The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice (32 page)

“What we need is cultural intelligence”:
Major General Anthony C. Zinni,
USMC, “Non-Traditional Military Missions: Their Nature, and the Need for Cultural Awareness and Flexible Thinking,” presentation to the Armed Forces Staff College, June 4, 1994, in Joe Strange,
Capital ‘W’ War: A Case for Strategic Principles of War (Because Wars
Are
Conflicts of Societies,
Not
Tactical Exercises Writ Large)
(Quantico, VA: Marine Corps War College, 1998), 267.

Instead, it focused on technology at the expense of history:
Colin S. Gray, “Irregular Enemies and the Essence of Strategy: Can the American Way of War Adapt?” Strategic Studies Institute, March 2006, 32–33. Both this and Zinni’s presentation are cited in Christopher J. Lamb, James Douglas Orton, Michael C. Davies, and Theodore T. Pikulsky, “Human Terrain Team Performance: An Explanation, draft” (Washington, DC: The Institute for World Politics Press. Forthcoming 2013), 13–14.

But at the Foreign Military Studies Office:
Kipp, interview by author, July 2, 2010. Founded in 1986 as the Soviet Army Studies Office, the Foreign Military Studies Office had been conceived to educate the Cold War–era U.S. Army about how the Soviets thought and operated on the battlefield. Army veterans who understood the history and culture of the Soviet Union and spoke Russian worked alongside civilian academics, developing a unique intellectual culture. When the Soviet Union fell, the office changed its name and adopted a broader vision, but its hard-won knowledge of Russia and the former Soviet bloc continued to define it. In the 1990s, U.S. soldiers returning from peacekeeping missions in Bosnia complained that they hadn’t been adequately prepared for the asymmetrical, urban combat they’d found there. One of them, Maxie McFarland, would later supervise Kipp and others at the Foreign Military Studies Office. Realizing that future conflicts would probably not resemble the Cold War, the Army started using social science variables to analyze operational environments, but its focus remained on technology. “I perpetually argued that it was dangerous because it didn’t take culture into account,” Kipp told me. “But in the 1990s, culture wasn’t seen as important. We had all the people looking at advanced technology and they were saying, ‘We’ll have perfect transparency on the battlefield. . . . We don’t have to worry about this.’ ” For more on the Foreign Military Studies Office, see “Foreign Military Studies Office: About Us,”
http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/About-Us.html
, accessed June 26, 2012.

Long before anyone envisioned an American war in Afghanistan:
Lester Grau, interview by author, July 28, 2010. Grau joined the Foreign Military Studies Office in 1989 and published his first paper on the Soviet-Afghan War in 1995. “I got into Afghanistan back when nobody could care less,” he told me. “We were never going to Afghanistan.” Kipp recalled: “We had to struggle to get Les to have the time to do the three books” on the Soviets in Afghanistan. The powers that be argued it was a useless project for three reasons: “ ‘You want to do a book about the Soviet-Afghan War; the Soviets don’t exist. It’s about counterinsurgency; we’re not going to do that. And we’re never going to Afghanistan.’ ” Kipp, interview by author, July 2, 2010.

Today, Grau’s books of battlefield case studies:
Grau’s
The Bear Went Over the Mountain: Soviet Combat Tactics in Afghanistan
(1996) and
The Other Side of the Mountain:
Mujahideen Tactics in the Soviet-Afghan War
(1998), the latter written with former Afghan Interior Minister Ali Ahmad Jalali, are included in “Pre-Deployment Afghanistan Reading List,”
http://usacac.army.mil/cac2/coin/repository/AFGReadingList.pdf
, accessed June 26, 2012.

Among the misapprehensions Grau and his colleagues:
Kipp, interview by author, July 2, 2010. Grau had been chipping away at the notion that technology would guarantee future military success for some time. “Future war may indeed be a computer-driven battle between high-technology systems,” he wrote in 1997, but “there are limits to technology. . . . All the answers are not in the application of new technology.” Lester Grau, “Bashing the Laser Range Finder with a Rock,”
Military Review
(May–June 1997),
http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/documents/techy.htm
, accessed June 26, 2012.

In the late summer of 2001, Kipp and Grau tried to warn the Army:
“The siren song of technology is that it will eliminate the fog and friction of war,” Kipp and Grau wrote. “The reality is that the military’s application of technology has usually created its own fog and friction. . . . Technology promises much—the paperless office, the perfect intelligence picture, the rapid destruction of enemy forces, the collapse of civilian morale—but it rarely delivers. . . . Cookie-cutter solutions do not work universally in different theaters, on different terrain, or against different forces and cultures. . . . The side with the greater ability to adapt, exercise initiative, and enforce tactical and operational innovations discovered during combat will enjoy success.” Kipp and Grau, “The Fog and Friction of Technology,”
Military Review
(September–October 2001),
http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/documents/fog/fog.htm
, accessed June 26, 2012.

No longer would American soldiers see the enemy’s tanks:
Kipp, interview by author, July 2, 2010. When the Army’s high-tech 4th Mechanized Infantry Division arrived in Iraq in 2003, kitted out with every kind of computerized sensor, its equipment found neither enemy tanks nor high levels of detectable radio traffic, Kipp told me: “There’s just [the enemy] exercising initiative by an RPG and run, or an IED, and we’re blind, and we’re stuck.” The 4th ID was celebrated at the time as the “only division in the Army fully ‘digitized’ to carry out computerized warfare.” See Michael Killian, “Mechanized Infantry Ships Out,”
Chicago Tribune,
March 28, 2003.

The enemy would fight and disappear into an urban landscape:
Kipp, interview by author, July 2, 2010, and Grau and Kipp, “Urban Combat: Confronting the Specter,”
Military Review
(July–August 1999),
http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/documents/urbancombat/urbancombat.htm
, accessed June 26, 2012. “ ‘Don’t go there’ remains the best advice for urban combat,” Grau and Kipp wrote. “However, urban sprawl, the high-tech battlefield and the expeditionary role for US Armed Forces make this axiom problematic. . . . An urban combat training center  . . . should be developed to teach urban tactics, techniques and procedures. Such a training center would need to incorporate training models that include
social, cultural, ethnic and political dynamics
as well as urban terrain features.” Emphasis is mine.

The Taliban had ruled brutally, massacring ethnic minorities:
On the Taliban’s massacre of Hazaras, see among many others Lawrence Wright,
The Looming Tower
(New York: Vintage, 2007), 304.

But in the fall of 2001, Afghans allied:
“War Crime in Afghanistan,” Physicians for Human Rights,
http://physiciansforhumanrights.org/issues/mass-atrocities/afghanistan-war-crime
, accessed August 10, 2012. See also Scott Horton, “Dasht-e-Leili, Ten Years Later,”
Harper’s,
December 13, 2011. In Kabul, the bodies of Arabs and Pakistanis were found hanging in a pleasant downtown park, their mouths stuffed with dollars. See Kate Clark, “2001 Ten Years On: How the Taleban Fled Kabul,”
Afghanistan Analysts Network,
November 13, 2011,
http://www.aan-afghanistan.org/index.asp?id=2237
, accessed August 10, 2012.

Old tribal structures had been ravaged by war:
“In Afghanistan, power is rarely transparent,” Noah Coburn, an anthropologist who has written about political power in Afghanistan, told me. “This is a very old game in Afghanistan,” where there is a pattern of “stronger individuals allowing a weak person to ascend to a position that appears powerful, whereas most of the real power is behind the scenes.” This subterfuge shields the genuinely powerful from direct responsibility for what happens under them and protects them from blood feuds, among other benefits. Coburn, interview by author and email correspondence, July 24–25, 2011.

The Taliban were excluded:
“Talking About Talks: Toward a Political Settlement in Afghanistan,” International Crisis Group, Asia Report N°221, March 26, 2012, 9.

But within months of Saddam Hussein’s toppling, buried bombs:
Rick Atkinson, “Left of Boom: ‘The IED Problem Is Getting Out of Control. We’ve Got to Stop the Bleeding,’ ”
Washington Post,
September 30, 2007. Radio-controlled IEDs had begun to plague U.S. forces in Afghanistan in 2002, but at that time there were relatively few of them.

The Army sent thousands of jammers to Iraq and Afghanistan:
Atkinson, “Left of Boom: ‘The IED Problem Is Getting Out of Control,’ ” and Rick Atkinson, “Left of Boom: ‘There Was a Two-Year Learning Curve  . . . and a Lot of People Died in Those Two Years,’ ”
Washington Post,
October 1, 2007. Atkinson writes that by 2007, more than thirty thousand jammers of various kinds had found their way to Iraq.

Beating IEDs became the Defense Department’s second-highest priority:
Atkinson, “Left of Boom: ‘The IED Problem Is Getting Out of Control.’ ”

In an experiment designed by the Pentagon’s joint staff:
Hriar Cabayan, interview by author, December 7, 2009, and Atkinson, “Left of Boom: ‘There Was a Two-Year Learning Curve.’ ”

The cameras had missed it entirely:
Cabayan, interview by author, December 7, 2009. The experiment, known as IED Blitz, was “a complete failure,” Cabayan told me. “Not a single IED was detected.”

Analysts found they could use surveillance video:
Ibid. The technique, known as “backtracking,” was another technological fix, but Cabayan called it the “silver lining” of IED Blitz because it pushed him and others to “figure out how to connect IED emplacers within a social network, within the context of a population that is partly supporting them.” It was this kind of thinking that would lead to the creation of Cultural Preparation of the Environment and, by extension, the Human Terrain System.

This kind of thinking was unfamiliar to the conventional Army:
The U.S. military had lost most of what it had learned in Vietnam, Cabayan told me: “The Colin Powell Doctrine, you go in with overwhelming force, you win, and you get out. You don’t need culture to do that. So it was all lost. The Army and the Marines had to relearn something that had gone out of their training.”

Retired Army Major General Robert H. Scales wrote:
Major General Robert H. Scales, “Culture-Centric Warfare,”
Proceedings,
U.S. Naval Institute, October 2004.

Few young soldiers knew how to gather cultural intelligence:
Remarks by Major General John Custer at the Fourth Annual U.S. Army Culture Education and Training Summit, Tucson, AZ, April 19, 2010. “Everything that you and I grew up with is irrelevant,” Custer told his audience. “I’m an anachronism, and many of you are too. . . . The world has changed. Culture  . . . will be a critical factor in everything we do, and let’s face it, some of our failures in the past have been directly related to our lack of cultural understanding.” Custer compared the role of cultural knowledge in contemporary counterinsurgency to that of chemical weapons in World War I, nuclear bombs in World War II, and satellites in the Cold War. “We are going to fight in sewers,” Custer said. “We are going to fight clans. We are going to fight warrior-based societies forever. That’s the way of the world.”

Slight and animated with an irreverent manner:
Cabayan, interview by author, December 7, 2009; David Schwoegler, “Pentagon Recognizes Hriar Cabayan’s Decade of Service,”
Newsline
(Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) 32, no. 11 (May 7, 2007), 2; and “DOE Pulse: Science and Technology Highlights from the DOE National Laboratories,” no. 235, May 21, 2007,
http://www.ornl.gov/info/news/pulse/pulse_v235_07.htm
, accessed June 27, 2012. Cabayan became an adviser to the joint staff in time to evacuate the Pentagon when a plane struck it on September 11, 2001. Later, he would receive the Joint Distinguished Civilian Service Award, the highest civilian award that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs can bestow. The secrecy of his weapons work was well known, but he would come to believe that broad sharing of information and open-source intelligence among academics, military officers, and analysts was the only way to save soldiers’ lives and succeed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Born in Armenia, he had been raised in Syria:
Cabayan, interview by author, December 7, 2009: “I am an Armenian and spent a lot of time in the Middle East before I came over. That was when I was young, so I’m very attuned to cultural things.” For his time in Syria, see Schwoegler, “Pentagon Recognizes Hriar Cabayan’s Decade of Service,” 2.

In the winter of 2004, Cabayan met with an Army lieutenant colonel:
Cabayan, interview by author, December 7, 2009. The other physicist was Nancy Chesser, a contractor who worked often with Cabayan. For Cabayan and McFate’s first meeting, Cabayan, interview by author, December 7, 2009, and Montgomery McFate, interviews by author, January 28, 2009, and June 30, 2010.

When she walked into Cabayan’s office:
Cabayan, interview by author, December 7, 2009. Anthropologists are actually a stylish bunch; Cabayan’s assumption betrayed his unfamiliarity with their tribe. For a photo of McFate from that era, see “ONR Conference Makes Case for Study of Cultures,”
OrigiNatoR,
December 13, 2004,
http://fellowships.aaas.org/PDFs/2004_1210_ORIGConf.pdf
, accessed June 28, 2012.