[JJ_BPK]

Looks like the 1st contract was a little hit-n-miss..

Steve Fondacaro is not happy. Being fired may be why??

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010...-chief-ousted/

‘Human Terrain’ Chief Ousted, By Noah Shachtman, June 15, 2010

The manager and co-founder of the U.S. Army’s controversial social-science program is no longer in charge.

Retired Colonel Steve Fondacaro — a charismatic, mercurial, mile-a-minute former infantryman and East Harlem native – turned the Human Terrain System from an academic experiment into a military reality, embedding social scientists into combat units.

Then he waged an internal insurgency to expand the effort Army-wide, despite the service’s dedication at the time to a purely bombs-and-bullets approach to warfare. ”We’re like a germ in the body of [the Army],” Fondacaro (pictured) once told me. “All of their systems are sending white blood cells to puke me up.”

But the Army changed its ways. And Fondacaro’s expansion effort was largely successful. At last count, there were 21 Human Terrain Teams operating in Iraq and six more in Afghanistan, offering advice to commanders on the local cultural landscape.

There was a sense of perpetual chaos swirling around HTS, however. The program came under assault from nearly every angle: the quality of the Human Terrain “experts,” the depth of its training, the utility to infantry leaders, the competency of its managers, the exposure of civilian researchers to hostile environments, the ethics of turning social science into military intelligence.

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http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010...n-unqualified/

Hundreds of Army Social Scientists Unqualified, Former Boss Says, By Spencer Ackerman, December 21, 2010

Nearly five years after the Army began a controversial program to embed social scientists in combat units, the former director and chief bureaucratic force behind the program says that over a third of those researchers never should have been part of the program in the first place.

“Thirty to 40 percent of the people were not qualified,” says Steve Fondacaro, the retired Army colonel who ran the Human Terrain System from its 2006 birth until he was ousted in June. He’s speaking out in a rare post-firing interview because the contract to supply HTS with social-science experts is up for grabs — and the company that handled the job for the last five years hobbled the program, he says.

The Army’s Training and Doctrine Commands disagrees, and the company, BAE Systems, didn’t answer Danger Room’s questions. But with the program expanding, the ability of the next HTS contractor to provide local commanders with quality cultural advisers could make an enormous difference in the American combat efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Simply put, if the United States can’t understand the populations it deals with in complex, irregular wars like Afghanistan — their traditions, their social structures, their power dynamics — then American counterinsurgency efforts are in deep trouble.

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