Chapter Six: Commandeering Scholarship - The New Counterinsurgency Manual, Anthropology, and Academic Pillaging

If I could sum up the book in just a few words, it would be: “Be polite, be professional, be prepared to kill.

— John Nagl, pitching the new Counterinsurgency Field Manual on The Daily Show

Soon after the U.S. Army and Marine Corps published their new Counterinsurgency Field Manual (No. 3-24), in December 2006, the American public was subjected to a well orchestrated publicity campaign designed to convince them that a smart new plan was underway to salvage the lost war in Iraq. In policy circles, the Manual became an artifact of hope, signifying the move away from the crude logic of “shock and awe” toward calculations that rifle-toting soldiers can win the hearts and minds of occupied Iraq through a new scholarly appreciation of cultural nuance.

At the time of this media blitz, things were going poorly in Iraq, and the American public was assured that the Manual contained plans for a new intellectually fueled “smart bomb” for an Iraqi victory. This contrivance was bolstered in July 2007, when the University of Chicago Press republished the Manual in a stylish, olive drab, faux-field ready edition, designed to slip into flack jackets or Urban Outfitter accessory bags (US Army & USMC 2007). The Chicago edition included the original forward by General David Petraeus and Lt. General James Amos, with a new forward by counterinsurgency expert Lt. Col. John Nagl and introduction by Harvard’s Sarah Sewell. Chicago’s republication of the Field Manual spawned a media frenzy, and Nagl became the Manual’s poster boy, appearing on NPR, ABC News, NBC, and the pages of the NYT, Newsweek, and other publications, pitching the Manual as the philosophical expression of Petraeus’ intellectual strategy for victory in Iraq (see Ephron 2006; Kaplan 2007; Kerley 2006; NPR 2007; Sutherland 2008).

The Pentagon’s media pitch claimed the Manual was a rare work of applied scholarship, and old Pentagon hands were shuffled forth to sell this new dream of cultural engineering to America. Robert Bateman wrote in the Chicago Tribune that it is “probably the most important piece of doctrine written in the past 20 years,” crediting this success to the high academic standards and integrity that the Army War College historian, Conrad Crane, brought to the project. Bateman touted Crane’s devotion to using an “honest and open peer review” process, and his reliance on a team of top scholars to draft the Manual. This team included “current or former members of one of the combat branches of the Army or Marine Corps.” As well as being combat veterans, “the more interesting aspect of this group was that almost all of them had at least a master’s degree, and quite a few could add ‘doctor’ to their military rank and title as well. At the top of that list is the officer who saw the need for a new doctrine, then-Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, Ph.D” (Bateman 2007).

The Manual’s PR campaign was extraordinary. In an August 23, 2007, Daily Show interview, John Nagl hammed it up in uniform with Jon Stewart, but amidst the banter Nagl stayed on mission and described how Gen. Petraeus collected a “team of writers [who] produced the [Manual] strategy that General Petraeus is implementing in Iraq now.” When Jon Stewart commented on the speed at which the Manual was produced, Nagl remarked that this was “very fast for an Army field manual; the process usually takes a couple of years”; but for Nagl this still was “not fast enough”. The first draft of each chapter was produced in two months before being reworked at an Army conference at Ft. Leavenworth. The speed at which the Manual was produced should have warned involved academics that corners were being cut, but none of those involved seemed to worry about such problems. The Counterinsurgency Field Manual’s insertion into mainstream American popular culture was part of the military’s larger scheme to use willing glossy outlets to convince the American public that new military uses of culture would lead to success in Iraq. While one conservative magazine criticized these efforts (e.g. The Weekly Standard), the liberal press (New Yorker, Elle, More, Wired, Harper’s etc.) climbed on board, running glossy uncritical profiles of the cultural counterinsurgency’s pitchmen in glamorous write-ups portraying this new generation of anthropologists as a brilliant new breed of scholars who could build culture traps for foreign foes and capture the hearts and minds of those we’d occupy (see: Burleigh 2007; Featherstone 2008; Kamps 2008; Marlowe 2007; Packer 2006; Shachtman 2007). The willing press pitched the Pentagon’s message that top scholars were now using scholarship to prepare America for victory in Iraq.

The American public was assured that in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military was implementing the Manual’s approach to the use of culture as a battlefield weapon. Human Terrain Teams embed anthropologists with troops operating in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Counterinsurgency Field Manual was hailed as the intellectual tool guiding their coming success.

The Secrets of Chapter Three

The heart of the Manual is Chapter Three’s discussion of “Intelligence in Counterinsurgency.” Chapter three introduces basic social science views of elements of culture that underlie the Manual’s approach to teaching counterinsurgents how to weaponize the specific indigenous cultural information they encounter in specific theaters of battle. General Petraeus bet that troops working alongside Human Terrain System teams could apply the Manual’s principles to stabilize and pacify war-torn Iraq.

When I read an online copy of the Manual in early 2007, I was unimpressed by its watered-down anthropological explanations, but having researched anthropological contributions to the Second World War, I was familiar with such oversimplifications. Like any manual, it is written in the dry, detached voice of basic instruction. But when I re-read Chapter Three a few months later, I found my eyes struggling through a crudely constructed sentence and then suddenly being graced with a flowing line of precise prose, “A ritual is a stereotyped sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects performed to influence supernatural entities or forces on behalf of the actors’ goals and interest” (FM 3-24, 3-51).

The phrase “stereotyped sequence” leapt off the page. Not only was it out of place, but it sparked a memory. I knew that I’d read these words years ago. With a little searching, I discovered that this unacknowledged line had been taken from a 1977 article written by the anthropologist Victor Turner, who brilliantly wrote that religious ritual is, “a stereotyped sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a sequestered place, and designed to influence preternatural entities or forces on behalf of the actors’ goals and interests” (Turner 1977:183).

The Manual simplified Turner’s poetic voice, trimming a few big words and substituting “supernatural” for “preternatural”. The Manual used no quotation marks, attribution, or citations to signify Turner’s authorship of this barely altered line. Having encountered students passing off the work of other scholars as their own, I know that such acts are seldom isolated occurrences; this single kidnapped line of Turner got me wondering if the Manual had taken other unattributed passages. With a little searching in chapter three alone I found about twenty passages showing either direct use of others’ passages without quotes, or heavy reliance on unacknowledged source materials.

The numerous instances I found shared a consistent pattern of unacknowledged use. While any author can accidentally drop a quotation mark from a work during the production process, the extent and consistent pattern of this practice in this Manual is more than common editorial carelessness. The cumulative effect of such non-attributions is devastating to the Manual’s academic integrity, and claims of such integrity are the heart and soul of the Pentagon’s claims for the Manual.

The use of unquoted and uncited passages is pervasive throughout this chapter. For example, when the Manual’s authors wanted to define “society” they simply “borrowed” every word of the definition used by David Newman in his Sociology textbook (cf. FM 3-24 3-20, Newman 2006:16), they lifted their definition of “race” from a 1974 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica (cf. FM 3-24 3-25, Encyclopedia Britannica. “Race.” 1974, vol. 15.), and their definition of “culture” was swiped from Fred Plog and Daniel Bates’ Cultural Anthropology textbook (cf., FM 3-24 3-37; Plog & Bates 1988:7). The Manual’s definition of “tribe” was purloined from an obscure chapter by Kenneth Brown (cf., FM 3-24 3-27; Brown 2001:206), and not only is Victor Turner’s definition of “ritual” hijacked without attribution but the Manual’s definition of “symbols” was a truncated lifting of Turner (cf., FM 3-24 3-51 ; Turner 1967:19). Several sections of the Manual are identical to entries in online encyclopedia sources. The Manual’s authors used an unacknowledged truncated version of Anthony Giddens’ definition of “ethic groups” (cf., FM 3-24 3-26; Giddens 2006:487). Max Weber’s definition of “power” is taken from Economy and Society and used without attribution (cf., FM 3-24 3-55; Weber 1922:53). And so on. Each of these passages was taken without the use of either quotation marks or any acknowledgement that real scholars had originally written these words.

Other sections of the Manual have unacknowledged borrowings from other sources. Roberto González discovered that the Manual’s Appendix A was “inspired by T.E. Lawrence, who in 1917 published the piece ‘Twenty-seven articles’ for Arab Bulletin, the intelligence journal of Great Britain’s Cairo-based Arab Bureau” (González 2010:79). González compared several passages of Lawrence with David Kilcullen’s Appendix A, and found parallel constructions where paragraphs were reworded but followed set formations between the two texts . González observed that while these parallel constructions can be seen, “Lawrence is never mentioned in the appendix.” González shows that “Kilcullen’s other written work makes a passing reference, but does not acknowledge the degree to which Lawrence’s ideas and style have been influential” (González 2010:81).

A complicating element of the Manual’s reliance on unattributed sources is that the Manual includes a bibliography listing of over 100 sources, yet not a single source I have identified is included. My experience with students trying to pass off the previously published work of others as their own is that they invariably omit citation of the bibliographic sources they copy, so as not to draw attention to them. Even without using bibliographic citations, the Manual could have just used quotes and named sources in a standard journalistic format, but no such attributions were used in these instances.

Examples of Lifted Text

In some sentences, the Manual directly follows the vocabulary and structure of identifiable sentences in other works. For example, the Manual’s entry for “ethnic groups” says:

“An ethnic group is a human community whose learned cultural practices, language, history, ancestry, or religion distinguish them from others. Members of ethnic groups see themselves as different from other groups in a society and are recognized as such by others” (US Army & USMC 2006: 3-26).

Elements of this definition follow the model sentence patterns of a passage in Anthony Giddens’ 2006 Sociology text discussing ethnicity:

“Different characteristics may serve to distinguish ethnic groups from one another, but the most usual are language, history, or ancestry (real or imagined), religions and …Members of ethnic groups see themselves as culturally distinct from other groups in a society, and are seen by those other groups to be so in return” (Giddens 2006:487)

Comparisons of Unacknowledged Sources for Passages in The Counterinsurgency Field Manual

Here are specific examples of portions of the Counterinsurgency Field Manual, derived from other unacknowledged sources. The hyphenated numbers preceding passages indicate the citation used in the Counterinsurgency Manual. Bold writing indicates the portion of the passage that has been used without attribution from another source; indented passages present the original unacknowledged source passage (references for source passages appear in parenthesis).

Counterinsurgency Manual, section 3-20: Society

“...sociologists define society as a population living in the same geographic area that shares a culture and a common identity and whose members are subject to the same political authority” (US Army & USMC 2006:3-20).

Unacknowledged Source:

“Formally, sociologists define society as a population living in the same geographic area that shares a culture and a common identity and whose members are subject to the same political authority.” (Newman 2006:19)

Counterinsurgency Manual, section 3-24: Groups

“A group is two or more people regularly interacting on the basis of shared expectations of others’ behavior and who have interrelated status and roles” (US Army & USMC 2006: 3-24).

Unacknowledged Source:

“Group: two or more people regularly interacting on the basis of shared expectations of others’ behavior; interrelated statuses and roles.” (Silbey 2002)

Counterinsurgency Manual, section 3-25: Race

“A race is a human group that defines itself or is defined by other groups as different by virtue of innate physical characteristics. Biologically, there is no such thing as race among human beings; race is a social category” (US Army & USMC 2006: 3-25).

Unacknowledged Source:

[Race] “refers to a human group that defines itself or is defined by others as different by virtue of innate and immutable physical characteristics” (Encyclopedia Britannica 1974).

Counterinsurgency Manual, section 3-26: Ethnic groups

“Members of ethnic groups see themselves as different from other groups in a society and are recognized as such by others” (US Army & USMC 2006: 3-26).

Unacknowledged Source:

Members of ethnic groups see themselves as culturally distinct from other groups in a society, and are seen by those other groups to be so in return” (Giddens 2006: 487).

Counterinsurgency Manual, section 3-27: Tribes

“Tribes are generally defined as autonomous, genealogically structured groups in which the rights of individuals are largely determined by their ancestry and membership in a particular lineage” (US Army & USMC 2006: 3-27).

Unacknowledged Source:

“[A Tribe is an] autonomous, genealogically structured group in which the rights of individuals are largely determined by their membership in corporate descent groups such as lineages” (Brown 2001:206).

Counterinsurgency Manual, section 3-37: Culture

“Culture is a system of shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviors, and artifacts that members of a society use to cope with their world and with one another” (US Army & USMC 2006: 3-37).

Unacknowledged Source:

“The system of shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviors, and artifacts that the members of society use to cope with this world and with one another.” (Plog & Bates 1988:7).

Counterinsurgency Manual, section 3-44: Values

“A value is an enduring belief that a specific mode of conduct or end state of existence is preferable to an opposite or converse mode of conduct or end state of existence” (US Army & USMC 2006: 3-44).

Unacknowledged Source:

“A value is an enduring belief that a specific mode of conduct or end state of existence is personally or socially preferable to an opposite or converse mode of conduct or end state of existence” (Rokeach 1973:5).

Counterinsurgency Manual, section 3-51: Cultural Forms

“A ritual is a stereotyped sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects performed to influence supernatural entities or forces on behalf of the actors’ goals and interest” (US Army & USMC 2006: 3-51).

Unacknowledged Source:

Religious ritual is “a stereotyped sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a sequestered place, and designed to influence preternatural entities or forces on behalf of the actors’ goals and interests” (Turner 1977:183).

Counterinsurgency Manual, section 3-51: Cultural Forms

“Symbols can be objects, activities, words, relationships, events, or gestures” (US Army & USMC 2006: 3-51).

Unacknowledged Source:

“The symbols I observed in the field were, empirically, objects, activities, relationships, events, gestures, and spatial units in a ritual situation” (Turner, 1967:19).

Counterinsurgency Manual, section 3-55: Power and Authority

“Power is the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his or her own will despite resistance.”

Unacknowledged Source:

“Power [Macht] is the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his or her own will despite resistance” (Weber 1922:53).

Several sections of the manual are identical to entries in online encyclopedia sources like www.answers.com. For example, the Handbook’s definition of “language” is the same as that on http://www.answers.com/topic/duration-poem-4), portions of other entries appear on wikipedia. Because such online entries are not dated, it cannot be demonstrably shown which text is the original, but the overall pattern of unacknowledged use suggests that the Handbook relied on these sources.

The inability of this chapter’s authors to come up with their own basic definitions of such simple sociocultural concepts as “race,” “culture,” “ritual,” or “social structure” not only raises questions about the ethics of the authors but also furnishes a useful measure of the Manual and its authors’ weak intellectual foundation. In all, I quickly found over a dozen examples of lifted passages from uncredited source.

When I published an exposé in October 2007 documenting the extent of the Manual’s unacknowledged “borrowed” passages in CounterPunch, the military had a variety of responses (Price 2007). U.S. Army Spokesman Major Tom McCuin issued a doublespeak statement declaring a mistakes-were-made-but-the-message-remains-true admission that passages were indeed used in an inappropriate manner. Major McCuin officially proclaimed Army’s official position to be that:

the messages contained in the manual are valid, regardless of any discussion of academic standards. Any argument over missing citations should in no way diminish the manual’s utility in the current counterinsurgency fight. . . .The Human Terrain System is recognition of the fact that academic study and applied social science has practical uses, and those who have chosen to devote their time and efforts to exploring non-lethal alternatives to combat are making a vital contribution to the nation’s efforts to secure a peaceful, stable and secure future for the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. The long term by-product of their heroic efforts will be better informed military decisions that minimize casualties and suffering, and ultimately, optimized policy decision making within government that is harmonized with the ethical principles social science values the most (McCuin 2007).

Less-officially, a mob of blood-boiling COIN believers furiously blogged on the Small Wars website and sent emails attacking me, my credentials, and my reputation and discussed plots designed to get me fired from my job or cause me trouble in the workplace. The comments were a pretty good example of the state of anti-intellectual currents prevailing in American. These were blog rants of angry warriors carrying on in ways that demonstrated they did not understand academia or even basic principles of academic freedom, the discourse failed to address how the Manual was being used to sell the American public on the war, much less that the use of these unsourced passages ran counter to Manual’s own claims that the work of others was properly cited and acknowledged.

Montgomery McFate issued no statement concerning the sourcing problems in the manual, and to the best of my knowledge, to this day she has never explained what happened. John Nagl issued a statement claiming that the Manual, as military doctrine, did not need footnotes or attributions of any type — this was of course counter to the Manual’s own claims (Nagl 2007). Nagl’s response skirted the issue of the Manual’s lifting exact sentences (and of slightly modifying others) and reproducing them in the manual without quotation marks as if the problem was simply one of missing footnotes and citations and not of quotations. Nagl wrote that it was his “understanding that this longstanding practice in doctrine writing is well within the provisions of “fair use” copyright law.” A few military scholars, like historian Lt. Col. Gian Gentile of West Point publicly criticized Lt. Col. Nagl’s excuses and argued that the academic credibility of the Manual has been undermined.

Lt. Col. Gentile posted a public letter on the Small Wars Journal website to Nagl, stating that scholarship matters, and asking Nagl to publicly respond to how this stealing of the work of others had happened. He wrote that he agreed with Nagl that my piece had an angry strident tone and was using a critique of Human Terrain Teams because a deeper disapproval of anthropologists contributing to warfare, but then he wrote:

However, in all of the responses to the Price piece to include yours not one has offered a satisfying explanation of the passages that are used in the Coin manual that Price shows to be directly lifted from other sources. Now the garden variety explanation for this has been oh yes, oh well what should we realistically expect since it is a doctrinal manual and it can not be cluttered with footnotes and quotation marks.

But I look at it this way, like you I have an advanced degree (a PhD in history from Stanford University). I was not an author of the Coin manual. You were along with others like Dr Conrad Crane. Con was in fact a senior mentor of mine at Stanford and read and critiqued my dissertation. So I have to tell you that if I was involved with the writing of this manual and even understanding the limits of using footnotes, if I would have pulled so many direct quotes from other sources and placed them in quotations and then found out that the publisher had removed the quotations then I would have taken that to be a “fall on my sword issue” for me. Is that the way it was with you, Con, and the other scholars who were involved with the writing of this manual?

Again and to sum up, I am looking for an explanation for the reason so many passages from the manual were pulled directly from other sources (as the Price piece demonstrates) but were not set off in quotations in the manual. I mean heck on page 1-4 of the manual the publishers did find it in their means to use quotation marks to quote directly from TE Lawrence; So why not these other passages? (Gian P. Gentile to Nagl 11/2/07 http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2007/11/desperate-people-with-limited/ )

Gentile’s questions are fundamental questions that still demand answers. Nagl chose silence to these direct questions about how and why the passages of others appeared in the Manual. Montgomery McFate and others involved in the production of these chapters have joined Nagl in the silence over how this occurred; a silence assisted by a national media uninterested in holding the military accountable.

In one sense, the particular details of how the Manual came to reprint the unacknowledged writings of scholars do not matter. If quotation marks and attributions were removed by someone other than the chapter’s authors, the end result is the same as if the authors intentionally took this material. The silence on the reproduction of these passages, the lack of any authorial erratum, and the failure to add quotation marks even when Chicago Press republished the Manual seems to argue against the likelihood of a simple editorial mix-up, but who knows. The ways that the processes producing the Manual so easily abused the work of others inform us of larger dynamics in play, when scholars and academic presses lend their reputations, and surrender control, to projects mixing academic with military goals.

Criticizing the Manual’s rejection of the most basic of scholarly practices is not (as Nagl later tried to argue) holding it to external standards, it is to hold the manual to its own standards (Nagl 2007). Lt. Col Nagl later argued that using the un-attributed passages of others is acceptable when writing military doctrine. But the preface of the University of Chicago Press’s edition of the Manual clearly says: “This publication contains copyrighted material. Copyrighted material is identified with footnotes. Other sources are identified in the source notes” (US Army & USMC 2007:xlviii). According to doctrine’s preface: doctrine should have footnotes; and Nagl remains silent on the glaring contradiction. The instances in which the Manual does use quotes and attributions provides one measure of its status as an extrusion of political ideology rather than scholarly labor, as these instances most frequently occur in the context of quoting the apparently sacred words of generals and other military figures — thereby, denoting not only differential levels of respect but different treatment of who may and may not be quoted without attribution.

After my critique was published in CounterPunch, the Small War’s website posted a document full of citations and quoted passages that purported to be an original draft of one the problematic section of the Manual’s third chapter (COIN Draft n.d.). Even as a draft this document has a lot of problems. While it has an impressive use of footnotes, there remain sentences (often marked with footnotes) that have no quotation marks yet are the words of others. I don’t know the provenance of this document, but even if it were the original draft of a chapter that was later altered by unknown citation-and-quote-removing editors, it does not answer basic questions of why McFate, Nagl or others remained silent when the University of Chicago Press republished a work they would have then known to have contained the unacknowledged work of others. If this is what happened, why was no errata forthcoming? The mysterious production of this claimed early draft without any explanation solves nothing, and raises more questions than it answers.

The numerous footnotes in this supposed “draft” document do shed more light on the extent of anthropologists whose work was consulted in the production of this chapter; these anthropologists include: Clifford Geertz, E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Napoleon Chagnon, Raymond Firth, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, Ralph Linton, Bronislaw Malinowski, and Sherry Ortner. I assume that many of the “draft’s” cited non-anthropologist radicals such as C. Wright Mills, Antonio Gramsci or Pierre Bourdieu, would have been disgusted to have his work used for such manipulative needs of military occupation (See Chapter Eleven for a critique of the worthless form of theory this haphazard mixing of social theory produces).

The few published critical examinations of the Manual focus on the text’s provenience and philosophical roots. In The Nation, Tom Hayden links the Manual to the philosophical roots of U.S. Indian Wars, reservation policies, and the Vietnam War’s Phoenix Program (Hayden 2007). Roberto González observed that the Manual

reads like a manual for indirect colonial rule — though ‘empire’ and ‘imperial’ are taboo words, never used in reference to US power. The authors draw historical examples from British, French and Japanese colonial counterinsurgency campaigns in Malaya, Vietnam, Algeria and China. They euphemistically refer to local leaders collaborating with occupying forces as the ‘host nation’ (rather than indirect rulers) and uniformly describe opponents as ‘insurgents’. Yet they never mention empire — hardly surprising, since FM 3-24 is a document written for the US Army and Marine Corps, and from a perspective ensconced within US military culture. Indeed, is it possible to imagine that any US Army field manual would ever use such terms?

Instead, FM 3-24’s authors imply that a culturally informed occupation — with native power brokers safely co-opted by coalition forces, community policing duties carried out by a culturally sensitive occupying army, development funds doled out to local women, etc. — will result in a lighter colonial touch, with less ‘collateral damage’ and a lower price tag (González 2010:83).

That a press as drenched in “reflexive” critiques of colonialism as Chicago would publish such a manual is an ironic testament to just how depoliticized many of postmodernism’s salon bound critiques have become; and a New York Times op-ed by University of Chicago anthropologist, Richard Shweder, voiced a stance of soft postmodern inaction from which the travesties of Human Terrain could be lightly critiqued while anthropologists are urged not to declare themselves as being “counter-counterinsurgency” (cf., Shweder 2007, Gusterson & Lutz 2007).

The Politics of Republication

The role of University of Chicago Press in bringing the Manual to a broader audience is a crucial element of understanding my critique of how the manual was publicly praised, while fake scholarship was a critical element of the Manual’s domestic propaganda function. That such shoddy scholarship passed so briskly through the press’ editorial processes raises questions concerning Chicago’s interest in rushing out this faux academic work — though some authors writing about the flap following revelations of these problems misunderstood the importance of the University of Chicago Press’s role in transforming the Manual into a work of domestic propaganda (e.g. Wasinki 2007). Rushing a book through the production process at an academic press in about half a year’s time is a blitzkrieg requiring a serious focus of will. There was more than a casual interest in getting this book to market — whether it was simply a shrewd recognition of market forces, or reflected political concerns or commitments. The Press enjoyed robust sales of a hot title (it was one of Amazon’s top 100 in September 2007); but it did not adequately consider the damage to the Press’ reputation that could follow its association with this deeply tarnished service manual for Empire.

To highlight the Manual’s scholarly failures is not to hold it to some over-demanding, external standard of academic integrity. It is important to recognize that claims of academic integrity are the very foundation of the Manual’s promotional strategy. Somewhere along the line, Petraeus’ doctorate became more important than his general’s stars, touted by Petraeus’ claque in the media as tokening a shift from Bush’s “bring ‘em on” cowboy shoot-out to a nuanced thinking-man’s war.

In a September 2007 phone call, University of Chicago Press acquisitions editor, John Tryneski, told me the Manual went through the standard peer review process, but there are unusual dynamics in reviewing an already published work whose authors are not just unknown (common in the peer review process), but essentially unknowable. Tryneski acknowledged that peer reviewers came from policy and think tank circles. When I asked Tryneski if there had been any internal debate over the decision by the Press to disseminate military doctrine, he said there were some discussions and then, without elaboration, changed the subject, arguing that the Press viewed this publication more along the lines of the republication of a key historic document. This might make sense if this was an historic document, not a component of a campaign being waged against the American people by a Pentagon, surging to convince a skeptical American public that Bush hasn’t already lost the war in Iraq.

Chicago’s republication of the Manual was a transformative event for the document. This transformed the Manual from an internal document of military doctrine into a public document designed to convince a weary public that the war of occupation could be won. But the act of republication also forced arguments of academic legitimacy. It is remarkable that the scholars who worked on the Manual remained silent about attribution problems when they learned of Chicago’s plans to republish the Manual. If, as some later claimed, quotation marks and citations had been removed by others after the initial draft was submitted, these authors should have alerted the University of Chicago Press of this. In at least one case, one of the authors of Manual chapter three was notified that Chicago would be republishing the manual, but no such warning was forthcoming.

That militaries commandeer food, wealth, and resources to serve the needs of war is a basic rule of warfare — as old as war itself. Thucydides, Herodotus and other ancient historians record standard practices of seizing slaves and food to feed armies on the move; and the history of warfare finds similar confiscations to keep armies on their feet. But the requirements of modern warfare go far beyond the needs of funds and sustenance; military and intelligence agencies also require knowledge, and these agencies commandeer ideas for use to their own purposes in ways not intended by their authors.

Commandeering scholarship for dirty wars

The requisitioning of anthropological knowledge for military applications has occurred in colonial contexts, world wars and proxy wars. After World War II, Carleton Coon recounted how he produced a 40-page text on Moroccan propaganda for the OSS by taking pages of text straight from his textbook, Principles of Anthropology. “[He] padded it with enough technical terms to make it ponderous and mysterious, since [he] had found out in the academic world that people will express much more awe and admiration for something complicated which they do not quite understand than for something simple and clear” (see Price 2008: 251).

The most egregious known instance of the military’s recycling of an anthropological text occurred in 1962, when the U.S. Department of Commerce secretly, and without authorization or permission from the author, translated into English from French the anthropologist Georges Condominas’ ethnographic account of Montagnard village life in the central highlands of Vietnam, Nous Avons Mangé la Forêt. The Green Berets weaponized the document in the field. The military’s uses for this ethnographic knowledge were obvious, as assassination campaigns tried to hone their skills and learn to target village leaders. For years, neither publisher nor author knew this work had been stolen, translated, and reprinted for militarized ends. In 1971, Condominas described his anger in learning of this abuse, saying:

I must admit having been shocked, but not by the disdain for international copyright laws which such an act indicates — on the part of a bureaucracy which is at the origin of these laws, and shows such indignation when others bypass them — or by the lack of courtesy shown the author, because I well know that technocrats have little respect for those who indulge in unprofitable occupations. Not! That which irritated me above all was the translation, very bad by the way, had been distributed to the all too famous ‘green berets.’ How can one accept, without trembling with rage, that this work, in which I wanted to describe in their human plenitude these men who have so much to teach us about life, should be offered to the technicians of death — of their death! I know very well that these mercenaries, these well-oiled machines with human faces, are too proud of their lack of culture to be interested in that of others, especially if it is filled with poetry and without the sense of money or technology. But you will understand my indignation when I tell you that I learned about the ‘pirating’ [of my book] only a few years after having the proof that Srae, whose marriage I described in Nous Avons Mangé la Forêt, had been tortured by a sergeant of the Special Forces in the camp of Phii Ko’ (Condominas 1973:4).

Today, anthropologists serving on militarily “embedded” Human Terrain Teams study Iraqis and Afghans with claims that they are teaching troops how to recognize and protect noncombatants. But as Bryan Bender reports in the Boston Globe, “one Pentagon official likened [Human Terrain anthropologists] to the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support project during the Vietnam War. That effort helped identify Vietnamese suspected as communists and Viet Cong collaborators; some were later assassinated by the United States” (Bender 2007). This chilling revelation clarifies the role that Pentagon officials envision for anthropologists in today’s counterinsurgency campaigns.

Militarized Anthropology

There is a real demand within the military and intelligence agencies for the type of disarticulated and simplistic view of culture found in the Manual not because it is innovative — but because, beyond information on specific manners and customs of lands they are occupying, this simplistic view of culture tells them what they already know. This has long been a problem faced by anthropologists working in such confined military settings. My research examining the frustrations and contributions of World War II era anthropologists identifies a recurrent pattern in which anthropologists with knowledge flowing against the bureaucratic precepts of military and intelligence agencies faced often impossible institutional barriers. They faced the choice of either coalescing with ingrained institutional views and advancing within these bureaucracies, or enduring increasing frustrations and marginalized status. Such wartime frustrations led Alexander Leighton to conclude in despair that “the administrator uses social science the way a drunk uses a lamppost, for support rather than illumination” (see Price 2008:197). In this sense, the Manual’s selective abuse of anthropology — which ignores anthropological critiques of colonialism, power, militarization, hegemony, warfare, cultural domination and globalization — provides the military with just the sort of support, rather than illumination, that they seek. In large part, what the military wants from anthropology is to offer basic courses in local manners so that they can get on with the job of conquest. The fact that so many military anthropologists appear disengaged from questioning conquest exposes the fundamental problem with military anthropology.

As the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan present increasing concrete problems for the Manual’s lofty claims of counterinsurgency, the Manual’s “authors” and defenders take on an increasingly cult-like devotion to thieir guiding text, a devotion that even finds some betraying the lost cause of Iraq in an effort to save the Manual’s sacred doctrine. In a December 24, 2007 interview, Charlie Rose gently questioned Sarah Sewell about ongoing disasters in Iraq; Sewell quickly disserted the war she had been recruited to rationalize in order to save the Manual, insisting: “the surge isn’t the field manual; Iraq is not the field manual. And I think many Americans tend to conflate these things at their peril. And I think they risk of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. If and when we look back on Iraq, it will not mean that the manual was wrong, it will mean that Iraq had very different problems, starting with the legitimacy of the invasion to begin with” (Rose 2007). With this twisted logic, the Counterinsurgency Field Manual’s use as an instrument of domestic propaganda comes full-Orwellian-circle, as the public is asked to forget that just months prior to these revelations of poor scholarly practices in the Manual, a barrage of media appearances by Lt. Co. Nagl and others had pitched the Manual as the intellectual foundation for victory in Iraq.

But those selling the American public the Counterinsurgency Field Manual know full well that counterinsurgencies, just like “insurgencies[,] are not constrained by truth and create propaganda that serves their purposes,” (FM 3-24: 5-23) and the Manual’s tactics are embraced by intellectual counterinsurgents battling the American public’s wish to abandon the disastrous occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.