Word: hts
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Since 2007, the Pentagon's Human Terrain System (HTS) has been placing social scientists in every Army combat brigade, regiment and Marine Corps regimental combat team. There are now more than 500 people employed by HTS, a number that is increasing rapidly. On the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, their job is to gather information and provide commanders with a greater understanding of the local population, reducing the need for lethal force by helping the Army determine the needs of the community, according to Steve Fondacaro, the project manager at HTS. Secretary of State Robert Gates has publicly praised...
...continue its expansion in Afghanistan with the nation's top scholars, it may be facing an uphill battle. The AAA says the program violates its code of ethics - a sort of Hippocratic oath in which anthropologists vow to do no harm. Two years ago, the AAA condemned the HTS program, but this month's 72-page report goes into much greater detail about the potential for the military to misuse information that social scientists gather. Some anthropologists involved in the report say it's already happening. David Price, a professor of anthropology at St. Martin's University in Washington state...
...HTS adamantly denies that its program is designed to help the Army improve its targeting, saying on its website that the role of the program "is neither to directly assist in lethal targeting of insurgents nor the collection of actionable military intelligence." But Ben Wintersteen, who recently finished the nearly five-month HTS training program and has a master's in anthropology, says oversight is lacking. Once on the battlefield, "there's definitely an intense pressure on the brigade staff to encourage anthropologists to give up the subject," Wintersteen says. "There's no way to know when people are violating...
...Still, Wintersteen, who is waiting to be sent to Iraq through HTS, says the AAA's decision to attack the program will ultimately put more lives in danger by undermining the organization's ability to provide guidance and dissuading top talent from joining. So far, HTS has struggled to bring in topflight social scientists with regional knowledge. "It hurts HTS and the people downrange like the American soldiers and the locals who depend on the rational analysis that anthropology brings," Wintersteen says. In his training class of about 50 people, there were only about 13 social scientists, five with Ph.D.s...