The army has released General Petraeus’ counterinsurgency manual, including instructions on civilian-military integration (see sections on “Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Afghanistan” and “Civil Operations and Rural Development Support in Vietnam”). Note also the definition of culture as a “web of meaning” (Section 3.36), the “muscle on the bones” of social structure.
COLLABORATORY: VITAL SYSTEMS SECURITY
The Vital Systems Security collaboration examines how, today, security is being constituted as an object of knowledge, intervention, and political reflection. It proposes that the security of vital systems such as energy, transportation, communication and health is one norm in relationship to which security is being reproblematized. A central goal of the collaboration is to examine these issues through collective, conceptually driven inquiry that addresses rapidly developing contemporary problems.
I was planning to make a post about this earlier, but the comment on the importance of “culture” in counterinsurgency leads me to an article in the New Yorker a few weeks back on the “anthropology of insurgency,” anthropologists in the military who are pushing for a ‘cultural’ approach to counterinsurgency. http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/061218fa_fact2
I think the article is also interesting in terms of our discussions around what kind of inquiry or critique we are engaged in.
I have been reading George Packard’s book on the “postwar” in Iraq. Much to be said about it. Immediately relevant to this post is what the military did and did not see as part of the “mission.” As we now know, there was mindboggling inattention to the reconstruction and stabilization aspects of the postwar situation. The state department was totally frozen out of war planning. This was, in part, due to the Bush administration’s total disdain for any kind of reconstruction or stabilization operations (a Clinton PD on the issue — I think 56 — was annulled as soon as Bush came to office). Counterinsurgency is another in this category of functions that the military considered “not us” before the war, but now is taking up in earnest as part of its operations. So these are cases in which the “event” from the perspective of military transformation proved to be the collapse in Iraq rather than 9.11 per se.