Battle,” 426. 90. Kolditz, In Extremis Leadership, 8. A number of military sociologists have made the case that cross-cultural military leadership in multinational operations requires both transformational leadership and certain aspects of transactional leadership (including contingent reward and management by exception). B. Shamir and E. Ben-Ari, “Challenges of Military Leadership in Changing Armies,” Journal of Political and Military Sociology 28, no. 1 (2000). A commander must be “willing to adopt and apply the principles of transformational leadership in addition to the more typical transactional leadership approach, and moreover, must be capable of transitioning from one approach to the other, depending on the circumstances.” Angela R. Febbraro, “Leadership and Command,” in Multinational Military Operations and Intercultural Factors, edited by Angela R. Febbraro, Brian McKee and Sharon L. Riedel (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation Research and Technology Organisation, November 2008), 3–6. 91. Tom Kolditz, “Why the Military Produces Great Leaders,” Harvard Business Review Blog (6 February 2009). 92. Thomas, Naga Queen, 168. 93. Keane, Road of Bones, 56. 94. Thomas, Naga Queen, 169. 95. Ibid., 149. 96. Osborne et al., “Toward a Contextual Theory,” 799. 97. George Murdock, Ethnographic Atlas (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1967), cited in Bernard M. Bass, “Does the Transactional-Transformational Leadership Paradigm Transcend Organizational and National Boundaries?” American Psychologist 52, no. 2 (1997): 130–9. 98. Cultural groups may vary in their conceptions of the most important characteristics of effective leadership. Therefore, “different leadership prototypes would be expected to occur naturally in societies that have differing cultural profiles.” D.N. Den Hartog, et al., “Culture Specific and Cross-Culturally Generalizable Implicit Leadership Theories: Are Attributes of Charismatic/Transformational Leadership Universally

Endorsed?” Leadership Quarterly 10, no. 2 (1999): 219–56. 99. J. G. Hunt, K. B. Boal and R. L. Sorensen, “Top Management Leadership: Inside The Black Box,” Leadership Quarterly 1, no. 1 (1990); M. Erez and P. C. Earley, Culture, Self-Identity, and Work (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1993). 100. For reviews on the question of “universal” versus “culturally specific” transformational leadership, see Gretchen M. Spreitzer, Kimberly Hopkins Perttula and Katherine Xin, “Traditionality Matters: An Examination of the Effectiveness of Transformational Leadership in the United States and Taiwan,” Journal of Organizational Behavior 26, no. 3 (May, 2005). 101. G. Hofstede, Culture’s Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions, and Organizations Across Nations (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2001). 102. R. Pillai, T. A. Scandura and E. A. Williams, “Leadership and Organizational Justice: Similarities and Differences across Cultures,” Journal of International Business Studies 30, no. 4 (1999). 103. Bernard Bass, “Does the Transactional-Transformational Leadership Paradigm Transcend Organizational and National Boundaries?” American Psychologist 52, no. 2 (1997). See also P. W. Dorfman and J. P. Howell, “Leadership in Western and Asian countries: commonalities and differences in effective leadership processes across cultures,” Leadership Quarterly 8, no. 3 (1997). 104. Bass, “Transactional-Transformational Leadership,” 132. 105. Den Hartog et al., “Culture Specific.” 106. Bass, “Transactional-Transformational Leadership,” 132. 107. R. J. House, P. J. Hanges, M. Javidan, P. W. Dorfman, and V. Gupta, eds., Culture, Leadership, and Organizations: The GLOBE Study of 62 Societies (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004); R. J. House, P. J. Hanges, S. A. Ruiz-Quintanilla, P. W. Dorfman, M. Javidan, M. Dickson, V. Gupta, et al., “Cultural Influences On Leadership And Organizations: Project GLOBE,” in Advances in Global Leadership, edited by W. H. Mobley, M. J. Gessner, and V. Arnold (Stamford, CT: JAI Press, 1999). 108. Den Hartog et al., “Culture Specific.” 109. Ibid. 110. S. Martinez and P. W. Dorfman, “Mexican Entrepreneur: An Ethnographic Study of the Mexican Empressario,” International Studies of Management and Organizations 28 (Summer 1998). 111. Neal M. Ashkenasy, “The Australian Enigma,” in Culture and Leadership Across the World: The GLOBE Book of In-Depth Studies of 25 Societies, edited by R. J. House and J. Chhokar (New York, NY: Psychology Press, 2007). 112. Ping Ping Fu, “Chinese Leadership and Culture,” in Culture and Leadership Across the World, edited by R.J. House and J. Chhokar (New York, NY: Psychology Press, 2007). 113. Ursula Betts, “The Zemi Nagas,” Man 48 (August 1948): 91. However, it should be noted that in rare occasions when there was no male incumbent of suitable age, leadership of the community would be given to an outsider. Thomas, Naga Queen, 88. 114. Thomas, Naga Queen, 88. See also Bower, Naga Path, 80. 115. Ibid., 163. 116. Ibid., 82. 117. Ibid., 81. 118. Ibid., 83. 119. Janice H. Laurence, “Leading Across Cultures,” in Leading in Dangerous Contexts, edited by P. Sweeney, M. Matthews, and P. Lester (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2011); J. Soeters and M. Bos-Bakx, “CrossCultural Issues In Peacekeeping Operations,” in Psychology of the Peacekeeper, edited by T. Britt and A. Adler (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003); Barak Salmoni, “Iraq’s Unready Security Forces: An Interim Assessment,” Middle East Review of International Affairs 8, no. 3 (2004). 120. Thomas, Naga Queen, 148. 121. Kelly Lea Fisher, “Military Leadership in a Cross-Cultural and In Extremis Context: A Case Study of the Australian Army Training Team Vietnam” (Doctoral Dissertation, Department of Management, Faculty of Business and Economics, Monash University, September 2010), 174. 122. Graham Bower, Naga Path, 205–6. 123. Ibid., 82. 124. Ibid., 165. 125. While organizations such as the British Army are comprised of individuals who may be of West Indian, Pakistani or Scottish heritage, they nevertheless identify as ‘British.’ Thus I am using the term ‘single-ethnic’ as a shorthand for armies comprised of soldiers who identify with the predominant national culture. 126. Gal Luft, Beer, Bacon and Bullets: Culture in Coalition Warfare from Gallipoli to Iraq (Middletown, DE: Amalfi Press, 2009), x. 127. Cynthia Enloe, Ethnic Soldiers: State Security in Divided Society (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1980), 26. Incorporation of the “martial races” into state military forces is a both recruiting strategy and a strategy for ensuring that ethnic groups that might otherwise pose a threat to the state are brought into the system, becoming “reliable upholders of the state system.” By making military service an integral part of the groups own sense of ethnicity, the state elite thus weds “ethnicity to state allegiance.” Enloe, Ethnic Soldiers, 25. 128. Ibid., 30. 129. Ibid., 29. 130. Allison Abbe, Lisa M. V. Gulick and Jeffrey L. Herman, Cross-Cultural Competence in Army Leaders: A Conceptual and Empirical Foundation (Ft Belvoir, VA: U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences, October 2007), 2. 131. Allison Abbe, David S. Geller and Stacy L. Everett, Measuring Cross-Cultural Competence in Soldiers and Cadets: A Comparison of Existing Instruments, Technical Report 1276 (Ft Belvoir, VA: U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences, 2010), 1.

132. Stephen Bochner, “The Social Psychology of Cross-Cultural Relations,” in Cultures in Contact: Studies In Cross-Cultural Interaction, edited by Stephen Bochner (Oxford: Pergamon, 1982), 35. 133. For scholarly studies of leadership in combat, see: A. W. Halpin, “Leadership Behavior and Combat Performance of Airplane Commanders,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 49, vol. 1 (1954); S. L. A. Marshall, Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command in Future Warfare (New York, NY: William Morrow & Co., 1947); U. Ben-Shalom, Z. Lehrer, and E. Ben-Ari, “Cohesion During Military Operations: A Field Study On Combat Units In The Al-Aqsa Intifada,” Armed Forces and Society 32, no. 1 (2005); Laura Miller and Charlie Moskos, “Humanitarians or Warriors? Race, Gender, And Combat Status in Operation Restore Hope,” Armed Forces and Society 21, no. 4 (1995); A. Kellett, Combat Motivation: The Behavior of Soldiers in Battle (Boston, MA: Klewer-Nijhoff Publishing, 1982); Leonard Wong, Tom Kolditz, R. A. Millen and T. M. Potter, Why They Fight: Combat Motivation In The Iraq War (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, 2003). For scholarly studies on cross-cultural military leadership in combat (excluding training and advising missions), see: H. Boré, “Cultural Awareness And Irregular Warfare: French Army Experience in Africa,” Military Review 86 no. 4 (2006); Charles Moskos, Peace Soldiers (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1976); Soeters and Bos-Bakx, “Cross-Cultural Issues;” J. Soeters, T. Op den Buijs and A. Vogelaar, “The Importance of Cultural Information in Multinational Operations: A Fragmented Case Study of UNFICYP,” Netherlands Annual Review of Military Studies 4 (2001); J. Soeters, E. Tanercan, K. Varoglu and U. Sigri, “Turkish and Dutch Encounters in Peace Operations,” International Peacekeeping 11, no. 2 (2004). 134. John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in The Pacific War (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1986); David Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Co., 1995); Peter Watson, War On The Mind: The Military Uses and Abuses Of Psychology (London: Hutchinson & Company, 1978). 135. Luft, Beer, Bacon and Bullets, 10; E. Elron, N. Halvey, E. Ben-Ari, and B. Shamir, “Cooperation and Coordination Across Cultures in the Peacekeeping Forces: Individual and Organisational Integrating Mechanisms,” in Psychology of the Peacekeeper, edited by T. Britt and A. Adler (Westpoint, CT: Praeger, 2003). In one, a study of Dutch personnel attached to a British unit in a United Nations peacekeeping mission in Cyprus, for example, the British hierarchical command orientation (high power distance, low concern for others) clashed with Dutch horizontal orientation (low power distance, concern for others). J. Soeters et al., “The Importance of Cultural Information.” 136. Robert Ramsey, Advising Indigenous Forces: American Advisors in Korea, Vietnam, and El Salvador (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute Press, 2006); E. Elron et al., “Cooperation and Coordination;” Soeters and Bos-Bakx, “Cross-Cultural Issues.” 137. G. Breakwell and K. Spacie, Pressures Facing Commanders (Camberley: Strategic & Combat Studies Institute, 1997); C. Moldjord, L. K. Fossum and A. Holen, “Coping with Peacekeeping Stress,” in Psychology of the Peacekeeper, edited by T. Britt and A. Adler (Westpoint, CT: Praeger, 2003) 138. A. Cox, “Unit Cohesion and Morale in Combat: Survival in a Culturally and Racially Heterogeneous Environment” (master’s thesis, U.S. Army School of Advanced Studies, 1996); D. Skaggs, “The KATUSA Experiment: The Integration of Korean Nationals into the U.S. Army, 1950–1965,” Military Affairs 38, no. 2 (1974). 139. Keane, Road of Bones, 295. 140. Thomas, Naga Queen, 208. 141. Yaakov Weber, Oded Shenkar and Adi Raveh, “National and Corporate Cultural Fit in Mergers/Acquisitions: An Exploratory Study,” Management Science 42, no. 8 (August 1996). 142. Karen L. Newman and Stanley D. Nollen, “Culture and Congruence: The Fit between Management Practices and National Culture,” Journal of International Business Studies 27, no. 4 (1996). 143. Z. Aycan and R. N. Kanungo, “Current Issues and Future Challenges in Expatriate Management”, in Expatriate Management: Theory and Practice, edited by Z. Aycan (Greenwich: JAI Press, 1997); D. S. Ones and C. Viswesvaran, “Personality Determinants in the Prediction of Aspects of Expatriate Job Success”, in Expatriate Management: Theory and Practice, edited by Z. Aycan (Greenwich: JAI Press, 1997). 144. Geerte Hofstede, Culture’s Consequences (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1980). 145. Bruce Kogut and Harbir Singh, “The Effect of National Culture on the Choice of Entry Mode,” Journal of International Business Studies 19, no. 3 (1988). 146. R. Inglehart, Changing Values, Economic Development and Political Change (Oxford: UNESCO/Blackwell Publishers, 1995). 147. R. J. House et al., GLOBE Study. 148. Lu Luo, “Cultural Fit: Individual and Societal Discrepancies in Values, Beliefs, and Subjective Well-Being,” Journal of Social Psychology146, no. 2 (April 2006). 149. N. M. Ashkanasy, “The Australian Enigma.” 150. H. C. Triandis, Individualism and Collectivism (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1995). 151. Adrian Furnham and Stephen Bochner, “Social Difficulty in a Foreign Culture: An Empirical Analysis Of Culture Shock,” in Cultures in Contact: Studies in Cross-Cultural Interaction, edited by Stephen Bochner (Oxford: Pergamon, 1982), 171. See also W. A. Glaser, “Experts and Counterparts in Technical Assistance,” in Bonds Without Bondage: Explorations in Transcultural Interactions, edited by K. Kumar (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1979). 152. G. K. Stahl and P. Caligiuri, “The Effectiveness of Expatriates Coping Strategies: The Moderating Role of Cultural Distance, Position Level, and Time on the International Assignment,” Journal of Applied Psychology 90 (2005). Greater cultural distance is associated with poorer adjustment across personal, interpersonal, and work domains. P. Bhaskar-Shrinivas, D. A. Harrison, M. A. Shaffer and D. M. Luk, “Input-based and TimeBased Models of International Adjustment: Meta-Analytic Evidence and Theoretical Extensions,” Academy of Management Journal 48, no. 2 (2005). 153. One study found that sojourners whose personality profiles resembled that of the host culture aggregate had lower levels of depression. C. Ward and W. C. Chang, “Cultural Fit: A New Perspective on Personality and Sojourner Adjustment,” International Journal of Intercultural Relations 21, no. 4 (1997). This effect was not replicated in a second study; see C. Ward, C. H. Leong and M. Low, “Personality and Sojourner Adjustment,” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 35, no. 2 (2004).

154. Thomas, Naga Queen, 12. “Just one look and they were gone, and I was left with my head fairly going round, wondering what on earth had happened to me. I knew Nagas—I was certain I knew Nagas. I just didn’t know where I was.” 155. Ibid., 28. 156. Ibid., 31. 157. Ibid., 208. 158. Ibid., 69. 159. Ibid., 71. 160. Graham Bower, Naga Path, 57. 161. Thomas, Naga Queen, 78. 162. Ibid., 71. 163. Ryan Kranc, “Advising Indigenous Forces,” Small Wars Journal 8 (May, 2007); T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1977); Ramsey, Advising Indigenous Forces. 164. Fisher, “Military Leadership”; Salmoni, “Iraq’s Unready Security Forces.” 165. Luft, Beer, Bacon and Bullets; Elron et al., “Cooperation and Coordination”; B. A. Eyal & E. Efrat, “Blue Helmets and White Armor Multinationalism and Multiculturalism Among UN Peacekeeping Forces,” City & Society 13, no. 2 (2001); J. Soeters and M. Bos-Bakx, “Cross-Cultural Issues.” 166. Ramsey, Advising Indigenous Forces. 167. Fisher, “Military Leadership,” 241. 168. Ibid. Coalition troops have come to understand the need in “Arab cultures to create personal, quasibrotherlike relationships with Iraqi counterparts.” Salmoni, “Iraq’s Unready Security Forces,” 18. 169. Fisher, “Military Leadership.” 170. Gerald Hickey, American Military Advisor and His Foreign Counterpart: The Case Of Vietnam (Santa Monica, CA: The RAND Corporation, 1965), v. 171. Salmoni, “Iraq’s Unready Security Forces,” 17. 172. Ibid. 173. Graham Bower, Naga Path, 64–65. 174. S. Black, Mark Mendenhall and Gary Oddou, “Toward a Comprehensive Model of International Adjustment: An Integration of Multiple Theoretical Perspectives,” Academy of Management Review 16, no. 2 (1991). 175. Kalvero Oberg, “Cultural Shock: Adjustment to New Cultural Environments,” Practical Anthropology 7 (1960). 176. Ibid. 177. Ibid. 178. Furnham and Bochner, “Social Difficulty,” 171. 179. D. J. Kealey and D. R. Protheroe, “Effectiveness of Cross-Cultural Training for Expatriates: An Assessment of the Literature on the Issue,” International Journal of Intercultural Relations 20, no. 22 (1996). 180. Oberg, “Cultural Shock.” 181. H. Nishida, “Japanese Intercultural Communication Competence and Cross-Cultural Adjustment,” International Journal of Intercultural Relations 9 (1985). 182. M. Snyder, “Self-monitoring of Expressive Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 30, no. 4 (1974). 183. Abbe, Gulick and Herman, Cross-Cultural Competence, 9. 184. Mark Mendenhall and Gary Oddou, “The Dimensions of Expatriate Acculturation: A Review,” Academy of Management Review 10, no. 1 (1985); A. T. Church, “Sojourner Adjustment,” Psychological Bulletin 91, no. 3(1982). 185. A. Bandura, Self-efficacy: The Exercise Of Control (New York, NY: WH Freeman, 1997), 3. 186. Jennifer Palthe, “The Relative Importance of Antecedents to Cross-Cultural Adjustment: Implications for Managing a Global Workforce,” International Journal of Intercultural Relations 28 (2004); R. Hechanova, T. A. Beehr and N. D. Christiansen, “Antecedents and Consequences of Employees’ Adjustment to Overseas Assignment: A Meta-Analytic Review,” Applied Psychology: An International Review 52, no. 2 (2003). 187. R. A. Detweiler, “Intercultural Interaction and the Categorization Process: A Conceptual Analysis and Behavioral Outcome,” International Journal of Intercultural Relations 4 (1980). 188. J. S. Osland and A. Bird, “Beyond Sophisticated Stereotyping: Cultural Sensemaking in Context,” Academy of Management Executive 14 (2000). 189. R. L. Wiseman, Mitchell Hammer and H. Nishida, “Predictors of Intercultural Communications Competence,” International Journal of Intercultural Relations 13 (1989). 190. Mendenhall and Oddou, “Dimensions of Expatriate Acculturation.” 191. C. Leong, “Predictive Validity of the Multicultural Personality Questionnaire: A Longitudinal Study on the Socio-Psychological Adaptation of Asian Undergraduates Who Took Part in a Study Abroad Program,” International Journal of Intercultural Relations 31, no. 5 (2007). 192. G. Cui and N. E. Awa, “Measuring Intercultural Effectiveness: An Integrative Approach,” International Journal of Intercultural Relations 16, no. 3 (1992). 193. Mitchell R. Hammer, “Behavioral Dimensions of Intercultural Effectiveness: A Replication and Extension,” International Journal of Intercultural Relations 11 (1987); M. R. Hammer, W. B. Gudykunst and R. L. Wiseman, “Dimensions of Intercultural Effectiveness: An Exploratory Study,” International Journal of Intercultural Relations 2, no. 4 (1978). 194. Abbe, Gulick and Herman, Cross-Cultural Competence, 20; F. Lievens, M. M. Harris, E. Van Keer and C. Bisqueret, “Predicting Cross-Cultural Training Performance: The Validity Of Personality, Cognitive Ability, and Dimensions Measured by an Assessment Center and a Behavior Description Interview,” Journal of Applied Psychology 88, no. 3 (2003).

195. W. Arthur and W. Bennett, “The International Assignee: The Relative Importance of Factors Perceived to Contribute to Success,” Personnel Psychology 48 (1995). 196. Graham Bower, Naga Path, 187–88. 197. Ibid., 192. 198. Febbraro, “Leadership and Command.” 199. Fisher, “Military Leadership,” 162. 200. T. E. Lawrence, “Twenty-Seven Articles,” Arab Bulletin (20 August 1917). 201. Thomas, Naga Queen, 173, 175. 202. Ibid., 186. 203. Ibid., 210. 204. Ibid., 230. 205. Osborne et al., “Toward a Contextual Theory,” 807. 4. GREGORY BATESON AND INFORMATION OPERATIONS 1. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, Inc., 1987), 53. 2. Kermit Roosevelt, War Report of the OSS (New York, NY: Walker and Company, 1976), 5. 3. Jane Foster, Unamerican Lady (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1980), 133. 4. Ibid., 135. 5. The commendation noted: “in connection with a compromised operation, Mr. Bateson volunteered to penetrate deep into enemy territory in order to attempt the rescue of three agents believed to have escaped after their capture by the Japanese. Mr. Bateson shared all the very considerable dangers of this operation and in the view of his civilian status, his courage in so doing [resounds?] greatly to his credit.” As the commendation noted, Bateson was not obliged to carry out this type of “clandestine operations against the enemy, deep in enemy territory and beyond any possible support from Allied forces.” Cited in David Price, “Gregory Bateson and the OSS: World War II and Bateson’s Assessment of Applied Anthropology,” Human Organization 57, no. 4 (winter 1998): 380. 6. David Lipset, “Author and Hero: Rereading Gregory Bateson: The Legacy of a Scientist,” Anthropological Quarterly 78, no. 4 (Autumn, 2005): 902–3. 7. John Brockman, “Introduction” in About Bateson, edited by John Brockman (New York, NY: E.P. Dutton, 1977), 8. 8. David Lipset, Gregory Bateson: The Legacy of a Scientist (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1980), 116. 9. Brockman, “Introduction,” 8. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 9. 12. Margaret Mead, Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years (New York, NY: William Morrow & Co, 1972), 216–7. 13. Peter Mandler, Return from the Natives (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 18. 14. Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, “Science, Democracy and Ethics: Mobilizing Culture and Personality for World War II,” in Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict and Others: Essays on Culture and Personality, edited by George Stocking, Jr. (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. 1986), 191. 15. Yans-McLaughlin, “Science, Democracy and Ethics,” 192. 16. Brockman, “Introduction,” 9. 17. Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis (New York Academy of Sciences, 1942). 18. Brockman, “Introduction,” 10. 19. Ibid. 20. See, for example, Paul Gibney, “Double Bind Theory: Still Crazy-Making After All These Years,” Psychotherapy in Australia 12, no. 3 (May 2006). 21. Douglas Valentine, Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs (New York, NY: Verso, 2004), 132. 22. Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: the CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond (New York, NY: Grove, 1985), 58. 23. Brockman, “Introduction,” 10. 24. See, for example, Kenneth S. Norris, Bernd Wursig, Randall S. Wells and Melany Wursig, Hawaiian Spinner Dolphin (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994). 25. George E. Marcus, “A Timely Rereading of Naven: Gregory Bateson as Oracular Essayist,” Representations 12 (Autumn, 1985): 66. 26. Peter Harries-Jones, Recursive Vision: Ecological Understanding and Gregory Bateson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995). 27. Brockman, “Introduction,” 4. 28. Steven Rose, “Review of Mind and Nature,” Times Literary Supplement, 21 November 1980, 1314. 29. Brockman, “Introduction,” 5. 30. Field Manual 3–31, Information Operations (Washington, DC: U.S. Army, 25 January 2013), II-3. 31. For example, “the War Department disbanded its psychological and propaganda sections in 1918, shortly after the Allied victory. The Creel committee dissolved in 1919, ending virtually all formal coordination of U.S. overseas propaganda efforts for the next twenty years. By the time the United States entered World War II in 1941, there was only one officer in the U.S. War Department General Staff who had had psychological warfare experience.” Christopher Simpson, Science of Coercion (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1994), 16. 32. J. T. Ford, “State Department and Broadcasting Board of Governors Expand Post-9/11 Efforts But Challenges Remain,” Testimony before the Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats, and International

Relations, House Committee on Government Reform, 23 August 2004, 9. 33. Jeffrey B. Jones, “Strategic Communication: A Mandate for the United States,” Joint Forces Quarterly 39 (October 2005): 110. 34. Field Manual 3–31, I-1. 35. Ibid., I-3. 36. Ibid., II-4 37. Quoted in Lieutenant Colonel Bryan N. Sparling, “Coming of Age: Information Operations and the American Way of War” (masters thesis, Joint Advanced Warfighting School, 2010), 7. 38. Linda Robinson, “The Propaganda War,” U.S. News & World Report, 29 May 2006. 39. Tom Vanden Brook and Ray Locker, “U.S. ‘Info Ops’ Programs Dubious, Costly,” USA Today, 29 February 2012. 40. According to the House Appropriations Committee report: “[President Obama’s] budget request includes nearly one billion dollars for Department of Defense information operations (IO) programs. The Committee has serious concerns about … the significant amount of funding being spent on these programs.… The Committee questions the effectiveness of much of the material being produced with this funding, the supposed efforts to minimize target audience knowledge of United States Governmental sponsorship of certain production materials, and the ability of the Department to evaluate the impact of these programs.” Quoted in J. Michael Waller, “Murtha Axes Military Information Operations for FY2010,” Center for Security Policy, 29 July 2009. Available at: http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/2009/07/29/murtha-axes-militaryinformation-operations-forfy2010–2/. 41. Peter Cary, Pentagon, Information Operations, and International Media Development (Washington, DC: Center for International Media Assistance, 2010), 5. 42. National Security Strategy (Washington, DC: White House, 2010), 4. 43. In a 2008 poll by University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes, nearly 90 per cent of Egyptian respondents, 65 per cent of Indonesians, 62 per cent of Pakistanis, and 72 per cent of Moroccans said they agreed with al-Qaeda’s goal of “push[ing] the U.S. to remove its bases and its military forces from all Islamic countries.” Jim Lobe, “Poll: Muslims Reject U.S. Military Bases,” Electronic Intifada, 26 February 2009. Available at: http://electronicintifada.net/content/poll-muslims-reject-us-military-bases/8100. 44. Pew Research, “Global Opinion of Obama Slips, International Policies Faulted,” 13 June 2012. Available at: http://www.pewglobal.org/2012/06/13/chapter-1-views-of-the-u-s-and-american-foreign-policy-4/. 45. Admiral Michael G. Mullen, “From the Chairman: Strategic Communication: Getting Back to Basics,” 28 August 2009. Available: http://www.jcs.mil/newsarticle.aspx?ID=142. 46. Arturo Munoz, U.S. Military Information Operations in Afghanistan: Effectiveness of Psychological Operations 2001–2010 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2012). 47. Fred T. Krawchuk, “Strategic Communication: An Integral Component of Counterinsurgency Operations,” Connections: The Quarterly Journal 5, no. 3 (Winter 2006). 48. For example, in May 2005 Newsweek published a story that an American interrogator had flushed a copy of the Koran down a toilet. Riots at U.S. bases were imminent. The CJTF 76 Commander asked his PSYOP Commander to use the Afghan-wide radio system Merlin to “calm the situation.” However, the radio content for Merlin was developed and controlled by the PSYOP Group Commander at Fort Bragg, NC. Due to the difference in time zones and work schedules, the Koran issue was not addressed on Merlin for 72 hours. At least sixteen people were killed in the rioting. Michael A. Ceroli, “Psychological Operations: Fighting the War of Ideas” (masters thesis, U.S. Army War College, 18 May 2007), 14–5. 49. Andrew Sullivan, Some Considerations in Developing Effective Messaging: The SUCCESs Framework and Military Influence Activities (Ottawa: Centre for Operational Research & Analysis, January 2011), 7. 50. Munoz, U.S. Military Information Operations, 74. 51. Ibid., 34. 52. In recounting this experience at the American Anthropological Association meeting later that year, an audience member told me that my experience was “proof that anthropologists have no real power to influence anything.” On the contrary, to be asked to review a President’s speech demonstrates that when anthropologists talk, those in power do listen. Whether they act on an idea is an entirely different matter, and depends upon direct access to those in power. Many years ago Margaret Mead noted that using anthropologists to advise advisors is ineffective; to have a useful impact, anthropologists must work directly with policy makers. See Carleton Mabee, “Margaret Mead and Behavioral Scientists in World War II: Problems in Responsibility, Truth, and Effectiveness,” Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences 23, no. 1 (January 1987), 5. 53. Field Manual 3–31, I-3. Italics added. JP 3–31 offers a quick and dirty formula for conducting culturally-based information operations by influencing rules, beliefs and norms of a population. JP 3–31 defines rules as “explicit regulative processes such as policies, laws, inspection routines, or incentives,” while norms are “regulative mechanisms accepted by the social collective.” Beliefs are defined as “the collective perception of fundamental truths governing behavior.” The manual notes that beliefs shared by members of a social system —e.g., culture—are persistent over time and difficult to change. Moreover, “strong beliefs about determinant factors (i.e., security, survival, or honor) are likely to cause a social entity or group to accept rules and norms.” The manual suggests that once the target audience has been identified, their rules, norms and beliefs should be analyzed. Next, means (such as diplomatic, informational, military, or economic actions) and ways (such as the use of IRCs) should be identified. JP 3–31 then comes to the key point: “Influencing the behavior of TAs requires producing effects in ways that modify rules, norms, or beliefs.” Field Manual 3–31, I-5. 54. Kenneth Friedman, “Learning the Arabs’ Silent Language: Interview with Edward T. Hall,” in Culture, Communication, and Conflict: Readings in Intercultural Relations, edited by Gary Weaver (Needham Heights, MA: Simon and Schuster, 1998), 17. 55. Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (New York, NY: Knopf, 1965), 70. 56. Ibid., 70. L. John Martin of USIA called this type of propaganda facilitative communication, which can include such forms as books, cultural programs, films, etc. This is communication designed to create a positive attitude toward a potential propagandist. L. John Martin, “Effectiveness of International Propaganda,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 398 (1971): 62.

57. Ibid., 75. 58. Ibid., 79. 59. State Department officials considered buying airtime on Al Jazzera, the Qatar-based Arabic satellite news channel, but decided that $10,000 per primetime minute was too expensive. Vanessa O’Connell, “‘Shared Values’ a Bust: U.S. Suspends TV Ad Campaign Aimed at Winning Over Muslims,” Wall Street Journal, 16 January 2003. 60. “The whole idea of building a brand is to create a relationship between the product and its user.” Alexandra Starr, “Charlotte Beers’ Toughest Sell,” Business Week, 17 December 2001. 61. Jim Lehrer, “Under Secretary Charlotte Beers,” Online News Hour, January 2003. Available at: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/media/public_diplomacy/beers_1–03.html. 62. Starr, ‘Charlotte Beers’. 63. Email, 2006, in possession of the author. 64. Greg Miller, “Panel Casts Doubt on U.S. Propaganda Efforts against ISIS,” Washington Post, 2 December 2015. 65. Christopher W. Lowe, “From ‘Battle’ to the ‘Battle of Ideas’: The Meaning and Misunderstanding of Information Operations” (master’s thesis, School of Advanced Military Studies, 2010), 2. 66. Ibid. 67. Peter Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 1 (Autumn, 1994): 234. 68. Ibid., 235. 69. Ibid., 236. 70. Ibid., 235. 71. Lipset, Gregory Bateson, 179. 72. Bateson called the Macy Conferences “one of the great events of my life.” Ibid., 180. 73. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (New York: Wiley, 1948). 74. Steve P. Heims, “Gregory Bateson and the Mathematicians: From Interdisciplinary Interaction to Societal Functions,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 13, no. 2 (1977): 155. 75. The cybernetic model perhaps appealed to Bateson because it posited that a self-regulating system was fundamentally a system of communication. “The study of … effective messages of control,” Wiener wrote, “constitutes the science of cybernetics.” Lipset, Gregory Bateson, 181. 76. Ibid., 183. 77. Darrell Arnold, editor, Traditions of Systems Theory: Major Figures and Contemporary Developments (New York, NY: Routledge, 2014). 78. In 1953, Soviet Admiral A. I. Berg, the newly appointed Deputy Defense Minister, became responsible for developing “Soviet radio electronics and cybernetics.” By 1958, Wiener’s book had been translated into Russian, and a year later, a faculty of military cybernetics was established. Jacob Kipp, From Foresight to Forecasting: The Russian and Soviet Military Experience (College Station, TX: Center for Strategic Technology, Texas A&M University, 1988), 178. 79. Slava Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002), 265. 80. Charles F. Smith, “Command, Control and Countermeasures (C3CM),” Military Review 63, no. 1 (January 1983): 68. 81. Floyd D. Kennedy Jr., “The Evolution of Soviet Thought on ‘Warfare in the Fourth Dimension,’” Naval War College Review (March–April 1984): 42. 82. Lowe, “From ‘Battle’ to the ‘Battle of Ideas,’” 17. 83. In 1979, DoD Directive 4600.4 introduced an American version of the REC concept, termed Command, Control, Communications Countermeasures (C3CM), defined as: “The integrated use of operations security, military deception, jamming, and physical destruction, supported by intelligence, to deny information, to influence, degrade, or destroy adversary C3 capabilities and to protect friendly C3 against such action.” DoD Directive 4600.4, Command, Control, and Communications Countermeasures (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, 27 August 1979). 84. Memorandum of Policy 30, Command and Control Warfare (Washington, DC: U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, 8 March 1993). Available at: www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/joint_staff/jointStaff_jointOperations/732.pdf. 85. Field Manual 100–6, Information Operations (Washington, DC: U.S. Army, 1996), iii. 86. Field Manual 3–31, iii. 87. Yans-McLaughlin, “Science, Democracy and Ethics,” 194. 88. The Committee sponsored projects such as Ladislas Farago’s German Psychological Warfare (1942); development of the culture and personality approach for predicting national behavior; and the associated methodology for studying “culture at a distance” based on documents and interviews. Ibid., 196. 89. Ibid., 200. 90. Ibid., 202. 91. Patrick K. O‘Donnell, Operatives, Spies, and Saboteurs: The Unknown Story of the Men and Women of WWII’s OSS (New York, NY: Free Press, 2004), 229. 92. Roosevelt, War Report, 212. 93. Ibid., 213. 94. Bateson’s first job was training agents in Washington, D.C. for morale operations in the Far East. Bateson wanted to lecture on “what is common to the Far East,” such as the “special importance of the mother,” “fatalism,” “passivity,” and specifics of Japanese, Burmese, and other cultures. His superiors, however, thought the material was a little too theoretical. Mandler, Return from the Natives, 158. 95. Elizabeth P. McIntosh, Sisterhood of Spies: The Women of the OSS (Annapolis, MA: Naval Institute Press, 2009), 191.

96. Mandler, Return from the Natives, 158. 97. Ibid., 159. 98. Ibid., 158. 99. Bateson’s movements for the rest of the war are unknown. Mead was told through official channels in Washington that Bateson was “in the interior” and would not be home until the war was over. Bateson may have been a member of Gold Dust, a morale operations unit running mobile print and broadcasting to induce the Japanese to surrender in northern Burma. Ibid., 160. 100. Lipset, Gregory Bateson, 174. 101. Mandler, Return from the Natives, 159. 102. Ibid., 160. 103. Nathan Maung, “‘Yellow Revolution’ in Burma,” Prachatai, 25 September 2007. Available at: http://www.prachatai.com/english/node/227. 104. Noel Riley Fitch, Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (New York, NY: Anchor Books, 2012), 100. 105. Gregory Bateson, Naven: A Survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture of a New Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of View (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958), 24. 106. Western culture, believed Bateson, had its own premises, twisted into a logical whole. “So much of occidental thinking,” wrote Bateson “is shaped on the premise of transcendent deity that it is difficult for many people to rethink their theories in terms of immanence. Even Darwin from time to time wrote about Natural Selection in phrases which almost ascribed to this process the characteristics of transcendence and purpose.” Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 472. 107. Bateson, Naven, 25. 108. Ibid. 109. Ibid. 110. Ibid., 235. 111. Jurgen Ruesch and Gregory Bateson, Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co., 1951), 218. Premises, while they may be taken as true and valid as a matter of belief, may also contradict each other. For example, among the Iatmul of New Guinea, expression contradicts concealment: “knowledge must be expressed in order to make claims of ownership, but knowledge must be concealed so that its ownership is uncompromised.” Charles W. Nuckolls, “The Misplaced Legacy of Gregory Bateson: Toward a Cultural Dialectic of Knowledge and Desire,” Cultural Anthropology 10, no. 3 (August 1995): 387. 112. Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 336. 113. Ruesch and Bateson, Communication, 204. 114. Ruesch and Bateson, Communication, 204–5. But, of course, the premise that as human beings we share the capacity for language depends on the recognition of others as human beings: “The late Doctor Stutterheim, Government Archeologist in Java, used to tell the following story: Somewhat before the advent of the white man, there was a storm on the Javanese coast … After the storm the people went down to the beach and found, washed up by the waves and almost dead, a large white monkey of unknown species. The religious experts explained that this monkey had been a member of the court of Beroena, the God of the Sea, and that for some offense the monkey had been cast out by the god whose anger was expressed in the storm. The Rajah gave orders that the white monkey from the sea should be kept alive, chained to a certain stone. This was done. Dr. Stutterheim told me that he had seen the stone and that, roughly scratched on it in Latin, Dutch, and English, were the name of a man and a statement of his shipwreck. Apparently this trilingual sailor never established verbal communication with his captors. He was surely unaware of the premises in their minds which labeled him as a white monkey and therefore not a potential recipient of verbal messages: it probably never occurred to him that they could doubt his humanity. He may have doubted theirs.” Ruesch and Bateson, Communication, 204–5. 115. Editors, “U.S. Apologizes to Afghans for Soccer Ball Snafu,” NBC News, 27 August 2007. Available at: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/20469239/ns/world_news-south_and_central_asia/t/us-apologizes-afghans-soccerball-snafu/. 116. Michael Cook, Koran: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 55. 117. Editors, “Islam in the Sub-Saharan Africa”, Encyclopedia of Religion, edited by Mircea Eliade (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1987), 7:356. 118. Karl F. Friday, “Bushidō or Bull? A Medieval Historian’s Perspective on the Imperial Army and the Japanese Warrior Tradition,” History Teacher 27, no. 3 (May, 1994): 348. 119. Allison B. Gilmore, “‘We Have Been Reborn’: Japanese Prisoners and the Allied Propaganda War in the Southwest Pacific,” Pacific Historical Review 64, no. 2 (May 1995): 204. 120. Interestingly, the premise “surrender leads to death” was so powerfully embedded in the minds of Japanese troops that if they did surrender to the Allies, they considered themselves to have died and been reborn. One Japanese prisoner said that he had “died as a Japanese soldier,” and that “all we prisoners of war have been reborn. We all fight against the American Army with all our might before capture,” but “from that time on we must fulfill our loyalty to America the same as we did to the Emperor before capture.’’ Gilmore, “‘We Have Been Reborn,’” 201. 121. For example, in Vietnam, U.S. PSYOP units proposed to use two photographs, one showing civilians wounded by the Viet Cong and the second depicting the victims receiving medical treatment in a government hospital. To people in Saigon, the material seemed credible. Outside of Saigon, however, the hospital photograph was not considered to be realistic. Rural peasants simply had never seen modern medical equipment in their district or even provincial hospitals; these sophisticated machines only existed in Saigon. While the premise “hospitals treat the sick” existed for the Vietnamese peasant, the premise “hospitals have medical equipment” was not part of their experience. Thus, the intended meaning of the information campaign (“the VC destroys; the government builds”) was not conveyed. Taro Katagiri, “A Former PSYOP Group Commander in Vietnam Looks Back,” in Art and Science of Psychological Operations: Case Studies of Military Application (Washington, DC: Headquarters Department of the Army, 1976), 139. 122. Sullivan, Some Considerations, 10. 123. “The ISAF produced Sada-e Azadi paper contains a regular feature of a parable, with a proverb as the moral.

This moral is presented at the end of the story and represents the central, simple, idea at the core of the story.” Ibid., 5. 124. James R. Price and Paul Jureidini, Witchcraft, Sorcery, Magic, and other Psychological Phenomena and Their Implications on Military and Paramilitary Operations in the Congo (Washington, DC: Special Operations Research Office, 1965). 125. Didier Bertrand, “The Thầy: Masters in Huế, Vietnam,” Asian Folklore Studies 55, no. 2 (1996). 126. Edward Lansdale, In the Midst of Wars: An American’s Mission to Southeast Asia (New York, NY: Harper & Row Publishers, 1972), 225–227. 127. Bateson, Naven, 4. 128. Bateson, quoted in Lipset, 131. 129. Lipset, Gregory Bateson, 130–131. 130. Ibid., 133. 131. Ibid., 140. 132. Bateson, Naven, 4, fn. 1. 133. Gregory Bateson, Naven: A Survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture of a New Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of View (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958). 134. Marcus, “A Timely Rereading,” 67. 135. Bateson, Naven, 4. 136. Ibid., 6–7. 137. Ibid., 20. 138. Yans-McLaughlin, “Science, Democracy and Ethics,” 191. 139. Bateson, Naven, 29. 140. Ibid., 86. 141. Ibid., 96–97. 142. Ibid., 175. 143. Ibid. 144. Ibid., 176. 145. Ibid., 177. 146. Yans-McLaughlin, “Science, Democracy and Ethics,” 201. 147. Bateson, Naven, 190. 148. Ibid. 149. Ibid., 194. 150. Mandler, Return from the Natives, 31. 151. Gregory Bateson, “Culture Contact and Schismogenesis,” Man 35 (December 1935), 182. 152. Mandler, Return from the Natives, 32. 153. Ibid., 47. 154. Ibid., 48. 155. Ibid., 32. 156. Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 435. 157. Ibid. Bateson identified “three of these enormously complex systems or arrangements of conservative loops” that had self-corrective properties: the human individual; “the society in which that individual lives”; and the ecosystem, “the natural biological surroundings of these human animals.” 158. Since Bateson’s death, other scholars have developed and expanded the idea of self-correcting (or selfconfirming) human systems. David A. Snow and Richard Machalek note that most of the social scientific literature on religious cults subscribes “to the assumption that unconventional beliefs are highly vulnerable to everyday experience and therefore inherently fragile.” On the contrary, argue Snow and Machalek, “some unconventional belief systems are amazingly resilient and apparently invulnerable to disconfirmation.” For example, in the Buddhist cult Nichiren Shoshu, anything negative is attributed to three obstacles and four devils (Sansho Shima). Anything beneficial to the member or the movement is attributed to the power of chanting Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo. “Thus, whatever happens, whether good or bad, intended or unintended, is explained in terms of Sansho Shima or chanting. The system cannot fail, for the very occurrence of an event provides its confirmation.” In the world of Nichiren Shoshu, everything fits within the system; everything that happens or doesn’t happen can be explained by the system itself. This is an example of a self-correcting, selfconfirming belief system. David A. Snow & Richard Machalek, “On the Presumed Fragility of Unconventional Beliefs,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 21, no. 1 (1982): 19. 159. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, “Sayyid Qutb: Ideologue of Islamic revival,” in Voices of Resurgent Islam, edited by J. L. Esposito (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1983), 74. 160. Haddad, “Sayyid Qutb,” 75. 161. Ibid., 76. 162. Ellul, Propaganda, 35. 163. David Kilcullen, “Countering Global Insurgency,” Journal of Strategic Studies 28, no. 4 (August 2005): 608. 164. Ibid., 609. 165. Ibid. 166. Ibid., 610. 167. Editors, “Al-Zarqawi Declares War on Iraqi Shia,” Al Jazeera, 14 September 2005. Available at: http://www.aljazeera.com/archive/2005/09/200849143727698709.html. 168. Muhammad Munir, “Suicide Attacks and Islamic Law,” International Review of the Red Cross 90, no. 869 (March 2008); Karima Bennoune, “As-Salamu ‘Alaykum? Humanitarian Law in Islamic Jurisprudence,” Michigan Journal of International Law 15 (Winter 1994).

169. Ceroli, “Psychological Operations,” 21. 170. Ibid., 22. 171. Ibid., 35. 172. Thomas H. Henriksen, Dividing Our Enemies (Hurburt Field, FL: Joint Special Operations University, November 2005), 10. 173. Ayman Al-Zawahiri, “Letter to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,” Federation of American Scientists (2005), 5. Available at: http://www.fas.org/irp/news/2005/10/letter_in_english.pdf. 174. Ceroli, “Psychological Operations,” 8. 175. Ibid., 9. 176. MNF-I brief, 7 October 04, quoted in Ceroli, “Psychological Operations,” 20. 177. Stephen Nachmanovitch, “Gregory Bateson: Old Men Ought to Be Explorers,” Leonardo 17, no. 2 (1984): 113. 178. The Social Science Citation Index counts 1,805 references over the past decade to the book, almost doubling Durkheim’s 1894 classic Rules of the Sociological Method with 936 references. Thomas J. Scheff, “The Structure of Context: Deciphering “Frame Analysis,” Sociological Theory 23, no. 4 (December 2005): 368–85. 179. “…it is [in] Bateson’s paper that the term ‘frame’ was proposed in roughly the sense in which I want to employ it.” Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1974), 7. 180. Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 179. 181. Ibid., 184. 182. Ibid., 182. 183. Ibid., 187. 184. Social movement theory also generally views frames as a shared process for the organization of reality and political mobilization. David A. Snow, E. Burke Rochford, Jr., Steven K. Worden and Robert D. Benford, “Frame Alignment Processes, Micromobilization, and Movement Participation,” American Sociological Review 51, no. 4 (August 1986). 185. Stephen Hart, “The Cultural Dimension of Social Movements: A Theoretical Reassessment and Literature Review,” Sociology of Religion 57, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 89. 186. Tamar Liebes and Elihu Katz, Export of Meaning: Cross-Cultural Readings of Dallas (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1990). 187. President George W. Bush, “Remarks by the President at the 20th Anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy” (United States Chamber of Commerce, Washington, DC, 6 November 2003). 188. Steve R. Corman, “Weapons of Mass Persuasion: Communicating Against Terrorist Ideology,” Connections: The Quarterly Journal, Countering Ideological Support for Terrorism 5, no. 3 (Winter 2006). This provides an example of how conflicting frames may result in symmetrical schismogenesis. 189. Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 190. 190. Ibid., 191. 191. Robert M. Entman, “Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm,” Journal of Communication 43, no. 3 (1993): 52. (emphasis in original) 192. Recently, for example, the presence of troops in the Middle East and Central Asia was the subject of a frame dispute. Some ideologically left-leaning individuals and groups construed the Coalition and ISAF presence in Iraq and Afghanistan as “occupations,” while others framed the very same troop presence as “counterinsurgencies.” Goffman, Frame Analysis, 322. 193. Snow, et al., “Frame Alignment.” 194. Alice H. Eagly and Shelly Chaiken, Psychology of Attitudes (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993); William J. McGuire, “Attitudes and Attitude Change,” in Handbook of Social Psychology, edited by Gardner Lindzey and Elliot Aronson (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1985); John R. Zaller, Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 195. William J. McGuire, “Inducing Resistance to Persuasion: Some Contemporary Approaches,” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 1, edited by Leonard Berkowitz (New York, NY: Academic Press, 1964). 196. Thomas E. Nelson, Zoe M. Oxley and Rosalee A. Clawson, “Toward a Psychology of Framing Effects,” Political Behavior 19, no. 3 (September 1997): 225. (emphasis in original) 197. Ibid., 235. 198. David A. Snow and Robert D. Benford, “Ideology, Frame Resonance and Participant Mobilization,” International Social Movement Research 1 (1988). 199. Ibid., 622. 200. Abu’l A’la Mawdudi, “Political Theory of Islam,” in Islam: Its Meaning and Message, edited by Khurshid Ahmad (London: Islamic Council of Europe, 1976), 159–61. 201. John L. Esposito and John O. Voll, Islam and Democracy (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1996), 23– 28. 202. Holy Koran, Chapter Al-Hadeed 57, verse 25. 203. Khaled Abou El Fadl, “Islam and the Challenge of Democracy,” Boston Review, 2003. Available at: http://www.bostonreview.net/BR28.2/abou.html. 204. See V. P. Gagnon, “Ethnic Nationalism and International Conflict: The Case of Serbia,” International Security 19, no. 3 (Winter 1994–1995): 367–90; Jack Snyder, From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Conflict (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2000). 205. Quoted in Roger Cohen, Hearts Grown Brutal: Sagas of Sarajevo (New York, NY: Random House, 1988), 243. 206. Ibid., 244. 207. William Lockwood, European Moslems: Economy and Ethnicity in Western Bosnia (New York, NY: Academic Press, 1975); Tony Bringa, Being Muslim the Bosnian Way: Community and Identity in a Central Bosnian Village (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). 208. Ruza Petrovic, “Ethnically Mixed Marriages in Yugoslavia,” Sociologija 12 (1986). 209. Robert Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1996).

210. Ibid., 22. 211. Ibid., xxvii. 212. Ibid., x. 213. “Numbers of Killed in Bosnia,” 22 June 2007. Available at: http://srebrenicagenocide.blogspot.com/2007/06/bosnian-book-of-dead.html. 214. Tony Bringa notes that the “ancient ethnic hatreds” frame was exactly the justification used by Bosnian Serb leader Rodovan Karadzic (“there is too much hatred, centuries-old hatreds”) for the Serbian program of ethnic cleansing. “Those who tried to voice other opinions … were often dismissed as pro-Muslim because they were contradicting the ‘centuries-old ethnic hatred’ thesis that was the constant refrain of Bosnian Serb nationalist leaders.” Tony Bringa, “Haunted by the Imaginations of the Past,” in Why America’s Top Pundits are Wrong: Anthropologists Talk Back, edited by Catherine Besteman and Hugh Gusterson (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), 63. 215. Daniel Heradstveit and G. Matthew Bonham, “What the Axis of Evil Metaphor Did to Iran,” Middle East Journal 61, no. 3 (Summer 2007). 216. Ibid., 422. What the authors call a “metaphor,” “principally a way of conceiving one thing in terms of another,” can more accurately be called a frame or “schemata of interpretation” that enables individuals “to locate, perceive, identify, and label” occurrences within their life space and the world at large. 217. Ibid., 425. 218. Ibid., 435. 219. Mandler, Return from the Natives, 42. 220. Gregory Bateson, “The Science of Decency,” Philosophy of Science 10, no. 2 (April 1943): 141. 221. Foster, Unamerican Lady, 136. 222. Arthur B. Darling, “Birth of Central Intelligence,” Studies in Intelligence 10, no. 2 (Spring 1966). 223. At the end of the war, in late 1945, the Office of Strategic Services was disbanded by executive order and elements of the OSS were absorbed into other organizations. The Special Operations branch was abolished, though the concept was revived with the creation of U.S. Army Special Forces in 1952. The Research & Analysis Branch was absorbed by the State Department, as the Interim Research Intelligence Service (IRIS). In turn, IRIS became the Office of Research Intelligence in July 1947 and was brought into the new Central Intelligence Agency. In early 1946, elements of the OSS conducting psychological operations were re-formed into the Central Intelligence Group (CIG), which became the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) a few years later. Christopher Simpson, Science of Coercion: Communications Research & Psychological Warfare 1945– 1960 (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1994), 34. 224. Yans-McLaughlin, “Science, Democracy and Ethics,” 203. 225. Gregory Bateson, “Problems of Applied Science and Manipulation,” 1941, unpublished paper (U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, RG 226 OSS, 230/86/27/1, Box 42), 2. 226. Ibid., 1. 227. Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 162. 228. Bateson, “Problems of Applied Science and Manipulation” (unpublished manuscript, 1941): 4. 229. Bateson, “The Science of Decency,” 141. 230. Terence Turner, “Review of Mind and Nature,” In These Times, September 1980. 231. “Gregory Bateson (1904–1980).” Available at: http://www.interculturalstudies.org/Bateson/biography.html. 232. Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, xx-xxi. 233. Ibid., xxii. 234. Nachmanovitch, “Gregory Bateson,” 114. 235. Jan van Boeckel, “A Review of an Ecology of Mind—The Gregory Bateson Documentary,” 2011. Available at: http://www.naturearteducation.org/AnEcologyOfMind.htm. 236. Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (New York, NY: Dutton, 1979), 8. 5. TOM HARRISSON AND UNCONVENTIONAL WARFARE 1. Tom Harrisson, World Within: A Borneo Story (London: Cresset Press, 1959), 20. 2. Harrisson, World Within, 137. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid., 138. 5. Judith M. Heimann, Most Offending Soul Alive: Tom Harrisson and his Remarkable Life (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1997), 174. 6. Harrisson, World Within, 178. 7. Ibid., 177. This proved to be the fate of most of Australia’s coastal insertions in insular Southeast Asia. See also Heimann, Most Offending Soul Alive, 174. 8. Harrisson, World Within, 138. 9. The 1944 Royal Australian Air Force map omitted one of the largest mountains on the island, while the DutchAmerican version contained the same mountain twice. The result was that scores of downed airmen and ground troops lost their lives unnecessarily. Tom Harrisson, “Explorations in Central Borneo,” Geographical Journal 114, no. 4/6 (October–December 1949), 130. 10. Tom Harrisson, “Explorations,” 129. 11. Quoting E. Banks, Harrisson, World Within, 184. 12. Ibid., 182. 13. Ibid., 194. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 196. 16. Ibid.

17. Ibid., 197. 18. Heimann, Most Offending Soul Alive, 184. 19. Ibid., 186. 20. Ibid., 2. Harrisson’s own figures are lower. Harrisson, World Within, 342. 21. Ibid., 197. 22. Ibid., 187. 23. Harrisson, quoted in Heimann, Most Offending Soul Alive, 17. 24. Tom Harrisson, “Remembered Jungle,” in Borneo Jungle: An Account of the Oxford Expedition of 1932, edited by Tom Harrisson (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1988 [1938]), 15. 25. There is some debate among anthropologists and historians as to whether cannibalism actually exists. See, for example, Gananath Obeyesekere, Cannibal Talk: The Man-Eating Myth and Human Sacrifice in the South Seas (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005). 26. Harrisson, World Within, 160. He adapted the story of his adventure for young readers in Living Among Cannibals (London: G. G. Harrah, 1979 [1943]). 27. Heimann, Most Offending Soul Alive, 2. 28. For example, Sir Edmund Leach, the famous grand old man of anthropology, met Harrisson in Borneo while conducting a socio-economic survey for the British Colonial Office. Although Leach knew almost nothing about Borneo and Harrisson had been there for over a decade, he dismissed Harrisson’s research as non-scientific, accused Harrisson of failing to “collect concrete well documented data,” of being inadequately objective, and of lacking a theoretical framework. Heimann, Most Offending Soul Alive, 255–7. 29. Emile Simpson, War from the Ground Up: Twenty-First Century Combat as Politics (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2013), 165, 175. 30. Major General Walter Walker, quoted in Heimann, Most Offending Soul Alive, 343. 31. Ibid., 345. Beginning in 1963, these Border Scouts began crossing into Indonesian territory to attack specific targets. At first the Border Scout units were staffed completely by indigenous warriors, since this offered some plausible deniability if they were caught in Indonesian territory. Later, the SAS joined these teams. Indeed, as Walker observed, “the SAS liked Tom Harrisson, with whom they formed so close a relationship that … they set up their headquarters in his garden.” Major General Walter Walker quoted in Heimann, Most Offending Soul Alive, 345. On the Border Scouts, see also General Sir Walter Walker, “How Borneo was Won,” Survival 11, no. 3 (January 1969); Major General Walter Walker, Fighting On (London: New Millennium, 1997). 32. Heimann, Most Offending Soul Alive, 344. 33. Major General Walter Walker, quoted in ibid, 344. 34. Ibid., 4. 35. Major General Walter Walker, quoted in ibid, 193. 36. “Some bitter hatred is essential and valuable in every unit of young people working very hard, in difficult places, on one common plan. It forms a nucleus of fire, concentrates the worst in each one on to something understandable and immediately at hand for the loathing.” Harrisson, “Remembered Jungle,” 4. 37. Quoted in Heimann, Most Offending Soul Alive, 141. 38. Harrisson, World Within, 172. The 161 Reconnaissance Regiment was previously an infantry battalion of the Green Howards. 39. Ibid., 173. 40. The Minister of Economic Warfare, Dr. Hugh Dalton, proposed the creation of an organization able to conduct irregular warfare in occupied territories. Dalton argued that “We have got to organize movements in enemyoccupied territory comparable to the Sinn Fein movement in Ireland, [and] to the Chinese Guerillas now operating … against Japan.” Dalton believed that this new organization “must use many different methods, including industrial and military sabotage, labour agitation and strikes, continuous propaganda, terrorist acts against traitors and German leaders, boycotts and riots.” M. R. D. Foot, Special Operations Executive 1940– 1946 (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1984), 19. 41. Harrisson, World Within, 173. SOE provided no language or culture training prior to deployment to Borneo; Harrisson was actually the only person who knew anything about Borneo on the entire staff. 42. Joint Publication 3–05, Special Operations (Washington, DC: Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2014), II-8. 43. Tony Schwalm, Guerrilla Factory: The Making of Special Forces Officers, the Green Berets (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2012), 129. 44. Mark Boyatt, “Special Forces: Who Are We and What Are We?” Special Warfare (Summer 1998): 36. 45. Joint Publication 3–05, II-9. Italics added. There is a large literature on indigenous forces in warfare, such as David K. Moore, Tribal Soldiers of Vietnam: the Effects of Unconventional Warfare on Tribal Populations (Bloomington, IN: Xlibris, 2007); Andrew James Birtle, U.S. Army Counterinsurgency and Contingency Operations Doctrine, 1860–1941 (Washington, DC: U.S. Army Center for Military History, 1998); Thomas W. Dunlay, Wolves for the Blue Soldiers: Indian Scouts and Auxiliaries with the United States Army, 1860–90 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1982); Robert M. Cassidy, Counterinsurgency and the Global War on Terror: Military Culture and Irregular War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). 46. Jessica Turnley, Cross-Cultural Competence and Small Groups: Why SOF Are the Way SOF Are (Hurlburt Field, FL: Joint Special Operations University Press, 2011), 14. 47. Brigadier General Bennet Sacolick, “Character and the Special Forces Soldier,” Small Wars Journal, 2008. Available at: http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/journal/docs-temp/127-sacolick.pdf. 48. See, for example, Harry F. Wolcott, Art of Fieldwork (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 1995); Paul Riesman, Freedom in Fulani Social Life: An Introspective Ethnography, trans. Martha Fuller (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1977 [1974 French ed.]), 151–153; Richard Chaney, “Cultural Transmission from the Native’s Point of View,” Anthropology & Education Quarterly 15, no. 4 (Winter 1984). 49. Clifford Geertz and Alfred Kroeber, quoted in Henrika Kuklick, “Personal Equations: Reflections on the History of Fieldwork, with Special Reference to Sociocultural Anthropology,” Isis 102, no. 1 (March 2011): 31. 50. See also Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011); Jonah

Lehrer, How We Decide (New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin, 2009). 51. Gary Klein, Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 31. 52. Joseph W. Pfeifer and James L. Merlo, “The Decisive Moment: The Science of Decision Making Under Stress,” in Leadership in Dangerous Situations: A Handbook for the Armed Forces, Emergency Services, and First Responders, edited by Patrick Sweeney, Michael Matthews and Paul Lester (Annapolis, VA: Naval Institute Press, 2011). 53. Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000 [1983]), 167. 54. John Pimlott, “The British Experience,” in Roots of Counter-Insurgency: Armies and Guerrilla Warfare, 1900– 45, edited by I. F. W. Beckett (London: Blandford Press, 1988), 21. 55. Sun Tzu, Art of War (New York, NY: Delacorte Press, 1983), 32. 56. David C. Thomas and Mark F. Peterson, Cross-Cultural Management: Essential Concepts (Los Angeles, CA: Sage, 2014), 203. 57. Dunlay, Wolves for the Blue Soldiers, 91–92. 58. Jean-Michel Chapoulie, “Everett C. Hughes and the Development of Fieldwork in Sociology,” in Qualitative Research Methods, edited by Paul Atkinson and Sara Delamont (London: Sage, 2011), 309. 59. “All I got out of it was a great deal of experience in carrying a two-gallon tin of kerosene two hundred miles,” wrote Harrisson, “and a great contempt for the toughness of rowing men and the scientificness of lecturers in botany when faced with months of similarity and sunshine.” Harrisson, “Remembered Jungle,” 14. 60. Ibid., 12–13. 61. Ibid., 11. 62. For a history, see Robert Payne, White Rajahs of Sarawak (Sydney: Oxford University Press, 1987). 63. Harrisson, World Within, 152. 64. Ibid., 154. 65. 48 scientific papers were published as a result of the Sarawak expedition alone. Heimann, Most Offending Soul Alive, 36. 66. Harrisson, “Remembered Jungle,” 61. 67. David Kaplan and Robert A. Manners, “Anthropology: Some Old Themes and New Directions,” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 27, no. 1 (Spring 1971): 221. 68. Kuklick, “Personal Equations,” 33. 69. For a detailed account of the shift from naturalism to ethnography, see Kuklick, “Personal Equations.” 70. George W. Stocking, editor, Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983). 71. Malinowski, “Practical Anthropology,” 25. 72. Social scientists from a variety of disciplines now recognize that research on the ground provides a “much deeper understanding of the empirical context” which increases the validity and reliability of research. For example, see Henry Wai-Chung Yeung, “Practicing New Economic Geographies: A Methodological Examination,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 93, no. 2 (June 2003). 73. A. C. Haddon, quoted in Kuklick, “Personal Equations,” 15, fn. 51. 74. Kuklick, “Personal Equations,” 13. 75. Ibid., 20; Bronislaw Malinoski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (New York, NY: Dutton, 1961 [1922]), 20. 76. Judy G. Chizek, Military Transformation: Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 31 May 2002), 16. 77. Eric Olson, “2011 SOCOM Posture Statement Before the 112th Congress House Armed Services Committee” (Washington, DC, 2 March 2011). Available at: http://armedservices.house.gov/index.cfm/files/serve? File_id=87e34357-bd5d-4d29-989b-82d6edbe3635. 78. Eric V. Larson, Derek Eaton, Brian Nichiporuk and Thomas S. Szayna, Assessing Irregular Warfare: A Framework for Intelligence Analysis (Washington, DC: RAND, 2008); Bruce Berkowitz and Allan Goodman, Best Truth: Intelligence in the Information Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). 79. William G. Boykin and Scott Swanson, “Operationalizing Intelligence,” Special Warfare Bulletin (May 2008). Available at: http://www.army.mil/professional-Writing/volumes/volume6/june_2008/6_08_1_pf.html; Michael Flynn, James Sisco and David C. Ellis, “Left of Bang: The Value of Sociocultural Analysis in Today’s Environment,” Prism 3, no. 4 (2012). 80. Michael Flynn, Matt Pottinger and Paul D. Batchelor, Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan (Washington, DC: Center for New American Security, January 2010). Available at: http://www.cnas.org/files/documents/publications/AfghanIntel_Flynn_Jan2010_code507_voices.pdf. 81. Robert W. Noonan Jr. and Brad T. Andrew, “Army Intelligence Provides the Knowledge Edge,” Army (April 2002). Available at: http://www.ausa.org/publications/armymagazine/archive/2002/4/Documents/Noonan_Andrew_0402.pdf. 82. Boykin and Swanson, “Operationalizing Intelligence.” On the ground such local knowledge collected by combatants has tremendous value: during the Vietnam War, for example, over 50 per cent of all ground intelligence reports in the country came from Special Forces sources. Francis J. Kelley, US Army Special Forces 1961–1971 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Army, 1973), 16, 87. 83. This is not a new concept. See, for example, Brian McAllister Linn, US Army and Counterinsurgency in the Philippine War, 1899–1902 (Charlotte, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 84. Perhaps ironically, given their mutual animosity, the disciplines of anthropology and military intelligence even use the same lexicon: ‘informants’ offering ‘revealing’ (impressionistic and unverified) ‘evidence’ to fieldworkers who have ‘penetrated’ local culture, gathering ‘local knowledge’. 85. James D. Campbell, Making Riflemen from Mud: Restoring the Army’s Culture of Irregular Warfare (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, 2007), 20. 86. Indigenous forces can be incorporated into the U.S. military machine in a variety of ways. For example, indigenous people have been used as scouts, such as the Native American scouts of the Frontier Wars. See

Allen R. Millett and Peter Maslowski, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States (New York, NY: The Free Press, 1994), 12–13, 42–44, 252–57. In other cases, local people comprised segregated “native” military units within larger armies. See Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa: White Man’s Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876–1912 (New York, NY: Avon Books, 1991); Charles Allen, Soldier Sahibs: the Daring Adventurers who Tamed India’s Northwest Frontier (New York, NY: Carroll and Graf, 2000); Cynthia Enloe, Ethnic Soldiers: State Security in Divided Societies (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1980). In unconventional warfare (such as the type of campaign that Tom Harrisson undertook with the Dyaks) indigenous people have been recruited, trained, armed, and supported in combat by Special Forces. See Oscar Salemink, “Mois and Maquis: The Invention and Appropriation of Vietnam’s Montagnards from Sabatier to the CIA,” in Colonial Situations: Essays on the Contextualization of Ethnographic Knowledge, edited by George W. Stocking, Jr. (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991); Campbell, Making Riflemen from Mud. 87. See, for example, James F. Powers, Filling Special Operations Gaps with Civilian Expertise (Hurlburt Field, FL: Joint Special Operations University Press, December 2006). 88. Technically, HTS research was not ‘intelligence,’ given the narrow scope of how it is defined in the U.S. Whether HTS research should have been considered intelligence is beyond the scope of this chapter. See Montgomery McFate and Steve Fondacaro, “Reflections on the Human Terrain System During the First Four Years,” Prism 2, no. 4 (2011). 89. See, for example, the story of Paula Loyd. Vanessa Gezari, Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2013). Partially in reaction to the development of the HTS, a debate developed inside the Pentagon. Should the military hire outside experts or should it develop its own experts in uniform? Those who opposed the HTS often suggested that the military ought to establish a persistent presence in a remote area, and then use the soldiers presumably stationed there as collectors of “ethnographic intelligence.” Ben Connable, “All Our Eggs in a Broken Basket,” Military Review (March–April 2009); Anna Simons, Improving Human Intelligence in the War on Terrorism: The Need for an Ethnographic Capability (Washington, DC: Office of Net Assessment, 2004). On the other hand, while using military manpower to conduct social science research on the ground may be an optimal solution for a small, selective, highly-trained, language competent and regionally geo-located force, it is difficult to imagine that the Army or Marine Corps could implement such an “ethnographic intelligence” program. Among the many hurdles would be acquiring the manpower with the requisite skills in language, research, and writing; training them in social science data collection and analysis; reforming the personnel system to accommodate long-term nonwarfighting occupational specialties; preventing these soldiers from ‘going native’ (a topic discussed later in the chapter), and so on. 90. Heimann, Most Offending Soul Alive, 116. 91. Harrisson, World Within, 158. 92. Harrisson, quoted in Heimann, Most Offending Soul Alive, 12. 93. Harrisson, World Within, 158. 94. Heimann, Most Offending Soul Alive, 134. Subsequently, he worked as a lorry driver, an ice cream man, and a shop assistant. 95. Ibid., 132. 96. Ibid., 130. 97. H. Russell Bernard, editor Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (Lanham, MD: Rowman Altamira, 2011), 7. 98. Collecting reams of data may reveal patterns or it may make researchers frustrated with information overload. One of Harrisson’s friends complained that so much detail was unnecessary and irrelevant, telling Harrisson that “You might as well list the items on a person’s mantelpiece.” Harrisson’s response was to direct Mass Observation volunteers to investigate what people put on their mantelpieces. Heimann, Most Offending Soul Alive, 140. 99. As a means of reducing the complexity of the battlespace, headquarters units tend to quantify reality, including the number of enemy dead, number of bombing runs, number of schools built, and so on. Reducing complexity yet further, doctrine importunes military commanders to use the linear seven-step military decision making-process to determine a rational course of action, based on available ‘facts’ and ‘data’. But in the battlespace, the rational, quantitative, quasi-scientific military decision-making process often becomes so truncated that it cannot be recognized as the linear process prescribed by doctrine. 100. Years ago, for example, a Marine Corps officer told me about the IED attack in Iraq that destroyed much of the left side of his skull: “I had a hunch it was there, but we didn’t stop.” As Gary Klein argues, simultaneous recognition of the pattern (rocks by the side of the road not covered with dust) and the solution (stop the MRAP) may feel like intuition but actually comes from the conjunction of experience and learning. Gary Klein, Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). 101. Ahmed Rashid, quoted in Simpson, War from the Ground Up, 190–1. 102. Ibid., 5–6. 103. David Kilcullen, Accidental Guerilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One (London: Hurst, 2009). Alternatively, a multiplicity of well-armed soldiers with different histories, beliefs, organizations, networks, and motivations get lumped together as ISAF. 104. Napoleon Bonaparte, quoted in Thomas R. Phillips editor, Roots of Strategy, vol. 1 (Mechanicsburg: Stackpole Book, 1985), 440. 105. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Michael Howard and Peter Paret, editors (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984 [1832]), 112. 106. Michael Handel, Masters of War: Classical Strategic Thought (London: Frank Cass, 1996), 142. 107. Clausewitz, On War, 578. 108. Napoleon Bonaparte, quoted in Michael B. Colegrove, editor, Distant Voices: Listening to the Leadership Lessons of the Past (Lincoln, NE: Universe, 2005), 24. 109. Field Manual 3–0, Operations (Washington, DC: Department of the Army, 2008), 7–57. “Situational understanding is the product of applying analysis and judgment to relevant information to determine the relationships among the mission variables to facilitate decision making.” In the scientific literature, situation

awareness is often defined as “the perception of the elements in the environment within a volume of time and space, the comprehension of their meaning and the projection of their status in the near future.” Mica R. Endsley, “Design and Evaluation for Situation Awareness Enhancement,” Proceedings of the Human Factors Society 32nd Annual Meeting (Santa Monica, CA: Human Factors Society, 1988). 110. Mica R. Endsley, “Theoretical Underpinnings of Situation Awareness: A Critical Review,” in Situation Awareness Analysis and Measurement, edited by Mica R. Endsley and D. J. Garland (Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000), 3, 4. Emphasis added. 111. The goal was to capture the incredible heterogeneity of ordinary English life without changing people’s behavior by observing them. Thus, instead of using students or scientists to conduct research, Harrisson recruited factory workers, football players, and shop girls who could blend into the surrounding environment. These volunteers observed diverse topics such as the behavior of people at war memorials, the geographical distribution and diffusion of dirty jokes, the shouts and gestures of angry motorists, sexual behavior in public at holiday resorts, and attitudes toward contemporary art. Heimann, Most Offending Soul Alive, 143. 112. Ibid., 133. 113. If the word “online” is omitted from the generally accepted definition of crowd-sourcing, it could easily apply to Mass Observation: “Crowdsourcing is a type of participative online activity in which an individual, an institution, a non-profit organization, or company proposes to a group of individuals of varying knowledge, heterogeneity, and number, via a flexible open call, the voluntary undertaking of a task. The undertaking of the task, of variable complexity and modularity, and in which the crowd should participate bringing their work, money, knowledge and/or experience, always entails mutual benefit. The user will receive the satisfaction of a given type of need, be it economic, social recognition, self-esteem, or the development of individual skills, while the crowd-sourcer will obtain and utilize to their advantage that what the user has brought to the venture, whose form will depend on the type of activity undertaken.” Enrique Estellés-Arolas and Fernando González-Ladrón-de-Guevara, “Towards an Integrated Crowdsourcing Definition,” Journal of Information Science 38, no. 2 (2012). 114. See, for example, Daren C. Brabham, “Crowdsourcing the Public Participation Process for Planning Projects,” Planning Theory 8, no. 3 (August 2009). Before Mass Observation, scientific research had been the prerogative of the elite. Now, anyone could participate; in fact, in many cases it was actually more beneficial to have a housewife, plumber or coal miner observe life than a trained scientist. One of the Grand Poobahs of anthropology, Raymond Firth, disapproved of Mass Observation’s democratization of science. How could untrained, uneducated volunteers possibly observe as carefully as a scientist? On the other hand, Malinowski supported Mass Observation, noting that “the basic idea of the movement is 100 percent right.” He warned critics such as Firth that if you “Make a parody of a scientific school you become the godfather of its fame. Psycho-analysis has grown and thrived on jokes … so has behaviorism and even relativity. One good travesty is worth stacks of review or volumes of pedantic criticism. Malinowski, quoted in Heimann, Most Offending Soul Alive, 146. 115. Without the aid of computers, such a goal proved impossible to meet; the problem for Mass Observation was always too much data. Heimann, Most Offending Soul Alive, 144–145. 116. Ibid., 166. 117. Ibid., 162–163. 118. Tom Harrisson, Living Through the Blitz (London: Collins, 1976), 13. 119. Ibid., 22. 120. “Collections were essential to give a basis for scientific research,” Harrisson wrote. “Linnaeus made Darwin possible … but the constant accumulation of the same fact is a waste of scientists in a world which is clamouring for a wider extension of science, arts, behavior and mind.” Harrisson, “Remembered Jungle,” 22. 121. Harrisson, World Within, 157. 122. Harrisson, “Remembered Jungle,” 13. 123. “War is the main feature of Big Namba life. Its ramifications are endless. One lives always in the shadow of war .… As in all decent war, women are at the bottom of it; though they supply rather the superficial motive, fanning the flame of endless immemorial feuds.” Tom Harrisson, Savage Civilization (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1937), 401. Not only did the Big Nambas exist in an almost perpetual state of war, they also ate their dead adversaries. In the year Harrisson lived on Malekula, thirty men were killed by the Big Nambas but only seven were actually eaten. Typically, the victim’s body was slung on a pole and tied with bush cord ropes. Back in the village, the men drummed and danced all night, chanting the story of their victory in minute detail. At dawn, the body was beaten with hardwood clubs to break the bones, cut into large pieces, wrapped in leaves, and placed in a stone pit oven. Eating the adversary transferred power from the enemy to the victor, raising their social ranking. Although it is unclear whether Harrisson directly participated, he noted that “the taste is like that of tender pork, rather sweet … In general a small helping is enough, for this is a very filling food. The inner part of the thighs and the head are the greater delicacies.” Harrisson, Savage Civilization, 404. After the feast, left-over body parts were typically sent to allied communities, who then became obliged to reciprocate. Not only were the Big Nambas warrior cannibals, but they also practiced male pedophilic homosexuality. “This homosexuality system is ancient, with its own technique and nomenclature, relationship regulations as to which boys you may like. Each man has his boy, if he can get one; he guards him more jealously than his female wife .… Many men who have boys have one or more wives and children .… The women have developed a parallel pleasure system of their own.” Harrisson, Savage Civilization, 410. 124. Harrisson, Living Among Cannibals, 13. 125. Ibid., 20. 126. Harrisson, Savage Civilization, 399. 127. Harrisson, Living Among Cannibals, 21. 128. Ibid., 23. 129. Harrisson described himself as “a kava booze-artist of first rank.” Harrisson, Savage Civilization, 396. 130. Quoted in Ibid, 348. 131. Ibid., 350–360. Harrisson compares Big Namba art to the work of Paul Klee, also referring to Freud’s notion of the preconscious mind. 132. Harrisson, Savage Civilization, 424. Hoping to help people of Malekula, Harrisson agreed to an appointment

as acting district agent for six months. He wrote a report highly critical of the colonial government, observing that much of the violence attributed to the “savage nature” of the islanders was “due to illegal operations of whites with guns, drink, woman-stealing, non-repatriation [from forced labor in Australia] and illegal recruiting [for plantation labor in Australia].” Harrisson, Savage Civilization, 420. Harrisson reported all this up the chain, requested medial help for local people, urged control of missionary activities, argued for the prevention of forced labor, and so on. With the exception of passing an ordinance preventing the recruiting of women for forced labor on Australian plantations, most of Harrisson’s efforts to reform the government and economic system came to naught. 133. “Australia, with the full knowledge of the British Government during nearly twenty years, during the period in which we featured as the greatest opponents of slavery, made no serious attempt to control a traffic which is a permanent blot on our record of decent concern for the underdog. After reading all that is written, especially the official correspondence filed in the Record Office, I find it very hard to believe any more of the stuff we British talk about developing and protecting native races, governing them for their own good. I used to think that at least the high officials and politicians believed in such fine words.” Harrisson, Savage Civilization, 204– 5. 134. Harrisson continues: “When these are understood at first hand, much that to the scholar in New York or Munich seems illogical, prelogical, or something of the sort, turns out to be an ordinary part of the life of the people who lead it. While straightforward misunderstanding results from our easy confidence, our belief that we are the only civilised ones. Thus, many observers have accused the Hebridean of ingratitude. When a Hebridean is given a present, he shows no gratitude. The explanation is simple; he shows none because he feels none. In this society … the exchange of presents has been raised into a system of rivalry. … What is a miserable bushman to do if a white man gives him, for no reason at all, a very nice axe? He cannot repay. He loses face. So he is justly angry. And the white is justly angry.” Harrisson, Savage Civilization, 343. 135. Harrisson, Living Among Cannibals, 11–12. 136. Harrisson, Savage Civilization, 343. 137. Ibid., 430. 138. When the Z Force doctor arrived in the interior, he was horrified to hear about the prohibition on shoes. As Harrisson explained, “This estimable and highly qualified medico flatly refused to comply with my footloose order. He said that as a professional medical man, he could not agree to expose himself—or permit other personnel to be exposed—to the dangers of hook worm and other diseases attacking through the soles of the feet. There followed one of the most macabre military arguments.… But for an hour or two it was a question whether or not I should shoot this gentleman, quietly, in the jungle?” Harrisson, World Within, 231. 139. Heimann, Most Offending Soul Alive, 192. 140. Ibid., 193. 141. Quoted in ibid., 194. 142. Ibid. 143. Ken Watson, Implementing an Integrated Approach to Train SOF for the FID Mission (Hurlburt Field, FL: Joint Special Operations University Press, 2011), 50. 144. Anna Simons, “The Military Advisor as Warrior-King and Other ‘Going Native’ Temptations,” in Anthropology and the United States Military, edited by Pamela R. Frese and Margaret C. Harrell (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 145. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937), 270. 146. Liza Crihfield Dalby, Geisha (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983). See also Paul Stoller and Cheryl Olkes, In Sorcery’s Shadow: A Memoir of Apprenticeship among the Songhay of Niger (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Robert R. Desjarlais, Body and Emotion: The Aesthetics of Illness and Healing in Nepal (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992). For a critical view, see Mary Louise Pratt, “Fieldwork in Common Places,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986). 147. Barbara Tedlock, “From Participant Observation to the Observation of Participation: The Emergence of Narrative Ethnography,” Journal of Anthropological Research 47, no. 1 (Spring 1991). 148. For a deeply personal account, see Katherine P. Ewing, “Dreams from a Saint: Anthropological Atheism and the Temptation to Believe,” American Anthropologist 96, no. 3 (September 1994): 571. 149. Don Kulick, “Theory in Furs: Masochist Anthropology,” Current Anthropology 47, no. 6 (December 2006): 942–3. 150. See, for example, Melville J. Herskovits, Acculturation: The Study of Culture Contact (New York, NY: J. J. Augustin, 1938). 151. Robert Redfield, R. Linton and Melville J. Herskovits, “Memorandum for the Study of Acculturation,” American Anthropologist 38, no. 1 (1936). 152. Raymond H. C. Teske, Jr. and Bardin H. Nelson, “Acculturation and Assimilation: A Clarification,” American Ethnologist 1, no. 2 (May 1974): 354. 153. Bruce P. Dohrenwend and Robert J. Smith, “Toward a Theory of Acculturation,” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 18, no. 1 (1962); George Devereux and Edwin M. Loeb, “Antagonistic Acculturation,” American Sociological Review 8, no. 2 (1943). The most extreme variety of coercive acculturation is “culture conquest,” such as the Spanish conquest of the New World, in which a government of one cultural group “has some degree of military and political control over the recipient people, and … this control is utilized to bring about planned changes in the way of life of this group.” George Foster, Culture and Conquest (Chicago, IL: Quadrangle Books, 1960), 11. The non-dominant group often adopted certain cultural elements imposed by the dominant group. See J. W. Berry, “Acculturation Stress,” in Readings in Ethnic Psychology, edited P. Balls Organista, K. M. Chun, and G. Marin (New York, NY: Routledge, 1998). However, often the meaning of the object, idea, or institution is changed. Linton, for example, notes that although people can be forced to adopt certain external cultural features, accompanying values and attitudes cannot be forced. Furthermore, even though cultural elements may be accepted by a dominated group, they frequently are adapted to fit the culture of this group and their cultural meaning may be changed. Ralph Linton, Acculturation in Seven American Indian Tribes (New York, NY: Appleton-Century, 1940), 501–20. See also Richard Thurnwald, “The Psychology of Acculturation,” American Anthropologist 34, no. 4 (1932).

154. In 1972, for example, Eric Wolf complained that cultures were treated by anthropologists as “bounded objects … like so many hard and round billiard balls.” Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1972), 6, 14. 155. Talal Asad, editor, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1973); Gerard Leclerc, Anthropologie et colonialisme, essai sur l’histoire de I’africanisme [Anthropology and Colonialism: An Essay on the History of Africanist Anthropology] (Paris: Fayard, 1972). 156. Lila Abu-Lughod, “Writing against Culture,” in Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, edited by Richard Fox (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1991), 142–3; Joel Kahn, “Culture: Demise or Resurrection?” Critique of Anthropology 9, no. 2 (1989). 157. “Whereas the Boasians took cultural difference as given and emphasized people’s ability to overcome it through acculturation and transcultural insight,” Ira Bashkow has noted, “anthropologists in our time have become skeptical of the concept of ‘cultural difference’ in general and wary of specifying cultural contrasts in particular cases for fear of overstating them. Our anxiety stems from our heightened awareness of the negative dimension of essentialized otherness and exoticism.” Ira Bashkow, “A Neo-Boasian Conception of Cultural Boundaries,” American Anthropologist 106, no. 3 (September 2004): 454. 158. See for example, J. S. Black, H. B. Gregersen and Mark Mendenhall, Global Assignments: Successfully Expatriating and Repatriating International Managers (San Francisco, CA: Josey-Bass, 1992); Mark Mendenhall and Gary Oddou, “Dimensions of Expatriate Acculturation: A Review,” Academy of Management Review 10, no. 1 (1985); P. Christopher Earley and Soon Ang, Cultural Intelligence: Individual Interactions Across Cultures (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). 159. The idea of a scale comes from Daniel Trop. Discussing British experiences in the New World and New Zealand, Trop pointed out that “some Europeans entered native society willingly, while others were dragged in kicking and screaming; some adopted just external symbols of native life—clothing for example, while others seem to have genuinely internalized a native world view as well as life style; and while some [of] those who went native returned to European society within a few months, others never went back.” Daniel B. Trop, “Going Native in New Zealand and America: Comparing Pakeha Maori and White Indians,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 31, no. 3 (2003): 1. 160. Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire, and the Imagining of Masculinities (London: Routledge, 1994), 186. 161. Max Boot, “What Makes Some Soldiers ‘Special’,” Tulsa World, 10 Nov 2002, G3. Similarly, Russian soldiers garrisoned in the Caucasus in the 1850s abandoned their regulation uniforms designed for drilling in favor of the local costume which was warmer and more practical for riding. Senior commanders from St. Petersburg were shocked to see Russian soldiers dressed in the shabby native outfits. But by the middle of the nineteenth century, the cherkesska and burka became the official uniform of the Russian army in the Caucasus. Tactical considerations in the physical terrain also led Russians in the Caucasus to adopt the local breed of horse, which was “absolutely indispensable in the wild mountains of Daghestan” since they were familiar with how to traverse steep terrain. Mikail Mamedov, “‘Going Native’ in the Caucasus: Problems of Russian Identity, 1801– 64,” Russian Review 67, no. 2 (April 2008): 280, 275, 279. Similarly, 5th Group of U.S. Special Forces working with the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan in 2001 found that the “shaggy and thin-legged” horses “descended from the beasts Genghis Khan had ridden out of Uzbekistan” were “built for mountain walking.” Doug Stanton, Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan (New York, NY: Scriber, 2010), 121. 162. Boot, “What Makes Some Soldiers ‘Special’,” G3. (Additionally, as I witnessed first-hand, growing a beard reduced the amount of sexual harassment an attractive male junior NCO experienced from local Afghans.) 163. Harrisson, World Within, 220. Participation in rituals may solidify an alliance with local nationals. During the Vietnam War, Special Forces Captain Vernon Gillespie participated in sacrificial ritual performed by a Montagnard Rhade sorcerer to unite him with his Montagnard and Vietnamese counterparts so that they would be protected during the Montagnard FULRO rebellion. Howard Sochurek, “American Special Forces in Vietnam,” National Geographic (January 1965). 164. W. J. McGee, “Piratical Acculturation,” American Anthropologist 11, no. 8 (August 1898): 245. 165. Devereux and Loeb, “Antagonistic Acculturation,” 142. 166. Ralph Linton, “The Distinctive Aspects of Acculturation,” in Acculturation in Seven American Indian Tribes, edited by Ralph Linton (New York, NY: Appleton-Century, 1940), 498. 167. Maurice V. Poitras, “Adoptable Afghan Customs or Practices in a Military Operations Environment” (master’s thesis, School of Advanced Military Studies, 2009), 30. 168. During the Vietnam War, for example, respect for Montagnard beliefs about the spirit world caused an Australian military advisor to alter his operational planning: “they know all the ancestors that have died and you have got to be very careful. They live in some valleys you can’t go into. That means you’ve got to spend half a day walking around the ridge to get in, because people won’t go down there.” Kelly Fisher and Kate Hutchings, “Making Sense of Cultural Distance for Military Expatriates Operating in an Extreme Context,” Journal of Organizational Behavior 34, no. 6 (2013): 804. 169. Acculturation stress may include “psychological toll,” which refers to the depleting and burdensome feeling when cross-cultural code switching elicits high levels of negative emotion, or disillusionment, which is the feeling that the cross-cultural “experiment in friendship, i.e., in trust” has failed. Robert B. Edgerton, “Some Dimensions of Disillusionment in Culture Contact,” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 21, no. 3 (Autumn 1965). 170. William P. Yarborough, “Unconventional Warfare: One Military View,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 341 (May 1962): 5. Italics added. 171. Major Jim Gant, “One Tribe at a Time: A Strategy for Success in Afghanistan” (2009), 22. Available at: http://blog.stevenpressfield.com. 172. Jody M. Prescott, “Training in the Law of Armed Conflict—A NATO Perspective,” Journal of Military Ethics 7, no. 1 (2008). 173. As Kelly Fisher has noted in the case of Australian soldiers training South Vietnamese soldiers, “some advisers drew upon their self-identity as Australian soldiers and did not condone ethical violations, despite potentially negative repercussions for their career .… Still others adopted an ethnorelativistic perspective by rationalizing the use of local force upon other locals, or a pragmatic approach by weighing situation

specifics.” Fisher and Hutchings, “Making Sense,” 801. 174. Avan Jassawalla, Ciara Truglia and Jennifer Garvey, “Cross-Cultural Conflict and Expatriate Manager Adjustment: An Exploratory Study,” Management Decision 42, no. 7 (2004). 175. Berry, “Acculturation Stress.” See also Fintan O’Toole, White Savage: William Johnson and the Invention of America (New York, NY: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2005). 176. Gant, “One Tribe at a Time,” 8. 177. J. W. Berry, “Acculturation as Varieties of Adaptation,” in Acculturation: Theory, Models, And Some New Findings, edited by A. M. Padilla (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1980). 178. “Terminate with Extreme Prejudice,” Apocalyse Now. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola (1979). 179. Europeans who went native during the colonial era “cast away the garb of civilization,” married local women, and cut their ties to home. At this point, “racial and cultural identity [was] blurred to such an extent” that unaffected Europeans were “unable to discern the difference between the white savage and the black savage.” Richard Eves, “Going Troppo: Images of White Savagery, Denegation and Race in Turn-of-theCentury Colonial Fiction of the Pacific,” History and Anthropology 11, no. 2–3 (1999): 3. 180. Sarah E. Simons, “Social Assimilation,” American Journal of Sociology 6 (1901): 800. 181. Patrick James Christian, Combat Advisor’s Guide to Tribal Engagement: History, Law and War as Operational Elements (Boca Raton, FL: Universal Publishers, 2011), 55. 182. Ibid., 54. 183. Ibid., 52. 184. Joseph Eaton, “Controlled Acculturation: A Survival Technique of the Hutterites,” American Sociological Review 17, no. 3 (1952). 185. Christian, Combat Advisor’s Guide, 54. 186. From the perspective of the host community, a soldier ‘gone native’ defeats the purpose of his presence in the first place: “A combat advisor who over-identifies with his ‘client’, the tribe, loses the balance between local and national/international that is so valuable to the tribe and its leaders.” Ibid., 55. 187. After the cessation of hostilities, the Japanese relinquished their territorial claim on Borneo. The Dutch then claimed the emancipated territory, which was actually occupied by Australian forces in the form of Z Special. To resolve this confusing situation, Harrisson was called to a meeting with a Dutch general and given the choice either to become an officer in the Dutch Army subject to Dutch orders and regulations, or withdraw his forces entirely from Borneo. Harrisson, World Within, 312. 188. Ibid. 189. “So far as I was concerned,” Harrisson wrote, “the immediate effect of peace threatened to be disastrous. I was being ordered to stop fighting, disband all irregular forces, send out immediately all my Australian personnel and as soon as possible evacuate my own headquarters. At the same time, some thousands of Japanese were either known or supposed to be milling about and moving inland … I was, in brief, being ordered to abandon the whole island and its people to the apparent mercy of by now angry and always potentially vicious enemies.” Ibid., 307. 190. Quoted in Heimann, Most Offending Soul Alive, 210. 191. Harrisson, World Within, 328. 192. Ibid., 330. 193. Joint Publication 3–05, II-9. Italics added. 194. John Jandora, “War and Culture: A Neglected Relation,” Armed Forces and Society 25, no. 4 (Summer 1999): 555. There is a large literature on the ‘way of war’, including some lesser known books such as Robert Harkavy and Stephanie G. Neuman, Warfare and the Third World (New York, NY: Palgrave, 2001); Adrian R. Lewis, American Culture of War (New York, NY: Routledge, 2012). 195. T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph (New York, NY: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2013), 189. 196. Lawrence, Seven Pillars, 191. 197. He writes: “it dawned on me that we had won the Hejaz war. Out of every thousand square miles of Hejaz nine hundred and ninety-nine were now free.” Ibid., 189. 198. Ibid., 194. 199. Ibid., 224. 200. Ibid., 194. 201. Ibid. 202. In the employment of surrogate or indigenous forces, an enemy may be shared but objectives may diverge. Thus, although the Hejaz Arabs shared a common enemy with the British, their strategic objectives were different. “The British sought to establish British hegemony in the Middle East, while the Arabs sought an independent Arabia. D. Jonathan White, “Legitimacy and Surrogate Warfare” in Contemporary Security Challenges: Irregular Warfare and Indirect Approaches, edited by Richard D. Newton, Travis L. Homiak, Kelly H. Smith, Isaac J. Peltier, and D. Jonathan White (Hurlburt Field, FL: Joint Special Operations University Press, February 2009), 90. 203. Harrisson, World Within, 221. Unlike the coastal dwellers, the upland tribes had not been assaulted, harassed, or taxed by the Japanese. 204. As the war drew to a close, the Japanese stragglers suffered because of a lack of salt. “Not wise to the ways of the jungle, they did not know how to extract [salt] from a wild palm .… Soldiers were hanging themselves, along the way … thinking of home and feeling no salt in the bones. Some of them left pathetic notes with their bones, so quickly stripped by the blood (and salt) hungry mammals and insects of Borneo.” Harrisson, World Within, 327–328. 205. Ibid., 285. 206. Ibid., 221. 207. Ibid., 207. 208. Ibid., 208.

209. Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 210. John Arquilla and Theodore Karasik, “Chechnya: A Glimpse of Future Conflict?” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 22, no. 3 (1999): 211. 211. Harrisson, World Within, 263. 212. Ibid., 250. 213. Ibid., 263. 214. Ibid. 215. The connection between hunting and war is both deep and old: the first warrior bands were the same group of men who were hunting game for their community. Indeed, the earliest warriors in recorded literature from the Epic of Gilgamesh were warriors and hunters of dangerous beasts. Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War (New York, NY: Holt, 1997), 123. 216. Harrisson, World Within, 285. 217. Ibid. 218. Ibid., 88. 219. Ibid., 266. 220. Ibid., 254. 221. Ibid., 266. 222. Ibid. 223. Ibid., 104. 224. Ibid., 95. 225. Harrisson, “Remembered Jungle,” 27. 226. Harrisson, World Within, 104. 227. Ibid., 104–5. 228. Judith Heimann, Airmen and the Headhunters (New York, NY: Harcourt, 2007), 51–52. 229. Harrisson, World Within, 90. 230. Heimann, Most Offending Soul Alive, 186. 231. Harrisson, “Remembered Jungle,” 39. As Harrisson noted, “It is only in Sarawak that the native is under Government control and yet outside any noticeable European missionary or trader influence.” 232. Harrisson, World Within, 90. 233. Ibid., 91–92. 234. Ibid., 28. 235. Harrisson, “Remembered Jungle,” 27. 236. Heimann, Most Offending Soul Alive, 203. 237. Ibid. 238. Ibid., 204. Not all of the westerners in Borneo during the war found themselves on the right side of the Dyaks. In November 1944, a B-24 bomber was shot down by the Japanese and its parachuting crew were scattered across the interior. Some of these American airmen were discovered by the friendly Murut people and eventually rescued by Harrisson. The other half of the crew tried to cross through North Borneo and were captured by the Tagal people and sold to the Japanese. The Tagals, however, were allowed to keep the Americans’ heads as payment. Among the Tagal—unlike the Kelabit—“head-hunting rites often do not require possession of a whole head. When new head material is required for any ceremony or circumstances, a small fresh piece frequently suffices.” Thus, the Americans’ heads were divided and distributed to many different tribes in North Borneo, making post-war recovery of KIAs very difficult. Harrisson, World Within, 241. 239. Ibid., 95. 240. Ibid., 94. 241. Ibid., 266. 242. Harrisson, “Remembered Jungle,” 29. 243. Heimann, Most Offending Soul Alive, 170. 244. Ibid., 169. 245. Harrisson, World Within, 268. 246. Harrisson wrote that they were so deep in the jungle and so segregated from regular forces “that it was virtually impossible for anyone outside our unit to know what we were up to, in detail, in the interior.” Ibid., 307. 247. Yarborough, “Unconventional Warfare,” 5. Italics added. 248. Harrisson, World Within, 208. Harrisson’s status as Rajah would probably not fall within U.S. regulatory boundaries. Department of Defense Manual 1348.33, Manual of Military Decorations and Awards (31 October 2013). 249. Harrisson, “Remembered Jungle,” 61–62. 250. Harrisson, Savage Civilization, 343–44. 251. Harrisson, World Within, 258. 252. Heimann, Most Offending Soul Alive, 344. Although neither anthropologists nor the Special Warfare community remember his name, Hollywood could not resist such a juicy story. In 1988, Pierre Schoendoerffer’s novel L’Adieu au Roi (Paris: Grasset, 1969), based on Harrisson’s Borneo escapades, was adapted as the film Farewell to the King starring Nick Nolte. In 2007, David Attenborough hosted a BBC documentary called Tom Harrisson—The Barefoot Anthropologist. 253. Harrisson, World Within, 154. 254. Harrisson, Savage Civilization, 365. 6. JOHN USEEM AND GOVERNANCE OPERATIONS

1. Robert K. McKnight, “Proverbs of Palau,” Journal of American Folklore 81, no. 319 (January–March 1968): 18. 2. James B. McKee, “Obituary for John Useem,” Newsletter of the American Sociological Association 28, no. 8 (November 2000). 3. Andrea Useem, “Towards a Civil Society: Memory, History and the Enola Gay.” Available at: http://www.eliewieselfoundation.org/CM_Images/UploadedImages/WinnersEssays/Andrea_Useem.pdf. 4. Suzanne Falgout, Lin Poyer and Laurence M. Carucci, “‘The Greatest Hardship’: Micronesian Memories of World War II,” Isla: A Journal of Micronesia Studies 3, no. 2 (1995): 209. See also Dorothy E. Richard, Post War Military Government Era, 1945–1947, vol. 2, United States Naval Administration of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, 1957). 5. The island of Babeldaob was identified as the most suitable location. However, after conducting air reconnaissance over the island, the U.S. determined that taking the island from 37,000 Japanese troops would not be worth the cost. Karen R. George, “Through a Glass Darkly: Palau’s Passage Through War, 1944–1945,” Isla: A Journal of Micronesia Studies 3, no. 2 (1995): 318. 6. Action at Angaur, Palau 1945 (Washington, DC: Department of Defense). World War II Pacific film. Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZbM-FnX-S8. 7. George, “Through a Glass Darkly,” 318. 8. Ibid., 315. 9. Ibid., 317. 10. Ibid., 320. 11. Ibid., 321. 12. Ibid., 321–22. 13. Ibid., 322. 14. John Useem, “Changing Structure of a Micronesian Society,” American Anthropologist 47, no. 4 (October– December 1945): 580. 15. George, “Through a Glass Darkly,” 323. 16. Ibid., 322–323. 17. Useem, “Changing Structure,” 579. 18. George, “Through a Glass Darkly,” 325. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., 326. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 326. 24. Ibid., 324. 25. Useem, “Changing Structure,” 580. 26. John Useem, “Changing Economy and Rural Security in Massachusetts,” Agricultural History 16, no. 1 (January 1942): 29–40. 27. John Useem, Pierre Tangent and Ruth Useem, “Stratification in a Prairie Town,” American Sociological Review 7, no. 3 (June 1942). 28. See Carnes Lord, Proconsuls: Delegated Political-Military Leadership from Rome to America Today (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 29. Lawrence A. Yates, U.S. Military’s Experience in Stability Operations, 1789–2005 (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute Press, 2006); Stanley Sandler, Glad to See Them Come and Sorry to See Them Go: A History of US Army Tactical Civil Affairs/Military Government, 1775–1991 (Fort Bragg, NC: U.S. Army Special Operations Command, 1998). 30. James Dobbins, “Nation-Building: The Inescapable Responsibility of the World’s Only Superpower,” RAND Review (Summer 2003). Available at: http://www.rand.org/publications/randreview/issues/summer2003/nation.htm1/. 31. Only during the interwar years was any distinction drawn between military government and civil affairs. “As good a definition as any would probably he that civil affairs was military government conducted on one’s own or friendly territory, and military government was civil affairs conducted in enemy territory.” Earl F. Ziemke, US Army in the Occupation of Germany, 1944–1946 (Washington, DC: Center for Military History, 1975), 4, fn2. 32. Field Manual 27–5, Military Government and Civil Affairs (Washington, DC: U.S. War Department and U.S. Navy Department, 22 December 1943), 1. 33. The reasons for the demise of military government are many, including: Constitutional concerns about scope of military authority; hesitancy to assume the fiscal and administrative burden of occupation; and military dislike of post-conflict operations. 34. Field Manual 3–57, Civil Affairs Operations (Washington, DC: Department of the Army, October 2011), 3–18. 35. Stability operations are defined in the 2009 version of DoD Directive 3000.05 as “military missions, tasks, and activities conducted outside the United States in coordination with other instruments of national power to maintain or reestablish a safe and secure environment, provide essential governmental services, emergency infrastructure reconstruction, and humanitarian relief.” Department of Defense Directive 3000.05, Stability Operations (2009), 1. 36. Dobbins, “Nation-Building.” Using armed force to create democracy strikes some observers as imperialism under a different name. Michael Ignatieff, for example, has criticized early U.S. efforts in Afghanistan as “nation-building lite.” Michael Ignatieff, “Nation-building Lite: The Bush Administration is Trying to Reconstruct Afghanistan on the Cheap,” New York Times Magazine, 28 July 2002, 26. 37. Nadia Schadlow, “War and the Art of Governance,” Parameters 33, no.3 (Autumn 2003): 85. 38. See, for example, Stephen Bell, Economic Governance and Institutional Dynamics (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2002); Robert I. Rotberg, editor, When States Fail: Causes and Consequences (Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 2004). 39. Field Manual 3–07, Stability (Washington, DC: Department of the Army, June 2014), 1–23. 40. Robert M. Gates, “A Balanced Strategy: Reprogramming the Pentagon for a New Age,” Foreign Affairs, January 2009. Available at: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/63717/robert-m-gates/a-balanced-strategy. 41. F. S. V. Donnison, Civil Affairs and Military Government: Central Organisation and Planning (London: HMSO, 1966), 341. 42. Lester W. Grau and Jacob W. Kipp, “Urban Combat: Confronting the Specter,” Military Review (July–August 1999): 13. 43. United States Marine Corps, Small Wars Manual (Manhattan, KS: Sunflower University Press, 2004 [1940]), 13. The full paragraph runs: “Military government usually applies to territory over which the Constitution and laws of the United States have no operation. Its exercise is sanctioned because the powers of sovereignty have passed into the hands of the commander of the occupying forces and the local authority is unable to maintain order and protect life and property in the immediate theater of military operations. The duty of such protection passes to the occupying forces, they having deprived the people of the protection which the former government afforded. It is decidedly to the military advantage of the occupying forces to establish a strong and just government, such as will preserve order and, as far as possible, pacify the inhabitants.” 44. An invasion occurs when armed forces enter enemy territory. A military occupation occurs when an invading force takes possession of enemy territory for the purpose of holding it and achieves effective control over the territory. Hague Convention (IV) Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land and Its Annex: Regulations Concerning the Laws and Customs of War on Land, 18 October 1907, Section III, article 42 (hereafter the 1907 Hague Convention). Because an occupation only extends to the territorial areas where authority has been established, “not every invasion results in a military occupation. It is possible for an invading force to be an occupying force in one portion of an invaded country but not another due to the level of resistance and lack of control exercised. If an invading force pushes rapidly through a large portion of enemy territory without establishing effective control, no occupation occurs. Similarly, raiding parties and reconnaissance detachments, patrols, or even large combat forces quickly moving through an area do not occupy a territory.” Lyle W. Cayce, “Liberation or Occupation? How Failure to Apply Occupation Law During Operation Iraqi Freedom Threatened U.S. Strategic Interests” (Carlisle Barracks: U.S. Army War College, 19 March 2004), 3. 45. Article 43 of the 1907 Hague Regulations provides: “The authority of the legitimate power having in fact passed into the hands of the occupant, the latter shall take all the measures in his power to restore, and ensure, as far as possible, public order and safety, while respecting, unless absolutely prevented, the laws in force in the country.” 46. Adjutant General’s Office, General Orders 100, Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field, Art. 4 (24 April 1863). 47. Geoffrey Best, Humanity in Warfare (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1980), 155. 48. 1907 Hague Convention, article 55. 49. Ibid., article 43. 50. Ibid., article 46. 51. Geneva Convention (IV) Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, Aug. 12, 1949, article 50. (Hereafter 1949 Geneva Convention). 52. 1949 Geneva Convention, article 55. 53. Ibid., 56. 55. Ibid., articles 54–64. 56. Field Manual 27–10, Law of Land Warfare (Washington, DC: Department of the Army), 1976 [1956]), 141. 57. See, for example, George W. Bush, “Address to the Nation,” 19 March 2003. Available at: http://georgewbushwhitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/03/20030319–17.html; Brigadier General Vincent Brooks, “U.S. Central Command Daily Briefing,” 14 April 2003. Available at: http://www.iwar.org.uk/news-archive/2003/04– 14.htm: “[I]t’s still a bit premature for me to declare what our status is … what we do know is that we have responsibilities as a force that has entered. The specific references to occupying power are very precise and very legalistic, and I’m not really in the best position to be able to give you information on that. We’ll give you some more as time goes on as it relates to that specific concern .… Right now we’re still a liberating force, and that’s how we’re approaching our operations .… Whether that changes over time needs to be seen.” 58. Cayce, “Liberation or Occupation?,” 1–2. 59. Kofi Annan, “UN Secretary-General to Commission on Human Rights: We Must Hope a New Era of Human Rights in Iraq Will Begin Now,” 24 April 2003. Available at: http://un.op.org/fr/node/2704. 60. Department of State Office of the Press Secretary, “U.S. Diplomats Object to Annan Statements on Iraq,” 24 April 2003. Available at: http://wfile.ait.org.tw/wf-archive/2003/030424/epf407.htm. 61. Kathleen Rhem, “Iraqis Need Work, Paychecks, U.S. Administrator Says,” American Forces Press Service, 24 April 2003. Available at: http://www.defense.gov/News/NewsArticle.aspx?ID=29065. 62. Cayce, “Liberation or Occupation?” 11. 63. Defense Science Board, Summer Study on Transition to and from Hostilities (Washington, DC: December 2004), 6. 64. Stephen Peter Rosen, “After the Fall,” Wall Street Journal, 4 April 2003, A8. 65. Ziemke, US Army, 12. 66. Samuel P. Huntington, Soldier and the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 143. 67. Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in War and Peace (New York, NY: Harper & Brothers, 1948), 553. 68. Cited in Harry L. Coles and Albert K. Weinberg, Civil Affairs: Soldiers Become Governors (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, 1992), 22. Roosevelt considered military government to be a civilian matter within the scope of the State Department’s responsibility: “The military operations of our Army should not be unnecessarily diluted or diverted by the questions affecting relief, rehabilitation, reconstruction, restoration of trade, strategic procurement and development, repatriation, property rights, legal systems, political warfare, political organization and other essentially civilian problems.” William E. Daugherty and Marshall Andrews, Review of U.S. Historical Experience with Civil Affairs, 1776–1954 (Bethesda, MD: Operations Research Office

of the Johns Hopkins University, May 1961), 226. 69. Ibid., 204. 70. Earl F. Ziemke, “Improvising Stability and Change in Postwar Germany,” in Americans as Proconsuls: United States Military Government in Germany and Japan, 1944–1952, edited by Robert Wolfe (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), 64. 71. Cited in Daugherty and Andrews, Review of U.S. Historical Experience, 213. 72. Ibid., 260. 73. George Packer, Assassin’s Gate: America in Iraq (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 120. 74. Ibid., 134. 75. Nora Bensahel, “Mission Not Accomplished: What Went Wrong with Iraqi Reconstruction,” Journal of Strategic Studies 29, no. 3 (June 2006): 461. 76. Packer, Assassin’s Gate, 142. 77. L. Elaine Halchin, “Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA): Origin, Characteristics, and Institutional Authorities,” Congressional Research Service, 6 June 2005, 2. 78. Ibid., 14. 79. Coalition Provisional Authority, Regulation 1, 16 May 2003. Available at: http://www.iraqcoalition.org/regulations/. 80. Ricardo S. Sanchez with Donald T. Phillips, Wiser in Battle: A Soldier’s Story (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2008), 179. 81. James Dobbins, Seth G. Jones, Benjamin Runkle and Siddharth Mohandas, Occupying Iraq: a History of the Coalition Provisional Authority (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2009), xiii. 82. Timothy A. Jones, “Military Proconsuls: The Army and Its Role in Military Governance” (master’s thesis, U.S. Army War College, March 2007), 9. In the words of Joseph Collins, “As long as there are few wingtips on the ground, the boots will be forced to move into the vacuum. As long as State is a budgetary midget, it will play second fiddle to the Pentagon colossus. If we want to fix planning for complex contingencies, we must fund State and USAID as major players and not poor relatives.” Joseph J. Collins, “Planning Lessons from Afghanistan and Iraq,” Joint Forces Quarterly 41 (2006): 10. 83. U.S. Department of State, “Frequently Asked Questions, Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization,” 15 July 2008. Available at: http://2001–2009.state.gov/s/crs/66410. 84. Fleet Marine Force Manual 1, Warfighting (Washington, DC: U.S. Marine Corps, 1989). 85. General Alfred M. Gray, “Preface,” Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 1, Warfighting (Washington, DC: U.S. Marine Corps, 20 June 1997). 86. Ibid., 72 87. Field Manual 3–0, Operations (Washington, DC: Headquarters U.S. Army, 2008), 4–1. 88. The conceptualization of warfighting as the true purpose of the U.S. military became entrenched in the Army’s organizational culture after the Vietnam War. Colonel Harry Summers, in On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War, argued that the U.S. lost the Vietnam War because it had not fought conventionally enough. Summers advocated that the Army should not deviate from big war approach and engage in counterinsurgency. This idea was codified in the Weinberger-Powell doctrine in 1984: which stated that military force should only be used if there was a clear risk to U.S. national security interests, and only as a last resort. The objective should be unambiguous and the force used should be overwhelming. The operation should have strong public support and a clear exit strategy. The Powell-Weinberger doctrine expresses a preference for a particular style of warfighting: quick, decisive operations. In this style of warfare, often referred to as the ‘American Way of War,’ the application of overwhelming firepower quickly achieves the objective, and then everyone goes home. In fact, there are very few examples of quick, decisive operations in the history of American warfare. Arguably, American military history is actually characterized by small, irregular wars. Quick, decisive operations are particularly ill-suited to irregular warfare, which generally involves protracted campaigns that can last decades. Colin Gray, Irregular Enemies and the Essence of Strategy: Can the American Way of War Adapt? (Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College, 2006). 89. George W. Bush, “Commission on Presidential Debates,” debate transcript, 11 October 2000. Available at: http://www.debates.org/pages/trans2000b.html. 90. Ziemke, “Improvising Stability,” 59. 91. Henry Shelton, “The Military: An Instrument of Statecraft,” Vital Speeches of the Day 66, no. 7 (15 January 2000): 195. 92. Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (New York, NY: Vintage, 2007), 558. 93. See Congressional Research Service, Peacekeeping and Related Stability Operations: Issues of U.S. Military Involvement, Issue Brief for Congress (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2004), 5–6, 9; Richard Rinaldo, “Warfighting and Peace Ops: Do Real Soldiers Do MOOTWT,” Joint Forces Quarterly (Winter 1996–7): 111–113. 94. Conrad C. Crane, “Phase IV Operations: Where Wars Are Really Won,” Military Review 85, no. 3 (May–June 2005). 95. U.S. Department of State, “Conferences at Malta and Yalta, 1945,” in Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic Papers (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1955), 536; Coles and Weinberg, Civil Affairs, 153. 96. Richard H. Schultz Jr., In the Aftermath of War: US Support for Reconstruction and Nation-Building in Panama Following Just Cause (Maxwell Air Base, AL: Air University Press, 1993), 19. 97. Thomas E. Ricks, “Army Historian Cites Lack of Postwar Plan,” Washington Post, 25 December 2004. Available at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/22/AR2006062200916.html. 98. Schadlow, “War,” 85. 99. I. C. Campbell, “‘A Chance to Build a New Social Order Well:’ Anthropology and American Colonial Government in Micronesia in Comparative Perspective,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 3, no. 3 (2002).

100. John Dower, “Occupied Japan and the American Lake, 1945–50,” in America’s Asia: Dissenting Essays on Asian-American Relations, edited by Edward Friedman and Mark Selden (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1971), 170. 101. Leonard Mason, “Trusteeship in Micronesia,” Far Eastern Survey 17, no. 9 (5 May 1948): 106. 102. On the debate concerning trusteeship, see Elizabeth Converse, “The United States as Trustee,” Far Eastern Survey 18, no. 22 (2 November 1949): 260–63. 103. Rear Admiral Carleton H. Wright, U.S.N., functioned as Deputy High Commissioner and administered the Territory from his headquarters in Guam. Next in the administrative hierarchy were four naval officers, dually appointed as civil governors and as district military commanders in the Northern Marianas, Western Carolines, Eastern Carolines, and Marshalls. Beneath these civil governors were seven civilian administrators located at Saipan, Palau, Yap, Truk, Ponape, Kwajalein, and Majuro. These administrators were primarily naval officers who dressed in civilian clothes and who had been trained at the Stanford University School of Naval Administration. Mason, “Trusteeship,” 106. 104. Suzanne Falgout, “Americans in Paradise: Anthropologists, Custom, and Democracy in Postwar Micronesia,” Ethnology 34, no. 2(Spring 1995): 99. 105. Ibid. 106. John F. Embree, “American Military Government,” in Social Structure: Studies Presented to A. R. RadcliffeBrown, edited by Meyer Fortes (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1949), 215. 107. Ibid. 108. John Useem, “Institutions of Micronesia,” Far Eastern Survey 17, no. 2 (28 January 1948): 23. 109. Ibid., 24. 110. Ibid. 111. Kiste and Falgout describe Useem as “an anthropologically oriented sociologist.” Robert C. Kiste and Suzanne Falgout, “Anthropology and Micronesia: The Context,” in American Anthropology in Micronesia: An Assessment, edited by Robert C. Kiste and Mac Marshall (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1999), 23. Moreover, many of the subjects that Useem found compelling (such as acculturation, social structure, and culture change) were more commonly studied by anthropologists than sociologists in the 1940s and 1950s. In many ways, Useem bridged the fields of sociology and anthropology, even serving in the late 1940s as a regional vice president of the Society for Applied Anthropology. Mac Marshall, “‘Partial Connections’: Kinship and Social Organization,” in American Anthropology in Micronesia: An Assessment, edited by Robert C. Kiste and Mac Marshall (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1999), 391. 112. Glenn Petersen, “Politics in Postwar Micronesia,” in Kiste and Marshall, American Anthropology in Micronesia, 149. 113. John Useem, “Democracy in Process: The Development of Democratic Leadership in the Micronesia Islands,” Human Problems in Technological Change, edited by Edward H. Spicer (New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 1952), 279. 114. Geoffrey Best, Humanity in Warfare (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980), 180. 115. Andrew J. Birtle, US Army Counterinsurgency, 101. The 1920 booklet, Military Government, published during the post-World War I occupation of the Rhineland, noted that: “It is better to leave all laws, civil and criminal, in effect and their enforcement to the local officials .… Do not try to make over the people, to change their habits or customs, or bind them to our way of thinking.” Cited in Colonel H. A. Smith, Military Government (Fort Leavenworth, KA: The General Service Schools, 1920), 9–10. Similarly, the 1934 Basic Manual for Military Government by U.S. Forces articulated the principle of non-interference with local civilian populations: “As a principle, changes in existing government will be as few as practicable under the situation, and only after sufficient study to insure that they are warranted by conditions.” Cited in Walter M. Hudson, “Occupational Pursuits: The Army and World War II Occupation Planning” (master’s thesis, U.S. Army War College, 2010), 7. 116. Janine Davidson, Lifting the Fog of Peace: How Americans Learned to Fight Modern War (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 59. 117. Field Manual 27–5, 6. 118. The 1943 revision of the Manual of Military Government and Civil Affairs recommended that “local laws, customs and institutions be retained” and that “it is unwise to impose upon an occupied territory the laws and customs of another people.” Cited in Rudolf V. A. Janssens, “What Future for Japan?”: U.S. Wartime Planning for the Postwar Era, 1942–1945 (Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1995), 151. 119. Cited in Birtle, US Army Counterinsurgency, 104. 120. R. A. Alger, Spanish American War (New York, NY: Harper and Brothers, 1901), 1–5. 121. Daugherty and Andrews, Review of U.S. Historical Experience, 133. 122. Ibid., 130–139. 123. Leonard Wood, “The Military Government in Cuba,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, 21 (1903): 30. Unfortunately, the ‘reforms’ made it easier for the politicos and the Cuban Army to consolidate their power and oppress their people. Allen Reed Millett, Politics of Intervention: The Military Occupation of Cuba 1906–1909 (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1968), 215. 124. Ray A. Moore and Donald L. Robinson, Partners for Democracy: Crafting the New Japanese State under MacArthur (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2002), 10. 125. In addition, Japanese Foreign Minister Shigemitsu convincingly argued to MacArthur that direct rule would enable the Japanese Government to eschew responsibility for ensuring execution of occupation policies. Eiji Takemae, Allied Occupation of Japan (New York, NY: Continuum, 2002), 63. 126. Ibid., 64. 127. Ibid., 65. 128. R. Bryan Christensen, “The Weight of Culture in Nation Building” (master’s thesis, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, 2007), 49. 129. “Tribal institutions are preserved as the natural framework within which African society can healthily develop. By its adoption you undertake to guide social evolution and educate Africans so that they may evolve a mode of government which shall conform to civilized standards. You act upon the belief that every system of

government, if it is to be permanent and progressive, must have its roots in the framework of indigenous society. Edwin W. Smith, “Presidential Address: Anthropology and the Practical Man,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 64 (January-June 1934): xx. 130. Margery Perham, “Some Problems of Indirect Rule in Africa,” Journal of the Royal African Society 34, no. 135 (April 1935): 4. 131. Quoted in David L. Hanlon, Remaking Micronesia: Discourses Over Development in a Pacific Territory (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1998), 34–5. 132. Hal M. Friedman, “The Beast in Paradise: The United States Navy in Micronesia, 1943–1947,” Pacific Historical Review 62, no. 2 (May 1993): 176. “It is not surprising, therefore, that the navy wanted to prevent other powers from gaining possession of the islands, as had happened in 1898 and 1919. Yet the navy hoped for more than a mere neutralization of the islands. It argued for direct control of the islands on the grounds that anything short of domination would invite a repetition of the interwar years, when the nonfortification clauses of the Washington Treaty system allegedly allowed the Japanese to rearm and prepare for war in the Pacific while the United States dismantled its defenses.” 133. Falgout, “Americans in Paradise,” 103. 134. Friedman, “The Beast in Paradise,” 184. 135. Ibid., 185. 136. Falgout, “Americans in Paradise,” 99. 137. John F. Embree, “Micronesia: The Navy and Democracy,” Far Eastern Survey 15, no. 11 (5 June 1946): 163. 138. Embree, “Micronesia,” 163. 139. John Useem, “Governing the Occupied Areas of the South Pacific: War Time Lessons and Peace Time Proposals,” Applied Anthropology 4, no. 3 (1945): 2. 140. Useem, “Governing the Occupied Areas,” 3. 141. The Pacific Charter, issued on 12 December 1945, established the military’s first formal statement of policy for the postwar period, including physical rehabilitation of the islands and restoration of educational, health, and local political systems. Cited in Hanlon, Remaking Micronesia, 35, fn. 43. 142. John Useem, “American Pattern of Military Government in Micronesia,” American Journal of Sociology 51, no. 2 (September 1945): 96. 143. Ibid., 96–7. 144. Ibid. 145. Friedman, “The Beast in Paradise,” 193. 146. Useem, “Changing Structure,” 581. 147. Useem, “American Pattern,” 95. 148. Useem, “Changing Structure,” 582. 149. Ibid., 582–3. 150. Ibid., 583. 151. Ibid., 581. 152. Ibid. 153. John Useem, “Social Reconstruction in Micronesia,” Far Eastern Survey 15, no. 2 (30 January 1946): 23. 154. Useem, “Changing Structure,” 587–588. 155. Ibid., 581. 156. Ibid., 580–581. 157. Even the most egalitarian societies may rank individuals. “In unstratified societies individuals are ranked merely on the bases of sex, age, and kinship statuses.” L. Plotnicov and A. Tuden, “Introduction,” in Essays in Comparative Social Stratification, edited by L. Plotnicov and A. Tuden (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970), 4–5. On the other hand, Lloyd Fallers has argued that the term “social stratification,” while it “has a certain historical appropriateness in contemporary Western societies,” is “a poor term for which social scientists might well substitute “inequality.” Not only is it quite misleading when applied to the many non-Western societies in which thought and action about inequality center much more upon interpersonal relations of superiority and inferiority; it also oversimplifies by attempting to capture with a single graphic image the multiple bases of differentiation and inequality which exist within Western societies. Race, ethnicity, occupation, and regionalism are not reducible to “class” or “stratum,” and all these terms, to the extent to which they have meaning in non-Western societies, very often have different meanings there.” Lloyd A. Fallers, Inequality: Social Stratification Reconsidered (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 29. 158. G. D. Berreman, “Caste in India and the United States,” American Journal of Sociology 66 (1960): 120. 159. Plotnicov and Tuden, “Introduction,” 4–5. 160. The commonly held view is that democratic government rests on a commitment to political equality. See, for example, C. Beitz, Political Equality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); Allen Buchanan, “Political Legitimacy and Democracy,” Ethics 112, no. 4 (2002). For a critique, see Steven Wall, “Democracy and Equality,” Philosophical Quarterly 57, no. 228 (July 2007). 161. Robert A. Dahl, Democracy and its Critics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 31. 162. Robert A. Dahl, Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 6. 163. J. M. Balkin, “The Constitution of Status,” Yale Law Journal 106, no. 8 (June 1997): 2313. 164. Balkin, “The Constitution of Status,” 2314. 165. Ibid. 166. Useem, “Governing the Occupied Areas,” 2. 167. Ibid. 168. Berreman, “Caste in India and the United States,” 120. 169. Yap has only two castes: upper (arou) and lower (thal). As John Useem observed, “There are no significant differences between the two castes in income, standard of living, or population composition. The quality of

homes, type of clothing, and foods consumed are the same for both castes. The chief differences between them prevail in the division of labor, the ownership of land, the holding of chieftainships, the exercise of power, the rights to special privileges, and social prestige. The two castes are subdivided into seven social classes, four in the upper and three in the lower. The classes within each caste are ranked in a hierarchy.” John Useem, “Human Resources of Micronesia,” Far Eastern Survey 17, no. 1 (14 January 1948): 3–4. 170. Unlike Yap, Palau did not restrict residency by class; “nevertheless, there are decided gradations in social position ascribed to villages and to districts. A family residing in Angaur, for example, is deemed socially inferior to one in Me-lekeok and the difference has the same significance here as the contrast between a mining family in Kentucky and a Brahmin family in Boston.” Useem, “Human Resources,” 4. 171. Raymond Firth, Principles of Polynesian Economy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1939); Elizabeth Keating, “Moments of Hierarchy: Constructing Social Stratification by Means of Language, Food, Space, and the Body in Pohnpei, Micronesia,” American Anthropologist 102, no. 2 (June 2000): 306. 172. George Marcus, “Three Perspectives on Role Distance in Conversations Between Tongan Nobles and Their “People,” in Dangerous Words: Language and Politics in the Pacific, edited by Don Brenneis and Fred Myers (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1991). 173. As Edmund Leach noted, “In theory rank depends strictly upon birth status; all legal rules are framed as if the hierarchy of aristocrats, commoners and slaves had a caste-like rigidity and exclusiveness.” However, in practice, “this theory is a fiction.” Edmund Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1965), 159–60. 174. Ibid. 175. Useem, “Democracy in Process,” 277. 176. Ibid., 264. He continues: “The symbolic status of senior-ranking position was made into a functional one of ‘chief,’ who was assumed to be supreme within his jurisdiction in a manner like that of the sovereign in the homeland of the foreigners. Power was concentrated to a greater degree than before in the elite sections of the population through the reduction of the controls exercised by persons in lower social statues. The heads of loose confederations, who had limited power, were converted into permanent all-inclusive positions of authority.” 177. John Useem, Report on Yap and Palau, and the Lesser Islands of the Western Carolines, vol. 6, Economic Survey of Micronesia (Honolulu, HI: U.S. Commercial Company, 1945). 178. Useem, “Democracy in Process,” 264–265. 179. Ibid., 265. 180. Ibid., 268. 181. Useem, “American Pattern,” 95; Useem, “Governing the Occupied Areas,” 2; John Useem, “Americans as Governors of Natives in the Pacific,” Journal of Social Issues 2, no. 3 (August 1946): 40. 182. According to the Officer-in-Charge of the agency responsible for planning postwar naval military government in the islands, “the islanders seldom comprehended or responded rationally to federations or to other features of the American-European political patterns.” A sudden attempt to introduce “republican” forms of government, he claimed, would destroy whatever “democracy” already existed. The interests of the inhabitants would best be served “by establishing in most of the islands a strong but benevolent government— a government paternalistic in character.” Quoted in Friedman, “The Beast in Paradise,” 195. 183. Useem, “Democracy in Process,” 266. 184. Ibid., 261. 185. Ibid. 186. Most of the men elected had held offices previously. In one case, “the only eligible candidate on one Carolinian Island was the individual at the top of the ancestral social hierarchy. This headman won the election unanimously but his power was completely circumscribed. He could make no decisions without the unanimous approval of other high ranking members of the group and his authority was confined to certain honorific functions. Useem, “Americans as Governors,” 40–41. 187. In another instance, a particular man won successive elections, “several having been called by military government in the hope of deposing him and electing an abler official. Though invariably re-elected as the formal leader, he was thereafter ignored by his group except on ceremonial occasions. The real leadership in this case lodged in a strong personality who by tradition could not hold high office but who was expected to take charge of specific projects.” Useem, “Americans as Governors,” 40–41. 188. Ibid., 42–3. 189. Useem, “Democracy in Process,” 266. 190. Useem, “Americans as Governors,” 40–41. 191. Useem, “Democracy in Process,” 279. 192. Useem, “Americans as Governors,” 47. 193. Useem, “Changing Structure,” 580–581. 194. Useem, “Democracy in Process,” 279. 195. Ibid., 278. 196. Useem, “Social Reconstruction,” 23. 197. DoD Directive 3000.05, Military Support for Stability, Security, Transition, and Reconstruction Operations (2005), 2. 198. Slightly varying the language, the 2009 version of DoD Directive 3000.05, Military Support for Stability, Security, Transition, and Reconstruction Operations required the COCOMS to “Ensure their Joint Intelligence Operations Centers (JIOCs) provide tailored all-source intelligence products that support planning for and execution of stability operations. These products will incorporate information from traditional intelligence sources as well as information from social science knowledge, including from sociological, anthropological, cultural, economic, political science, and historical sources within the public and private sector.” DoD Directive 3000.05, Military Support for Stability, Security, Transition, and Reconstruction Operations (2009), 9. 199. Adjutant General of the Army, “Subject: Establishment of School,” quoted in Hudson, “Occupational Pursuits.”

By 1943 Civil Affairs Training Schools (CATS) had been established at ten other American universities to train civilians who already had technical or professional knowledge for military administration. John Brown Mason, “Training for American A.M.G. Officers,” American Journal of International Law 38, no. 3 (July 1944): 468–9. 200. J. O. M. Broek, “The Navy Prepares for Military Government,” Far Eastern Survey 12, no. 13 (30 June 1943): 127. Apparently the Navy’s decision was somewhat extemporaneous. According to contemporary observers, “the Navy Department had registered an intention toward the government of occupied areas, but nothing more. There was no Navy office charged with the functions of military occupation, and no one knew who was to administer the school or assign the graduates…. As far as anyone on the working level knew, the school had suddenly emanated from the Secretary’s office and was set up, perhaps reluctantly, in the office of VCNO [Vice Chief of Naval Operations]. If there were empire builders in the Navy Department during the fall of 1942, none apparently regarded the Columbia school and the functions of military occupation as an asset.” Sydney Connor, “The Navy’s Entry into Military Government,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 267 (January 1950): 16. 201. Campbell, “A Chance to Build.” When the war ended the Navy created a School of Naval Administration (SONA) at Stanford for Navy officers who would administer Micronesia and other Pacific territories such as Guam, Samoa, and the Japanese mandate. Thomas K. Hitch, “Administration of America’s Pacific Islands,” Political Science Quarterly 61, no. 3 (September 1946). 202. The curriculum focused on four specific subjects: language; “the study of native customs;” an understanding of the governmental institutions in the southwest Pacific and the Far East; and certain technical aspects of military government itself, such as the international law of belligerent occupation, naval courts and boards, economic problems of military government, and problems of military administration. Schuyler C. Wallace, “Naval School of Military Government and Administration,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 231 (January 1944): 29. 203. Hitch, “Administration,” 404; Alexander Spoehr, “Anthropology and the Trust Territory: A Summary of Recent Researches,” Clearinghouse Bulletin of Research in Human Organization 1, no. 2 (1951): 1–3; Edward A. Kennard and Gordon Macgregor, “Applied Anthropology in Government: United States,” in Anthropology Today, edited by A. L. Kroeber et al. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 837. 204. Campbell, “A Chance to Build.” 205. Wallace, “Naval School,” 29. 206. Ibid., 32. 207. Ibid., 29. 208. Felix M. Keesing, “Experiments in Training Overseas Administrators,” Human Organization 8, no. 4 (1949): 20–22. 209. Leonard Mason, “Anthropological Presence in American Micronesia,” Association for Anthropology Micronesia Newsletter 2, no. 1 (1973). 210. Campbell, “A Chance to Build.” 211. Ibid. 212. Embree, “Micronesia,” 161–164. 213. Campbell, “A Chance to Build.” 214. Mason, “Trusteeship,” 108. 215. Campbell, “A Chance to Build.” 216. Bronislaw Malinowski, Dynamics of Culture Change: An Inquiry Into Race Relations In Africa (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1945), vii. 217. Useem, “Americans as Governors,” 41. 218. Ibid., 45. 219. Ibid. 220. Useem goes on to note: “Americans expect sexual drama and are unhappy when confronted with the complications of the marital patterns which prevail. They admire independence as a social attribute yet resent natives who are aggressive. Native institutions are respected, but the mores evoke emotional reactions—as when the native class-caste system calls for in-equalities, or when indirection or silent acquiescence are the reactions to proposals made instead of the natives ‘speaking their minds.’” Useem, “Social Reconstruction,” 22. 221. Useem, “Changing Structure,” 580. 222. Useem, “Americans as Governors,” 40. 223. Ibid., 40–41. 224. Ibid., 47. 225. Ibid. 226. Ibid. 227. Useem, “American Pattern,” 95. 228. Malinowski, Dynamics of Culture Change, vii. 229. Useem, “American Pattern,” 95–96. 230. Ibid. 231. See http://www.lonelyplanet.com/palau/angaur. 232. Useem, “Governing the Occupied Areas,” 8. 7. JOMO KENYATTA, LOUIS LEAKEY, AND THE COUNTERINSURGENCY SYSTEM 1. Quoted in Donald L. Barnett and Karari Njama, Mau Mau from Within: Autobiography and Analysis of Kenya’s Peasant Revolt (Letchworth and London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1966), 239–240. 2. Montagu Slater, Trial of Jomo Kenyatta (London: Secker & Warburg, 1955), 34. 3. Graham Greene, Ways of Escape (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1980), 193. 4. Carl G. Rosberg, Jr. and John Nottingham, Myth of Mau Mau: Nationalism in Kenya (New York, NY: Signet,

1966), 6. 5. F. D. Corfield, Origins and Growth of Mau Mau (Nairobi: Colony and Protectorate of Kenya, 1960), 52. 6. Bildad Kaggia, Roots of Freedom, 1921–1963: Autobiography of Bildad Kaggia (Nairobi: East Africa Publishing House, 1975), 196. 7. Robert B. Edgerton, Mau Mau: An African Crucible (New York, NY: Free Press, 1989), 109. 8. John Lonsdale, “Kenyatta’s Trials: Making and Breaking an African Nationalist,” in Moral World of the Law, edited by Peter Coss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 217. 9. David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2005), 66. 10. Rosberg and Nottingham, Myth of Mau Mau, 283. 11. The judge was paid 20,000 pounds. Wunyabari O. Maloba, Mau Mau and Kenya: An Analysis of a Peasant Revolt (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998), 99. 12. Lonsdale, “Kenyatta’s Trials,” 219. 13. Quoted in Lonsdale, “Kenyatta’s Trials,” 222. 14. Quoted in Rosberg and Nottingham, Myth of Mau Mau, 284. 15. Quoted in Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 67. 16. Quoted in Lonsdale, “Kenyatta’s Trials,” 227. 17. Mary Leakey, Disclosing the Past: An Autobiography (Garden City, NY: Double Day, 1984), 112. 18. A. E. Norman, “The Crime of Mau Mau,” Australian Quarterly 26, no. 3 (1954): 74–86. 19. Corfield, Origins and Growth of Mau Mau, 316. Anderson estimates the fatalities to be likely closer to 20,000: see Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 4. Despite the settlers’ portrayal of the Mau Mau as a terrorist organization whose aims were to expel or kill the white settlers and take back their ancestral land, only 32 settlers and 63 European combatants lost their lives. Given that 90 per cent of the casualties were indigenous Africans, the Mau Mau Emergency can better be understood as a civil war. E. S. Atieno Odhiambo and J. Lonsdale, “Introduction,” in Mau Mau and Nationhood: Arms, Authority and Narration, edited by E. S. Atieno Odhiambo and J. Lonsdale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 3. 20. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 200. 21. A full recount of the counterinsurgency in Kenya is beyond the scope of this chapter. See Anderson, Histories of the Hanged; Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (New York, NY: Holt, 2005); Daniel Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Counterinsurgency, Civil War, and Decolonization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Huw Bennett, Fighting the Mau Mau: The British Army and Counter-Insurgency in the Kenya Emergency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Anthony Clayton, Counter-Insurgency in Kenya: A Study of Military Operations Against the Mau Mau, 1952–1960 (Manhattan, KS: Sunflower University Press, 1984). 22. Lawrence Fellows, “Harambee, Says Kenyatta,” New York Times, 7 November 1965. 23. Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya: The Tribal Life of the Gikuyu (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1938), xviii. 24. Quoted in Maloba, Mau Mau and Kenya, 74. 25. Hughes papers, quoted in ibid., 75. 26. Ibid., 73. 27. Lee Harris, “Al Qaeda’s Fantasy Ideology,” Policy Review, no. 114 (August 2002). Available at: http://www.hoover.org/research/al-qaedas-fantasy-ideology. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. See, for example, C. J. D. Duder, “Love and the Lions: The Image of White Settlement in Kenya in Popular Fiction, 1919–1939,” African Affairs 90, no. 360 (1991); Thomas R. Knipp, “Kenya’s Literary Ladies and the Mythologizing of the White Highlands,” South Atlantic Review 55, no. 1 (1990). 31. Dorothy Hammond and Alta Jablow, Myth of Africa (New York, NY: Library of Social Science, 2012), 159. 32. Rosberg and Nottingham, Myth of Mau Mau, xvi. 33. Edgerton, Mau Mau, 2. 34. Ibid., 6. 35. Ibid., 7. 36. Negley Farson, Behind God’s Back (New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1940), 234. 37. Nicholas Best, Happy Valley: The Story of the English in Kenya (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1979), 47. 38. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 78. 39. The actual percentage of Kikuyu land lost to settlers was 4 per cent, however, population increase combined with lack of room for expansion created population pressure among the Kikuyu. Over-utilization of land aggravated economic and agricultural problems after 1939. Maloba, Mau Mau and Kenya, 27–30. 40. George Padmore, “Behind the Mau Mau,” Phylon 14, no. 4 (1953): 358. 41. Edgerton, Mau Mau, 14. 42. Padmore, “Behind the Mau Mau,” 359. 43. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 139. 44. A full discussion of the origins of Mau Mau is beyond the scope of this chapter. However, Mau Mau seems to have had origins in multiple predecessor organizations. According to a widely accepted account, when the KCA was banned in 1948, Kenyatta and other Kikuyu elders began meeting. Technically they were the executive committee of the newly-formed Kenya African Union (KAU), but they called themselves mbari (clan). Although the mbari had success administering a unity oath to rural Kikuyu, they had less success reaching the more militant urban population of Nairobi. Reluctantly, Kenyatta invited Kubai, Kaggia, and other union leaders to assist them. These militant union leaders created the Mau Mau, and they relied on the Kikuyu model of the extended patriarchal sub-clans, the mbari, to do so. See Edgerton, Mau Mau, 47–52; Rosberg and Nottingham, Myth of Mau Mau, 263; Kaggia, Roots of Freedom, 108; Maloba, Mau Mau and Kenya, 59–63.

45. John Lonsdale, “The Moral Economy of Mau Mau: The Problem,” in Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa, edited by Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 326. 46. John Lonsdale, “Mau Maus of the Mind: Making Mau Mau and Remaking Kenya,” Journal of African History 31, no. 3 (1990): 395. Although many settlers and administrators remained willfully oblivious to the political undercurrents in Kikuyu society, their children often saw the world around them with much clearer eyes. Elspeth Huxley recounted her childhood as a settler child among the Kikuyu, writing that “I began to see that a third world lay beyond, inside, and intermingled with the two worlds I already knew of, those of ourselves and the Kikuyu: a world of snakes and rainbows, of ghosts and spirits, of monsters and charms .… It was a world in which I was a foreigner but the Kikuyu were at home.” Elspeth Huxley, Flame Trees of Thika: Memories of an African Childhood (New York, NY: Penguin, 2000), 197. 47. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 87. 48. Edgerton, Mau Mau, 41. 49. Ibid. 50. Greene, Ways of Escape, 195. 51. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 87. 52. Ibid., 280. 53. Ibid. 54. Lonsdale, “Kenyatta’s Trials,” 214. 55. Jules Archer, African Firebrand: Kenyatta of Kenya (New York, NY: Julian Messner, 1969), 18. 56. Rosberg and Nottingham, Myth of Mau Mau, xvii. 57. Archer, African Firebrand, 82. 58. Ibid., 83. 59. Lonsdale, “Kenyatta’s Trials,” 231. 60. Lonsdale, “Mau Maus of the Mind,” 404. According to Lonsdale: “This was the chief supporting evidence in Baring’s request to call an emergency.” 61. See Waruhiu Itote, Mau Mau General (Nairobi: East Africa Publishing House, 1967), 44–6. 62. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 61. However, whether he had knowledge of Mau Mau actions and strategy remains open to debate. See Atieno Odhiambo, “Review: Kenyatta and Mau Mau,” Transition 53 (1991): 147– 52; Kaggia, Roots of Freedom, 113. 63. Josiah M. Kariuki, ‘Mau Mau’ Detainee (New York, NY: Penguin, 1964), 49. 64. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 260. 65. Quoted in Padmore, “Behind the Mau Mau,” 371. 66. Rosberg and Nottingham, Myth of Mau Mau, 297. 67. Edgerton, Mau Mau, 85. 68. Kennell Jackson, Jr., “Survival Craft in the Mau Mau Forest,” in Mau Mau and Nationhood: Arms, Authority and Narration, edited by E. S. Atieno Odhiambo and John Lonsdale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 69. Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister, believed the Kikuyu “were not the primitive cowardly people which many imagined them to be, but people of considerable fibre, ability and steel.” Quoted in Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 277. 70. Edgerton, Mau Mau, 85. 71. Ibid., 43. 72. Rosberg and Nottingham, Myth of Mau Mau, 101. 73. Edgerton, Mau Mau, 43. 74. Frederic Warburg, An Occupation for Gentlemen (London: Hutchinson, 1959), 253. 75. Bruce Berman, “Ethnography as Politics, Politics as Ethnography: Kenyatta, Malinowski, and the Making of Facing Mount Kenya,” Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines 30, no. 3 (1996): 318. 76. Berman, “Ethnography as Politics,” 323. 77. Jeremy Murray-Brown, Kenyatta (New York, NY: E. P. Dutton, 1973), 222–23. 78. Berman, “Ethnography as Politics,” 314. 79. Bruce J. Berman and John M. Lonsdale, “Louis Leakey’s Mau Mau: A Study in the Politics of Knowledge,” History and Anthropology 5, no. 2 (1991): 162. 80. Ibid., 161. 81. Rosberg and Nottingham, Myth of Mau Mau, 190. 82. Quoted in Murray-Brown, Kenyatta, 249. 83. Maloba, Mau Mau and Kenya, 52. 84. Guy Arnold, quoted in Maloba, Mau Mau and Kenya, 52. 85. Quoted in James P. Harrison, Endless War: Vietnam’s Struggle for Independence (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1982), 263. 86. “America stood out as an object for admiration, envy, and blame. This created a kind of cultural asymmetry. To us, Afghanistan seemed very far away. To members of al Qaeda, America seemed very close. In a sense, they were more globalized than we were.” 9/11 Commission, Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (2004), 340. 87. Quoted in Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 69. See also Joseph Henrotin and Tanguy Struye de Swielande, “Ontological-Cultural Asymmetry and the Relevance of Grand Strategies,” Journal of Military and Strategic Studies 7, no. 2 (Winter 2004). 88. V. D. Hanson, “Our Weird Way of War,” National Review Online, 7 May 2004. 89. Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya, xvi.

90. Ibid., 134. 91. James H. Smith, “Njama’s Supper: The Consumption and Use of Literary Potency by Mau Mau Insurgents in Colonial Kenya,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 40, no. 3 (1998): 546. 92. Barnett and Njama, Mau Mau from Within, 89. 93. Ibid., 88. 94. Kenyatta, quoted in Kaggia, Roots of Freedom, 88–9. 95. Ibid. 96. Archer, African Firebrand, 70. 97. Ibid. 98. Smith, “Njama’s Supper,” 532. 99. Maloba, Mau Mau and Kenya, 45. 100. Barnett and Njama, Mau Mau from Within, 239. 101. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 249. 102. Barnett and Njama, Mau Mau from Within, 253. 103. Derek Peterson, “Writing in Revolution,” in Mau Mau and Nationhood: Arms, Authority and Narration, edited by E. S. Atieno Odhiambo and J. Lonsdale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 91. 104. UNESCO, “Aberdare Mountains,” 2010. Available at: http://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/5506/. 105. Peterson, “Writing in Revolution,” 89. 106. Smith, “Njama’s Supper,” 538. 107. Oginga Odinga, Not Yet Uhuru (London: Heinemann, 1968), 1. 108. Quoted in Berman, “Ethnography as Politics,” 317. 109. Ibid., 316. 110. Ibid., 322. 111. Ibid., 325. 112. Wendy James, “The Anthropologist as Reluctant Imperialist,” in Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, edited by Talal Asad (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1988 [1973]), 62. 113. Berman and Lonsdale, “Louis Leakey’s Mau Mau,” 158. 114. Bronislaw Malinowski, “Practical Anthropology,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 2, no. 1 (January 1929). 115. Bronislaw Malinowski, “Introduction” in Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya, vii. 116. Berman, “Ethnography as Politics,” 328. 117. Murray-Brown, Kenyatta, 219. 118. Quoted in Maloba, Mau Mau and Kenya, 32. 119. Ibid., 33. 120. Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya, 297. 121. Murray-Brown, Kenyatta, 139. 122. The demands of organizations such as the East African Association, the KCA and the even the KAU concerned redress of grievances—abolition of the labor pass, increase in the number of schools, improved wages—not political independence from Britain. 123. Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya, 137–38. 124. Ibid., 188. 125. Ibid., 305. 126. Berman, “Ethnography as Politics,” 338. 127. T. C. W., “Review: Facing Mount Kenya. The Tribal Life of the Gikuyu by J. Kenyatta,” Geography 24, no. 1 (March 1939): 59. 128. Barnett and Njama, Mau Mau from Within, 440. 129. L. S. B. Leakey, Defeating Mau Mau (London: Methuen & Co., 1954), v. 130. Berman and Lonsdale, “Louis Leakey’s Mau Mau,” 186–7. 131. Bruce J. Berman, “Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Modernity: The Paradox of Mau Mau,” Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines 25, no. 2 (1991): 183. 132. Louis B. Leakey, White African (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 1966 [1937]), 263. 133. Berman and Lonsdale, “Louis Leakey’s Mau Mau,” 166. Of course, the notion that a European could provide an authentic voice for Africans is somewhat problematic. 134. Ibid., 184. 135. Shirley C. Coryndon, “A Bibliography of the Written Works of Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey,” Human Origins: Louis Leakey and the East African Evidence, edited by Glynn L. Isaac and Elizabeth Richards McCown (Boston, MA: Addison Wesley Longman, 1976). 136. See, for example, Margaret Poynter, The Leakeys: Uncovering the Origins of Humankind (Berkeley Heights, NJ: Enslow Publishers, 1997). 137. Sonia Cole, Leakey’s Luck: The Life of Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey, 1903–1972 (New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 34. 138. Leakey, White African, 32. 139. Ibid., 83. 140. Phillip V. Tobias, “Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey 1903–1972,” South African Archaeological Bulletin 28, no. 109/110 (June 1973): 3. 141. Ibid., 5. 142. Louis B. Leakey, Stone Age Races of Kenya (London: Oxford University Press, 1935).

143. Berman and Lonsdale, “Louis Leakey’s Mau Mau,” 156. 144. L. S. B. Leakey, By the Evidence: Memoirs, 1932–1951 (New York, NY: Harcourt, 1974), 74. 145. Mary Leakey, Disclosing the Past, 66. 146. Louis Leakey, Southern Kikuyu Before 1903 (London, New York and San Francisco: Academic Press, 1977). 147. Berman and Lonsdale, “Louis Leakey’s Mau Mau,” 156. 148. Ibid., 153. 149. Melvin M. Payne, “The Leakeys of Africa: Family in Search of Pre-Historic Man,” National Geographic (February 1965), 206. 150. Tobias, “Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey,” 3. 151. Berman and Lonsdale, “Louis Leakey’s Mau Mau,” 152. 152. Leakey, By the Evidence, 76. 153. Mary Leakey, Disclosing the Past, 76 154. Ibid., 111. 155. T. O. Ranger, “From Humanism to the Science of Man: Colonialism in Africa and the Understanding of Alien Societies,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 26 (1976): 118. 156. Of course, colonial administrators frequently assumed that a ‘working misunderstandings’ implied real understanding. In the words of Kenyatta, “the assumption of knowing the African’s mind has been very often heard in the usual phraseology: ‘I have lived for many years amongst the Africans and I know them well.’ Yet this is far from the actual fact, for there is a great difference between ‘living’ among a people and ‘knowing’ them.” Kenyatta, quoted in Archer, African Firebrand, 29. 157. D. C. Dorward, “Ethnography and Administration: A Study of Anglo-Tiv ‘Working Misunderstanding’,” Journal of African History 15, no. 3 (1974): 457. 158. L. S. B. Leakey, Mau Mau and Kikuyu (New York, NY: John Day, 1952), vii. 159. Leakey, Mau Mau and Kikuyu, 35. The titular head of the mbari (who also owned the territory) was chosen by unanimous consensus of the clan on the basis of his “wisdom, tact, and also suitability as a religious leader.” Leakey, Mau Mau and Kikuyu, 28. 160. Ibid., 36. 161. Rosberg and Nottingham, Myth of Mau Mau, 81. 162. Archer, African Firebrand, 26. 163. Leakey, Mau Mau and Kikuyu, 64. 164. Rosberg and Nottingham, Myth of Mau Mau, 154. 165. Leakey, Mau Mau and Kikuyu, 28. 166. Ibid., 4. Mutual adoption prevented treachery, created reciprocal obligations, and ensured that the ancestral spirits would be “amicably disposed” to the new residents. Ibid, 5. 167. Rosberg and Nottingham, Myth of Mau Mau, 153. 168. Edgerton, Mau Mau, 4. 169. Leakey, Mau Mau and Kikuyu, 13. 170. Ibid., 12. 171. Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya, 44–5. 172. Leakey, Mau Mau and Kikuyu, 65. 173. Barnett and Njama, Mau Mau from Within, 50–51. 174. Rosberg and Nottingham, Myth of Mau Mau, 74. 175. Leakey, Mau Mau and Kikuyu, 57–85. 176. John Middleton, quoted in Gilbert Kushner, “An African Revitalisation Movement: Mau Mau,” Anthropos 60, no. 5–6 (1965): 775. 177. Leakey, Mau Mau and Kikuyu, viii. 178. Ibid., 44. 179. Ibid., 44–5. 180. Leakey, Mau Mau and Kikuyu, 49–50. 181. Annette Rosenstiel, “An Anthropological Approach to the Mau Mau Problem,” Political Science Quarterly 68, no. 3 (September 1953): 421–22. 182. Leakey, Mau Mau and Kikuyu, 53. 183. The rules surrounding oathing acted as a strong disincentive, making oathing an act of last resort: parties that took an oath were debarred from sex with their wives, as were all closely related adult members of the family for seven planting seasons (3.5 years), and all male cattle, goats, and sheep were castrated for the same period. Leakey, Mau Mau and Kikuyu, 54. 184. Ibid., 54–5. 185. Kaggia, Roots of Freedom, 194. 186. Ibid., 108. 187. Edgerton describes a case where a Mau Mau leader brought oath ingredients to a meeting with the British government and poured them over a roast lamb, with the belief, as Wachange put it, that “the government would eat the lamb and become Mau Mau.” Edgerton, Mau Mau, 137. 188. Itote, Mau Mau General, 64. 189. J. L. Austin, Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), 222. 190. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 281. 191. In the words of Mau Mau General Kaggia, “the method of administering the oath and the paraphernalia of the oath were those of the traditional Kikuyu oath. But what is important in any oath is not whether one holds a Bible, a Koran, a sword, but the actual words to which one swears. To make the oath binding we used an oath

we believed would have meaning to the people involved. Each tribe used some of its own traditional oath.” Kaggia, Roots of Freedom, 193. 192. Itote, Mau Mau General, 275–77. 193. Edgerton, Mau Mau, 135. 194. Barnett and Njama, Mau Mau from Within, 126. 195. Ibid. 196. Leakey, Defeating Mau Mau, 84–5. 197. Ibid., 77. 198. Ibid., 45. 199. Ibid., 98–9. 200. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 46. 201. Quoted in Maloba, Mau Mau and Kenya, 189, fn.53. 202. Ibid., 74. 203. African Affairs Department Annual Report (1952), 24, quoted in Maloba, Mau Mau and Kenya, 75. 204. Katherine Luongo, “If You Can’t Beat Them, Join Them: Government Cleansings of Witches and Mau Mau in 1950s Kenya,” History in Africa 33, no. 1 (2006), 451. British administrators in the Machakos District believed that “Kamba Mau Mau were in league with Kamba witches in using ‘nzevu’—a form of witchcraft whose object is to cause confusion—against British authorities and in deploying a different type of lethal witchcraft against black Kenyan officials.” Luongo, “If You Can’t Beat Them,” 464. 205. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 47. 206. Ibid., 51. 207. Ibid., 55. 208. Cole, Leakey’s Luck, 196. 209. Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, 44. 210. By the mid-1950s, de-oathing fell out of favor among colonial officials in Kikuyu areas, but in other areas such as among the Kamba, “colonial officials saw a strong connection between Mau Mau and witchcraft. Screening and cleaning of known or suspected Kamba Mau Mau persisted and gave rise to similar treatment of local ‘witches.’” Luongo, “If You Can’t Beat Them,” 456. 211. Mary Leakey, Disclosing the Past, 111. 212. Ibid., 112. 213. Ibid. 214. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 117. 215. Leakey, Defeating Mau Mau, 43. 216. “Culture and Counterinsurgency,” in Understanding Counterinsurgency: Doctrine, Operations, and Challenges, edited by Thomas Rid and Thomas Keaney (London: Routledge, 2010); “‘Memory of War’: Tribes and the Legitimate Use of Force in Iraq,” in Armed Groups, edited by Jeffery Norwich (Newport, RI: Naval Institute Press, 2008); “Object Beyond War: Counterinsurgency and the Tools of Political Competition” (with Andrea Jackson), Military Review (January–February, 2006); “Social Context of IEDs in Iraq,” Military Review (May/June 2005); “Ceasefire: Impact of Republican Culture on the Ceasefire,” Journal of Conflict Studies 21, no. 2 (2001). 217. Stephen Peter Rosen, “Military Effectiveness: Why Society Matters,” International Security 19, no. 4 (Spring 1995): 5. 218. McFate, “Culture and Counterinsurgency,” 194. 219. Barnett and Njama, Mau Mau from Within, 125. 220. Edgerton, Mau Mau, 75. 221. Barnett and Njama, Mau Mau from Within, 155. 222. Ibid., 154. 223. Ibid., 48. 224. Maloba, Mau Mau and Kenya, 117. 225. Quoted in Maloba, Mau Mau and Kenya, 77. 226. Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya, 198. 227. Barnett and Njama, Mau Mau from Within, 62. 228. Ibid., 170. 229. Ibid., 334. 230. Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya, 198. 231. Ibid., 200. 232. In general, see Barnett and Njama, Mau Mau from Within, 404. 233. Ibid., 456. 234. Early in 1953, for example, General Mathenge attempted to order a concerted attack against bridges, railways and farms. However, “many Mau Mau units refused to acknowledge Mathenge’s leadership, and relatively little damage was done.” Edgerton, Mau Mau, 83. 235. Edgerton, Mau Mau, 113. The results often appeared bizarre, such as the promotion of a Mau Mau commander’s girlfriend to “Knight Commander of the Gikuyu and Mumbi Empire” and “Mother of God.” Edgerton, Mau Mau, 116. 236. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 248. 237. Itote, Mau Mau General, 284. 238. Edgerton, Mau Mau, 140. 239. Barnett and Njama, Mau Mau from Within, 292.

240. Edgerton, Mau Mau, 120. 241. Barnett and Njama, Mau Mau from Within, 382. 242. Terence Ranger, Peasant Consciousness and Guerilla War in Zimbabwe (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1985), 188. 243. See Barnett and Njama, Mau Mau from Within, 264. 244. Ibid., 354. 245. Available at: http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/napoleons-oraculum-1839/. 246. Maloba, Mau Mau and Kenya, 127. 247. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 283. 248. Luongo, “If You Can’t Beat Them,” 170. 249. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 284. 250. Ibid. 251. Ibid., 313. 252. Ibid., 203. 253. Ibid., 307–11. 254. Edgerton, Mau Mau, 159. 255. Ibid., 163. 256. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 258–9. 257. Ibid., 260. 258. Leakey, Defeating Mau Mau, 127–149. 259. Edgerton, Mau Mau, 219. 260. Ibid., 220. 261. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 230. 262. Wealthy Africans who had been loyal to the British government during the emergency acquired land vacated by fleeing white settlers, becoming “Black Europeans.” Kenyatta’s family acquired wealth and power, assuming the role of the hereditary “Royal Family.” Edgerton, Mau Mau, ix. 263. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 336. 264. Michael Blundell, So Rough a Wind (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964), 98. 265. Itote, Mau Mau General, 53. 266. Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey, Kenya: Contrasts and Problems (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 1966), 63. 267. Tobias, “Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey,” 4. 268. Mary Leakey, Disclosing the Past, 112–3. 269. Lonsdale, “Mau Maus of the Mind,” 418. 270. Leakey, Kenya: Contrasts and Problems, 183. 8. DON MARSHALL AND THE STRATEGIC OBJECTIVE 1. Donald Marshall, Ra’ivavae (New York, NY: Doubleday, 1961), 29. 2. Don S. Marshall, An Anthropologist in the Government (unpublished manuscript, 1 September 1981). Marshall’s fragmentary manuscript has only two chapters, the first of which is paginated, the second of which is not. Further citations in the introductory section of this chapter are also from Chapter Two of Marshall’s manuscript. The manuscript can be found among papers of Donald S. Marshall (unprocessed acquisition), U.S. Army Center of Military History, Carlisle, Pennsylvania. 3. U.S. military doctrine is not clear cut on the definition of “strategic end states,” “strategic objectives,” and “military objectives.” Moreover, experts such as Milan Vego disagree with much of what has been published in joint doctrine. In addition, many of these meanings have changed since the Vietnam War. Throughout this chapter, I have tried to be as clear as possible and follow common sense usage of terminology. Thanks to Milan Vego for reading and commenting on the chapter. 4. Lewis Sorley, “To Change a War: General Harold K. Johnson and the PROVN Study,” Parameters (Spring 1998): 98–109. 5. General Harold K. Johnson, quoted in ibid., 99. 6. Andrew J. Birtle, “PROVN, Westmoreland, and the Historians: A Reappraisal,” Journal of Military History 72, no. 4 (October 2008): 1216. 7. PROVN authors were: Don Marshall, Art Brown, Tom Hanifen, Dan Schungel, Ames Albro, Anne Doering, Volney Warner, Chuck Emmons, John Granger, and Harry Jackson. Two of the military officers eventually became four-star generals. Lewis Sorley, Honorable Warrior: General Harold K. Johnson and the Ethics of Command (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 229–31. 8. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, edited by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 88. Italics added. 9. Marshall, An Anthropologist in the Government. 10. Legion of Merit citation for Lieutenant Colonel Donald Stanley Marshall, 29 June 1968 to 24 June 1969, papers of Donald S. Marshall. 11. Marshall, An Anthropologist in the Government. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. “Obituary, Army Col. Donald S. Marshall; Studied Polynesian Cultures,” Washington Post, 7 September 2005, B06; Donald Stanley Marshall, “General Anthropology: Strategy for a Human Science,” Current Anthropology 8, no. 1/ 2 (February–April 1967): 61–66; Donald S. Marshall, Curricula Vitae, dated 10 September 1989, papers of Donald S. Marshall.

16. Representative early writing included “Notes on Rarotongan Kinship Terminology,” Journal of Austronesian Studies 1, no. 2 (1958); “Settlement of Polynesia,” Scientific American 195, no. 2 (August 1956); “Archaeology of the Far Fan Beach, Panama Canal Zone,” American Antiquity 15, no. 2 (October 1949). 17. Marshall, An Anthropologist, xii. 18. Ibid., xiii. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., xv. 21. Ibid. 22. Ambassador William Colby, Promotion of Lieutnant Colonel Donald S. Marshall, 4 January 1971, papers of Donald S. Marshall. 23. James R. Arnold, Jungle of Snakes: A Century of Counterinsurgency Warfare (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2009), 223. 24. John Paul Vann, Letter to the Secretariat of the Department of the Army Selection Board, 14 December 1970, papers of Donald S. Marshall. General Creighton Abrams, Jr. described Marshall as a “brilliant intellectual who is also comfortable with ordinary mortals.” General Creighton W. Abrams, Jr., Letter of Commendation, 18 December 1970, papers of Donald S. Marshall. 25. Marshall, “General Anthropology,” 61–6. 26. Jonathan Margolis, O: The Intimate History of the Orgasm (New York, NY: Grove Press, 2005). 27. John Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), 160. The Pentagon Papers described PROVN as a “major step forward in thinking.” Senator Michael Gravel editor, Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decisionmaking on Vietnam (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 2:577. 28. Andrew J. Birtle, “PROVN,” 1215. 29. PROVN, 1:46. 30. White House, National Security Action Memorandum 288, Implementation of South Vietnam Programs, 17 March 1964. 31. PROVN, 2:Annex F-5. 32. Ibid., 1:46. 33. Ibid., 1:46–47. 34. Ibid., 1:I-6–7. 35. Ibid. 36. See Faleh A. Jabar, “Shaykhs and Ideologues: Detribalization and Retribalization,” Middle East Report 215 (Summer 2000): 28–31; Judith Yaphe, “Tribalism in Iraq, the Old and the New,” Middle East Policy 7, no. 3 (June 2000): 51–58. 37. See, for example, Chanrithy Him, When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001). 38. Social change is not the same thing as cultural change. Cultural change, in the most narrow sense, means changes to culture, defined here as beliefs, narratives, ideologies, norms, values, and the cultural forms that reflect this conceptual web, such as rituals, artifacts, and behaviors. Cultural change, for example, would be the development of a jihadist narrative that defines jihad not as a spiritual obligation but as a military one. Social change, in this same example, would involve the development of a social movement pledged to enact this narrative. 39. Lucy Mair, Anthropology and Social Change (London: Athlone Press, 1969), 121. 40. “Change, to be social, must connote a significant variation from accustomed patterns of interaction and the generation of new loyalties resulting from new contacts. This is precisely what occurs when families, clans, and tribes, for whatever reasons, draw together and swear a solemn oath of allegiance over a burning fire upon a newly erected altar to a god who is to be the guarantor of peace among them and the protector of them all, the god of the city. This ceremony symbolizes the absorption of older and narrower loyalties into more inclusive patterns of association.” Werner J. Cahnman, “Culture, Civilization, and Social Change,” Sociological Quarterly 3, no. 2 (April 1962): 99–100. 41. Larry L. Naylor, Culture and Change: An Introduction (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1996), 41. 42. Ibid., 41. 43. Ibid., 43. 44. Ibid., 53. 45. A. Rode and R. J. Shephard, Health Consequences of “Modernization”: Evidence from Circumpolar Peoples (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 46. Naylor, Culture and Change, 66. 47. Lynn White, Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). 48. Naylor, Culture and Change, 68. 49. See, for example, Gerald Zaltman and Robert Duncan, Strategies for Planned Social Change (New York, NY: Wiley-Interscience, 1977). 50. “In their immodest quest for generalities, the founders of modern anthropology sought to explain societal differences under the rubric of evolution and ethnology, which then spawned particularistic and diffusionist arguments, equally inspired by the notion of social change. There next arose an overwhelming concern to explain precisely the inverse: not how societies changed, but how they constrained individual actors toward conformity to norms and values which perpetrated the status quo. We learned of the positive functions, in Radcliffe-Brown’s sense, of seemingly disruptive social phenomena. In the immediate post-World War I decades in American anthropology, ethnographers organized their data around the odd metaphor ‘culture contact’ and produced studies on acculturation-primarily discourses on the indigenous adaptations to imperialism and colonialism. British practitioners next considered how indigenous peoples, especially in Africa and Melanesia, were likewise ‘changed’ by external forces, a focus which led to the consideration of the strategies individuals adopted in performing supposedly inosculate roles. A short while later, certain

materialistically inclined anthropologists developed the hypothesis that ‘progressive’ change was positively associated with increased animal protein consumption! In short, we have in a way claimed a distinct expertise in studying something we cannot specifically define and have adduced a myriad of theories to account for what it is we study.” John W. Burton, “Social Change,” Cahiers d’Études Africaines 20, no. 77/78 (1980): 181– 3. 51. Bronislaw Malinowski, Dynamics of Culture Change: An Inquiry into Race Relations in Africa (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1945), 1. 52. W. H. R. Rivers, “The Psychological Factor in the Depopulation of Melanesia,” in Beyond the Frontier: Social Process and Cultural Change, edited by Paul Bohannon and Fred Plog (Garden City, NY: Natural History Press, 1967), 156. 53. War, being sometimes interstate and intrastate, may be both an internal force for social change and an external force for social change. 54. Richard Miles, Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization (New York, NY: Viking Press, 2011). 55. Roland G. Robertson, Rotting Face: Smallpox and the American Indian (Caldwell, ID: Caxton Press, 2001). 56. Bruce D. Porter, War and the Rise of the State (New York, NY: Free Press, 1994), 15. 57. In general, the social effects of war have not been well studied within the social sciences. As Michael N. Barnett writes: “Although warfare and the state have marched in tandem throughout history, they marched separately in the social science literature. Indeed, although war is credited with producing such major events as the rise of capitalism, the emergence of representative institutions, and the establishment of the modem administrative state, most sustained investigations of state power overlook the important role of international conflict. There is a discrepancy between the demonstrated effects of war on state-society relations and the theoretical attention it has received.” Michael N. Barnett, Confronting the Costs of War: Military Power, State, and Society in Egypt and Israel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), ix. However, some effects of war on society can be clearly identified. Marwick identifies the following ten types of change as the result of war: first, social geography, such as population, urbanization and distribution of industry; second, economic and technological change, including changes in production and distribution; changes in social structure; changes in social cohesion, especially racial minorities; fifth changes in social welfare and social policy; sixth, changes in material conditions; seventh, changes in customs and behavior; eighth, changes in artistic and intellectual ideas; ninth, changes in the family and in the role of women; tenth, changes in social and political values, institutions and ideas. Arthur Marwick, “Introduction” in Total War and Social Change, edited by Arthur Marwick (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), xiv. Anthropologists, in observing human behavior in situ and through the archeological record, have noted a variety of social and cultural effects of war on small scale societies. These effects include territorial expansion, adaptation between resources and population, displacement of population, acquisition of resources, development of sedentary/agricultural societies, change in organization of production, professional differentiation, social stratification, development of tribal systems, formation of ethnic and racial identities, and so on. R. Brian Ferguson, “The General Consequences of War: An Amazonian Perspective,” in Studying War, edited by S. P. Reyna and R. E. Downs (Langhorne, PA: Gordon & Breach, 1994), 85–112. 58. Other effects include: growth of government; fiscal expansion of states, through the imposition of tax; the ratchet effect, where levels of taxation and size of government never decrease to pre-war levels; the opportunity for leadership that would otherwise not have existed; the integrative effect, where the popular basis of the state is increased by linking citizenship rights to military service; the socializing effect, in which conscripts experience common training and service; the social-leveling effect, where class barriers are eroded through participation in military efforts; and the social reform effect, where war creates pressure for improving domestic social and political conditions. War may consolidate the power of the state. See Porter, War and the Rise of the State, 12; Henry Barbera, Military Factor in Social Change (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998). 59. Charles Tilly, “Reflections on the History of European State-Making,” in Formation of National States in Western Europe, edited by Charles Tilly (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 42. 60. In general, see Edward Doyle and Stephen Weiss, Vietnam Experience: A Collision of Cultures (Boston, MA: Boston Publishing Company, 1984), a book for which Don Marshall was a historical consultant; Loren Baritz, Backfire: A History of How American Culture Led Us into Vietnam and Made Us Fight the Way We Did (New York, NY: William Morrow & Company, 1985). Don Marshall noted that: “Too much US effort in support of GVN is wasted through our own ineptness .… Too much US effort contributes too little to the big problem; there are too many headquarters, organizations, and lines of command, control and coordination. The majority of the US middle level management personnel in Vietnam—both military and civilian—consider this conflict primarily from the viewpoint of their ‘careers’.” Don Marshall, Long Range Planning Task Group Beliefs and Questions (unpublished, undated manuscript), papers of Donald S. Marshall. 61. Statement of Mr. Frank Scotten, CIA representative in South Vietnam, August 1964. Quoted in PROVN, 5:61. 62. Condoleezza Rice, “Iraq: Goals, Objectives, Strategy,” 29 October 2002, reproduced in Douglas J. Feith, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism (New York, NY: Harper Collins, 2009), 542. 63. As Paul Wolfowitz noted, “The truth is for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction.” Quoted in George Packer, Assassin’s Gate: America in Iraq (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 60. 64. Peter Slevin and Dana Priest, “Wolfowitz Concedes Iraq Errors,” Washington Post, 24 July 2003, A1. 65. Quoted in Packer, Assassin’s Gate, 113. 66. Rice, “Iraq: Goals, Objectives, Strategy,” 542. 67. Editors, “Rice Admits Iraq Regrets, Says US Eventually ‘Got It Right’,” Agence France Presse, 19 March 2010. “We should have worked with the tribes. We should have worked with the provinces. We should have smaller projects than the large ones that we had.” 68. Rice, “Iraq: Goals, Objectives, Strategy,” 542. 69. Martti Ahtisaari, Impact of War on Iraq: Report to the Secretary-General on Humanitarian Needs in Iraq in the Immediate Post-Crisis Environment (Westfield, NJ: Open Magazine Pamphlet Series 7, 1991), 5. 70. Anthony Arnove, Iraq Under Siege: The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War (Boston, MA: South End Press,

2000). 71. Whether they could have been addressed is another question entirely. As one CENTCOM planner noted, “Planning was not done as it normally would have been by a joint task force commander, but was given to OSD by Rumsfeld. ORHA did not have the time or resources under LTG Garner to do so. They had no theories about how to stabilize the country, and no staff to do so. They did not anticipate the social chaos that would ensure with the removal of an authoritarian regime.” Interview, September 2012, notes in possession of author. 72. Packer, Assassin’s Gate, 137. 73. Paul M. Belbutowski, “Strategic Implications of Cultures in Conflict,” Parameters (Spring 1996), 35. 74. Clausewitz, On War, 579. 75. General Orders No. 100, Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field (Washington, DC: War Department, 24 April 1863). 76. Milan Vego refers to this as the “desired strategic end state.” See Milan Vego, Joint Operational Warfare: Theory and Practice (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2009), 44. 77. Joint Publication 5–0, Joint Operation Planning (Washington, DC: Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2011), III-7. 78. Joint Operation Planning, I-2. 79. Kurt Eichenwald, “How Bush Snared Blair,” Vanity Fair, October 2012. 80. Quoted in Maurice Matloff, Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare, 1941–1942 (Washington, DC: Dept. of the Army, 2000), 156. 81. Joint Operation Planning, II-20 82. William Flavin, “Planning for Conflict Termination and Post-Conflict Success,” Parameters 33 (Autumn 2003): 97. 83. See, for example, the comments of Paul Wolfowitz in Packer, Assassin’s Gate, 60–61. 84. For example, during Operation Desert Storm, President Bush provided these objectives: “First, we seek the immediate, unconditional and complete withdrawal of all Iraqi forces from Kuwait; Second, Kuwait’s legitimate government must be restored to replace the puppet regime; and third, my administration, as had been the case with every president from President Roosevelt to President Reagan, is committed to the security and stability of the Persian Gulf; and fourth, I am determined to protect the lives of American citizens abroad.” George Bush, speech to the nation, 8 August 1990; reprinted in John T. Fishel, Liberation, Occupation and Rescue: War Termination and Desert Storm (Carlisle Barracks, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, 1992), 12. 85. Anthony Zinni, “Non-Traditional Military Missions,” in Capital ‘W’ War: A Case for the Strategic Principles of War, edited by Joe Strange (Quantico, VA: Marine Corps University, 1998), 253. 86. Joint Operation Planning, I-1. 87. Ibid., III-8. 88. For example, when the Indonesia government issued a directive requiring female education, the result among the Dani people of Irain Jaya was a huge increase in child brides. This was an unintended consequence of what was meant to be a progressive policy. For the Dani, however, sending girls to school prevented them from working in the fields, which threatened the subsistence economy. Since married women were excluded from the directive, it made sense to the Dani to marry the girls off as young as possible. Naylor, Culture and Change, 178. 89. Joint Operation Planning, III-21–22. 90. Tony Zinni and Tony Koltz, Battle for Peace: A Frontline Vision of America’s Power and Purpose (New York, NY: Palgrave, 2006), 28. 91. Ibid., 22. 92. Marshall, Long Range Planning Task Group Beliefs and Questions, 10. 93. PROVN, 2: Annex F-20. See also Gravel, Pentagon Papers, 3:II-106–157. 94. PROVN, 1:102, endnote 1. 95. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, quoted in Sorley, Honorable Warrior, 239–40. 96. Some historians believe that the U.S. should never have abandoned this approach: “Instead of focusing our attention on the external enemy, North Vietnam—the source of the war—we turned our attention to the symptom—the guerilla war in the south—and limited our attacks on the North to air and sea actions only.” Harry G. Summers Jr., On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1982), 102. 97. Andrew F. Krepinevich, Army and Vietnam (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 197. 98. Wheeler, quoted in Baritz, Backfire, 243. 99. Sir Robert Thompson, “Squaring The Error,” Foreign Affairs (1968), 449. Encouragement of regional factions, multiple parties, premature elections, and social revolution (which promoted chaos rather than reform) were ancillary problems. 100. Baritz, Backfire, 241. 101. Thompson, “Squaring The Error,” 442–56. 102. PROVN, 1:1. 103. General and flag officers present included Lieutenant General Herman Nickerson, Jr., Commanding General, III Marine Amphibious Forces; Major General Roderick Wetherill, military advisor in Delta Military Assistance Command; General William Rosson, Deputy Commander of the U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV); General George Brown, Deputy Commander for Air Operations, U.S. Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV); Lieutenant General Frank T. Mildren, Deputy Commanding General MACV; Vice Admiral Zumwalt, Navy adviser to General Creighton Abrams, Jr.; Lieutenant General Julian J. Ewell who had recently commanded the 9th Infantry Division in the Mekong Delta and later as commander of II Field Force; General Richard Giles Stilwell, commander of the XXIV Corps. Lewis Sorley, Vietnam Chronicles: The Abrams Tapes, 1968–1972 (Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press, 2004), 201. For positions held by the various officers in 1968, see Shelby L. Stanton, Vietnam Order of Battle (New York, NY: Stackpole Books, 2003).

104. Richard K. Dembowski III, “Eating Dinner with a Fork, Spoon, and Knife: How A Corps Executed MACV’s One War Strategy” (master’s thesis, School of Advanced Military Studies, United States Army Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, 2009). 105. Sorley, Vietnam Chronicles, 201. 106. Marshall quoted in Sorley, Vietnam Chronicles, 202. 107. Ibid. 108. Ibid. 109. Ibid. 110. Ibid. 111. Ward Goodenough, Cooperation in Change (New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 1963), 50. 112. Ibid. 113. Verrier Elwin, The Baiga (London: J. Murray, 1939), 106–07. 114. Goodenough, Cooperation, 58. 115. In Iraq, for example, the U.S. government wanted to build a free market economy and to encourage small business ownership. Therefore, the U.S. undertook a variety of initiatives to encourage local capitalism, including funding pastry-making classes for Iraqi women. Iraqi women apparently did not want to learn how to bake French pastry; what they wanted was an environment that was secure enough for their children to go to school without the threat of kidnapping or stray bombs. Peter Van Buren, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People (New York, NY: Metropolitan Books, 2012), 209. 116. Seymour J. Deitchman, Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Science Research and Bureaucracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976), 401–03. 117. PROVN, 2, Annex I: 11. 118. Ibid., 2:1:33 119. Ibid., 1:1:39 120. Ibid., 1:1:56. “Even more than by nationalism, large numbers of VC are motivated by a desire for a simple form of social justice and a strong, just government of their own. And in this they differ from their noninsurgent countrymen only in that they are effectively led by disciplined leaders.” 121. Marshall, Long Range Planning Task Group Beliefs and Questions, 15. 122. Donald S. Marshall, “Sexual Behavior on Mangaia,” in Human Sexual Behavior: Variations in the Ethnographic Spectrum, edited by Donald S. Marshall and Robert C. Suggs (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University, 1971), 105. 123. Ibid., 162. 124. Marshall, Ra’ivavae, 18–21. 125. Ibid. 126. Ibid., 18. 127. Ibid., 293. 128. Emile Durkheim, Division of Labour in Society (New York, NY: Free Press, 1997). 129. J. A. Barnes, “Durkheim’s Division of Labour in Society,” Man 1, no. 2 (June 1966). 130. Bronislaw Malinowski, Crime and Custom in Savage Society (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1926), 55. 131. “Herein lies social cohesion, rooted in the conflicts between men’s different allegiances.” Max Gluckman, “Peace in the Feud,” Past & Present 8 (November 1955): 2. 132. Of course, no society is perfectly cohesive or integrated within itself. Cultural incoherence is not, in itself, pathological. Edmund R. Leach, “Culture and Social Cohesion: An Anthropologist’s View,” Daedalus 94, no. 1 (Winter 1965). 133. “Patterns of culture had died with the death of those who could pass on the ways of the past to those who might carry them into the future.” Marshall, Ra’ivavae, 285. 134. Ibid., 300–01. 135. PROVN, 2:Annex I-4. Recently, a number of governments have also come to the conclusion that a cohesive society is necessary for democracy, including Canada and the UK. See Deena White, “Social Policy and Solidarity, Orphans of the New Model of Social Cohesion,” Canadian Journal of Sociology 28, no. 1 (Winter 2003); House of Commons ODPM: Housing, Planning, Local Government and the Regions Committee, “Social Cohesion,” Sixth Report of Session 2003–04 (London: The Stationery Office Limited, May 2004). 136. Jean Jacques Rousseau, “The Social Contract,” in Social Contract and Discourses, edited by G. D. H. Cole (New York, NY: Dutton, 1950), 65–66. 137. Seymour M. Lipset, “Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy,” American Political Science Review 53 (1959). 138. Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, Civic Culture (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1963). 139. Stein Rokkan, “Dimensions of State Formation and Nation Buili” in Formation of National States in Western Europe, edited by Charles Tilly (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975). 140. PROVN, 1:90. 141. Ibid. 142. Donald Lancaster, Emancipation of French Indochina (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 77. 143. PROVN, 1:55. 144. Ibid., 1:102. 145. “South Vietnam is a society in turmoil. Vietnamese institutions, long dominated by the French, were unable to produce change rapidly enough to cope with this society’s needs. Consequently, SVN society now reflects a curious admixture of organization and disorganization operating simultaneously. The GVN is attempting to build a new society while concurrently undertaking operations to destroy the VC ‘shadow society’ rising within it. On the other hand, the VC are equally bent on denying GVN this opportunity to organize; they play upon existing Vietnamese dissatisfactions and magnify long standing social differences. The Communists

initially and successfully accelerated the process of evolutionary change in SVN to revolutionary proportions. The GVN’s ability to answer this challenge, by providing a better society, remains in doubt.” PROVN, 1:39–40 146. Ibid., 1:102–103, fn. 2. 147. Ibid. 148. Ibid., 2: Appendix I-3. 149. Ibid. 150. Ibid. 151. Ibid., 1:II-29–30. Emphasis in original. 152. Ibid., 1:III-8–9. 153. Ibid., 1:II-28. 154. Ibid., 1:53. 155. Ibid. 156. Ibid., 1:102. 157. Ibid., 1:49. 158. For an overview of recent social theory on societies as complex systems, see R. Keith Sawyer, Social Emergence: Societies as Complex Systems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 159. Paul Van Riper, “The Foundation of Strategic Thinking,” Infinity Journal 2, no. 3 (Summer 2012): 6; Clausewitz, On War, 75. 160. PROVN, 1:I-72. 161. Ibid. 162. Ibid., 1:I-54–55. 163. Ibid., 1:I-55. 164. Ibid., 1:I-58. 165. Ibid., 1:II-47. 166. Ibid., 1:54. 167. Ibid., 1:54–55. 168. Ibid., 2:38. 169. Ibid., 1:9. 170. Gravel, Pentagon Papers, vol. II, 580. 171. Sorley, Honorable Warrior, 236. 172. Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup, 160. 173. Sorley, “To Change a War”, 93–109. 174. Ibid. 175. Ibid. 176. Ibid. 177. Ibid. 178. Ibid. 179. Ibid. 180. Ibid., 107. 181. Gerald C. Hickey, Window on a War: An Anthropologist in the Vietnam Conflict (Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press, 2002), 260. 182. Sorley, Honorable Warrior, 230. 183. Mai Elliot, RAND in Southeast Asia: A History of the Vietnam War Era (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Press, 2010), 330–31. 184. Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup, 160. 185. “Army Col. Donald S. Marshall; Studied Polynesian Cultures,” Washington Post, 7 September 2005, B06. 186. After Marshall retired, he was a founding member and executive director of the Military Conflict Institute. From 1980–90, he worked at the University of California at Berkeley on the Vietnam Project, a collection of archival materials now housed at Texas Tech University. In 1990, he became director of publications and research for Oceania at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., and editor of the Neptune. Ill health forced him to resign a second time in 2000, when he returned to Alexandria. Shortly before his death in 2005, he had finished editing a book on hieroglyphics. “Army Col. Donald S. Marshall; Studied Polynesian Cultures,” B06 187. Donald S. Marshall, “Personal End-of-Tour Report and Appraisal” (1970), papers of Donald S. Marshall. He also offers some recommendations for study groups (“By the very nature of such groups, which are attacking problems that the ‘system’ itself cannot resolve, the personnel will not emerge from the system’s pipeline”). 188. Marshall, “Personal End-of-Tour Report.” These problems include lack of unity of command, a ‘business as usual’ attitude among the officer corps, failure to consider economic consequences of the war, and so on. 189. Marshall also raises an enduring problem of nation-building—namely, the expectation that other people will change in accordance with U.S. wishes. “Vietnamese socio-psychological patterns—their ‘national character’— preclude an integrated, continuous progression of national development. … But because of human nature, such matters cannot be changed in a time frame to fit American demands.” The final paragraph concerns the loss of integrity in the officer corps. Marshall writes, “The really serious level of concern is set forth by what can be described only as mass murder—not the reactive tragedies of the My Lai type, but systematic killing in the name of ‘statistics’; by existence of the ‘body count’ syndrome that exists long after the commander has given the word to get rid of it; by the fact that open self-glorification is allowed to ‘pay off’ in promotion … and much of this stems from a career system that increasingly puts advancement ahead of service, that values the ‘system’ itself more than victory.” 190. Marshall, “Personal End-of-Tour Report.”

191. Creighton W. Abrams, Jr., “Letter to the Secretariat of the Department of the Army Selection Board,” 18 December 1970, papers of Donald S. Marshall. 192. James Mann, Obamians: The Struggle Inside the White House to Redefine American Power (New York, NY: Viking Books, 2012). 193. Sorley, “To Change a War,” 99. 9. CONCLUSION: DAVID PRESCOTT BARROWS AND THE MILITARY EXECUTION OF FOREIGN POLICY 1. C. P. Cavafy, “Waiting for the Barbarians,” in C. P. Cavafy: Collected Poems, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). 2. David Prescott Barrows, Memoirs of David Prescott Barrows, 1873–1954 (unpublished manuscript, 1954), 143. 3. David Prescott Barrows, “Notes on Military Government, 1942,” Carton 6, BANC MSS C-B 1005, David Barrows Papers, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley. 4. See William S. Graves, America’s Siberian Adventure, 1918–1920 (New York, NY: Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith, 1931); Richard Goldhurst, Midnight War: American Intervention in Russia, 1918–1920 (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1978); E. M. Halliday, Ignorant Armies (New York, NY: Bantam, 1990). 5. David Prescott Barrows, “Letter to General Churchill, August 29, 1919,” Box 2, BANC MSS C-B 1005, David Barrows Papers, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley. 6. David Prescott Barrows, “The American Expeditionary Force, Siberia,” undated, Carton 6, BANC MSS C-B 1005, David Barrows Papers, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley. 7. David Prescott Barrows, “American Officer in Siberia,” unpublished, undated, 4, Carton 5, BANC MSS C-B 1005, David Barrows Papers, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley. 8. David Prescott Barrows, “Letter to Walcoff, 16 January 1919,” Box 2, BANC MSS C-B 1005, David Barrows Papers, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley. 9. “Considering … the wild untamed character of many of his men,” Barrows wrote, “Semenof ’s control of his organization was remarkable .… His power, like that of Francisco Villa, rested upon great physical strength and courage, a readiness to share the actual life and hardships of his men, and that subtle, rare quality given to few, native power of command. Had Semenof been strongly supported, could he have had the concerted help of the Allies beyond everything, could he have been supplied with the funds, could he have been supported by a single battalion of trained Allied troops, there is no doubt in my mind that he could have taken Chita and freed all of Siberia east of Lake Baikal.” Barrows, “American Officer in Siberia.” 10. David Prescott Barrows, untitled note, undated, Carton 5, BANC MSS C-B 1005, David Barrows Papers, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley. 11. Mary Jane B. Rodriguez, “Reading A Colonial Bureau: The Politics of Cultural Investigation of the NonChristian Filipinos,” Social Science Diliman 6, no. 1 (2010): 1. 12. Kenton J. Clymer, “Humanitarian Imperialism: David Prescott Barrows and the White Man’s Burden in the Philippines,” Pacific Historical Review 45, no. 4 (November 1976): 499. 13. Ira Bashkow, “A Neo-Boasian Conception of Cultural Boundaries,” American Anthropologist 106, no. 3 (September 2004): 444. 14. F. M. Russell, W. G. Donald and E. Neuhaus, “David Prescott Barrows, 1873–1954,” In Memoriam (University of California, 1958). Available at: http://texts.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb6r29p0fn&chunk.id=div00002. 15. Barrows, Memoirs, 17. 16. Ibid., 25. 17. The contemporary preferred spelling is “Cahuilla” but Barrows’ usage predates the accepted transliteration. 18. Russell, Donald and Neuhaus, “David Prescott Barrows.” 19. Barrows, Memoirs, 39. 20. David P. Barrows, “A Friendly Estimate of the Filipinos,” Asia: Journal of the American Asiatic Association 21 (November 1921): 944. 21. David P. Barrows, A History of the Philippines (New York: American Book Company, 1905). 22. Barrows, Memoirs, 98. 23. Glenn A. May, “Social Engineering in the Philippines: The Aims and Execution of American Educational Policy, 1900—1913,” Philippine Studies 24, no. 2 (1976): 166–171. 24. David Prescott Barrows, “Autobiographical note,” Carton 5, BANC MSS C-B 1005, David Barrows Papers, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley. 25. Barrows, Memoirs, 128. 26. Ibid., 138. 27. Ibid.,142. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 146. 30. Ibid. 31. David Prescott Barrows, draft of “Siberia in Two Wars,” published by California Monthly, May 1941, carton 6, BANC MSS C-B 1005, David Barrows Papers, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley. 32. David Prescott Barrows, Letter to Captain Victor Cazalet, 21 September 1919, Box 2, BANC MSS C-B 1005, David Barrows Papers, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley. 33. David Prescott Barrows, “Notes on Military Government, 1942,” Carton 6, BANC MSS C-B 1005, David Barrows Papers, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley. 34. Ibid. 35. David Prescott Barrows, Letter to President E. Wilson Lyon, Pomona College, 13 May 1942, Box 2, BANC MSS C-B 1005, David Barrows Papers, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley. 36. Charles Ferguson, No End in Sight: Iraq’s Descent Into Chaos (New York, NY: Public Affairs, 2008), 121, 126; George Packer, Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 142.

37. David P. Barrows, “Review of the Siberian Intervention by John Albert White,” Western Political Quarterly 3, no. 3 (September 1950): 457. 38. For a discussion, see Betty Miller Unterberger, “President Wilson and the Decision to Send American Troops to Siberia,” Pacific Historical Review 24, no. 1 (February 1955): 73. “None of the governments uniting in action either in Siberia or in northern Russia contemplates any interference of any kind with the political sovereignty of Russia, any intervention in her internal affairs, or any impairment of her territorial integrity either now or hereafter, but that each of the associated powers has the single object of affording such aid as shall be acceptable, and only such aid as shall be acceptable, to the Russian people in their endeavor to regain control of their own affairs, their own territory, and their own destiny.” 39. David Prescott Barrows, “Letter to General Churchill,” 1 October 1919, Box 2, BANC MSS C-B 1005, David Barrows Papers, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley. Barrows was forbidden from communicating directly with the Chief of the Intelligence Division at Washington, or with the Intelligence Officer on duty at Peking. 40. Quoted in Joe Klein, “Is al-Qaeda on the Run in Iraq?” Time, 23 May 2007. 41. David Kilcullen, quoted in Bob Woodward, War Within: A Secret White House History 2006–2008 (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 385. 42. As David Kilcullen observed, the 2006 surge resulted in “the most significant political and security progress in years, via a structure outside the one we have been working so hard to create. Does that invalidate the last four years’ effort? Probably not as long as we realize that the vision of a Jeffersonian, ‘modern’ (in the Western industrial sense) democracy in Iraq, based around entirely secular, non-tribal institutions, was somewhat unrealistic.” Quoted in Woodward, War Within, 385–6. 43. James C. Thomson, Jr., “How Could Vietnam Happen? An Autopsy,” Atlantic Monthly (April 1968): 53. 44. Hamas’ victory in the 2006 Palestinian elections, for example, shows that supporting democratic governance may empower the very political actors—Islamist fundamentalist terrorists—it was intended to marginalize. Elisabeth Bumiller, Condoleezza Rice: An American Life: A Biography (New York, NY: Random House, 2007), 281. 45. David Prescott Barrows, “Education and Social Progress in the Philippines,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 30 (July 1907): 77. 46. Quoted in Clymer, “Humanitarian Imperialism,” 515. 47. In Spanish-speaking countries, a cacique often refers to an autocratic political leader who imposes informal rule over a “territorial group held together by some socioeconomic or cultural system” with a “detachment or freedom from the normative, formal, and duly instituted system of government.” Paul Friedrich, “The Legitimacy of a Cacique,” in Friends, Followers and Factions: A Reader in Political Clientelism, edited by S. W. Schmidt (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1977), 266. 48. Quoted in Clymer, “Humanitarian Imperialism,” 511. 49. May, “Social Engineering,” 155. 50. “If we can give the Filipino husbandman a knowledge of the English language,” Barrows observed, “we will free him from that degraded dependence upon the man of influence of his own race.” Quoted in Clymer, “Humanitarian Imperialism,” 511. 51. May, “Social Engineering,” 158. 52. Ibid., 159. 53. Ibid., 112. 54. Ibid. 55. For example, T. O. Ranger argues that “the Mau Mau upheaval was founded in reality upon the agonizing experience of the social and economic transformations of colonialism by thousands of unlearned men.” T. O. Ranger, “From Humanism to the Science of Man: Colonialism in Africa and the Understanding of Alien Societies,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 26 (1976): 124. 56. David Prescott Barrows, Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes for the Philippine Islands, (Manila: Museum of Ethnology, Natural History and Commerce, 1901), 3. 57. President Taft, quoted in J. P. Finley, “The Commercial Awakening of the Moro and Pagan,” North American Review 197 (1913): 327. 58. David Prescott Barrows, Instructions for Volunteer Fieldworkers (Manila: Museum of Ethnology, Natural History and Commerce, 1901), 4. 59. Ibid., 10. 60. Rodriguez, “Reading A Colonial Bureau,” 1. 61. Barrows, Instructions for Volunteer Fieldworkers, 12–13. 62. In his recent assessment of lessons learned in modern counterinsurgencies, a former combined Joint Special Operations Task Force—Afghanistan commander, Colonel (ret.) Joseph Celeski—writes that commanders must conduct a cultural “assessment,” including ethnicity, language (to include dialects), religion, and nationalism (or ideology), social influence networks (political, academic, criminal, business, and technology). Joseph D. Celeski, Operationalizing COIN, JSOU Report 05–2 (Hurlburt Field, FL: Joint Special Operations University, September 2005), 40. 63. Barrows, Memoirs, 79. 64. See for example: Evelyn Howell, Mizh: A Monograph on Government’s Relations with the Mahsud Tribe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1931); Sir Olaf Caroe, The Pathans, 550BC-AD1957 (London: Macmillan, 1958). 65. David Edwards, “Counterinsurgency as a Cultural System,” Small Wars Journal (December 2010): 16. Available at: http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/counterinsurgency-as-a-cultural-system. 66. Patrick James Christian, Combat Advisor’s Guide to Tribal Engagement: History, Law and War as Operational Elements (Boca Raton, FL: Universal-Publishers, 2011), 59. 67. Barrows, Memoirs, 87. 68. Ibid. 69. Daniel P. S. Goh, “States of Ethnography: Colonialism, Resistance, and Cultural Transcription in Malaya and the Philippines, 1890s-1930s,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 49, no. 1 (January 2007): 124–25;

Dean C. Worcester, “The Non-Christian Tribes of Northern Luzon,” Philippine Journal of Science 1, no. 8 (1906). 70. Goh, “States of Ethnography,” 124–25. 71. David Prescott Barrows, quoted in Goh, “States of Ethnography,” 124. 72. Robert Jervis, “Hypotheses on Misperception,” World Politics 20, no. 3 (April 1968): 455. 73. Dorothy Lee, “Cultural Curtain,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 323 (May 1959): 126. 74. Lee, “Cultural Curtain,” 127. 75. William McKinley, “Instructions of the President to the Second Philippine Commission, 7 April 1900,” reproduced in Dean Worcester, Philippines Past and Present (New York, NY: publisher unknown, 1914), 2:980– 88. Available at: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12077. 76. Paul A. Kramer, “Pragmatic Empire: U.S. Anthropology and Colonial Politics in the Occupied Philippines, 1898–1916” (PhD dissertation, Princeton University, January, 1998), 181. 77. David Prescott Barrows, “Letter to Dean C. Worcester, 7 April 1902,” Box 1, BANC MSS C-B 1005, David Barrows Papers, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley. 78. David P. Barrows, “Report of the Chief of the Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes for Year Ending August 31, 1902,” in Report of the Philippine Commission to the Secretary of War (Washington, DC: War Department, 1903), 684. 79. David P. Barrows, Decade of American Government in the Philippines, 1903–1913 (Yonkers-on-Hudson, NY: World Book Co., 1914), 52–53. 80. McKinley, “Instructions.” 81. Lanny Thompson, “Imperial Republic: A Comparison of the Insular Territories under U.S. Dominion after 1898,” Pacific Historical Review 71, no. 4 (November 2002). 82. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, quoted in Greg Bruno, “A Tribal Strategy for Afghanistan,” Council on Foreign Relations, 7 November 2008. Available at: http://www.cfr.org/afghanistan/tribal-strategyafghanistan/p17686. 83. Bernt Glatzer, “The Pashtun Tribal System,” in Concept of Tribal Society, edited by G. Pfeffer and D. K. Behera (New Delhi: Concept Publishers, 2002); José Oberson, “Khans and Warlords: Political Alignment, Leadership and the State in Pashtun Society” (master’s thesis, Institute for Ethnology, Berne, Switzerland, 2002). 84. Louis Dupree, Afghanistan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980). 85. Olivier Roy, “Afghanistan: Internal Politics and Socio-Economic Dynamics and Groupings” (Geneva: UNHCR, March 2003). 86. Harry W. Lawton, “Introduction,” in David Prescott Barrows, Ethnobotany of the Coahuilla Indians (Banning, CA: Malki Museum Press, 1977), ix. 87. Ibid., x. 88. Byron Farwell, Eminent Victorian Soldiers: Seekers of Glory (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 1985), 94. 89. R. S. Rattray, Ashanti Law and Constitution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1929), ix. 90. Tim Bayliss-Smith, “Colonialism as Shell-shock: W. H. R. Rivers’ Explanations for Depopulation in Melanesia,” in Ethnographic Experiment: Rivers and Hocart in Island Melanesia, 1908, edited by Cato Berg and Edvard Hviding (New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2014). 91. Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom (London: John Murray, 1871), 1. 92. Gananath Obeyesekere, “Methodological and Philosophical Relativism,” Man 1, no. 3 (September 1966); Michael F. Brown, “Cultural Relativism 2.0,” Current Anthropology 49, no. 3 (June 2008). 93. Joseph Goldstein, “U.S. Soldiers Told to Ignore Sexual Abuse of Boys by Afghan Allies,” New York Times, 20 September 2015. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/world/asia/U.S.-soldiers-told-to-ignoreafghan-allies-abuse-of-boys.html?_r=0. 94. However, President Ashraf Ghani has pledged to prosecute. Matthew Rosenberg, “Ashraf Ghani, Afghan President, Vows to Crack Down on Abuse of Boys,” New York Times, 23 September 2015. 95. IWPR Afghanistan, “Afghans Condemn Abuse of ‘Dancing Boys’,” 17 September 2015; Eugene Schulyer, Turkistan: Notes of a Journey in Russian Turkistan, Kokand, 1876 (1966 reprint); Frederick A. Praeger and Anthony Shay, “The Male Dancer in the Middle East and Central Asia,” Dance Research Journal 38, no. 1/2 (2006): 137–62. 96. Adam Curtis, “Kabul: City Number One—Part 9,” BBC blog, 27 May 2010. Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/c3dedc2f-3133-39e9-af1b-8444dd60605a. 97. Robert Edgerton, Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony (New York, NY: Free Press/Macmillan, 1992). 98. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948. Available at: http://www.un.org/en/universal-declarationhuman-rights/. 99. Wendy Doniger, “Suttee,” Encyclopedia Britannica. Available at: http://www.britannica.com/topic/suttee. 100. John Stratton Hawley, Sati, the Blessing and the Curse: The Burning of Wives in India (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1994). 101. See, for example, Chris Mondloch, “Bacha Bazi: An Afghan Tragedy,” Foreign Policy, 28 October 2013. 102. David Prescott Barrows, “Reflection,” 8 January 1944, Carton 5, BANC MSS C-B 1005, David Barrows Papers, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley. 103. David Price, Weaponizing Anthropology: Social Science in Service of the Militarized State (Counterpunch/AK Press, 2011), 5, 3, 109. 104. See, for example, Montgomery McFate, Pax Brittanica: British Counterinsurgency in Northern Ireland (New York, NY: Wilberforce Codex, 2014); Pearl Katz, “Emotional Metaphors, Socialization, and Roles of Drill Sergeants,” Ethos 18, no. 4 (1990); Anna Simons, Company They Keep; Life Inside the US Army Special Forces (New York, NY: Free Press, 1997); Eyal Ben-Ari, Mastering Soldiers: Conflict, Emotions, and the Enemy

in an Israeli Military Unit (New York, NY and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1998). 105. George R. Lucas, Anthropologists in Arms: The Ethics of Military Anthropology (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2009), 93. 106. Robert Rubinstein, Kerry Fosher and Clemintine Fujimari, editors, Practicing Military Anthropology: Beyond Expectations and Traditional Boundaries (Sterling, VA: Kumarian Press, 2012); Robert Albro, editor, Anthropologists in the Security Scape: Ethics, Practice and Professional Identity (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2012). 107. See, for example, David Glenn, “Cloak and Classroom,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 25 March 2005; Laura McNamara and Robert Rubinstein, editors, Dangerous Liaisons: Anthropologists and the National Security State (Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research, 2011); David Price and Hugh Gusterson, “Spies in our Midst,” Anthropology News 46, no. 6 (2005): 39–40. Available at http://www.aaanet.org/press/an/infocus/prisp/gusterson.htm. 108. Melville Herskovits, “Applied Anthropology and the American Anthropologists,” Science 83, no. 2149 (1934). 109. As Susan R. Trencher notes, “From this standpoint, ‘scientific impartiality’ is a form of neutrality about the use of findings. Anthropologists were to accumulate scientific findings and ‘apply’ them to knowledge but not to policies or programs.” Susan R. Trencher, “American Anthropological Association and the Values of Science, 1935–70,” American Anthropologist 104, no. 2 (June 2002): 452. 110. Jeremy Keenan, “Conspiracy Theories and Terrorists: How the War on Terror is Placing New Responsibilities on Anthropology,” Anthropology Today 22, no. 6 (2006). 111. Roberto J. Gonzalez, “Why We Must Fight the Militarization of Anthropology,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 2 February 2007. 112. Ibid. 113. Anthropologists have often made the argument that functionalism accorded with (and contributed to) the worldview of colonialism, which saw African societies as static, undeveloped, and unchanged by the forces of history. While this may very well be true, it is equally true that “Functional anthropology was tailor-made for the cultural nationalist, for whom all his indigenous institutions fitted together in harmonious order before the corruptions of colonialism.” Bruce J. Berman and John M. Lonsdale, “Louis Leakey’s Mau Mau: A Study in the Politics of Knowledge,” History and Anthropology 5, no. 2 (1991): 172. 114. “Just now General Semenoff is much misunderstood,” Barrows wrote. “General Semenoff is a human brute, a man to whom death is a jest.” However, the “massacre” of which Semenof was accused was actually an exchange of fire resulting from a misunderstanding between Semenof ’s forces and American troops at an outpost of the American sector. A few Americans were killed but the Cossacks “were mowed down almost to a man.” Editors, “Borah Would Hold Semenoff, Cossack Chief, As Murderer,” New York Times, 16 April 1922, 1. 115. Jamie Bisher, White Terror: Cossack Warlords of the Trans-Siberian (London: Routledge, 2009). 116. Barrows, Memoirs, 167. 117. David Prescott Barrow, Berbers and Blacks: Impressions of Morocco, Timbuktu and the Western Sudan (New York: Century Company, 1927). 118. Ibid., 220. See also Williamson R. Murray and Allan R. Millett, Military Innovation in the Interwar Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 75. In 1936, for example, as commander of the 40th Division, Barrows developed an exercise in which the U.S. was at war with a European power and Japan, with Japanese forces actively raiding the coast of California. One regiment acted as the opposing force, simulating enemy landings across rocks and breakers. “This manoeuver was not especially enjoyed by any but the invading force,” wrote Barrows, “and the rest of my army put up a deplorable resistance. I had difficulty at the time in making this general situation appear probable or have verissimiltidue, due to current dullness and lack of imagination of the period, but I believe it very close to the situation that may exist now.” 119. David Prescott Barrows, Letter to Colonel Landon, 25 February 1942, Box 2, BANC MSS C-B 1005, David Barrows Papers, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley. 120. David Prescott Barrows, Letter Lieutenant Colonel Eugene Bennet, assistant COS G02, Headquarters 7th Division, 21 April 1942, Box 2, BANC MSS C-B 1005, David Barrows Papers, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley. 121. David Prescott Barrows, Letter to Colonel William Donovan, 11 March 1942, Box 2, BANC MSS C-B 1005, David Barrows Papers, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley. 122. David Prescott Barrows, Report to Colonel William J. Donovan, Kamchatka Peninsula and the Okhotsk Sea, 25 March 1942, Box 2, BANC MSS C-B 1005, David Barrows Papers, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley. 123. David Prescott Barrows, Memorandum to the President of UC, 6 May 1942, also sent to Donovan, Box 2, BANC MSS C-B 1005, David Barrows Papers, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley. 124. David Prescott Barrows, “The Regular Army of the United States,” unpublished, undated, Carton 6, BANC MSS C-B 1005, David Barrows Papers, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley.

INDEX

Abbe, Allison: 112 Aberle, Kathleen Gough: 36 Abizaid, General John: 6 Abouhalima, Mahmud: role in World Trade Center Bombing (1993), 252 Abrams Jr, General Creighton: 310; Commander of MACV, 45, 298; ‘One War Strategy’ (1969), 45, 298; ‘Personal End-of-Tour Report and Appraisal’ (1970), 311 acculturation: definitions of, 179–80; going native, 180, 184–6; liminal adaptation, 180, 182; shallow acculturation, 180–2 Acholi (ethnic group): 60; dowry customs of, 59 acquaintance knowledge: concept of, 25 Afghanistan: 6, 8, 11, 20, 28, 67, 71, 78, 124, 152–3, 169–70, 181, 183, 235, 237, 322; Afghan National Army, 134; Babaji, 134; government of, 333; Helmand, 32; Khost Province, 133; Operation Enduring Freedom (2001–14), 9, 22, 29–33, 39, 52, 59, 82–3, 182–3, 203, 205, 226–7, 322, 333–5; Sangin Valley, 134 ‘Afghanistan Stability/COIN Dynamics–Security’: 13 African Lakes Corporation: 50 AirLand Battle (doctrine): 6 Albright, Madeline: US Secretary of State, 149 Algeria: 144; French Occupation of (1830–1962), 53, 127 American Anthropological Association: executive board of, 38; Statement on Research and Ethics (1967), 5 American Expeditionary Force (AEF): 315–16, 320 American Indian Historical Society: personnel of, 331 Anglo-Dutch Treaty (1824): 192 Annan, Kofi: UN Secretary-General, 207 Annual Colonial Report: Ashanti (1921): provisions of, 76 anthropology: 35, 40, 57, 63–4, 121–2, 258, 301–3, 307, 336–9; applied, 61–3; going native 178–9; issues of application, 61–3; relationship with colonialism, 34, 49–50, 60–1, 75, 332–3, 337 Army Field Manual 3–0, Operations: 211–12 Army War College: 282 Ashanti (ethnic group): 47–50, 58, 63, 66–7, 76, 333; Golden Stool, 48–9, 66; laws of, 48–9, 77–8; political systems of, 78, 80; Ten’dana, 80–1 Ashanti Constitution: 66 Ashanti Empire (2500–609 BC): 47 Assyrian Empire: 103 Australia: banking industry of, 93; military of, 104, 106, 114–15, 156, 158, 192–3 Australian Army Training Team Vietnam (AATTV): 104, 106 Avruch, Kevin: 8 ‘axis of evil’ (framing device): political impact of, 149 Ba’ath Party (Iraq): 23; members of, 78–9, 142 bacha bazi: 334 Balkin, Jack M.: 224 Bantu: 263 Bantu (language): 50 Baring, Evelyn: 259, 271 Barno, Lieutenant General David: 6, 21 Barrows, Lieutenant Colonel David Prescott: 11, 315–17, 319–22, 328–9, 331, 335, 337–8; A History of the Philippines (1909), 318; background of, 317–19, 323; Berbers and Blacks (1926), 337; Civilian Governor of Philippines, 325; Director of Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes, 318, 325, 328–30; ‘Ethno-Botany of the Cahuilla Indians, The’ (1900), 318, 331; General Superintendent of Education in the Philippines, 323; Instructions for Volunteer Fieldworkers (1901), 326; West Coast Coordinator for the Coordinator of Information, 338 Bashkow, Ira: 317 Bass, Bernard: view of transactional leadership, 90, 99 Bateson, Gregory: 16, 122, 129–3, 135, 138–40, 143, 150–2, 154, 329; background of, 120–1; Balinese Character, 121; concept of cultural premises, 132–5; concept of schismogenesis, 135–9, 142, 153; Conscious Purpose Versus Nature (1968), 140; military career of, 119–21, 131; Mind and Nature, 153; Naven: A Survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture of a New Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of View, 120–1, 136; ‘Problems of Applied Science and Manipulation’ (1941), 151; Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 121 Bateson, William: family of, 120 Bedouin: 10, 104, 188 Beers, Charlotte: US Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, 127 Belbutowski, Paul: 291 Benedict, Ruth: 7 Berlin Conference (1884–5): 53 Berman, Bruce: 256, 261 Bernard, Russell: 171 Bhatia, Michael: observations of political violence rhetoric, 19–20 Big Nambas (tribe): 175–6 von Bismarck, Otto: 52 Blair, Tony: 292

Boas, Franz: 74, 336 Bolsheviks: 315–16 Bonaparte, Napoleon: 172–3, 273 Bonham, G. Matthew: ‘What the Axis of Evil Metaphor Did to Iran’, 149 Booth, Ken: Strategy and Ethnocentrism, 17 Borneo: 191, 196; Japanese Occupation of (1941–5), 155–7, 167, 178, 183, 186–8, 327; Mount Dulit, 167 Borneo Confrontation (1963–6): 160–1 Bosnia and Herzegovina: 148, 150; ethnic Serb population of, 148; Muslim population of, 148 Bosnian War (1992–5): 147–8 Bower, Ursula Graham: 10, 98, 106–8, 111, 113–14, 116–17, 331–3; background of, 85; death of (1988), 116; depictions in media, 89; investigation of Naga, 86–92, 94, 100–2, 107, 109, 113, 116; role in command of V Force, 92, 100–2, 104, 107, 113, 116–17 Boyd, Alan Lennox: British Secretary of State for the Colonies, 247, 267–8 Bradley, General Omar: 105 Bremer, L. Paul: 210–11; head of CPA, 210 Bringa, Tony: 148 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC): 160, 197, 333; Radio 4, 89 British East Africa: 241 British Empire: 89, 239 British Museum: East African Expedition (1924), 260 British South African Company: 57 Brook, H.H. Charles Vyner: 166 Brooks, Rajah: 157, 192 Buddhism: 132, 304 Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes: personnel of, 318, 325, 328–30 Burma: 87, 91, 165; Arkan Mountains, 131; Japanese Invasion of (1942), 104, 116 Burns, James MacGregor: Leadership (1978), 90; theory of transactional leadership, 90 Bush, George W.: administration of, 67, 290; foreign policy of, 83, 144, 149, 210, 212, 291 Cable News Network (CNN): 174 Caesar, Julius: 105 Cahuilla Indians: 318, 331 Cambodia: 285 Cambridge University: 159, 166, 260–1; St John’s College, 120 Cameron, Sir Donald: 69, 73 Campbell, James: Making Riflemen from Mud, 169 Canada: 105; military of, 181 Cannadine, David: Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire, 79 Carless, Sally: study of Australian banking industry, 93 Caroline Islands: Yap, 225 Carthage: 288 Catholicism: 304–6 Cayce, Lyle W.: 208 Chalabi, Ahmed: 290–1 Chechnya: 141 Cheney, Dick: 292 Chilton, General Kevin P.: 123 China, General: 267, 271 China, People’s Republic of: People’s Liberation Army, 284 Chindits: 104 Chinnery, E.W.P.: 77 Chinyanja (language): 50 Christian, Patrick James: A Combat Advisor’s Guide to Tribal Engagement: History, Law and War as Operational Elements, 184–5, 328 Christianity: 109, 114, 192, 214, 256, 273–4, 290, 330; Holy Communion, 301; missionaries, 176, 219, 250, 253, 260, 303; spread of, 76 Christopher, Warren: US Secretary of State, 147 Churchill, General Marlborough: head of Military Intelligence at War Department, 316 civil affairs (CA): 130 civil-military operations (CMO): 123 Clapper Jr., Lieutenant General James: 31 Clark, Edna Grace: 251 Clark, Michael: 41–2 von Clausewitz, Karl: 14, 244, 248, 276, 280, 283, 291–2, 312; view of coup d’oeil, 173 Cleveland, Lieutenant General Charles: 12 Clinton, Bill: foreign policy of, 148 Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA): personnel of, 210–11; shortcomings of, 211 Cold War: 122–3, 324 Coleman, Norman: 295 colonialism: 257; American, 231; Belgian, 82; British, 71, 79, 327; European, 82; French, 304; neocolonialism, 11; relationship with anthropology, 34, 49–50, 60–1, 75, 332–3, 337 Columbia University: Naval School of Military Government & Administration, 131 Combined Joint Task Force 7 (CJTF-7): personnel of, 210 Command, Control, Communications Countermeasures (C3CM): 130 Command and Control Warfare (C2W): 130 commanders’ critical information requirements (CCIRs): friendly force information requirements (FFIR), 30; priority intelligence requirements (PIR), 30 Committee on National Morale: 130–1 Committee to Enquire into the Sociological Causes and Remedies for Mau Mau: establishment of (1954), 273; reports of, 273–4 communism: 4, 19, 337

Communist International (Comintern): 251 Compact of Free Association: 235 conceptual bias: 241; potential impact of, 276 Confucianism: 4 Convention (IV) Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land, Annex to the Convention, Regulations Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land (Hague Conventions): 207, 215; Article 43, 206; Article 55, 206 Cook Islands: 282 Coppola, Francis Ford: Apocalypse Now (1979), 15, 184 Cossaccks: Trans-Baikal, 316 Costo, Rupert: President of American Indian Historical Society, 331 counterinsurgency: 5, 11, 20, 45–6, 276–7, 326; role of local knowledge in, 276 coup d’oeil: 175; concept of, 172–4 Crowder, Michael: 54–5, 70–1 Crown Lands Ordinance (1902): provisions of, 264 Crusaders: 144 Cuba: US military government in (1899–1902), 216; US military government in (1906–9), 203 cultural congruence: 108 cultural disjunction: 64–5 cultural distance: measurement of, 108 cultural fit: concept of, 110 cultural knowledge: importance of, 6–8; military applications of, 8 Cushing, Frank Hamilton: 179 cyberspace operations (CO): 123 Dahl, Robert: definition of logic of political equality, 223; Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy, 223–4 Dalby, Liza Crihfield: 179 Dallas (TV series): international viewership of, 144 Defense Science Board: 28 Deitchman, Seymour J.: Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Science Research and Bureaucracy, The, 300 Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam): 45, 279–80, 296–7, 304; Hanoi, 308; military of (NVA), 282, 296, 309 Denton, John Horsley: Naga Queen, The, 89 Diem, Ngo Dinh: administration of, 284 diplomacy, information, military and economic (DIME): 122 direct rule: 53–4; destruction associated with, 74 Dobbins, James: 203 DoD Directive 3000.05, Military Support for Stability, Security, Transition, and Reconstruction Operations (2005): 230; revision of (2009), 230 DoD Military Assistance Plan (1966): 284 Dominican Republic: US military government in (1916–24), 203 Donlon, Captain Roger: 1–2; awarded Medal of Honor, 2 Donnison, F.S.V.: 205 Donovan, ‘Wild Bill’: 151 Driberg, J.H.: 60 Du Bois, Cora: 131 Dunlay, Thomas: 165–6 Durkheim, Emile: Division of Labour in Society (1892), 302 Dyaks (indigenous people): 165; coastal, 192; culture of, 166, 190; role in Borneo Campaign (1945), 160–2, 186, 189–90, 192, 194, 196–7 East African Association: formation of (1922), 245 East India Company: 332 Edgerton, Robert B.: 250 Edwards, David: 327 Egypt: 124, 170; Cairo, 35; French military expedition of (1801), 273 Eisenhower, Dwight D.: 89–90, 103, 209, 292 electronic warfare (EW): 123 Eliot, Sir Charles: High Commissioner of British East Africa, 245, 263 Eliot, T.S.: 15 Ellul, Jacques: 126–7, 141 Embree, John: 219, 231 Engels, Friedrich: 41–2 Enloe, Cynthia: Ethnic Soldiers, 104 Entman, Robert: 145 Erskine, Lieutenant General Sir George: 249, 274 Ethiopia: 35; borders of, 262 ethnocentrism: concept of, 17, 107; potential impact of, 107 Evans-Pritchard, E.E.: 35, 61–2, 64, 179; concept of ‘ordered anarchy’, 302 El Fadl, Khaled Abou: 147 Fairbanks Snr, Douglas: 177–8 Fast, Major General Barbara G.: 40 Feith, Doug: 8–9 feminism: 62 Field Manual 27–5, Military Government and Civil Affairs (1940): 216, 231; paragraph 13, 231 Field Manual 3–57, Civil Affairs Operations (2011): 204 Fiji: 76 Finland: 299 First World War (1914–18): 7, 51, 93, 159, 180, 203, 288, 319; belligerents of, 181 Fisher, Kelly Lea: study of AATV, 106–7 Flavin, William: 292

Fleet Marine Force Manual 1, Warfighting (1989): 211 Flynn, Michael: Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan, 32–3 FM 100–6 Information Operations (1996): 130 France: 66; colonies of, 53, 55 Franks, Commander Tommy: 212 Frazer, Sir Hugh: 50 Freakley, Brigadier General Benjamin C.: ‘Cultural Awareness and Combat Power’ (2005), 31 Free State of the Congo: 53 French and Indian Wars (1688–1763): 181 Friedman, Ken: 126 Front de Libération Nationale (FLN): 126–7 Fulani (ethnic group): 65, 67 bin Fulani, Fulani: 72 functionalism: concept of, 61; relationship with applied colonial anthropology, 62 Gaidiliu, Priestess: 109 Gaidinliu, Rani: rebellion led by (1932), 88 game theory: 129 Gant, Major Jim: 182–3 Garner, Lieutenant General (Ret) Jay: head of ORHA, 208 Gates, Robert: US Secretary of Defense, 205, 330 General Orders 100, Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field: provisions of, 206, 216, 292 Geneva Convention IV Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War (Geneva Convention) (1949): 206–7, 215 Geertz, Clifford: 165, 168 George, Karen: 200 George V, King: death of (1936), 170 Germany: 7, 151, 203, 205, 209, 214, 237, 299; colonies of, 53; Leipzig, 273; Rhineland, 203 Ghana (Gold Coast): 34, 47, 50, 80, 250; Coomassie, 48; Executive Council of, 54; Legislative Council of, 54; Northern Territories, 65 Ginsberg, Allen: 121 Girouard, Sir P.: 72 Global Leadership and Organizational Behaviour Effectiveness (GLOBE) study: 108; findings of, 100 globalization: 40 Goffman, Erving: 145; Frame Analysis (1974), 143 Gold Coast Customs Service: 50 Gonzalez, Roberto: 336 Governance Operations: 11 Grau, Les: 205 Graves, General: Commander of AEF, 316 Greene, Graham: 246–7 Guatemala: 70 Gulick, Lisa: 112 Gurkhas: 88, 104 Haddon, Alfred Cort: 57, 84, 120, 168, 192 Haiti: 6; US military government in (1915–34), 203 Hanson, Victor Davis: 253 Harkins, Lieutenant General Paul D.: Commander of the United States Military Assistance Command Vietnam (COMUSMACV), 4 Harper, Sir Charles: Chief Commission of Ashanti, 49, 66 Harris, Lee: 243–4 Harrisson, Brigadier General Geoffrey: family of, 158–9 Harrisson, Major Tom: 161, 163, 167–71, 174–6, 178, 181, 185–6, 188–9, 191–3, 197, 257, 326–7; background of, 158–60, 166–7, 170; Birds of the Harrow District (North-West Middlesex) 1925–1930 (1931), 159; Borneo Jungle: An Account of the Oxford Expedition of 1932 (1938), 159; Living Among Cannibals (1943), 177; Living Through the Blitz (1976), 160, 175; military career of, 155–8, 161–2, 178–9, 196–7; observations of Big Nambas, 175–7; role in Operation SEMUT, 156, 158, 178, 189–90, 195; Savage Civilisation (1937), 159 Harvard University: 230, 279, 281–2; Department of Linguistics, 282 Harvey, Colonel Derek: 24 Hausa (ethnic group): 67, 71, 79 Hausa (language): 50–1 Hausa Kingdom: 65 Heimann, Judith: Airmen and the Headhunters, 196 Henry, William: family of, 120 Heradstevit, Daniel: ‘What the Axis of Evil Metaphor Did to Iran’, 149 Herman, Jeffrey: 112 Herodotus: 7 Herr, Michael: Dispatches, 14 Hickey, Gerald: 1–3, 5, 11, 110–11; ‘American Military Advisor and His Foreign Counterpart, The’, 2; background of, 3–4 Hilldring, Major General John: 209 Hinduism: 109, 332 Hitler, Adolf: 19, 130, 170 Hizbullah: 19–20 Ho Chi Minh: 252 Hodgson, Sir Fredrick Mitchell: 48 Hofstede, Geerte: 108 Host Nation Information Requirements (HNIR): 30 Howard, Sir Michael: 6–7 Hull, Cordell: US Secretary of State, 209

Human Terrain System (HTS): 169–70, 330; creation of (2006), 169 Human Terrain Teams (HTTs): 29 Hussein, Saddam: 19, 285, 291; regime of, 68, 290, 293; removed from power (2003), 23, 207 Iatmul: 132; culture of, 135; naven ritual of, 136–8; territory inhabited by, 135–6 Iban (tribe): 192; culture of, 189 Ifa: 58 Igbo (ethnic group): 44, 60; clan system of, 71; political system of, 68–70 imperialism: 33, 144, 321; progressive, 288 India: 236, 299; Assam, 86, 109–10, 115; Civil Service, 50; government of, 115–16; Imphal, 86; Kohima, 88; Mandalay, 87; Nagaland, 105; North-East Frontier Service, 115; Pangsha, 85–6; River, Irrawaddy, 87, 132 indirect rule: 11, 44, 52, 54, 59, 61, 70, 83; concept of, 34, 51, 53–6, 65, 67, 73, 76–7; conflicting impulses in, 70–1; issue of knowledge imperative, 56–7, 64; ‘objectionable’ institutions, 77; progress under, 71–2; shortcomings of, 53, 58; use in colonial administration, 76–7 Indonesia: Batu, 120; Tarakan Island, 156 Information Operations (IO): 11, 122, 130, 133, 150, 152; concept of, 123, 125, 128; framing, 145–8, 153; potential application of schismogenesis, 135–7, 153; premises, 132–3, 153; role of culture in, 125–6; strategic, 125; tactical, 125; US spending on, 124 information related capabilities (IRC): 123 Initial Post-Surrender Policy for Japan: 217 International Herald Tribune: 126 International Institute of African Languages and Cultures: creation of (1926), 34 International Security Assistance Force (ISAF): 22, 124, 133; Joint Command (IJC), 30 Iran: 149 Iran-Iraq War (1980–8): 8 Iraq: 6, 11, 19–20, 26, 28, 67, 71, 78–9, 149, 152–3, 169, 270–1, 285, 290, 295; Baghdad, 13, 207, 291; Basra, 25; Battle of Fallujah (2005), 142; de-Ba’athification in, 23, 83; government of, 78; Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003–11), 8–9, 13, 18, 22–4, 29–31, 39, 41, 43–4, 52, 59, 82–3, 111, 128, 203, 205, 207, 210, 321, 330, 335; Shia population of, 142; Sunni population of, 141–2, 330 Irrizarry, Brigadier General Ferdinand: 27 Islam: 58, 65, 77, 124, 133, 142, 146; fundamentalist, 140–1; Koran, 133, 146–7; Ramadan, 127; Shia, 23, 142, 290; Sunni, 23–4, 141–2, 290, 330 Islamic State: 8, 128, 317 Israel: 32 Italy: military of, 35 Jandora, Colonel John: 187 Japan: 17, 78, 105, 144, 179, 199, 203, 214, 217, 237, 299; Diet, 217; Military Government Teams, 217; Okinawa, 338 Japan, Imperial (1868–1947): 87, 98, 115, 132, 155–6, 199–200, 220, 337; military of, 88, 102, 186, 200; Office of War Information, 134; Senjin kun (Code of Battlefield Conduct) (1941), 134 Jennings, Humphrey: 171 Johnson, General Harold K.: 310, 313; US Army Chief of Staff, 279, 309 Joint Chiefs of Staff Office Professional Military Education Policy (OP-MEP): provisions of, 9 Joint Intelligence Preparation of the Operational Environment (JIPOE): potential use of, 15 Joint Maritime Operations (JMO): 9–10 Joint Publication 2–01.3: Joint Intelligence Preparation of the Operational Environment, 7–8 Joint Publication 3–13 Information Operations: 130 Joint Publication 3–31 Information Operations: 125 Joint Publication 5–0, Joint Operation Planning: 292–4 Joint Publications JP 3–05 Special Operations: 162 Jordan, Hashemite Kingdom of: 124 Jorgensen, Joseph G.: Anthropology on the Warpath in Thailand (1970), 36–8 Judaism: 290 Kaggia, Fred: 267 Kahneman, Daniel: 170 Kaplan, Robert: Balkan Ghosts (1993), 148 Karzai, Hamid: 172 Keesing, Felix: 231 Kelabits: 188–9; culture of, 157–8, 187, 189–93, 195 Keller, Major-General R.F.L.: 103 Kennedy, John F.: administration of, 282; National Security Action Memorandum No. 124 (1962), 35 Kenya: 115, 240, 245; Aberdare Mountains, 254–5, 271–2; British Colony and Protectorate (1888–1962), 53, 253; education system of, 253–4; Githunguri, 254; government of, 259, 277; Independence of (1963), 277; Kapenguria, 241; Mombasa, 245; Mt Kenya, 240, 250, 271, 273; Nairobi, 269, 275; Nairobi Criminal Investigation Department, 262; Northern Frontier Province, 242 Kenya Africa Union (KAU): 267; formation of (1944), 245 Kenya Emergency (1952–60): 11, 239–41, 243, 246, 249–50, 253, 259, 262, 270, 275–6, 325; detention/rehabilitation of Kikuyu during, 274; Kapenguria Trial (1952–3), 241; Operation Anvil (1954), 242 Kenya National Museum: Centre for Prehistory and Palaeontology, 277 Kenya Teacher’s Training College: 254 Kenyah (tribe): culture of, 189 Kenyatta, Jomo: 239–40, 243, 247–8, 250, 253–8, 271–2, 335; arrest of, 240; associates of, 251; background of, 251–2, 276; director of Kenya Teachers’ Training College and Kikuyu Independent Schools Association, 254; Facing Mount Kenya, 251, 257–9; imprisonment of, 242; inauguration of (1963), 275; Secretary General of Kikuyu Central Association, 245 Khatami, Mohammad: 149 Khmer Rouge: 285 Kikuyu (ethnic group): 239–40, 244, 252, 259–60; culture of, 242–3, 256, 262–5, 267–8, 270–1, 273–5, 325; mbari (sub-clans), 263, 265; mundo mugo (medicine man), 266; muthanmaki (spokesman), 263; mythology of, 248, 266; oath of, 266–7; pastoralism, 264; view of education, 255

Kikuyu (language): 241, 246, 260 Kikuyu Central Association (KCA): 267; banning of (1948), 245; formation of (1928), 245; formerly Young Kikuyu Association, 250; representatives of, 251 Kikuyu Independent Schools Association: personnel of, 254 Kilcullen, David: 141 Kimathi, Dedan: 259, 271, 273 Kimmitt, Brigadier General Mark: Director of Strategic Communications for MNF-I, 142 Kipp, Jacob: 205 Klein, Gary: 170; Sources of Power, 164 Kluckholn, Clyde: 282 Koinage, Chief: 265 Kolchak, Admiral Alexander: capture of (1919), 337 Kolditz, Colonel Tom: 96–7 Korsah, Dr K.A.: 54, 74 Kroeber, Alfred: 164 Kuki (tribe): 109 Kuklick, Henrietta: 167 Kulick, Don: ‘Theory in Furs; Masochist Anthropology’, 179 Kurds (ethnic group): 290 Kuwait: military of, 104 bin Laden, Osama: 124, 142 Langley Porter Clinic: 121 Lansdale, Edward: 134 Lawrence, T.E.: 115, 179; role in Arab Revolt (1916–18), 104, 106, 180; Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 187–9 Leach, Sir Edmund: 34 leadership: 95–6, 101–3, 106; combat, 96–7; cross-cultural competence, 105–7, 165–6; hereditary, 100; in extremis, 96–7, 99, 106–7, 117; knowledge, skills and abilities (KSAs), 105; political, 90; relationship with gender, 92–3; traits of, 100; transactional, 90; transformational, 95, 98–100 Leakey, Gray Arundel: murder of, 270 Leakey, Louis: 241, 243, 264, 268, 273, 275–6, 337; background of, 260–2; Curator of Coryndon Memorial Museum, 277; Defeating Mau Mau (1954), 259; family of, 262; Mau Mau and Kikuyu (1952), 263, 265–6; Olduvai George discovery (1959), 242, 260; Southern Kikuyu Before 1903, 261; Stone Age Cultures of Kenya Colony (1931), 260; study of Leakey, 259–62; targeted by Mau Mau, 270; White African (1937), 260 Leakey, Mary: family of, 262 Lebanon: 125 Lee, Dorothy: 329 Léopold II of Belgium: 53 Lévi-Strauss, Claude: 120–1 Lewis, Herbert: Misrepresentation of Anthropology and Its Consequences, The, 33–4 Lincoln, Abraham: 206, 292 Lockwood, William: 148 London School of Economics (LSE): 240, 242, 251, 255; Department of Social Anthropology, 257 Long Range Planning Task Group: 282, 309–11 Lonsdale, John: 261 Louis XIV of France: 66 Lowe, Christopher W.: view of IO, 128 Lowry, Malcolm: Under the Volcano, 159 Lucas, George: Anthropologists in Arms: The Ethics of Military Anthropology, 335–6 Lugard, Lord Frederick: 55, 72–3, 82, 244; Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (1922), 53–4; Governor General of Nigeria, 53; Political Memoranda (1906), 54 Lutz, Catherine: 38 Lyttleon, Oliver: British Secretary of State for the Colonies: 269 MacArthur, General Douglas: 156, 217, 338 MacDonald, Malcolm: 63 Macy Conferences (1944/1946): 129 Madge, Charles: 171; role in development of mass observation, 174 Mahnken, Tom: 21 Mair, Lucy: Anthropology and Social Change, 286 Makassar Strait: 156 Malaya: 4, 87 Malaysia: military of, 104; Sarawak, 156–7, 166–7, 192 Malekula (island): 159 Malinowski, Bronsilaw: 64, 167–8, 251, 256–7, 287, 329; Crime and Custom in Savage Society, 302–3; ‘Practical Anthropology’, 34; role in development of functionalism, 61, 233–4 Maluku Islands: 156 Mamdani, Mahmood: 53 Mangaia (island): culture of, 301–2 Manual of Military Government and Civil Affairs (1943): 204 al-Maqdisi, Abu Muhammad: 144 Marshall, General George C.: 209, 338 Marshall, Lieutenant Colonel Don: 45, 279–81, 283–5, 295, 297–9, 303, 323, 325; background of, 281–3, 311; concept of ‘Area Security’, 282–3; ‘One War Strategy’ (1969), 45; study of Ra’iavave and Mangaia, 301–2 Marshall Islands: 199; Enewetak, 199; Kwajalein, 199; Majuro, 199 Marxism: 62, 256 Masai (ethnic group): 244–5, 272 mass observation: 159, 171, 174; observation of human behaviour, 171 Mathenge, Stanley: 254, 271 Mau Mau: 240, 243–4, 246–50, 254, 262–3, 265, 269–76; assassination of Chief Waruhiu wa Kunga (1952), 269; conceptualizations of, 247–9; Ituma Trinity Council, 272; members of, 240, 249, 253–5, 259, 267; oath of, 247, 268–9; targeting of Louis Leakey, 270

A’la Maududi, Sayyid Abul: 146 McChrystal, General Stanley: 13 McKiernan, Lieutenant-General David: 321 McKinley, William: 318, 329–30 McNamara, Robert: 36; US Secretary of Defense, 309–10 Mead, Margaret: 37, 121, 130, 139; Balinese Character, 121 Meek, C.K.: 44, 56 Mesopotamia: 286, 299 Mexican-American War (1846–8): 21, 203 Mexico: 319; US military government in (1914), 203 Michigan State University: 230, 235 Micronesia: 42–3, 199–200, 202, 213–14, 218–19, 235; Guam, 214; German trusteeship of (1899–1914), 225; Japanese annexation of (1919–45), 214, 225–6, 237, 322; US military government in, 203–4, 215, 218–23, 225, 232–3, 235, 237 Middleton, John: 265 military deception (MILDEC): 123 military government: 22, 43, 203–5, 207–10, 214, 217, 229–30, 236, 320; contradictions of, 202; aims of, 208–9; non-interference, 203, 222–3; social change issues, 220–1 military orientalism: concept of, 17–18 Mills, James Philip: 86; Governor’s Secretary and Director of Ethnography, 110 Mitchell, P.E.: 62–3 Mitchell, Sir Philip: 257; Governor of Kenya, 243 Modekngei: growth of, 214 Von Moltke the Elder, Count Helmuth: view of role of modern military, 212–13 Montagnard (indigenous people): 5; forced relocation of, 3 Mortimer, Sir Charles: 248 Mossadegh, Mohammad: 149; removed from power (1953), 70 Mountbatten, Lord Louis: 131 Muhammad, Prophet: 133; Companions of, 142 Mujaheddin Shura Council: 142 Murdock, George Peter: 231 Murtha, John: 124 Mussolini, Benito: 139 Mwangi, Josiah: leader of Mau Mau, 249 Nadel, S.F.: 9; Secretary of Native Affairs in Eritrea, 34 Naga (tribe): 94, 98–103, 106, 109, 111, 113–14, 116, 165; crops, 91, 107; culture of, 85–7, 100–2, 115; Home Guard, 116; kadepeo, 100–1; kienga, 101–2; morung system of, 101–2, 114; role in British war efforts, 87–90, 98, 101–2, 107–8, 113, 116–17; territory inhabited by, 86; Zemi, 86, 88, 94, 100–1, 110, 114 Nagl, John: Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, 283 Napier, Sir Charles James: banning of suttee, 332, 334; Commander-in-Chief of British forces in India, 332 Nation, The: 254 National Geographic: 260 National Security Action Memorandum 288 (1964): provisions of, 284 National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD): No. 24, 210 National Security Strategy (NSS): 292; (2010), 18 nationalism: 180; Kikuyu, 254, 256 Nature: 261 Naval War College: 9–10 Netherlands: colonial administration of, 157; government of, 192 Network of Concerned Anthropologists (NCA): 39 New Guinea: 77, 120, 132, 135–6, 152, 156; River, Sepik, 120–1, 135 New Hebrides (islands): 175–7; Malekula, 177–8 Ngo Dinh Diem: 3–4 Nigeria: 34, 51, 63, 68, 77, 81; Aba Women’s Riots (1929), 59; Biafran War (1967–70), 325; Native Administration, 70 Njama, General: 272 Nkrumah, Kwame: 250 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO): 114, 124, 333; presence in Afghanistan, 134 North Korea: 108, 149 Northern Alliance: supporters of, 149 Northern Marianas (islands): Rota, 214; Saipan, 200–1, 214; Tinian, 200 Northern Rhodesia: 57 Nri: 68 Oates, Lieutenant General Mike: 13 Obama, Barack: 124 Oberg, Kalvero: concept of ‘culture shock’, 111–12 Odinga, Oginga: 255 Office of Naval Research: Coordinated Investigation of Micronesian Anthropology (CIMA), 232; Scientific Investigation of Micronesia (SIM), 232 Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA): 208, 210; personnel of, 210 Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS): 211 Oliver, Douglas: head of CIMA, 232 Olson, Admiral Eric T.: Commander of US SOCOM, 168 Onitsha: 68 open-source intelligence (OPSINT): 327 Orientalism: 37 Ottoman Empire: Arab Revolt (1916–18), 104, 180; military of, 180, 188 Oxford University: 54, 85, 261; Exeter College, 50; Expedition to Arctic Lapland (1930), 159, 166; Expedition to New Hebrides (1933), 175; Expedition to Sarawak (1932), 157, 159, 166–7, 175; Exploration Club, 157, 159, 166–7

Pacific Charter (1945): provisions of, 219 Pacific Science Board (PSB): establishment of (1946), 232 Packer, George: Assassin’s Gate, 291 Padmore, George: 251 Pakistan: 124; Karachi, 124 Palau: 42–3, 201–2, 219–20, 224, 227–9, 234; Angaur (island), 199–202, 222, 235; class structure of, 225–6; dual chiefs system of, 226; Independence of (1981), 235; political structures of, 214, 227; US Naval administration of (1947–51), 215, 218–23, 225, 232–3, 235 Palestinian Authority: 32 Panama: 281; US Invasion of (Operation Just Cause) (1989–90), 203, 213 Pashto (language): 182 Pashtuns (ethnic group): 172; Pashtunwali, 18 Passfield, Lord: Secretary of State for the Colonies, 60 Patton, General George S.: 96 Peace Corps: 109 Peace of Westphalia (1646–8): 103–4 Peleliu (island): 200 Pels, Peter: 37 Perham, Margery: 55, 65, 74–5 Persian Gulf War (1990–1): Operation Desert Storm (1991), 293 Pew Research Institute: 124 Petraeus, General David: 7 Philip, Duke of Edinburgh: 275 Philippine-American War (1899–1902): 318 Philippine Commission: 318, 329 Philippines: 103, 141, 156, 200, 236, 318–19; Bureau of Education, 323–4; caciquismo, 324; Luzon, 328; Manila, 318; Mindanao, 328; Moro Province, 330; Mountain Province, 330; US Occupation of (1901), 216, 330 Pitt-Rivers Museum: 86 Porter, Bruce D.: War and the Rise of the State, 288 Porter, Patrick: Military Orientalism, 17–18 Portugal: colonies of, 53 Powell, General Colin: ‘Pottery Ban rule’, 320 Presidential Policy Directives (PDDs): 292 Price, David: 335 professional military education (PME) institutions: 9 ‘Program for the Pacification and Long-Term Development of Vietnam’ (PROVN): 45, 279–80, 284–5, 295, 301, 305, 307–8, 310–12; report of, 282–3, 297, 300–1, 303; Volume II, 304–5 Project Camelot: 35–6; cancellation of (1965), 36; concept of, 35 propositional knowledge: concept of, 25 Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA): schism of, 141 psychological operations (PSYOP): 133; campaigns, 134–5, 142–3 public affairs (PA): 123, 130 Punan (nomadic group): 190–1 Al Qaeda: 243, 330; ideology of, 141, 243 Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI): 142 Quadrennial Defense Review Report (2006): 23 Qutb, Sayyid: 140 Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred: role in development of functionalism, 61, 137 radio-electronic combat (REC): 129–30 Radio Havana: 36 Radio Moscow: 36 Ra’ivavae (island): culture of, 301–4 RAND Corporation: 203; studies compiled by, 1, 3–4, 110, 204 Rashid, Ahmed: 172 Rattray, Captain Robert Sutherland: 47, 49–51, 54, 63, 66–7, 70, 74, 77–82, 262, 327, 332; Ashanti Law and Constitution (1926), 76; Ashanti Proverbs: Primitive Ethics of a Savage People, 50; British Government Anthropologist, 48; death of (1938), 81–2; Hausa Folk-Lore (1913), 50; Leopard Priestess, The (1934), 81; MoleEnglish Vocabulary, with Notes on the Grammar and Syntax, 50; research methods of, 75–6; Some Folk-Lore Stories and Songs in Chinyanja, With English Translation and Notes (1907), 50; Tribes of the Ashanti Hinterland (1932), 81; view of decentralized societies, 68–9 Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam): 3, 280; Cu Chi, 281; government of, 4, 297, 300–1, 306; military of (ARVN), 284, 305, 310; Saigon, 2–4, 280–1 Rice, Condoleeza: 125; US National Security Advisor, 290; US Secretary of State, 291 Richards, Audrey: 61, 64 Rivers, William Halse Rivers: 56 Robeson, Paul: Sanders of the River, 250 Rodriquez, Lieutenant General David: 30 Roosevelt, Franklin D.: 209 Rosener, Judith: 93 Roth, H. Ling: 60–1 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: Social Contract, The, 303–4 Royal Anthropological Society: 94 Royal Geographical Society: 86; Founder’s Medal, 197 Rumsfeld, Donald: US Secretary of Defense, 44, 123 Russian Empire: 316, 319–22; Civil War (1917–22), 322, 337; October Revolution (1917), 315–16; Siberia, 11, 315–16, 320–2, 337; Trans-Siberian Railway, 315; US Intervention in (1918), 11, 315; Vladivostok, 315–16 Ruxton, F.H.: observations of Igbo culture, 68 Sacolick, Brigadier General Bennet: 163–4 Saïd, Edward: 17

Salafism: 142 San Blas Cuna Indians: 281 San Diego State College: 318 Sanchez, Lieutenant General Ricardo: commander of CJTF-7, 210 Sarawak Museum: 197 Sarawak Museum Journal: 157, 197 Schadlow, Nadia: 213; ‘War and the Art of Governance’ (2003), 204 School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS): 251 Scott, Colonel: Assistant Quartermaster General for V Force, 95 Scramble for Africa (1885–1910): 53 Second Boer War (1899–1902): 49–50, 159, 181 Second World War (1939–45): 11, 34, 61–2, 96, 103–4, 116, 128, 148, 150, 159–60, 178, 193, 203, 205, 216, 230, 245, 251, 262, 271, 282, 323, 338; Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1945), 150; belligerents of, 10, 86–9, 91, 98, 102, 132, 174, 209, 281, 327; Blitz, The (1940–1), 116, 159–60; Borneo Campaign (1945), 156–8, 160–1, 169, 186–8, 192, 194, 327; Fall of Singapore (1942), 87; Invasion of Italy (1943), 209; Invasion of Poland (1939), 130; Japanese Invasion of Burma (1942), 104, 116; Operation Overlord (1944), 103; Pacific Theatre (1941–5), 7, 17, 87, 131, 133–4, 155–6, 178, 183, 186–7, 199–202, 231, 338; Pearl Harbor Attack (1941), 17, 281; PSYOP campaigns of, 143; Winter War (1939–40), 27 Selmeski, Brian: 26 Semenof, Grigory: 316, 337 Senegal: Dakar, 337 separatism: 179–80 Seychelles, The: 48 Shakespear, Captain William: Death of (1915), 180 Shared Values initiative (2001): 127, 146 Shinto: 78 signals intelligence (SIGINT): 327 Sikhism: 104 Simpson, Major Emile: War from the Ground Up (2013), 160, 172 Singapore: 87, 121 Slim, General William: 88–9, 95 Smith, Lieutenant General Walter Bedell: US Chief of Staff, 209 Smithsonian Institute: 35 social change: 312–13, 323–4; concept of, 285–6; directed, 287–8; external forces of, 286–7; relationship with war, 294–5; voluntary, 287 social cohesion: concept of, 305–6 social theory problem: concept of, 25 socialism: 78, 85 socio-cultural knowledge: 33; concept of, 25–6 sociology: 170 Soon, Mathew: Butterfly Hunt, The, 89 Somalia: 6, 147, 262, 293; Civil War (1992–5), 31 South China Sea: 156 South Korea: 299 Soviet Union (USSR): 129, 211, 251; Invasion of Manchuria (1945), 337; Red Army, 337 Spain: 328 Spanish-American War (1898): 21, 217, 328 Special Operations Command (SOCOM): 330; Posture Statement (2011), 168 Special Operations Research Office (SORO): 35–6; establishment of (1957), 35; expansion of (1962), 35 Sproul, Dr R.L.: testimony to Congress (1965), 35 Spurance, Admial Raymond: 218 Sri Lanka (Ceylon): 120, 131 Stanford University: 230 Stimson, Henry: US Secretary of War, 209 Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT): 311 strategic objectives: 10–1, 45, 293, 312–13, 317, 323, 325; economic, 249; political, 249 Sudan: 9, 34 Sultan of Brunei: 157 Summers, Harry: 312 Sumner, W.G.: role in development of concept of ‘ethnocentrism’, 17 Sun Tzu: writings of, 7, 165, 252 Swahili (language): 250 Switzerland: 85 Taft, William Howard: 325 Tahiti: 178, 282 Taliban: 134, 149, 294; insurgency activity of, 8; members of, 294; removed from power (2001), 334 Tanganyika: 55, 62, 260 Taoism: 4 Temple, Sir Richard: Anthropology as a Practical Science (1914), 57 terrorism: 19 Third Punic War (149–146BC): 288 Third Reich (1933–45): 7, 19, 130, 152, 174; propaganda of, 131 Thomas, Northcote: 62–3; Report on the Ibo-speaking People of Nigeria (1913), 61 Thompson, Sir Robert: 4; head of British Advisory Museum to South Vietnam, 296 Thomson, Basil: 76 Thurman, General Maxwell: 213 Tibet: 115 Tilly,C harles: 288 Tito, Josip Broz: death of (1980), 147–8 Togoland: 51

Tonga: social structure of, 225 Torres Straights Expedition (1898): 57 Trobriand Islandes: 329 Truman, Harry S.: 212–13 Trust Territory of the Pacific: 235; establishment of (1947), 213 Turkmen (ethnic group): 290 Turkey: 124; military of, 103 Turney-High, Hugh: 38–9 Turnley, Jessica Glicken: 163 Twi (language): 51 umma: 142 Uganda: 55, 59, 241, 244 Uganda and Sudan Civil Services: personnel of, 60, 73 unconventional warfare: 11, 161–3, 168–9, 175, 187, 193–4; concept of, 162–3; intuition, 1, 64 unilateralism: 125 United Kingdom (UK): 254; British Borneo Civil Affairs Unit, 197; British Expeditionary Force (BEF), 181; Cambridge, 135; Colonial Office, 57, 85, 263, 269; colonies of, 53; Dorset, 260; Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 139; government of, 34, 50, 192, 240, 248, 258, 267–8, 275; London, 85–6, 93–4, 115, 174, 250–2, 320; military of, 10, 44, 87, 95, 99, 107–8, 160, 275; Ministry of Information, 174; Northern Ireland, 141, 161; Oxford, 86; Royal Air Force (RAF), 98; Royal Navy, 93; Scotland Yard, 251; Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), 119; Special Operations Executive, 162; Whitehall, 174 United Nations (UN): 291; Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 255; establishment of Trust Territory of the Pacific (1947), 213; Security Council Resolution 1483, 210 United States of America (USA): 13, 28, 39–40, 42, 78–9, 82, 121–2, 144, 146, 151, 199–200, 203, 206–7, 252, 281, 288, 304–5, 317, 322, 333–4, 337; 9/11 Attacks, 149, 243–4; American-Indian Wars (1540–1924), 22, 212; Board of Economic Warfare, 231; Boston, MA, 282; Bureau of Indian Affairs, 330; Carlisle, PA, 282; Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 5, 119, 151, 289; Charlottesville, VA, 230; Civil War (1861–5), 21, 203, 212; Congress, 35; Constitution of, 96, 208–9, 229; counterinsurgency doctrine of, 5; Defense Intelligence Agency, 31; Defense Nuclear Agency, 311; Department of Commerce, 210; Department of Defense (DoD), 4–5, 28–9, 35–6, 40–1, 124, 163, 210–11, 230; DoD Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 35; Fayetteville, NC, 38; Fort Bragg, NC, 163, 182; Government Accountability Office (GAO), 123; government of, 1, 5, 82, 123, 232, 294, 299, 312; Green Berets, 163; Joint Chiefs of Staff, 5–6, 9–10, 13, 125, 130, 213, 296, 311; Kansas City, KS, 124; Los Angeles, CA, 122; military of, 2–4, 6–7, 17–18, 20–5, 28, 30–1, 42, 44, 82–3, 96, 105, 126, 139, 169, 173, 181, 203–4, 228–9, 233, 237–8, 262, 296–7, 308–9, 319, 334–5; National Guard, 337–8; National Security Council (NSC), 292–3; Navy of, 42, 103, 200, 202, 213, 218–19, 230–2, 235–6, 309, 312; New York, 131; Office of Strategic Services (OSS), 104, 119–20, 131–2, 150–1, 194, 231, 338; Palo Alto, CA, 121; Pentagon, 5, 9, 39, 45, 125, 172, 213, 282, 309, 311, 327; Salem, MA, 282; Senate, 337; State Department, 12, 36, 127, 209–11, 213, 284; Treasury Department, 210; US Air Force (USAF), 106; US Army Corp of Engineers, 336; US Army Special Operations Command, 12; US Marine Corps (USMC), 32, 40, 142, 211–12, 336; US Special Forces, 1–2, 119, 163–6, 169, 181–2, 184, 194, 280, 284; War Department, 209; War of Independence (1775–83), 202; Washington DC, 36, 131, 147, 234–5, 293, 300, 311, 316, 330; World Trade Center Bombing (1993), 252 University of California, Berkeley (UCB): 318 University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA): 202 University of Chicago: 3, 5, 318 University of London: 116 University of the Toilers of the East (KUTV): 251 University of Virginia: School for Military Government, 230 University of Wisconsin: 202 US Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences: studies compiled by, 112–13 US Army John F. Kennedy Special Ware Center and School: faculty of, 163–4 US Army Special Warfare Center: personnel of, 182 US Army War College: 123 US Central Command (CENTCOM): 32, 210, 212, 290, 330 US Commercial Company: studies compiled by, 231–2 US Information Agency: 122–3 US Institute for Peace: 330 US Law of Land Warfare: 207 US Military Academy at West Point: 97 US National Security Strategy: 124; provisions of, 52 US Naval Academy (USNA): 23, 336 US Naval War College: Joint Maritime Operations, 20 Useem Dr Ruth Hill: family of, 236; Western-Educated Man in India, The, 236 Useem, Lieutenant John: 42–3, 202, 219, 227, 235–6, 262, 322; background of, 199–200, 202; family of, 236; military career of, 201, 215; Military Governor of Anguar, 219–24; observations of US government policy in Micronesia, 215, 232, 236–8; Western-Educated Man in India, The, 236 V Force: 92, 95, 100–2, 104, 107, 113; establishment of (1942), 87; personnel of, 95, 115; recruitment efforts, 87 Vann, John Paul: 282–3 Veterans Administration Hospital: 121 Victoria, Queen: 86 Viet Minh (Viet Cong) (VC): 2, 4, 15, 282, 284, 296–7, 301, 304–6, 308–10; members of, 45; support networks of, 297; tactics of, 252; territory held by, 1 Vietnam: 4–5, 11, 110, 114–15, 279, 311; Ban Me Thout, 3; Cochin-Chinese population of, 304; Delta, 299; Nam Dong, 1–2; Tonkinese population of, 304 Vietnam War (1955–75): 1, 11, 14, 36, 41–2, 45, 107, 111, 205, 284–5, 289, 295–8; belligerents of, 1–3, 252, 300; Mai Lai Massacre (1968), 312; Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV), 45, 298, 310; PSYOP campaigns in, 134–5; Tet Offensive (1968), 3, 281 Vietnamese Civilian Irregular Defense Group: training of, 1 Villa, Pancho: 319 Virilio, Paul: 14 Volta, River: 50

Walker, Major General Walter: 160–1 Walzer, Michael: Just War, 39 War of 1812 (1812–15): 21 War of the Golden Stool (1900): 47–9 Warner, Volney: 309 Waruhiu wa Kunga, Chief: assassination of (1952), 269; Paramount Chief for Central Province, 269 Wayne, John: Green Berets, The (1968), 3 Weigley, Russell F.: American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy, The (1973), 21 Westmoreland, General William: 296, 298, 309; Commander of MACV, 45 White, Thomas E.: US Secretary of the Army, 290 Wiener, Norbert: 128–9; concept of man-machine interface, 129; Cybernetics, 129 Wilson, Woodrow: 316 Wolf, Eric R.: Anthropology on the Warpath in Thailand (1970), 36–8 Wood, Brigadier General Leonard: Governor of Cuba, 217 Wright, Colonel Rawdon: 87 Yaa Asantewaa, Queen-Mother: 48 Yale University: 230–1 Yarborough, Brigadier General William: writings on US Special Forces conduct, 182–3, 195 Yezedis (ethnic group): 290 Yoruba (ethnic group): 67 Yuen Foong Khong: Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965, 19 Z Special: 156, 186; Operation SEMUT (1945), 156, 158, 178, 192; personnel of, 157–8 al-Zarqawi, Abu Musab: 141–2 al-Zawahiri, Ayman: 142 Zinni, General Anthony: 32, 293; Battle for Peace, 295 Zionist Congress: 245