An interesting piece on the problem plagued HTS and military bureaucracy where there is >$$$ and careers involved.
While the National Defense University report, to be published by the Institute for World Politics, praised the military's interest in cultural understanding, it concluded that the Army is expanding a program without a cogent strategy for success.
The conclusion is especially noteworthy.
"It is quite likely that the future of socio-cultural knowledge in U.S. military forces will be much like its past — a story of too little knowledge, obtained and disseminated at great cost, but too haphazardly, and often too late to ensure success."
And so it goes...
Richard
Army Plows Ahead With Troubled War-zone Program
S&S, 18 Feb 2013
Part 1 of 2
A $250 million Army program designed to aid U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan has been riddled by serious problems that include payroll padding, sexual harassment and racism, a USA Today probe has found.
As the Pentagon plans for sizable budget cuts beginning next month, the Army is planning to use the teams in other potential hot spots around the world despite the allegations outlined in an unreleased Army investigation obtained by the newspaper and in subsequent interviews.
The program, known as the Human Terrain System, sends civilian social scientists overseas to help U.S. troops better understand the societies in which they are operating, avoid bloodshed and smooth relations with local populations.
A 2010 Army investigation shows the program was plagued by severe problems, including:
Team members were encouraged to maximize their pay and comp time by inflating time sheets.
Allegations of sexual harassment and racism were made against the government contractors who recruited and trained Human Terrain teams and a soldier who worked in the program.
The program relied on unaccountable contractors and inadequate government oversight.
And many commanders deemed worthless — or worse — the reports the teams produced. In one case, the commander of a brigade combat team in Iraq told the Army investigator that he "relied very little on his (Human Terrain team) and viewed them as incapable and of little value. He never looked at his team's products and believed their survey efforts actually created anxiety among the local Iraqi populace."
The problems drew the attention of Gen. Martin Dempsey, then the commander of the Army's Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC). Dempsey, now the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in an April 2010 memo that the Human Terrain System program needed government oversight of "all phases including recruiting, training, organizing, deploying and redeploying, and in all aspects of employment including hiring and compensation."
Dempsey recalls that the internal investigation was designed "to address some concerns about the program while preserving the capability," Marine Col. David Lapan, Dempsey's spokesman, said recently in an e-mail.
But years later, the program is still rife with problems, according to Hugh Gusterson, an anthropology professor at George Mason University who has studied the program and its impact on anthropology.
"It's another example of a military program that makes money for a contractor while greatly exaggerating its military utility," Gusterson said in an e-mail. "The program recruited the human flotsam and jetsam of the discipline and pretended it was recruiting the best. Treating taxpayer money as if it were water, it paid under-qualified 20-something anthropologists more than even Harvard professors. And it treated our ethics code as a nuisance to be ignored."
In Afghanistan, the Human Terrain teams feed information to military intelligence centers called Stability Operations Information Centers, according to a 2010 Pentagon intelligence plan. The teams' reports are designed to help determine potential targets and adversaries.
"We don't know how that information is useful in identifying a group or individual," said R. Brian Ferguson, a Rutgers University anthropologist who has studied and written about the program in academic journals. "That's in the operational decisions we don't get to see. That's one of the problems with Human Terrain systems."
The Army maintains that the problems have been addressed since 2010 and that the program is providing commanders with valuable insights into foreign cultures. External assessments directed by Congress and the Army have "resulted in favorable reviews of the HTS (Human Terrain System) team effectiveness," Col. Christopher Kubik, a spokesman for the Army's Training and Doctrine Command, which oversees the program, said in response to a series of questions from USA TODAY.
USA TODAY has also obtained a soon-to-be published report by the National Defense University, a Pentagon-affiliated think tank, noting that Human Terrain System efforts "collectively were unable to make a major contribution to the counterinsurgency effort." The reason, according to the report: The Army failed to adopt the principles of counterinsurgency warfare.
Padding the payroll
Today, 79 Human Terrain specialists work in Afghanistan. Kubik and Army documents show that the Army wants to set up pilot programs in other parts of the world.
The military initially sent social scientists to Iraq and Afghanistan to help commanders understand how to assist local civilians with medical and veterinary care, agriculture and jobs. Doing so, it was hoped, would prevent troops from antagonizing civilians and make the local populations more willing to support their government and U.S. forces — key tenets of the counterinsurgency strategy first promoted in Iraq by Gen. David Petraeus in 2006.
Nonetheless, Human Terrain teams quickly became controversial. In 2007, the American Anthropological Association, the world's largest organization of the field's scholars, condemned the program for putting at risk its social scientists and the people they surveyed. Among its concerns: Anthropologists would be used by the military to target insurgents, a violation of their ethics not to harm those whom they study.
USA TODAY obtained the critical May 2010 report, called an AR 15-6 investigation, under a Freedom of Information Act request. The probe was launched in March 2010 by Lt. Gen. David Valcourt, then TRADOC's chief of staff, to examine "allegations of misconduct, mismanagement and/or lack of oversight within the Human Terrain System Program at Ft. Leavenworth, KS."
The investigation documents numerous cases in which team members earned salaries that outstripped that of even the secretary of Defense. (Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta's salary is $199,700.)
Team members were encouraged to maximize their pay and comp time by inflating time sheets, according to the Army probe. An 84-hour workweek "became the de facto or the desire standard of project leadership. This standard approximates a salary of between $224,000 and $280,000 per year." The program also entitled them to six months of paid leave after a nine-month deployment.
Four former Human Terrain team members confirmed time-sheet abuse in interviews with USA TODAY. One of those four, a retired senior military officer who worked on such a unit in Iraq, confirmed that he made more than $200,000 on a tour and knew of other "horrendous six-figure salaries." He spoke on condition of anonymity because he still works for the military.
In a sworn statement, contained in the Army's investigation, an unidentified team leader stated that attempting to enforce government rules on overtime resulted in dismissal. Members of the team "conspired together to have me fired (because) I refused to bow to their wishes for unconstrained overtime (and) comp time hours."
The statement, with names redacted, continued: "I remember thinking at the time that his team members must be getting only three or four hours of time off PER DAY, just sleep time, which I knew from personal experience would not stand up to common-sense scrutiny if continued for three or four days at a time."
A separate sworn statement said a Human Terrain System employee worked 1.5 hours but claimed on a time sheet to having worked 12.
Kubik, the Army spokesman, said an internal review determined that some supervisors had been inadequately trained in recording time sheets while deployed and that irregular hours were kept in war zones. But he said there was not enough evidence to prove fraud, and subsequent investigations by the FBI and Defense Criminal Investigative Service did not prove that fraud had been committed.
(Cont'd)