The US military weaponized social science and empathy in counterinsurgency doctrine
Evidence
In short, it wasn’t enough simply to kill and militarily defeat the enemy; soldiers needed to take part in building infrastructure, providing basic services, and being both “nation builders and warriors.” A coauthor of this manual wrote that counterinsurgency involved “collecting information about the whole society, understanding local conditions, monitoring public opinion, and analyzing social and political relationships and networks.” To aid this effort, the following year the Pentagon recruited anthropologists through a $40 million program called the “Human Terrain System.” It sent these anthropologists to Iraq and Afghanistan to gather cultural information in order to better prosecute the war on terror. It stated a clear goal: “Empathy will become a weapon.” — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 492
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: Connects to the broader literature on militarized anthropology and counterinsurgency (e.g. David Price’s work on anthropological collaboration with the military).
- QUESTION: How did professional anthropology organizations respond to the Human Terrain System program?
Related
- Counterinsurgency doctrine weaponizes social knowledge-gathering alongside military force (similarity 0.93)
- Counterinsurgency doctrine weaponizes knowledge and empathy as tools of empire. (similarity 0.88)
- The Pentagon weaponized anthropological empathy to control colonized populations (similarity 0.87)