The US Army’s Human Terrain System (HTS) and the Quest to Commandeer Culture
A flurry of policy pieces written over the last several weeks have called for a new improved version of HTS, reflecting a deep longing by military-linked strategists to reboot the program. American military and intelligence agencies have a long history of seeking the sort of cultural knowledge that HTS’s architects sought to weaponize in Afghanistan and Iraq. These agencies have largely failed to harness social science for military purposes, but they stubbornly persist. Given this background — and ongoing efforts to subjugate and control foreign populations to fulfil the requirements of automated, mechanized killing via drones, algorithms, and predictive modeling programs — we should understand HTS’s termination as an exercise in retiring one brand and replacing it with newly packaged operations that are well underway. The gaps in military knowledge that HTS claimed to fill still remain. The desire to weaponize culture is as old as dreams of counterinsurgency, and such dreams do not die easily.
