“All They Understand Is Force”: Debating Culture in Operation Iraqi Freedom

Abstract

ABSTRACT Drawing entirely on public, open sources, in this article I trace the recent development of U.S. military understandings and uses of cultural knowledge. Military education, training, and operations reveal complexity and diversity that demands empirical study. In particular, I locate in Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003–present) an internal, critical theoretical disagreement between a model of culture as a static, or slow‐moving, property of a constructed “other,” embraced by mainstream thought in the U.S. Army, and a competing sense of cultural process as dynamic, interactive, and emergent, emphasized by Special Forces and the Marine Corps. This disagreement feeds off of and into longer‐running debates within U.S. military circles, demonstrating that the U.S. military's engagement with the concept of “culture” is far from monolithic: different services’ approaches are shaped by their own histories, driving rival emphases on weaponizing culture and culturalizing warriors.