Montgomery McFate and Janice H. Laurence (Eds.). 2015. Social Science Goes to War: The Human Terrain System in Iraq and Afghanistan
| Author | Gavin Briggs |
| DOI | 10.1177/2347797018799861 |
| Published date | 01 December 2018 |
| Date | 01 December 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Journal of Asian Security
and International Affairs
5(3) 319–336
2018 SAGE Publications India
Private Limited
SAGE Publications
sagepub.in/home.nav
DOI: 10.1177/2347797018799861
http://journals.sagepub.com/home/aia
Book Review
Montgomery McFate and Janice H. Laurence (Eds.). 2015. Social Science
Goes to War: The Human Terrain System in Iraq and Afghanistan.
London: Hurst and Company. 383 pp. ISBN: 978-1-84904-421-9
War and the means to achieve mission success is not limited to kinetic force. An
array of tools available in the state toolkit is not just the blunt and offensive
weapon. One of the lesser known was the Human Terrain System (HTS), where
socio-cultural advisers from academia were deployed into operational areas.
Montgomery McFate and Janice Laurence’s edited volume of Social Science
Goes to War: The Human Terrain System in Iraq and Afghanistan offers a fasci-
nating insight into the world of practitioners and academics, deployed as part of
mixed civilian and military HTS teams which generally operated ‘outside the
wire’. The foreword, written by General (Ret’d) David Petraeus, notes that
‘counterinsurgency operations are sometimes described as “armed social work”’
(p. vii). The book’s numerous contributors dissect the HTS programme’s incep-
tion, role, achievements and limitations. The now defunct HTS programme
ended in the same manner it began, in controversy.
When Al-Qaeda was unequivocally linked to the 11 September 2001 terror
attacks in New York and Virginia, the United States (US) then President George
W. Bush responded by launching the so-called ‘Global War on Terror’, attacking
targets in Afghanistan in October 2001. The US unleashed its military might
against the Taliban, and in concert with a small number of allies and the Northern
Alliance, quickly toppled the Taliban from power. Only a year and a half after the
US coalition’s invasion of Afghanistan, the Bush Administration expanded the
War on Terror to Iraq on the erroneous pretence that its dictator Saddam Hussain
had ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and was in league with Al-Qaeda. However,
regime change in both countries did not bring a conclusion to the war, with the
conflict ultimately becoming the US and its allies’ longest war.
The origins of the HTS programme came from the dawning realization in the
mid-2000s that the changing character of war unfolding before the Coalition had
to be addressed by building better links with local communities in the field. With
mission success proving increasingly elusive, US commanders recognized that to
enhance counterinsurgency doctrine it required utilization of the social sciences,
and that meant a (grudging) engagement with academia. Montgomery McFate’s
own chapter, ‘Mind the Gap: Bridging the Military/Academic Divide’, and Ted
Callahan’s contribution, ‘An Anthropologist at War in Afghanistan’ lay out the
stark differences between the academy and the military, as well as the pros and
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