ABSTRACT
The mistaken burning of prisoners' copies of the Qur'an by American military personnel at Bagram AFB, Afghanistan in February 2012, and the tragic, violent social upheavals that followed in its wake, constitutes an unfortunate example of the crucial importance of regional knowledge and cross-cultural competence in the conduct of counterinsurgency. The American military's cultural deficit has hardly gone unnoticed, but it has proven difficult in the extreme to assure that such knowledge and competence is attained uniformly and adequately by military personnel, as well as to determine how best to provide such education in essential regional knowledge, and to assure such cross-cultural competence is readily available in theatres of conflict, especially to commanders in the field. The Air Force C model offers perhaps the most promise of effectively sensitizing and equipping military personnel, quickly and with reasonable efficiency and effectiveness, to operate in unfamiliar cultural terrain.
