ABSTRACT
The "holistic" understanding of local culture that we typically call ethnography can only be produced after sustained immersion. Soliciting cultural information from a potentially hostile population to be downloaded onto a computer back on base is not a task that the US Army has trained for, except for those who gather "human intelligence". Human intelligence is information obtained for an objective that makes clear military sense: determining targets. The idea for the army's Human Terrain System (HTS) came about well after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Anthropologist Montgomery McFate was working for the Navy and was asked to create a database that would include both historical material and contemporary information relating to the culture of the populations in current areas of conflict. The Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support Program (CORDS) and the HTS have both focused on winning the support of the local population, but that's where the similarity ends.
