03.26.12
Winning hearts and minds campaign deemed possibly ‘sick’
Today Secrecy Blog posted a copy of the Army’s Military Intelligence Bulletin, this particular edition devoted to th Human Terrain System.
The Human Terrain System “is a U.S. Army program to conduct social and cultural studies in support of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan,” writes Steve Aftergood. “The Bulletin provides theoretical and practical accounts from HTS personnel in the field.”
For instance, one of the accounts from the new bulletin contains an interesting if unintentionally hilarious account of some US information operations in Iraq:
With adolescents growing up in the recent decade, the word “sick” refers to something that is “crazy, cool, insane.” To people living in the US 10 to 30 years ago, the word “sick” had a different definition — “afflicted with ill health or disease, ailing” or “mentally, morally or emotionally deranged, corrupt, or unsound: a sick mind.” Now consider the development of an IO campaign to discredit a group of insurgents: “Those people are sick.” The American who lived in the US 10 to 30 years ago would understand this to mean that the group is mentally deranged or morally corrupt. However, an American adolescent today would interpret this to mean that the group is really cool and hip. Rather than being an abstract issue, this problem actually negatively impacted US IO in Iraq on numerous occasions. In the summer of 2010 an IO campaign was pursued to portray several individuals and insurgent groups as criminals. Unfortunately, the Arabic language used presented these people in more of a “Robin Hood” fashion and may have assisted in recruitment.
In other words, if you speak in the language of a duffer or military stodge, it may not communicate quite what one thinks to a younger generation in a different country.
In another section of the bulletin HTS researchers present numerous colored maps of Afghanistan.
Maps can be quite helpful in understanding where you are. And sometimes not so much, depending on circumstances.
For these maps, a red area denoted where locals were very unlikely to report IEDs to authorities. A yellow are was explained to mean the locals were “somewhat unlikely” to report IEDs to authorities.
But what if one is on the boundary between a red and a yellow or moving from one to the other? Which level of “unlikely” should be assumed?
And how much ‘likely” is in the “likely” in green areas where the color is said to signify the locals are “likely” to report IEDs?
One can see the conundrums that might arise in the determination and weighing of a variety of “likely” stories, so to speak.
Secrecy Blog’s post on Military Intelligence and the Human Terrain System magazine is here.
As an exercise, it is left to DD blog readers to determine the precise meaning of the word “sick” in the title of today’s post.
Locals in this area perhaps thought not likely to report IEDs.