updated Mon. April 15, 2024
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Foreign Affairs
February 4, 2016
The U.S. government's controversial effort to harness the social sciences in support of its counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, in an initiative known as the Human Terrain System, was one of the most ambitious and innovative efforts of the post-9/11 era to help warfighters make sense of ...
New York Times
August 18, 2015
The Army created the Human Terrain System — at the height of the counterinsurgency craze that dominated American strategic thinking in Iraq and Afghanistan late in the last decade, with much fanfare — to solve this problem. Cultural training and deep, nuanced understanding of Afghan politics and ...
CounterPunch
July 31, 2015
Several weeks ago, a CounterPunch special report revealed that the US Army's Human Terrain System (HTS)—a $726 million embedded social science program—had quietly expired. As media outlets picked up the story, it became evident that HTS's demise was a welcome development for many.
Foreign Policy (blog)
July 28, 2015
griped that the program, known as the Human Terrain System, had “no legitimate application in a war zone or out of one” and complained, ”The overall cost and failures of HTS indicate that [it] be considered for termination.” One self-described group of anti-colonial anthropologists even superimposed a ...
War on the Rocks
July 13, 2015
The Human Terrain System (HTS) – a U.S. Army program aimed at helping U.S. and allied military forces understand the people around them in Iraq and Afghanistan – is dead. And anthropologists are dancing ritualistically around its corpse. The idea behind HTS was simple and promising: embed social ...
CounterPunch
June 29, 2015
The most expensive social science program in history–the US Army's Human Terrain System (HTS)–has quietly come to an end. During its eight years of existence, the controversial program cost tax payers more than $725 million. The Pentagon distributed much of the funding to two large defense firms that ...
