Military Anthropology: Soldiers, Scholars and Subjects at the Margins of Empire. By Montgomery McFate (New York, Oxford University Press, 2018) 487 pp. $45.00

Abstract

McFate came to prominence as an early advocate of U.S. military engagement with anthropologists in order to grapple with “adversary culture” after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. She was an architect of the “Human Terrain System” that embedded social scientists within the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan between 2006 and 2014. She has deplored and sought to reverse what she sees as a historical anomaly of estrangement between the military and academia in the post-Vietnam era. She continues to advocate for this approach as a professor at the Naval War College and as an author of books like this one, which seeks to develop practical lessons for military anthropology from various historical episodes—ranging from Donald Barrows’ ethnographic work for the U.S. military in the Philippines from 1901 to Don Marshall’s in Vietnam in the 1960s and a half-dozen other examples drawn mostly from British imperial experience. In this way, this book resembles a more sober and extended version of John Nagl’s Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (Chicago, 2002), which sought counterinsurgency lessons from Malaya and Vietnam; Nagl and McFate were in fact both contributors to David Petraeus’ Counterinsurgency Field Manual (Chicago, 2007), another quasi-anthropological product of the Iraq War.Although McFate’s avowed intent is to build bridges between academia and the military, she admits that this book, as “written primarily for a military audience,” is unlikely to contribute much to the bridge-building goal (11). The book is peppered with military acronyms and insider observations; it is also full of capsule lessons in basic social science for those presumed to be unfamiliar with, or indeed hostile to, such an enterprise. It has a military tone, too, given McFate’s technocratic approach to social science, which often feels decidedly less anthropological than reminiscent of economics or quantitative sociology. She regrets anthropology’s failure to develop “a scalable, adaptable theory of society that could be used operationally by the military” (38, 328). In an essay on Ursula Bower’s “military leadership” of the Naga during World War II, she yearns for a neat formula such as Fisher’s “fifty-seven key findings pertaining to cross-cultural military leadership” (106–107).1 She commends Gregory Bateson’s highly scientistic ideas about the manipulation of cultural pattern as he applied them in service of the Office of Strategic Services. She even inscribes Tom Harrisson’s idiosyncratic unconventional warfare in Borneo as a sophisticated species of “qualitative, inductive pattern recognition” (172).More comfortably for most anthropologists, McFate acknowledges that these unified field theories nearly always break down in practice and that there is no replacement for deep cultural knowledge, a necessary complement to, or often replacement for, “firepower,” and thus alien to the American “way of war.” But although McFate, like any good ethnographer, pays close attention to this kind of context, she gives relatively little credence to the radically different contexts in which military ethnography takes place. She equates anthropologists’ feelings of responsibility for their subjects with the military’s concern for the “host nation,” without taking much account of what being the “host” of a violent military intervention by another nation actually means. When she says that “the social conditions of the host nation must be considered as part of national strategic objectives,” readers can only wonder which nation’s objectives are in question (323)—assuming that a unitary nation is to be considered in the first place. Because she deliberately eschews case studies of Iraq and Afghanistan, though constantly seeking lessons for those enterprises, McFate is not able to reflect much upon U.S. military intervention in deeply divided societies.McFate may or may not be correct to imagine that the military’s objectives would be better achieved with more anthropological awareness. It is at least arguable that deeper cultural engagement in a complex and fractured (not to mention war-torn) society might exacerbate rather than resolve the “morasses” to which recent U.S. military interventions have led. But what is even more puzzling is why she imagines that anthropologists outside the military ought to embrace these objectives. In her view, anthropologists have a role “analogous to that of professional soldiers”; they have “an obligation as citizens to reduce the errors caused by a lack of socio-cultural knowledge and thereby improve their execution” (39–40). Her book shows some anthropologists behaving in just such a way. But apart from the major changes in the culture and politics of academia since the 1960s, which have driven academia and military further apart, her own narrow, technocratic account of what “socio-cultural knowledge” can do, without a proper consideration of the military and political contexts of its application, is unlikely to draw them back together. Quite the contrary.