Military Operations in the 21st Century: A Cultural Cringe?
Abstract
This article examines the extent to which cross-cultural competence has been absorbed by the Army and incorporated into its institutions and practices. The author concludes that there is a firm understanding of culture’s importance within the Army, but that more work is necessary. The author focuses on several areas where improvements may be made, such as increasing the Army’s awareness that its own culture will affect operations, and the further institutionalisation of hard-won cultural lessons through more focused training and education.
From Sun Tzu’s repetition-worn exhortation to ‘know your enemy’, through Moses directing the Jews to spy on the people of Canaan,1 the campaigns of Napoleon in Spain and Lawrence in Arabia,2 the Second World War considerations of how to run post-surrender Japan,3 and into the slums of Iraq and poppy fields of Afghanistan today, understanding the local population and their culture has either reinforced success or contributed to failure. The place of culture in military operations remains a topic of professional discussion, with military journals, ‘lessons learned’ publications and the news media continuing to debate the importance of cultural factors to the modern battlespace. This interest is mirrored in the Australian Army; in June 2008, the Centre for Army Lessons newsletter had three articles that touched on culture, and in Lieutenant General Peter Leahy’s assessment just prior to his retirement he stated that the future will involve ‘a battlefield which is much more about the population. Where we protect and support and persuade. Where you need to understand culture and anthropology’.4
While there are voices cautioning that the wars of today will not necessarily be tomorrow’s,5 if today’s battlefields are about interacting with the population in the face of some adversary or disaster, and the population’s culture is critical to this interaction, then it is timely to ask whether the Australian Army is performing adequately in this regard. Are we embracing culture where it is relevant to our mission, or cringing at the idea of ‘soft’ power infringing on ‘hard’ decisions?
Culture and Military Operations
When discussing culture and military operations, the first issue is a definitional one. Culture touches on anthropology, sociology, history, religion, linguistics, economics, politics and psychology, and therefore means different things to different people. To complicate the matter, there is a proliferation of similar terms including human terrain, cultural awareness, cultural intelligence and cultural competence.6 The Army has dipped its spoon into this definitional soup and defined cultural understanding as ‘the capacity for active study and understanding of human and cultural influences affecting all decision-making and actions in the operating environment, in order to optimise one’s own decision superiority through empathy’.7 While there is a lot to like in this definition, particularly in the way that it relates culture to military operations, empathy is not a broad enough term to be more than partially useful in understanding all of the factors that have an impact on culture. It also does not sufficiently recognise that using cultural understanding for military gain involves more than identifying with the emotions and mental state of the ‘other bloke’. Incorporating cultural factors into military activities requires an awareness of one’s own culture and the way that this influences perceptions of what the ‘other bloke’ is doing. Additionally, the Army’s definition also implies a focus on commanders through the use of the term ‘decision superiority’.8 In today’s operations, everything that our soldiers and officers do when interacting with the population touches on culture, whether it is patrolling, engaging local leaders on security and development issues, coordinating with non-government organisations, or in wargaming a sequel to an operational plan. Consequently, I prefer Selmeski’s definition of ‘cross-cultural competence’ as it is broader and explicitly recognises the relationship between the observer and the observed.9 Selmeski’s definition is, however, focused on individuals and I have adapted it so that cross-cultural competence can be defined as the ability to quickly and accurately comprehend distinct cultural environments, and then appropriately and effectively act to achieve a desired effect.
With this definition in mind, it is worthwhile returning to the idea that cultural competence is a way through which military forces can influence a population. While a complex topic, the argument as to why culture is important to the success of military operations follows from the truism that the population is important. If future land operations are most likely to occur in complex, urban environments, then these environments will have many state and non-state stakeholders who may move between support, neutrality and opposition to military forces. All military operations, including combat, will have an impact on at least some of these stakeholders, and many will specifically aim to influence them. Ultimately, the perceptions and behaviour of the non-combatant stakeholders are the decisive factor in determining political success. When soldiers and military forces understand and incorporate cultural factors into their activities as a way of influencing perceptions and behaviour, this significantly increases the contribution that military operations make towards achieving political objectives.
The relative importance of culture to each operation, however, will differ. For example, cultural considerations, at least tactically and operationally, are largely peripheral in environments where the population is absent or negligible. Strategically, however, these considerations (for example, the British public’s reaction to the Argentinean invasion of the Falkland Islands) can be vital. Cultural considerations are also only relevant when the military outcome requires some degree of cooperation with the population, or a decisive element of the population. But even if it is thought that the population and cultural factors can be ignored, there can be second and third order effects that occur over decades. Examples can be seen in the contributions to future conflict of the Treaty of Versailles and the practice of elevating an ethnic minority to prominence to assist in the running of a colonial government.
Any discussion about cultural understanding should always be premised on the fact that understanding is not synonymous with military success. Understanding why there is racial or religious conflict, why women are not allowed to be educated, why government is unrepresentative, or why there is a patronage system that encourages nepotism and corruption does not ensure security, develop economies or result in good governance. Awareness, and even understanding, of different cultural norms may sometimes do little more than emphasise the intractability of a problem to a military-based solution. It should always be remembered that cultural understanding is no more of a silver bullet than technology.
Culture and Soldering
Everything that our soldiers, staffs and commanders do when considering or interacting with a population reflects the culture of both sides. The importance of even low-level interactions has been recognised in the concept of the ‘strategic corporal’. The idea is that even basic military decisions can have profound ‘ripple’ effects due to the media’s ability to broadcast what is happening almost instantly and almost limitlessly. While sometimes hyperbolic, when these interactions are portrayed as damaging to the local population, particularly when they are culturally insensitive or offensive, significant damage can occur—Abu Ghraib is a clear example of this. In many ways the phenomenon of the ‘strategic corporal’ could also be described as that of a ‘cultural corporal’, one who understands that every action that affects the local people has potential consequences beyond the here and now, and consequently makes good tactical decisions.
These decisions are embodied in the interactions that occur on a daily basis between soldiers and the locals in their area. It is these interactions, in competition with the adversary’s efforts to influence and coerce the population, which will determine where hearts and minds will go. The Army has sought to shape the attitudes and behaviour of our soldiers by providing them with basic language skills and cultural awareness from briefings and handbooks, and in training scenarios that include cultural aspects.10 This has been described as ‘formal and immersion training, incidental and collective experience and intrinsic motivation ... [and] regular, albeit secondary parts of many Mission Rehearsal exercises’.11 Although some military forces are doing more to prepare individuals, particularly in the United States,12 these efforts are not without their critics; Selmeski, for example, describes US efforts as ranging from ‘adequate but superficial to downright poor’.13 Regardless, some programs, such as the Tactical Iraqi interactive language and culture computer game, have achieved considerable success: ‘over 20,000 US servicemen and members of the Australian Defence Force have successfully learned and transferred to the real world the skills they acquired with our foreign-language training programs’.14 Returning to the definition of cross-cultural competence, one weakness of these programs is that they often focus on descriptions of the ‘other’ culture, rather than on drawing out cross-cultural differences. Without understanding these differences, this knowledge runs the risk of being decorative rather than decision-quality.
It is difficult to judge the effectiveness of the Australian Army’s preparation of its soldiers, although success can be inferred from the lack of any significant cultural incident in Iraq or Afghanistan. Regardless, cultural training is critical and should continue to be refined and expanded, although the responsibility for doing so sits largely with a busy chain of command, arguably neither better trained, nor more experienced, nor more aware of specific cultures than the troops they are preparing to deploy.
Culture and Doctrine
If the Army institutionally recognises the importance of culture in current operations, then it is reasonable to expect that such understanding be reflected in doctrine. To a limited extent it is, with the multidimensional complexity of the operating environment,15 the importance of the population,16 and the need to see from other perspectives17 all mentioned. Adaptive Campaigning is perhaps the Army’s most inclusive statement of the place of culture in operations, recognising that ‘influencing populations and perceptions ... is the central and decisive activity of war’18 and going on to reinforce this declaration by clearly linking four out of its five lines of operation to the population.19
While this is positive, too many of the Army’s doctrinal references are fleeting (the Fundamentals of Land Warfare refers to the ‘perceptional domain’ in a footnote20), dismissive (Urban Operations refers to the non-combatant population as a ‘friction of the environment’21), or lacking in substance. In terms of substance, population, culture, beliefs, ethnicity and religion are all mentioned, but the references are typically more declarative than substantive. A prime example is in Land Warfare Doctrine 3-0 Operations, which devotes six pages to discussing the manoeuvrist approach to warfare, of which only twenty-nine words relate to the population and then strictly in terms of the ‘bond between the population and adversary’.22 This lack of substance appears common, and issues include:
- The tendency to consider population and culture as only being relevant to psychological operations, public affairs and information, and rules of engagement.
- A weakness in manoeuvre theory in that, while the population is seemingly a perfect opportunity for an indirect approach, manoeuvre theory appears focused on achieving a blitzkrieg, and does not adequately integrate the population or the culture through which it may be influenced.23 Multidimensional or not, while manoeuvre theory advocates ‘the centrality of the human element in warfare’24 it almost exclusively does so in relation to the threat. In this way, it could be argued that the Army’s manoeuvre theory is as flawed as any industrial age focus on attrition.
- The tendency to make statements about the importance of population and culture without integrating these factors into planning and decision-making processes.
- The tendency to present culture as a laundry list, in one case running into hundreds of factors.25
- The lack of differentiation between the needs of the soldier, the staff and the commander.
A specific shortcoming exists in the relationship between cultural factors, intelligence doctrine and military decision-making processes. Intelligence preparation of the battlespace (IPB) is driven by the commander, and provides inputs into the military appreciation process (MAP) about the threat and the environment. It is clearly the process best suited to kick off the comprehension of distinct cultural environments that was mentioned in the definition. Unfortunately, culture and population is notable in current IPB and MAP doctrine mainly by its absence. These considerations are lumped under ‘other factors’, secondary at best in centre-of-gravity constructs, and not considered in wargaming.26 These shortcomings are not restricted to the Australian Army, and they have been discussed in some overseas professional military forums, with probably the best result currently being found in US Field Manual 3-24, Counterinsurgency.27 Many of the proposed solutions, unfortunately, are limited by presenting culture and population as an additional, separate consideration for the commanders, instead of one that should be interwoven into existing processes.
Although it would be tempting to say that Australian doctrine, in general, pays lip service to culture, it is fairer to see this as a more-or-less traditional focus on the application of military capabilities to win the land battle. Our doctrine does tend to focus on operations and our own perspectives—the comfortable and the knowable.
There are sufficient mentions of the importance of a population and the Army’s interactions to indicate that this dimension of conflict is acknowledged, but not sufficient detail and practical incorporation to indicate that this has really sunk in. This is not to say that insightful commanders and clever staff will not appropriately consider culture and population, but they are not encouraged to do so by doctrine.
Culture and Learning
If culture deserves a place in the awareness of every individual deployed on an operation, as well as in the Army’s planning and decision-making processes, then it follows that there is a requirement for training and education. This broad requirement was discussed in a cultural intelligence seminar held in Canberra in May 2008,28 achieving a consensus that the combinations of anthropological, psychological and sociological expertise required to support the range of cross-cultural competence was almost certainly unobtainable from within the military. Competent linguists and regional ‘experts’—assuming this is not a euphemism for passed over military officers—are not enough. Specialist civilian assistance is needed, but this is not without controversy.
The American Anthropological Association (AAA) has described the involvement of anthropologists in military operations as ‘controversial’ and involving ‘important unresolved issues and continuing concerns’.29 Some anthropologists have publicly expressed concern over the ‘weaponisation’ of anthropology: there is a ‘Network of Concerned Anthropologists’ opposed to ‘research and other activities that contribute to counter-insurgency operations’,30 and at least one social scientist has been killed while on operations.31
Just as the US anthropological community is divided about involvement in military operations, it is almost certain that there would be similar concerns among Australian academics. These concerns reflect the ethical issue of non-disclosure of the purpose of their activities with the people they interact with, the spectre of indirectly causing harm to civilians due to subsequent military operations, and the potential for damage to the academics’ profession and career. If the Army is to consider using psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists or other specialists on operations, it should at least be aware of these ethical issues and preferably actively engage with professional associations beforehand.
The advice and presence of academics does not, however, remove the need for Army to train and educate soldiers and officers in cultural matters relevant to the operations.32 With the importance of the ‘cultural corporal’ and his or her interactions with the local people, this training should occur as early as possible in both the All Corps officers and soldiers training continuum. The focus of this training should be on understanding why culture matters, on our own Australian (and Army) culture, and the ways in which other cultures can be broadly different. It should focus on individual behaviour at first, and then grow in complexity throughout an individual’s career. In this way our soldiers and officers will have the skills to be at least partially culturally competent wherever they are, no matter how much notice they are given to deploy, as they will know how to think about cultural differences. These basics can then be built upon, either from learning from experience on deployment, or from specific pre-deployment training. Fortunately, such an approach is not revolutionary, and forms the basis of the way that Army plans to develop its cultural capability.33
Building cross-cultural competence should be a process of continual renovation, as cultural competence is a two-way, dynamic activity. The stakeholders in a population, particularly adversaries, observe and learn about the culture of the military forces among them. When cultural preconceptions or patterns of behaviour are found, these can be used against those forces. While the result of many factors, there were cultural preconceptions contributing to expectations that there would be no attack from the Viet Cong during Tet or the Arabs during Yom Kippur. Similarly, the adversary’s culture can also change. An example can be seen in the Taliban’s experimentation and enthusiastic adoption of suicide attacks. Such attacks have been widely described as being against Afghan cultural values, but any cultural squeamishness has been overcome as these attacks have proven to be an effective psychological and propaganda weapon for the Taliban, significantly escalating in number from 2006.34 When situational factors influence a culture, the cross-cultural competence ‘floor’ may shift, surprising those who see it as a static absolute. An openness to this dynamism will be an important part of the Army’s planned training and education.
Conclusion
The operating environments in which the Australian Army is most likely to find itself in the future will be complex and populated by a wide range of different stakeholders, including the local population. If war is a violent extension of political struggle, then using culture as a lever to influence this population (and other groups as required) is one means by which military organisations can improve their chances of success. This understanding of the differences between cultures, and the ability to use such an understanding to achieve better results, should be developed in soldiers, staffs and commanders at all levels.
The Australian Army has a reasonable level of cultural understanding of the areas in which it has recently operated, although the manner in which this understanding was gained could be described as largely ad hoc and won on-the-job. To institutionalise this knowledge, a good approach would be to educate our soldiers and officers in broad cultural competence concepts; combine this with specific, organised and practical training on the culture of areas to which they were to deploy; and supplement this knowledge and skill set with specialist, deployable cultural advice. Importantly, this education should help form explicit Australian cultural perspectives, so that there is an understanding of the baseline against which we often subconsciously consider others’ actions. Army’s leadership has laid a good platform for this, but there have been some initial delays and moving cultural competence from the page and into the classroom and field will probably require additional command focus.
As doctrinal reviews take place they should explore and, where appropriate, incorporate the relationship between military operations, influencing the population and using culture to do so. This task is probably most pressing for intelligence, planning and decision-making doctrine. Through all of this, the temptation to make culture a separate consideration must be resisted. It will be of most relevance to military operations when it is considered as a way to improve what we do, not change it.
To return to the original question of how the Australian Army is performing in regards to cultural awareness training, the answer appears to be in an ad hoc manner, but not badly. There is sufficient evidence to indicate that the Army ‘gets’ the importance of culture and has a plan to institutionalise and develop what has been done so far. The work required is to flesh out these hooks into robust, considered doctrine supported by tiered education and training. In this way, the hard work of using the soft power of culture will be eased, giving our soldiers and commanders every chance of success.
Endnotes
1 Book of Numbers 13: 17-33.
2 The significant part that culture played in the Spanish resistance to Napoleon is discussed in George W Smith, Jr., ‘Avoiding a Napoleonic Ulcer: Bridging the Gap of Cultural Intelligence (Or, Have We Focused on the Wrong Transformation?)’, Essay, Marine Corps War College, <http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/usmc/cjcs_essay_smith.pdf> accessed 7 July 2008. Lawrence of Arabia has a considerable amount to say on culture, such as his statement that ‘the beginning and ending of the secret of handling Arabs is unremitting study of them,’ from T E Lawrence, ‘The 27 Articles of T E Lawrence’, The Arab Bulletin, 20 August 1917, <http://www.usma.edu/dmi/IWmsgs/The27ArticlesofT.E.Lawrence.pdf> accessed 12 August 2008.
3 Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture, 1st Mariner Books edition, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1946.
4 Max Blenkin, ‘Future battlefield will require soldier-anthropologists’, AAP Newswire, 2 July 2008.
5 Michael J Mazarr, ‘The Folly of “Asymmetric War”‘, The Washington Quarterly, Summer 2008, pp. 33–53.
6 Brian R Selmeski, Military Cross-Cultural Competence: Core Concepts and Individual Development, Occasional Paper Series No. 1, Royal Military College of Canada, Centre for Security, Armed Forces & Society, 11 October 2006 (revised 16 May 2007), pp. 3–8. See also Erik B Eldridge and Andrew J Neboshynsky, ‘Quantifying Human Terrain’ Thesis, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, June 2008, pp. 19–23. <http://www.nps.edu/Programs/CCS/Docs/Pubs/Eldridge_Nebo_Thesis.pdf> accessed 7 July 2008.
7 Deputy Chief of Army, Planning Guidance for Development of a Cultural Understanding Capability in the Australian Army, Department of Defence, Canberra, 19 November 2007.
8 The reference does recognise the importance of cultural understanding in all ranks in the body of the document.
9 Selmeski, Military Cross-Cultural Competence, p. 12.
10 Examples include: meetings with tribal or religious elders; use of culture specific hand gestures to convey meaning; and the searching of women at checkpoints.
11 Selmeski, Military Cross-Cultural Competence, p. 2.
12 There are least five organisations in the US military whose ‘expertise’ includes culture. There is a Culture Center at the US Army’s intelligence home, Fort Huachuca; the US Air Force has a Culture and Language Center, and the USMC has a Center for Advanced Operational Culture Learning (CAOCL). More broadly, Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University has a Centre for Leadership and Cultural Intelligence.
13 Selmeski, Military Cross-Cultural Competence, p. 24.
14 See <http://www.tacticallanguage.com> accessed 7 July 2008.
15 Department of Defence, Joint Operations for the 21st Century, Department of Defence, Canberra, June 2007, pp. 12, 19; Australian Army, Land Warfare Doctrine 1 – The Fundamentals of Land Warfare, Department of Defence, Canberra, 2008, pp. 15–16, 41.
16 Land Warfare Doctrine 1 – The Fundamentals of Land Warfare, pp. 15–16, 41; Australian Army, Land Warfare Doctrine 3-9-5 – Urban Operations (Developing Doctrine), Department of Defence, Canberra, 2005, pp. 1-30–1-31.
17 Joint Operations for the 21st Century, p. 19.
18 Australian Army, Adaptive Campaigning – The Land Force Response to Complex Warfighting, Department of Defence, Canberra, 1 December 2007, p. 3.
19 Adaptive Campaignings lines of operation are Joint Land Combat, Population Protection, Public Information, Population Support, and Indigenous Capacity Building.
20 Land Warfare Doctrine 1 – The Fundamentals of Land Warfare, p. 14 (footnote).
21 Land Warfare Doctrine 3-9-5 – Urban Operations pp. 2–12.
22 Australian Army, Land Warfare Doctrine 3-0 – Operations, Department of Defence, Canberra, 2003, pp. 2-9–2-15.
23 Joint Operations for the 21st Century, p. 19, discusses ‘Multidimensional Manoeuvre’ but is explicitly focused on the relationship between adversary and friendly capabilities. Australian Army, Land Warfare Doctrine 3-0-1 – Counterinsurgency Operations, Department of Defence, Canberra, 1999, p. 1-10, does discuss attacking the ‘centre(s) of gravity at every level, that is—diplomatic, economic, psychological and military’, but its limitations are clear when it goes on to say that a manoeuvrist approach is manifested in ‘interior’ geographical manoeuvre, and ‘exterior’ international manoeuvre, only the latter of which includes a psychological dimension.
24 Land Warfare Doctrine 1 – The Fundamentals of Land Warfare, p. 41.
25 Annex G to Chapter 2 of Land Warfare Doctrine 3-9-5 – Urban Operations is a sixteen-page checklist of factors, many of which would have to be considered multiple times for each group relevant to an area of operations.
26 The Action, Reaction, Counteraction’ wargaming cycle is friendly/threat focused.
27 Department of the Army (US), Field Manual 3-24 / Marine Corps Warfighting Publication 3-33.5, Counterinsurgency, December 2006.
28 This two day seminar was sponsored by Intelligence Security and International Policy Group with the aim of looking at the role of intelligence staff in assessing culture. It was attended by professional intelligence officers and a variety of civilian specialists from related fields.
29 The AAA has established an advisory ‘Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology with the US Security and Intelligence Communities’. Their initial 2007 report is available at <http://www.aaanet.org/cmtes/commissions/CEAUSSIC/index.cfm> accessed on 18 August 2008.
30 See the ‘Pledge of Non-participation in Counter-insurgency’ at <http://concerned.anthropologists.googlepages.com/> accessed on 27 June 2008.
31 Michael Bhatia was killed while working with a US Human Terrain Team in Khost Province, Afghanistan in May 2008.
32 This need, and guidance on how to address it, is in the Army’s Planning Guidance for Development of a Cultural Understanding Capability in the Australian Army.
33 Ibid., p. 5.
34 See the United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan’s report ‘Suicide Attacks in Afghanistan (2001-2007)’, 1 September 2007, pp. 3–4, 38, <http://www.unama-afg.org/docs/_UN-Docs/UNAMA%20-%20SUICIDE%20ATTACKS%20…; accessed 17 August 2008. See also Hekmat Karzai, ‘Afghanistan and the Logic of Suicide Terrorism’, IDSS Commentaries, 27 March 2006, <http://www3.ntu.edu.sg/rsis/publications/Perspective/IDSS0202006.pdf> accessed 17 August 2008
