The Human Terrain System: A CORDS for the 21st Century

Abstract

The U.S. military has not always made the necessary effort to understand the foreign cultures and societies in which it intended to conduct military operations. As a result, it has not always done a good job of dealing with the cultural environment within which it eventually found itself. Similarly, its units have not always done a good job in transmitting necessary local cultural information to follow-on forces attempting to conduct Phase IV operations (those operations aimed at stabilizing an area of operations in the aftermath of major combat). Many of the principal challenges we face in Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom (OIF and OEF) stem from just such initial institutional disregard for the necessity to understand the people among whom our forces operate as well as the cultural characteristics and propensities of the enemies we now fight. To help address these shortcomings in cultural knowledge and capabilities, the Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO), a U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) organization that supports the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, is overseeing the creation of the Human Terrain System (HTS). This system is being specifically designed to address cultural awareness shortcomings at the operational and tactical levels by giving brigade commanders an organic capability to help understand and deal with "human terrain" the social, ethnographic, cultural, economic, and political elements of the people among whom a force is operating. So that U.S. forces can operate more effectively in the human terrain in which insurgents live and function, HTS will provide deployed brigade commanders and their staffs direct social-science support in the form of ethnographic and social research, cultural information research, and social data analysis that can be employed as part of the military decision-making process.

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