Ultimate Weapon: Knowing a War Zone’s Culture - Miller-McCune
The U.S. military is paying more attention to the culture of the places where it fights, putting a new weapon in its arsenal, according to both soldiers and academics.
When U.S. soldiers first went into Afghanistan and Iraq a decade ago, the military gave little thought to how an understanding of regional language, values, and norms could ease the interaction between troops and the locals they encountered.
“There was this early period there when we invaded Iraq, in particular, where we just thought that this was a military endeavor,” said Rochelle Davis, an assistant professor of anthropology at Georgetown University and a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center. “If you go back and look at how we talked about it and the things we did, culture just wasn’t even considered.”
The military’s attitude has changed considerably since then, as culture and language training have shifted from the purview of a few specialists to a central tool in any service member’s arsenal. Maj. Gen. David Hogg, head of the Adviser Forces in Afghanistan, has even suggested the military more broadly think of “culture as a weapon system.”
A new report from the Government Accountability Office suggests that the Army and Marines still need to do a better job of tracking and assessing exactly who receives cultural training, assigning them where their training will be most useful, and following up so their newly acquired language skills don’t go stale. Nonetheless, the military is doing a much better job today, Davis says, than it did 10 years ago in applying insights from anthropology (without, that is, the problematic pursuit of bringing anthropologists on board in battle zones).