Oh my oh my
http://www.counterpunch.org/price10302007.htmlOctober 30, 2007
A CounterPunch Special Investigation
Pilfered Scholarship Devastates General Petraeus's Counterinsurgency Manual
* Core Chapter a Morass of "Borrowed" Quotes
* University of Chicago Press Badly Compromised
* Counterinsurgency Anthropologist Montgomery McFate's Role Under Attack
By DAVID PRICE
Editors' note: This expose of the stolen scholarship in the Army's new manual on counterinsurgency to which General David Petraeus has attached his name also runs in our current newsletter sent by US mail or as a pdf to our newsletter subscribers. Normally material in our newsletter does not run on the CounterPunch website. In the belief that David Price's story merits the widest and swiftest circulation, not only as regards the "borrowings" from unacknowledged sources but also the prostitution of anthropology in evil military enterprises we re making an exception in this case. AC / JSC
If I could sum up the book in just a few words, it would be: "Be polite, be professional, be prepared to kill."
--John Nagl, The Daily Show.
Last December, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps published a new Counterinsurgency Field Manual (No. 3-24). In policy circles, the Manual became an artifact of hope, signifying the move away from the crude logic of "shock and awe" toward calculations that rifle-toting soldiers can win the hearts and minds of occupied Iraq through a new appreciation of cultural nuance.
Some view the Manual as containing plans for a new intellectually fueled "smart bomb," and it is being sold to the public as a scholarly based strategic guide to victory in Iraq. In July, this contrivance was bolstered as the University of Chicago Press republished the Manual in a stylish, olive drab, faux-field ready edition, designed to slip into flack jackets or Urban Outfitter accessory bags. The Chicago edition includes the original forward by General David Petraeus and Lt. General James Amos, with a new forward by Lt. Col. John Nagl and introduction by Sarah Sewell, of Harvard's JFK School of Government. Chicago's republication of the Field Manual spawned a minor media orgy, and Lt. Col. Nagl, a counterinsurgency expert, became the Manual's poster boy, appearing on NPR, ABC News, NBC, and the pages of the NYT, Newsweek, and other publications, pitching the Manual as the philosophical expression of Petraeus' intellectual strategy for victory in Iraq.
The media buzz surrounding the Manual maintains it is a rare work of applied scholarship. Robert Bateman writes in the Chicago Tribune that it is "probably the most important piece of doctrine written in the past 20 years," crediting this success to the high academic standards and integrity that the Army War College historian, Conrad Crane, brought to the project. Bateman touts Crane's devotion to using an "honest and open peer review" process, and his reliance on a team of top scholars to draft the Manual. This team included "current or former members of one of the combat branches of the Army or Marine Corps". As well as being combat veterans, "the more interesting aspect of this group was that almost all of them had at least a master's degree, and quite a few could add 'doctor' to their military rank and title as well. At the top of that list is the officer who saw the need for a new doctrine, then-Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, Ph.D."
The Manual's PR campaign has been extraordinary. In a Daily Show interview, John Nagl hammed it up in uniform with Jon Stewart, but amidst the banter Nagl stayed on mission and described how Gen. Petraeus collected a "team of writers
produced the strategy that General Petraeus is implementing in Iraq now." When Jon Stewart commented on the speed at which the Manual was produced, Nagl remarked that this was "very fast for an Army field manual; the process usually takes a couple of years"; but for Nagl this still was "not fast enough". The first draft of each chapter was produced in two months before being reworked at an Army conference at Ft. Leavenworth. Most academics know that bad things can happen when marginally skilled writers must produce ambitious amounts of writing in short time periods; sometimes the only resulting calamities are grammatical abominations, but in other instances the pressures to perform lead to shoddy academic practices. Neither of these outcomes is especially surprising among desperate people with limited skills -- but Petraeus and others leading the charge apparently did not worry about such trivialities: they had to crank out a new strategy to calm growing domestic anger at military failures in Iraq.
Last year, the anthropologist Roberto González determined that anthropologists Montgomery McFate and David Kilcullen authored sections of the Manual and contributed to new Iraq counterinsurgency programs, relying on embedded military ethnographers in "Human Terrain System" teams, using anthropologists to assist troops making judgments in the field, employing cultural knowledge as a weapon of "pacification." Drs. McFate and Kilcullen have become media darlings. Kilcullen took on warrior-anthropologist status in last year's uncritical New Yorker profile by George Packer; profiles of McFate in the New Yorker, the S.F. Chronicle Magazine, and More (a glossy women's magazine "celebrating women 40+") sculpt images of Kilcullen and McFate as heroic soldier-thinkers, uncompromisingly harnessing knowledge for the state's agenda. This media campaign provides McFate with frequent opportunities to characterize her critics publicly (as she recently did in the Wall Street Journal) as having no ideas about the military beyond "waving a big sign outside the Pentagon saying, 'you suck.'" While such outbursts make Dr. McFate seem like a character right out of Team America, the military and intelligence community takes her and her work very seriously.
MORE 
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
