Other fields are being burned by working with the DoD. Look at the firestorm within both the legal and medical community in regards to their roles in enabling military operations that contribute to human rights violations.

The dividing line between working with the DoD as an “independent” group conforming to professional standards of conduct and active enablers for highly questionable conduct gets progressively hazier the closer you get to the DoD. Social scientists who choose to go for the “easy money” and largesse of the DoD should go with eyes open to the ethical costs of working for an institution devoted to killing other human beings.

Even though we hear the names of ethnic and religious groups mentioned in the news every day, US citizens don’t really understand the differences between Shiites, Kurds, and Sunni, or why up until the US-led invasion of Iraq, it was politically incorrect to dwell on these distinctions of creed. The educated classes in Iraq, who have largely fled the country, would not use this ethnic/religious model to understand natinal politics, though the American military has broken it down thusly.

It is my hope that the HTS will contribute some solid, relevant research, discover a way to ease conflict heretofore overlooked, and make AAA eat their words.

An introductory publication from October of 2006, explains the scope of the HTS,

“This system is being specifically designed to address cultural awareness shortcomings at the operational and tactical levels by giving brigade commanders an organic capability to help understand and deal with “human terrain” the social, ethnographic, cultural, economic, and political elements of the people among whom a force is operating. So that U.S. forces can operate more effectively in the human terrain in which insurgents live and function, HTS will provide deployed brigade commanders and their staffs direct social-science support in the form of ethnographic and social research, cultural information research, and social data analysis that can be employed as part of the military decision-making process.”

Furthermore, Barry Silverman, of the University of Pennsylvania, has drafted up some ideas on what to do with HTS data. Here’s a link. Roberto J. González, of San Jose State University, describes his accounts as an anthropologist conducting research in Abu Ghraib, in the journal Anthropology Today, here’s a link to his publication.

Programs like the HTS have introduced soldiers to abstract anthropological concepts, such as what is a tribe? The link to the PDF is down, but this Google cache of the document can show you how HTS research has been applied to instruct and educate the military.

Rather than obfuscate the actual definition of research, let’s see what the HTS is producing and evaluate its effectiveness.

Since when was the future of practicing anthropology as important as using anthropology to potentially save lives, reduce armed conflict, and build understanding?

… A very rhetorical question, but effectively the AAA has drawn a line in the sand. They’ve indicated that their code of ethics is more important than conducting this type of research in war zones. I guess what we gotta ask is what’s more important to salvage in this situation, the discipline of anthropology or people’s lives?