Over the last two years or so a new phrase has entered the language of the American military - ‘Human Terrain’. It’s shorthand for the dominant characteristics of the populations among which US soldiers find themselves fighting. By its own admission “the US military has not always done a good job of dealing with the cultural environment within which it found itself.” In other words, too many US soldiers have been behaving in appallingly inappropriate ways towards Iraqi and Afghan civilians. The resulting resentment has made the military job more difficult. The solution – the employment of ‘Human Terrain Teams’ at brigade level – started to be introduced in late 2007. These would provide “ethnographic and cultural information” that would inform “the military decision-making process.” Leading Generals now talk of conducting a ‘social scientist’s’ war.

The contract for recruiting and training anthropologists was given to the Lancashire-based BAE Systems. They advertised widely in US universities, and offered salaries that junior academics could only dream of. We interview people who have done the training, as well as the Yale-educated anthropologist who’s seen as the intellectual architect of the scheme, Montgomery McFate. We also talk to an anthropologist who has served in Iraq, and feels that what he did was so valuable he has given up his university post and joined the army.

On the other side of the argument the programme contains interviews with anthropologists who have tried to mobilise the whole profession against the ‘militarization’ of academic work. The Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association has concluded that Human Terrain work is “an unacceptable application of anthropological expertise” ; and a Network of Concerned Anthropologists has been formed. They argue that embedded academics can only be serving a military end, so putting the people they study at direct risk of harm. Since Human Terrain Teams have been deployed three social scientists have been killed, two in Iraq and the third in Afghanistan. We interview academic colleagues and friends of one of them – a woman blown up by a roadside bomb in Baghdad last June.