Word: pentagon
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...states have signed huge deals for U.S. military hardware, whose sophistication has been on full display in two long wars in the neighborhood. Petraeus said countries in the region now deploy eight Patriot missile-interceptor batteries - up from zero a few years ago - made by Raytheon Corp. And the Pentagon last month announced that Kuwait had ordered upgrades of its Patriot missile system, in a deal worth $410 million. But Raytheon isn't the only beneficiary of anxiety over Iran. The United Arab Emirates this year ordered $9 billion worth of U.S. military gear, Petraeus noted, including 70 Lockheed Martin...
...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...
...anthropologists don't have full control over the information they gather and that commanders can use it to kill. "The real fault with Human Terrain is that it doesn't even try to protect the people being studied," says Price. "I don't think it's accidental that [the Pentagon] didn't come up with ethical guidelines...
...authors of the AAA report, in fact, work closely with the military. But McFate's larger point stands: for the past few decades, anthropologists have had little influence in military or foreign policy circles. As American troops adopt a counterinsurgency strategy, cultural knowledge has become a foremost Pentagon concern. They know historically the record for winning a short-term counterinsurgency is not good, so they've once again sought out cultural expertise. The discipline's checkered history, however, has made many anthropologists sensitive to the parallels between HTS and the colonial era. "Anthropology was used in much the same...
...When it comes down to it, the AAA has no sanctioning power, and the decision whether or not to join HTS comes down to the individual. For now, at least, the Pentagon wants to leverage the cultural insights of academics to succeed in Iraq and Afghanistan, but whether HTS has brought more top scholars into the military fold or only widened the schism between academe and the military remains unclear. James Der Derian, a professor of political science at Brown University who recently finished a documentary on HTS, and whose friend and colleague Michael Bhatia was killed in Afghanistan...