CEAUSSIC Releases Final Report on Military's Human Terrain System

October 14, 2009

The final report of the AAA's Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology with the US Security and Intelligence Communities (CEAUSSIC) is now available here.

Executive Summary

In December of 2008, the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association asked the Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology with the U.S. Security and Intelligence Communities (CEAUSSIC) to thoroughly review the Human Terrain System (HTS) program, so that the AAA might then formulate an official position on members’ participation in HTS activities. This report details CEAUSSIC’s primary findings, which are summarized in the following key points:

1. HTS and similar programs are moving to become a greater fixture within the U.S. military. Given still outstanding questions about HTS, such developments should be a source of concern for the AAA but also for any social science organization or federal agency that expects its members or its employees to adhere to established disciplinary and federal standards for the treatment of human subjects.
2. The current arrangement of HTS includes potentially irreconcilable goals which, in turn, lead to irreducible tensions with respect to the program’s basic identity. These include HTS at once: fulfilling a research function, as a data source, as a source of intelligence, and as performing a tactical function in counterinsurgency warfare. Given this confusion, any anthropologist considering employment with HTS will have difficulty determining whether or not s/he will be able to follow the disciplinary Code of Ethics.
3. HTS managers insist the program is not an intelligence asset. However, we note that the program is housed within a DoD intelligence asset, that it has reportedly been briefed as such an asset, and that a variety of circumstances of the work of Human Terrain Teams (HTTs) "on the ground" in Iraq and Afghanistan create a significant likelihood that HTS data will in some way be used as part of military intelligence, advertently or inadvertently.
4. HTTs collect sensitive socio-cultural data in a high-risk environment and while working for one combatant in ongoing conflicts. Given the lack of a well-defined ethical framework of conduct for the program and inability of HTT researchers to maintain reliable control over data once collected, the program places researchers and their counterparts in the field in harm’s way.
5. When ethnographic investigation is determined by military missions, not subject to external review, where data collection occurs in the context of war, integrated into the goals of counterinsurgency, and in a potentially coercive environment – all characteristic factors of the HTS concept and its application – it can no longer be considered a legitimate professional exercise of anthropology.

In summary, while we stress that constructive engagement between anthropology and the military is possible, CEAUSSIC suggests that the AAA emphasize the incompatibility of HTS with disciplinary ethics and practice for job seekers and that it further recognize the problem of allowing HTS to define the meaning of "anthropology" within DoD.

Media Coverage

• "Program to Embed Anthropologists With Military Lacks Ethical Standards, Report Says" ~ The Chronicle of Higher Education
• "Anthropology and the Military" ~ Inside Higher Ed
• "Panel Criticizes Military's Use of Embedded Anthropologists" ~ NY Times
• "Use of Social Scientists in War Criticized" ~ Boston Globe
• "Anthropology Association Condemns Work with U.S. Counterinsurgency" ~ Huffington Post