Abstract
Conrad on geography militant ~ Barnes on geography and the mangle of war ~ The birth of geography counterinsurgent ~ US failure to win hegemony in Iraq ~ A shift in US counterinsurgency strategy ~ Petraeus’s influence in the Bowman expeditions ~ “Human terrain” defined ~ The need to re-tool old-fashioned geography with GIS ~ Geoproperty and geosecurity ~ An aside on the scholarly merits of the Bowman expeditions ~ Relations between US militarism and Anglo-American geographical thought summarized.
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Notes
Kipp et al. (2006, no page) emphasize that the mapping and analyzing of human terrain “is based on unclassified or open-source information derived from the social sciences.”
All citations from Conrad (1924): “fabulous geography” (p. 4); “circumstantially extravagant speculation” (p. 2); “adventurous action” (p. 2); “geography militant” (p. 6). Conrad has earned a poor reputation among geographers (see, e.g., Driver 2001) for these remarks. To be sure, his essay betrays a nostalgia for nineteenth-century expedition culture that is at best romantic, at worst masculine and colonial. Yet we should not be too quick to ignore Conrad’s potential contributions to the postcolonial geographical imagination.
Bowman felt that US power would grow best through new global institutions charged with regulating capitalism on a global scale. “Whereas ‘imperialistic leaders demand access to new resources or to increased territory,’ [Bowman writes,] US expansionism was entirely justified because it followed economic law” (Smith 2003, p. 188, italics in original).
Bowman (1918), cited in Crampton (2006, p. 733). Crampton’s study details how Bowman’s intellectual leadership, and the work of the Inquiry more generally, rested upon questionable presuppositions about the spatial fixity of identity.
The authors of the Bowman expeditions deny that the name is significant, apart from the fact that Bowman served as the director of the AGS from 1915 to 1935. On US imperialism in the post-9/11 era, see Harvey (2003), Gregory (2004), Cockburn and St. Clair (2004), Grandin (2005).
In another paper (2006), Barnes elaborates upon this thesis, specifically in relation to geographers who worked for the US Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner to the CIA: “The discipline began to change in response to its application, or in this case [the OSS] lack of application, to military ends. The very experiences of some of the geographers at R&A [the Research & Analysis branch of the OSS] as they tried to apply their geographical training to war altered their conception of geographical research, helping to propel the discipline to a different form [... ]. It took a long time, but by the late 1950s, parts of human geography began to model themselves on research practices introduced at R&A emphasizing multi-disciplinarity, team-based collaboration, problem-focused research, and rigour and numerical methods. Approaches to war now shaped geographical thought” (pp. 162–163).
One of the many evocative arguments Karatani makes in his most recent book (2012) concerns the structure of historical repetition (pp. vii—xiii). Karatani argues that although precise events do not repeat, the ancient wisdom that “history repeats” may be true for a given structure, such as that produced by the stages of global capitalism. In this view, the world finds itself today repeating many qualities of late nineteenth century, viz: a declining hegemonic state; imperialism; centrality of finance capital. I arrived at my thesis about the return of geography militant in the guise of geography counterinsurgent before reading Karatani’s essay; I find that his analysis provides a powerful, if necessarily schematic, basis to theorize this repetition.
Space does not permit an analysis of the ties between the emerging importance of drone warfare, geopiracy, and militant empiricism, but see Gregory (2011), Stanford Law School and NYU School of Law (2012) and Shaw and Akhter (2012). Shaw and Akhter write (2012, p. 3): “The drone dominates strategic US military thought and practice. In 2008, armed drones flew over Iraq and Afghanistan for 135,000 hours [... ] and dropped 187 missiles and bombs [... ]. The US military plans to triple its inventory of high-altitude armed and unarmed drones by 2020. In 2009 the US purchased more unmanned than manned aircraft—and as General Petraeus, formerly head of the US Central Command puts it, ‘We can’t get enough drones’ [... ]. The military currently has close to 7000 unmanned aircraft, [... ] expected to rise to 50 a day over the next 2 years and 65 a day by 2013.” In this age, all commanders are geographers of a sort: specialists in representing and analyzing world-as-target. Boyce and Cash (forthcoming, no page) draw the implications of the US military’s use of drones for geography: “The routine use of unmanned aerial drones by the U.S. military [... ] requires a growing cadre of personnel whose task it is to review, process and share surveillance data—generating additional logistical and bureaucratic hurdles for the useful deployment and management of the technology and the information it produces.”
See Cockburn and St. Clair (2004); Gregory (2004).
I recognize that this is a generalization. Fortunately, a careful study of US counterinsurgency doctrine and its interrelations with social science is forthcoming from Oliver Belcher. Belcher’s précis of this project—published in Antipode (2012) when he won that journal’s 2011–2012 Graduate Student Scholarship—explains that the concept of “human terrain” and its “systematization” as HTS “serves a threefold purpose: to gather ‘cultural intelligence’ for commanders; to provide a supporting role for disrupting connections between local insurgencies and transnational terrorist networks; and to present a ‘human face’ to civilians caught in the web of combat operations” (p. 261). US counterinsurgency practices have long been practiced upon indigenous Latin America: see Grandin (2005).
The field manual is called “radical” by Sewall (2006, p. xxi). Apropos the novelty of the Manual: Price’s (2009) article demonstrates that many of the ostensibly original claims and definitions in the Manual were plagiarized by military scribes. If there is anything new in the Manual, it stems from its emphasis on cultural-geographical analysis. The concept “human terrain” follows from this emphasis. Price (2009, p. 71) remarks on the distinctive quality of contemporary uses of scholarship to support military and intelligence needs: “That militaries commandeer food, wealth, and resources to serve the needs of war is a basic rule of warfare—as old as war itself. [... ] But requirements of modern warfare go far beyond the needs of funds and sustenance; military and intelligence agencies are evidently looking to commandeer scholarship in ways not intended by their authors.” Unless, of course, the scholarly authors openly collaborate with the military.
On Petraeus’ role, see Nagl’s foreword (2007) to the Manual (2006).
Of course, one could argue that the United States did succeed in meeting certain goals in Iraq. For instance, economic policies were transformed along neoliberal lines and capitalist social relations entrenched through programs such as the US Army’s “Operation Adam Smith” (see Gajilan 2004). On US attempts to make Iraq into a free market utopia, see Klein (2004).
Hayes was head football coach at Ohio State (1951–1978). His ridiculous slogan is taken seriously in Buckeye nation. The Manual uses a similar line: “the decisive battle is for the people’s minds” (p. 49, §I-153).
Another way to put this is that counterinsurgency is always fundamentally political. This is the central claim in Edward Luttwak’s (2007) visceral critique of Petraeus’ counterinsurgency strategy. Luttwak notes that Petraeus and the other authors of the 2006 Manual “assume that it is simply an intelligence problem to identify the insurgents among the population. [... I]n fact it is a political problem, which always has a political solution, however unpalatable that may be” (p. 35). Luttwak further remarks that Petraeus et al. seem to believe “that a necessary if not sufficient condition of victory is to provide what the insurgents cannot: basic public services, physical reconstruction, the hope of economic development and social amelioration. The hidden assumption here is that there is only one kind of politics in this world, a politics in which popular support is important or even decisive, and that such support can be won by providing better government” (p. 34). Of course, there is not. While Luttwak does not specify the specific military-political strategy that he would endorse, he concludes his essay with the suggestion that the United States must either embrace the costs of long-term occupations or cease intervening abroad: [T]he United States has preferred both in Vietnam long ago and now in Iraq to leave government to the locals. That decision reflects [... a] politics, manifest in the ambivalence of a United States government that is willing to fight wars, that is willing to start wars because of future threats, that is willing to conquer territory or even entire countries, and yet is unwilling to govern what it conquers, even for a few years. Consequently, for all the real talent manifest in the writing of [the 2006 Manual], its prescriptions are in the end of little or no use and amount to a kind of malpractice. All its best methods, all its clever tactics, all the treasure and blood that the United States has been willing to expend, cannot overcome the crippling ambivalence of occupiers who refuse to govern, and their principled and inevitable refusal to out-terrorize the insurgents, the necessary and sufficient condition of a tranquil occupation.” (p. 42, my italics)
The geographers behind México Indígena discussed Iraq with Petraeus. They saw Iraq as an opportunity for another expedition. Thus the October 2007 Project Status Report refers to an unspecified presentation at Fort Leavenworth and a planned “Iraq Bowman Expedition,” as well as a briefing to “the READIC Iraq team on the nature of property regime and global GIS place based research” (p. 1).
Does this breathless prose not betray a repressed homoeroticism? In fairness, there seem to be few Americans who are not enamored of this warrior hero. On June 30, 2011, the US Senate confirmed Petraeus as the new director of the CIA. The confirmation vote was 96 to 0: evidence that in the United States today there is no substantive political opposition to the riptide of ideas that carried Dobson and Herlihy deep into an ethical “grey area.” If support for the Petraeus-inspired, “radical” approach to “counter-insurgency strategy” (see Sewall 2006) conforms to state power and provides status and research funding, and there is no organized opposition to it, in what direction should we expect geographical dialogue to flow?
I believe that their source is McFate and Jackson (2005). A similar definition appears in Kipp et al. (2006), who explain that the “human terrain” concept was developed through the FMSO at Fort Leavenworth in 2005–2006—i.e., the same time and place as the Bowman expeditions: To help address these shortcomings in cultural knowledge and capabilities, the Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO) [... ] at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, is overseeing the creation of the human terrain system (HTS). This system is being specifically designed to address cultural awareness shortcomings at the operational and tactical levels by giving brigade commanders an organic capability to help understand and deal with “human terrain”—the social, ethnographic, cultural, economic, and political elements of the people among whom a force is operating. So that U.S. forces can operate more effectively in the human terrain in which insurgents live and function, HTS will provide deployed brigade commanders and their staffs direct social-science support in the form of ethnographic and social research, cultural information research, and social data analysis that can be employed as part of the military decision-making process.
I stress may because the same criticism could be made of culture, which is apparently a synonym for “human terrain”—yet “culture” has become the organizing object-concept of cultural anthropology.
See México Indígena Project Status Report, September 2006, p. 2. On the NGA, see note 21.
The argument that secure property rights lie at the basis of social order has a long and complex pedigree and it is beyond the scope of this work to review it. I note, however, that certain key texts in this tradition were written by empiricists, particularly John Locke.
See, e.g., Demarest (1995; 2003). Demarest is presently pursuing a PhD in the department of geography at the University of Kansas. I agree with activistjournalist Simón Sedillo that Demarest is the most compelling subject in this story—i.e., more impressive and more frightening than Herlihy or Dobson. Hence Sedillo, who deserves credit for “breaking” the México Indígena story to English readers (see Sedillo 2007, 2009), entitled his film on these matters The Demarest Factor (Sedillo, 2010). The film’s narrative suggests that while the geographers were wrong to enter into their fateful alliance with the US military, ultimately it is the military that bears responsibility for geopiracy. Notwithstanding my own criticisms of the film (e.g., its narrative fails to congeal around a sustained argument), it is to Sedillo’s credit that he frames the problem in this way. Still, for scholars and especially geographers, the challenge remains to account for the conditions of possibility and effects of military collaboration.
This is not to suggest that the Mexican state uniformly opposes US military engagements in Mexican territory, which is certainly not the case. I do not doubt that it is the true that Bowman geographers “discussed our project at [...] political levels in Mexico and state authorities have extended significant interest and access to information related to politically sensitive research” (México Indígena Project Status Report for June—December 2007, p. 2). It is beyond the scope of this study to examine the role of the Mexican state in this story—a worthy topic that I hope someone else may take up.
“APPO” stands for the Assemblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca. This is the name given to assembly, first convened on June 17, 2006, that emerged to govern Oaxaca City during the political crisis. The APPO uprising—which has been known by other names—has generated a rich and voluminous literature, mainly in Spanish (e.g. Martínez 2008); for English texts see Denham and CASA (2008) and Gibler (2009), as well as the following works by geographers: Wright (2008), Mutersbaugh (2008), and Martin and Gática (2008). I reject the hypothesis, implied by some activists in Oaxaca, that the Bowman expeditions went to Oaxaca because of the APPO uprising. The timeline does not support this hypothesis. It is certain, however, that the Bowman expeditionists were concerned with the uprising on their work (see, e.g., their references to APPO in the México Indígena Project Status reports of January, June, and July 2007).
Those familiar with Foucault’s (2008) lectures at the Collège de France of 1978–1979 will recognize in this passage the distinct features of a biopolitical approach to the social field. Given Foucault’s interest in the police/military and biopolitics, it is worth remarking that Demarest has examined the “overlap between military and police in Latin America” (1995).
Measured by the standard metric, JLAG is not an influential journal. In 2011 the mean number of citations per article over the previous two years (aka the “journal impact factor”) was only.21 (compare, e.g., with 1.5 for the Annals of the AAG, 1.4 for Geoforum, and 1.2 for Antipode) (data from http://www.scimagojr.comjournalsearch.php?q=29294&tip=sid ). I recognize that impact factor is a problematic measure and, to be sure, the only way for one to evaluate the texts that result from the Bowman expeditions is to read them carefully.
These lines are almost repeated in the 2010 paper (p. 177). I am not suggesting that the authors are engaged in “self-plagiarism” (on which see the AAG ethics statement) but rather “shingling,” i.e., redundant publishing.
This might lead us to wonder about the potential results of the same research had it been conducted without state/military ties (the authors worked not only with the US military but also with the Mexican state, including PROCEDE itself). Yet without these ties the research would not have been the “same.”
Herlihy et al. (2006), p. 11.
These funds were spent over a couple of years. My source here is Dobson’s (2009) previous-cited statement that “we’ve received about $2,500,000.” I suspect that this figure has grown considerably since 2009. A large sum in academic terms, this is peanuts in state/military calculus. The United States spent roughly one trillion dollars on the military in 2012 (see www. warresisters.org for details).
O’Laughlan warns that “the current political climate in the United States in the context of the ‘war on terrorism’ has frightened academic societies into censorship and self-censorship of research topics, results, and publication” (2006, p. 589). He concludes that while geographers are “entitled to engage in [... ] military geography in a classified manner, [... ] the journals of the Association [of American Geographers] should not be coopted in a manner that erodes their credibility and undermines the principles of transparency of academic work and publication” (p. 590).
For instance, on several occasions I have invited Professors Dobson and Herlihy to engage in an open, public debate on the question of whether geographers should accept funding from the US military. They have declined. Those who have seen Professors Dobson and Herlihy speak on their work recently know that, when this research is challenged in public, they tend to be unwilling to defend it in scholarly terms, electing instead to speak of it as necessary (both to geography and the US state/military), and/or to attack their critics via ad hominum argument. Whatever the ethics of such a stance, my point is that the lack of humility to question one’s own research through open debate is fatal to thoughtful scholarship.
Remember the first letter from the Oaxacan communities called out “all the other institutions involved” (Hernández and Mendoza 2009).
The University of Kansas is not the only educational institution to support the Bowman expeditions. For instance, according to México Indí;gena Project Status Report Two, in July 2005 Dobson “met with the Rector of the UASLP [state university of San Luís Potosí, then the center of research for the Bowman expeditions in Mexico]” and found that the Rector was “very supportive of our project.”
See also Bumiller (2012) on the return of US military officials to university classrooms.
The Manual (2006, p. 147) compares US Marine operations in Iraq (2004–2005) to those “used during the Philippine Insurrection (circa 1902),” the same that inspired these lines by Twain.
On participatory cartography, see chapter 1, note 2. Herlihy’s earlier work in indigenous mapping has proven, to put it lightly, deeply controversial. For instance, Chapin and Threlkeld’s study of indigenous landscapes (2001) is riddled with credible allegations about Herlihy’s unprofessional practices with indigenous mapping projects in Honduras and Panama.
A minute later in his reply, Herlihy added that “a wide-eyed visionary, Geoffrey Demarest, together with Jerry Dobson, [... [ brought this to the FMSO.” The argument seems to be that Demarest and Dobson worked out the particulars in full, brought them to the FMSO, and found funding. Even putting aside the evidence that the Bowman expeditions geographers engaged in regular discussions with the US Army/FMSO regarding their methods and data—see their monthly reports—it seems strange for Herlihy to cite Demarest here since Demarest worked for FMSO.
Shortly after becoming Lord Chancellor to the British Crown, Frances Bacon, a man with considerable interest in “wealth, precedence, titles, [and] patronage” (Macaulay 1866, p. 316), “was charged with accepting bribes from people whose cases he had to judge. He admitted the charges, though claiming that no bribe or reward had ever actually influenced him” (Woolhouse 1990, p. 9, my italics). Presumably the godfather of empiricism was only influenced by sense-experience.
Dobson (2011) proposes the term “macroscope” to name the spatial analysis of large patterns facilitated by the integration of fieldwork, satellite data, GIS, and so on. Like the microscope and telescope, Dobson sees the macroscope as a technology with potentially “revolutionary” implications for science.
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© 2013 Joel Wainwright
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Wainwright, J. (2013). Geography Counterinsurgent. In: Geopiracy: Oaxaca, Militant Empiricism, and Geographical Thought. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137301758_4
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