Aside from Special Forces, most U.S. soldiers are not trained to understand or operate in foreign cultures and societies. One U.S. Army captain in Iraq said, "I was never given classes on how to sit down with a sheik. . . . He is giving me the traditional dishdasha and the entire outfit of a sheik because he claims that I am a new sheik in town so I must be dressed as one. I don't know if he is trying to gain favor with me because he wants something [or if it is] something good or something bad." In fact, as soon as coalition forces toppled Saddam Hussein, they became de facto players in the Iraqi social system. The young captain had indeed become the new sheik in town and was being properly honored by his Iraqi host.4
As this example indicates, U.S. forces frequently do not know who their friends are, and just as often they do not know who their enemies are. A returning commander from the 3d Infantry Division observed: "I had perfect situational awareness. What I lacked was cultural awareness. I knew where every enemy tank was dug in on the outskirts of Tallil. Only problem was, my soldiers had to fight fanatics charging on foot or in pickups and firing AK-47s and RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades]. Great technical intelligence. Wrong enemy."5
While the consequences of a lack of cultural knowledge might be most apparent (or perhaps most deadly) in a counterinsurgency, a failure to understand foreign cultures has been a major contributing factor in multiple national-security and intelligence failures. In her 1962 study, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, Roberta Wohlstetter demonstrated that although the U.S. Government picked up Japanese signals (including conversations, decoded cables, and ship movements), it failed to distinguish signals from noise-to understand which signals were meaningful-because it was unimaginable that the Japanese might do something as "irrational" as attacking the headquarters of the U.S. Pacific fleet.6
Such ethnocentrism (the inability to put aside one's own cultural attitudes and imagine the world from the perspective of a different group) is especially dangerous in a national-security context because it can distort strategic thinking and result in assumptions that the adversary will behave exactly as one might behave. India's nuclear tests on 11 and 13 May 1998 came as a complete surprise because of this type of "mirror-imaging" among CIA analysts. According to the internal investigation conducted by former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff David Jeremiah, the real problem was an assumption by intelligence analysts and policymakers that the Indians would not test their nuclear weapons because Americans would not test nuclear weapons in similar circumstances. According to Jeremiah, "The intelligence and the policy communities had an underlying mind-set going into these tests that the B.J.P. [Bharatiya Janata Party] would behave as we [would] behave."7
U.S. Department of the Army Field Manual (FM) (interim) 3-07.22, Counterinsurgency Operations, defines insurgency as an "organized movement aimed at the overthrow of a constituted government through use of subversion and armed conflict. It is a protracted politico-military struggle designed to weaken government control and legitimacy while increasing insurgent control. Political power is the central issue in an insurgency [emphasis added]." Political considerations must therefore circumscribe military action as a fundamental matter of strategy. As British Field Marshall Gerald Templar explained in 1953, "The answer lies not in pouring more troops into the jungle, but rests in the hearts and minds of the . . . people." Winning hearts and minds requires understanding the local culture.3
Why has cultural knowledge suddenly become such an imperative? Primarily because traditional methods of warfighting have proven inadequate in Iraq and Afghanistan. U.S. technology, training, and doctrine designed to counter the Soviet threat are not designed for low-intensity counterinsurgency operations where civilians mingle freely with combatants in complex urban terrain.
The major combat operations that toppled Saddam Hussein's regime were relatively simple because they required the U.S. military to do what it does best-conduct maneuver warfare in flat terrain using overwhelming firepower with air support. However, since the end of the "hot" phase of the war, coalition forces have been fighting a complex war against an enemy they do not understand. The insurgents' organizational structure is not military, but tribal. Their tactics are not conventional, but asymmetrical. Their weapons are not tanks and fighter planes, but improvised explosive devices (IEDs). They do not abide by the Geneva Conventions, nor do they appear to have any informal rules of engagement.
Countering the insurgency in Iraq requires cultural and social knowledge of the adversary. Yet, none of the elements of U.S. national power-diplomatic, military, intelligence, or economic-explicitly take adversary culture into account in the formation or execution of policy. This cultural knowledge gap has a simple cause-the almost total absence of anthropology within the national-security establishment.
Once called "the handmaiden of colonialism," anthropology has had a long, fruitful relationship with various elements of national power, which ended suddenly following the Vietnam War. The strange story of anthropology's birth as a warfighting discipline, and its sudden plunge into the abyss of postmodernism, is intertwined with the U.S. failure in Vietnam. The curious and conspicuous lack of anthropology in the national-security arena since the Vietnam War has had grave consequences for countering the insurgency in Iraq, particularly because political policy and military operations based on partial and incomplete cultural knowledge are often worse than none at all.
A Lack of Cultural Awareness
In a conflict between symmetric adversaries, where both are evenly matched and using similar technology, understanding the adversary's culture is largely irrelevant. The Cold War, for all its complexity, pitted two powers of European heritage against each other. In a counterinsurgency operation against a non-Western adversary, however, culture matters.
Shalom bruthah laron i cant get online at home lol possible cia plot i dont know i just quickly copy and paste some of this i at fircrofts mental health centre for do mi drumming at music group jus use their internet quick this dont seem too relevaqnt but i not had time read it all i try write more later or go library tomorror i positng letter to u today too...
Anthropology and Counterinsurgency: The Strange Story of their Curious Relationship Something mysterious is going on inside the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD). Over the past 2 years, senior leaders have been calling for something unusual and unexpected-cultural knowledge of the adversary. In august 2004, retired Major General Robert H. Scales, Jr., wrote an article for the Naval War College's Proceedings magazine that opposed the commonly held view within the U.S. military that success in war is best achieved by overwhelming technological advantage. Scales argues that the type of conflict we are now witnessing in Iraq requires "an exceptional ability to understand people, their culture, and their motivation." 1 In October 2004, Arthur Cebrowski, Director of the Office of Force Transformation, concluded that "knowledge of one's enemy and his culture and society may be more important than knowledge of his order of battle."2 In November 2004, the Office of Naval Research and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) sponsored the Adversary Cultural Knowledge and National Security Conference, the first major DOD conference on the social sciences since 1962.
I hope you got these writings on your blog as well, my letter? I hoped you would have written some answer here, but still not a sign of you. So i'm waiting to see a letter in my mailbox now any day!
I was sick for 2 days: sore throat and i take antibiotics for some days now. I've the luck to display 22 paintings, oils and watercolors,in the clinic nearby. I shall put some poetic tekst underneath. Now that I follow a writer's course.
Some thoughts are here for you, Jason. :-)
Every one has a unique role to fill.Everyone, including you, is indispensable.- Jean Renoir
There are billions of people in the world, and every one of them is special. No one else in the world is like you.-Muhammad Ali
Don't let other people tell who you are. -Diane Sawyer
Talk back to your internal critic.- Robert J. Mckain
On the other hand, buhogrunon, there are people who spend hours and hours to get the highest score on a video game. Some of the reflexes and muscle memory spent on Guitar Hero is rather amazing. If that were put to use learning guitar for real, we'd have some crackerjack musicians.
Of course, as you point out, it all depends on whether people want to learn guitar during their game time. A beginner's first sounds out of a guitar are usually not "rocktastic."
A quick google search says that "Rocksmith" is the game that does this already, but this is the first I've heard of it. It might need a "version 2.0" before it takes off. :-)
The book is fiction, and actually is a series of seven books. They're fantasy aimed at teenagers but readable by anyone, by Susan Cooper.
The basic plotline is that there's a "race" of immortals on the side of absolute good who exist to defend the world and humanity from the agents of absolute evil. At the end of the series, the agents of evil are banished from the world, and so all but one of the agents of good take themselves off out of the world too because they're no longer needed. And one of them delivers the speech I borrowed that line from, to a group of youngsters who've been helping him.
I understand you and it's not easy at all to live in prison, I couldn't imagine how bad this can be. But it seems to me you're revolting against all and everyone and the question I ask by myself is, what do you achieve with that? You're angry OK but I doubt that what you call 'venting' gives you as much relief as you might hope. It's not that I don't like your posts, and I don't want to preach, but I too may here give you my opinion, letting you completely free what you do with it.
Wow, how deep is that? I do hope you really find your best friend and/or Soul Mate soon Quincy, hmm was her name Imani? oh sorry, maybe it was someone else!
RSS
As this example indicates, U.S. forces frequently do not know who their friends are, and just as often they do not know who their enemies are. A returning commander from the 3d Infantry Division observed: "I had perfect situational awareness. What I lacked was cultural awareness. I knew where every enemy tank was dug in on the outskirts of Tallil. Only problem was, my soldiers had to fight fanatics charging on foot or in pickups and firing AK-47s and RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades]. Great technical intelligence. Wrong enemy."5
While the consequences of a lack of cultural knowledge might be most apparent (or perhaps most deadly) in a counterinsurgency, a failure to understand foreign cultures has been a major contributing factor in multiple national-security and intelligence failures. In her 1962 study, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, Roberta Wohlstetter demonstrated that although the U.S. Government picked up Japanese signals (including conversations, decoded cables, and ship movements), it failed to distinguish signals from noise-to understand which signals were meaningful-because it was unimaginable that the Japanese might do something as "irrational" as attacking the headquarters of the U.S. Pacific fleet.6
Such ethnocentrism (the inability to put aside one's own cultural attitudes and imagine the world from the perspective of a different group) is especially dangerous in a national-security context because it can distort strategic thinking and result in assumptions that the adversary will behave exactly as one might behave. India's nuclear tests on 11 and 13 May 1998 came as a complete surprise because of this type of "mirror-imaging" among CIA analysts. According to the internal investigation conducted by former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff David Jeremiah, the real problem was an assumption by intelligence analysts and policymakers that the Indians would not test their nuclear weapons because Americans would not test nuclear weapons in similar circumstances. According to Jeremiah, "The intelligence and the policy communities had an underlying mind-set going into these tests that the B.J.P. [Bharatiya Janata Party] would behave as we [would] behave."7
The major combat operations that toppled Saddam Hussein's regime were relatively simple because they required the U.S. military to do what it does best-conduct maneuver warfare in flat terrain using overwhelming firepower with air support. However, since the end of the "hot" phase of the war, coalition forces have been fighting a complex war against an enemy they do not understand. The insurgents' organizational structure is not military, but tribal. Their tactics are not conventional, but asymmetrical. Their weapons are not tanks and fighter planes, but improvised explosive devices (IEDs). They do not abide by the Geneva Conventions, nor do they appear to have any informal rules of engagement.
Countering the insurgency in Iraq requires cultural and social knowledge of the adversary. Yet, none of the elements of U.S. national power-diplomatic, military, intelligence, or economic-explicitly take adversary culture into account in the formation or execution of policy. This cultural knowledge gap has a simple cause-the almost total absence of anthropology within the national-security establishment.
Once called "the handmaiden of colonialism," anthropology has had a long, fruitful relationship with various elements of national power, which ended suddenly following the Vietnam War. The strange story of anthropology's birth as a warfighting discipline, and its sudden plunge into the abyss of postmodernism, is intertwined with the U.S. failure in Vietnam. The curious and conspicuous lack of anthropology in the national-security arena since the Vietnam War has had grave consequences for countering the insurgency in Iraq, particularly because political policy and military operations based on partial and incomplete cultural knowledge are often worse than none at all.
A Lack of Cultural Awareness
In a conflict between symmetric adversaries, where both are evenly matched and using similar technology, understanding the adversary's culture is largely irrelevant. The Cold War, for all its complexity, pitted two powers of European heritage against each other. In a counterinsurgency operation against a non-Western adversary, however, culture matters.
Anthropology and Counterinsurgency: The Strange Story of their Curious Relationship
Something mysterious is going on inside the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD). Over the past 2 years, senior leaders have been calling for something unusual and unexpected-cultural knowledge of the adversary. In august 2004, retired Major General Robert H. Scales, Jr., wrote an article for the Naval War College's Proceedings magazine that opposed the commonly held view within the U.S. military that success in war is best achieved by overwhelming technological advantage. Scales argues that the type of conflict we are now witnessing in Iraq requires "an exceptional ability to understand people, their culture, and their motivation." 1 In October 2004, Arthur Cebrowski, Director of the Office of Force Transformation, concluded that "knowledge of one's enemy and his culture and society may be more important than knowledge of his order of battle."2 In November 2004, the Office of Naval Research and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) sponsored the Adversary Cultural Knowledge and National Security Conference, the first major DOD conference on the social sciences since 1962.
I hope you got these writings on your blog as well, my letter? I hoped you would have written some answer here, but still not a sign of you. So i'm waiting to see a letter in my mailbox now any day!
I was sick for 2 days: sore throat and i take antibiotics for some days now.
I've the luck to display 22 paintings, oils and watercolors,in the clinic nearby.
I shall put some poetic tekst underneath.
Now that I follow a writer's course.
Some thoughts are here for you, Jason. :-)
Every one has a unique role
to fill.Everyone, including you,
is indispensable.- Jean Renoir
There are billions of people
in the world, and every one of
them is special. No one else in
the world is like you.-Muhammad Ali
Don't let other people
tell who you are. -Diane Sawyer
Talk back to your internal critic.- Robert J. Mckain
Take care, dear jason!
Of course, as you point out, it all depends on whether people want to learn guitar during their game time. A beginner's first sounds out of a guitar are usually not "rocktastic."
A quick google search says that "Rocksmith" is the game that does this already, but this is the first I've heard of it. It might need a "version 2.0" before it takes off. :-)
Your writing and your life are both in a blooming phase. Great writing. Great reading. Keep inspiring others...including me. Thank you.
Grace
The basic plotline is that there's a "race" of immortals on the side of absolute good who exist to defend the world and humanity from the agents of absolute evil. At the end of the series, the agents of evil are banished from the world, and so all but one of the agents of good take themselves off out of the world too because they're no longer needed. And one of them delivers the speech I borrowed that line from, to a group of youngsters who've been helping him.