2.  The story of Montgomery McFate’s upbringing
in San Francisco makes her seem like a poster
child for the classic flower-power, hippy,
antiwar activist. Her mom was a beatnik
sculptor, her dad was discharged from the
USMC because of mental health issues, and
they lived on an abandoned military
ammunition barge. Yet Montgomery McFate
went on to a PhD in anthropology from Yale
and a JD from Harvard. She married a
paratrooper from the gung-ho 82nd Airborne
Division, and today teaches at the U.S. Naval
War College (NWC) in Newport, Rhode Island.

3.  Before she assumed the Minerva Chair at the NWC’s
Center for Naval Warfare Studies, Montgomery McFate
was the senior social scientist for the Army’s Human Terrain
System (HTS). HTS is a social sciences-based program
designed to provide military commanders the information
about the local population needed to conduct stability
operations, such as repairing infrastructure, supporting
elections, and providing medical attention to the local
people. In the field, Human Terrain Teams also provided a
bit of training to military units regarding cultural norms and
social taboos. So, in one sense, HTS is the military
counterpart of cultural training for people preparing to do
business in a foreign country. HTS was designed to help
commanders navigate the human terrain they
encountered, teaching them and their troops the cultural
rules of the road when dealing with civilian populations of
unfamiliar cultures.

4.  In the opening months of the Iraq War,
commanders usually had little awareness of
the cultural and social impact of their
troops’ activities on the local population
and unwittingly contributed to the
alienation of the civilian populations they
were defending. The HTS wasn’t simply a
way to placate local civilian populations; it
was also a valuable tool that aimed to
reduce political grievances and
miscommunication between the US military
and the local people that breeds violence
in the first place.

5.  Consisting of personnel with academic
backgrounds in the social sciences, the
first Human Terrain Teams (HTTs) were
assigned to combat units in 2007. They
have since become enormously popular
with commanders, and about 90
percent of them characterize the HTTs as
useful to the decision-making process.