May 10, 2007
Project Report Summary
Introduction
Senior Fellow Montgomery McFate opened by asserting that a lack of cultural knowledge has hindered Department of Defense (DOD) operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and asked why this gap exists. McFate noted that the DOD is currently demanding the exact same socio-cultural information as its predecessors did during WWII and the Vietnam War.
Why is the Cultural Knowledge Not Available?
Despite the fact that a lack of cultural knowledge has hindered its operations across the globe, the U.S. military is still not filling that knowledge gap, according to McFate. She listed six impediments to the availability of this knowledge.
First, the military spends very little on the social sciences. From 2002 to 2004, the DOD spent less money on social sciences than any other agencies except the Smithsonian, whose budget is considerably smaller. Secondly, the money that is invested is put towards the development of technology, weapons, equipment, and materiel rather than towards conducting basic social science research. Third, there is no coordination of the social science research conducted by the various agencies of the federal government. Federal agencies generally fund research in order to meet their specific agency needs and frequently do not share information with other agencies about the particular type of research they are sponsoring. Fourth, McFate found that government agencies’ assumption that some other agency is doing the research usually turns out to be incorrect. Fifth, as a result of the limited number of in-house government experts, the DOD relies heavily on external ‘subject matter experts’ (i.e. moonlighting academics, journalists, or foreign nationals) whose knowledge may be narrow, incomplete, or out-of-date. Sixth, there are a limited number of military Foreign Area Officers, individuals who possess both language skills and local and regional knowledge.
Consequences
McFate noted that the cultural knowledge gap’s consequences for military personnel and for U.S. national security are troubling. In the absence of any assistance or information from their headquarters, soldiers and marines are forced to conduct highly complex operations with almost no pertinent socio-cultural information. This means that military personnel often have a difficult time identifying the local leaders, thereby losing opportunities to gain intelligence, leverage support, and identify potential threats. As a result of the cultural knowledge gap, the military also has difficulty planning operations, and is forced to learn the same facts and lessons over and over again.
Conclusions and Recommendations
McFate recommended a four-step approach to closing the cultural knowledge gap. First, the federal government should develop a large-scale, systematic, social science research program. This program would sponsor highly directed research by social scientists to collect phase zero, open-source, baseline socio-cultural information. Secondly, a centralized socio-cultural knowledge database should be developed that covers each country where stability operations might occur. Third, current academic training programs, such as the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars or the National Security Education Program, should be expanded to bring young scholars into government service. Instead of requiring a few years of government service as condition of the grant, such individuals could instead be retained as an Individual Ready Reserve. Finally, the federal government should create an organization to act as a clearinghouse for cultural knowledge; conduct on-the-ground ethnographic field research in all areas of strategic importance; provide socio-cultural reach back to combatant commanders; provide cultural advisers for planning and operations to commanders on request; conduct cultural training as requested; and disseminate knowledge to the field in a useable, standardized form.
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