'Each man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world'
-- Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

'Artists are tricky fellows sir, forever shaping the world according to some design of their own'
-- Jonathan Strange, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Sunday 22 September 2013

Research on Human Terrain System


With US and coalition forces in phased draw-down in Afghanistan, the period in which scholars can first begin to make capped assessments of the Iraq and Afghan theatres is beginning. Within that large sphere of study, the Human Terrain System, which first deployed an Human Terrain Team to Afghanistan in February 2007, merits particular interest because it has bridged academia and the military, thus existing at that historically significant boundary between scholarship and soldiering.

HTTs were deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan in support of Phase Four and Phase Five operations there, working alongside US Army, US Marines and coalition forces. Significant previous studies on the HTTs and the wider programme have been undertaken by authors at Westpoint; the Center for Naval Analyses (as part of a congressionally-directed assessment); and the Institute for Defense Analyses.

A new study conducted by Christopher J. Lamb, James Douglas Orton, Michael C. Davies and Theodore T. Pikulsky at the National Defense University has attempted to answer the question: what accounts for the apparent variation in HTT effectiveness? In answering, the authors have conducted interviews with approximately 100 former or serving HTS personnel and brigade staff, going further than previous studies and charting the historical trajectory of the programme in hitherto unseen depth.

At the same time, the journalist Vanessa Gezari has published an account of the Human Terrain System, also drawing on a considerable range of interviews with key members of the programme. This journalistic account centres upon the story of Paula Loyd and Don Ayala in Afghanistan whilst placing it within a wider critique of the programme.

Centring on the NDU study, an article critical of the HTTs was penned recently by Gian Gentile. A detailed response was published by one of the NDU authors, Michael Davies, which rebuts Gentile's argument point by point.

Broadly, the continued interest which HTS holds for stakeholders is due to the unresolved notion of academic assistance to the military structure: Can it help or hinder? How can it help? How has this relationship developed through history? What does HTS mean for the future direction of social science approaches to warfighting more generally? Is this future direction a "good" or a "bad" thing for the United States military and partner forces?

One of the more interesting developments from the HTS architecture in the future may be the trajectories of those former HTT members as they continue in their careers - possessing a mixture of academic expertise, area specialty - and because of their participation in HTTs, having enhanced, invaluable authority from their experiences downrange in Phase 4 and Phase 5 operations - these individuals will offer the US government remarkable insight into future threats and planning, legitimated by scholastic intellect coupled to warzone experience. In combining these two prized commodities, some may come to influence the future direction of US foreign policy and in so doing, inevitably fuse at some intersections the spheres of social sciences and the military.
 

Saturday 21 September 2013

Stone software and Open Sourced global libraries


I'm online, therefore I am.

Piece in the Guardian about the open-source data used by Stone software developed at the University of Maryland to predict the organizational restructuring of terrorist groups. The arc of history may be long but ultimately it tends towards open-sourced information and that means that that data is pushed from the government to the public domain. There may be a current furore over the NSA procedures (and the slightly more unofficial applications) but the social media investigation of the Boston marathon bombing, complex and rumour-driven, points to new directions in which data is aggregated. Rolling newsfeeds are now largely driven by combing social media for information, and alive to the exabytes of information stored across all social media datasets, companies are designing software to create rapid composites of such data across different platforms to generate usable information on individuals and groups. One of the foremost projects is Raytheon's Rapid Information Overlay Technology. It's an acronym bound to travel quickly in social media when its use is first documented.  Perhaps that is why the Snowden revelations were apparently so damaging - it's a fast-paced battle between public expansion and government retention of information in which the NSA had obviously circumvented certain rules in order to stay a step ahead and moreover, the extent to which it has embraced Big Data has been met with surprise. Not that the NSA has ever shied away from Big Data, but the Internet now makes that dataset orders of magnitude larger. We are all thinking open source now - from Westpoint to Martha Crenshaw at Stanford the datasets are available, and the ways in which we leverage that data will continue to be one of the most important issues of our time and one in which precision is often in tension with accuracy. Still, the gselevator Twitter feed tweets the whole thing best: "Only idiots get bored when we've all got handheld devices containing infinite knowledge at our fingertips."