Millions of Dollars Wasted, Two Lives Sacrificed*
by John Stanton
According to sources, United States Army brigade commanders privately believe that the US Army's TRADOC Human Terrain System (HTS) program is a “joke” and completely unnecessary. The HTS program is publicly supported by brigade military commanders, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, only because it is a “pet project” of the currently politically popular US Army General David Petraeus.
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| US Army Human Terrain System in Disarray |
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 BREAKING NEWS |
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BAE Systems, the prime contractor on the project, has repeatedly been pressured by the HTS program manager and his staff to hire individuals who are not field-experienced ethnographers/anthropologists, but rather Google-fed political and social scientists. In two cases, pre-security clearance award investigations revealed that one candidate recommended for hire by senior staff was a felon. The other candidate had health problems that would have compromised the functions of a deployed Human Terrain Team (HTT). BAE Systems has been the punching bag for the poor decision making of HTS program managers and advisors.
The tragic deaths of two HTS members--HTT IZ3 Nicole Suveges and HTT AF1 Michael Bhatia---came amidst program management’s confusion over roles and missions, ignorance of threat situations, even dress code problems. Key questions remain open. What’s the role of a civilian ethnographer/anthropologist working with the military in a combat zone? Is a civilian trained to respond to a threat without threatening the life of the team? Should they carry weapons and wear military gear? Are they there to enhance the kill chain, organize and facilitate sporting events, or examine trash dumps for behavioral patterns? What kind of data do warfighters and negotiators really want? What happens when the HTT leaves the site of success? What's the historical experience of the US military with human geographers? (see David Price—Anthropolgical Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War: Duke University Press, 2008).
Whether all this mattered in the deaths of Suveges and Bhatia is utterly debatable. But according to sources, Suveges was a no-show at many training sessions at Fort Leavenworth and not properly trained for work in a combat zone. She was sent initially to the United Kingdom to recruit there for the HTS program and then afterwards was ultimately deployed to the volatile Sadr City in Iraq where three weeks later she met her end. One insider had predicted prior to her death that “someone was going to get killed.”
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