Military-Civil Anthropology 101
Saturday, September 8, 2007 at 3:24AM ARTICLE: 'US Army's strategy in Afghanistan: better anthropology: Counterinsurgency efforts focus on better grasping and meeting local needs,' By Scott Peterson, Christian Science Monitor, September 7, 2007
Interesting and welcome and clearly related to the new COIN strategy, but not as "unprecedented" as you think, and it doesn't exactly require an advanced degree in anthropology.
Civil Affairs teams from Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa have been doing the same basic thing (come into remote province and its communities and systematically query residents on their basic needs/desires) in eastern Africa for several years now. The officers call it a "normal assessment" and use it to uncover logical, small-scale assistance efforts (This school not working for some reason? Let's try to fix that specific problem.). It is very "searcher" oriented, in Easterly's terminology: small, very specific efforts to break typically minor logjams. The results are small but highly leveragable, and it's not the sort of stuff picked up by big aid projects any more, so it's a great niche to fill in the 3D paradigm (defense, diplomacy, development).
Again, as I argued in Esquire, CJTF-HOA is ahead of its time and is--in many ways--a reaction to failures and breakdowns elsewhere, just like the COIN.
(Thanks: Louis Heberlein)
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