BONUS EPISODE: The Human Terrain System
Added 2025-07-09 05:30:02 +0000 UTCIn this episode, we revisit the 2000s warrior-scholar fixation of famously-unproblematic guys like David Petraeus with the advent of the Hum
In this episode, we revisit the 2000s warrior-scholar fixation of famously-unproblematic guys like David Petraeus with the advent of the Human Terrain System, or what you might politely call "military anthropology." Is it ethical? No. Did it work? No. Was it run by someone named Dr. Montgomery McFate? Yes.
Sources used:
Gezari, Vanessa. "The Tender Soldier." Simon & Schuster. New York: 2013.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/08/AR2009050802457.html
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/06/29/human-terrain-system-afghanistan/29476409/
https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/06/29/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-human-terrain-system/
https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Portals/68/Documents/jfq/jfq-70/JFQ-70_21-29_Lamb-et-al.pdf
Comments
42 is meemaw age now?!?! WTF. I guess I'll just buy some depends and ensure today.
Julie Washburn
2025-08-18 11:18:48 +0000 UTCI remember reading about HTS in college, extremely hooked by the small wars journal and the idea of fighting smarter. What a mess.
Adam F
2025-08-13 02:12:25 +0000 UTCI cannot believe y'all are complaining about only getting yourr houses down to 25C. That's winter where I'm from.
NarrowEbb
2025-08-05 10:34:53 +0000 UTCHey, how does it feel that your generation's version of the nose cone art that WWII guys drew on their bombers is all the stuff that got scribbled in the portajohns? It is actually kinda a shame some of those didn't get saved for use as museum exhibits cuz that is definitely something that the historiography is gonna sanitize.
Brandon P
2025-07-15 08:18:28 +0000 UTCBecause war produces desperate people with little recourse and attracts predatory people with few consequences.
Brandon P
2025-07-14 13:52:43 +0000 UTCI also enjoy hyperbole.
Brandon P
2025-07-14 13:48:20 +0000 UTCI forgot all about the early Varg Vikerness lore. That's wild I've really missed the GWoT episodes.
Brandon P
2025-07-14 13:46:18 +0000 UTCAnother fun fact: VA work-study jobs still use paper time sheets (at universities at least)
LensWipe
2025-07-13 23:06:37 +0000 UTCBAE built the initial Harrier. I've spent way too much time inside of those
LensWipe
2025-07-13 19:07:44 +0000 UTCThe GWOT buttrock punoff hurts man. Was a little kid when this was on the radio, age creeping in.
Nadie Southpaw
2025-07-13 15:10:50 +0000 UTCI just don't get the jokes on T.E. Lawrence. Guys just believe all that homophobic gossip that was leveraged against him. Lawrence Seven Pillars is one of a kind book where the author confesses to how him being gang-raped turned him into a war criminal, it's the best confession about war and ethics ever written. TE expected he would be executed by the British for treason when we wrote the book. Listen to the Behind the Bastards episode on him. Even R Evans defends and respects him. Robert freaking Evans...
Filip Štěpánek
2025-07-13 11:04:01 +0000 UTCThe Human Terrain System sounds like an MRAP that requires running over civilians to refuel
Arueshalae Table Building Society
2025-07-13 01:00:51 +0000 UTCI felt the same goddamn thing watching the show Say Nothing. They took out all the horrible violence the police and British did during the troubles.
Cameron Squire
2025-07-12 03:38:30 +0000 UTCWhy restrain yourself do it and post it to the discord
Patricius Hibernius, Magister Militum
2025-07-11 05:39:04 +0000 UTC100% read this as “Human Instrumentality Project” at first
WoopChicken
2025-07-11 01:30:57 +0000 UTCDefinitely thought this was gonna be about corpse infrastructure by the sound of the title.
zach marks
2025-07-10 16:43:31 +0000 UTCHa ha this is so funny! Its like if members of the Dirlewanger Brigade did a comedy radio show in the 60s and talked about how some of their soldiers joked about when they caught the boy from Come and See! Haha damn so funny! Or the time they told someone they were going to be tortured by local SS clients. Haha so funny. Not at all so beyond the pale it made me sick to my stomach. Oh fart jokes haha!
HawkandQuail
2025-07-10 16:02:05 +0000 UTCcounterpoint: she could have simply not acceped an exorbitant paycheck to occupy his country. the phrase "legitimate military target" really does mean something, if perhaps not to you. executing a prisoner in captivity is a war crime, killing a uniformed combatant of an invading army is not.
Karl Childers
2025-07-10 14:58:46 +0000 UTCThe jokes hurt my little anthropology degree holding heart a little, but I get it. It's a discipline with huge baggage. I do specifically remember my favorite anthro professor telling us all very firmly to never work with the military.
Kathleen
2025-07-10 12:56:35 +0000 UTCI'm sorry but I'm having a hard time feeling bad for the guy who murdered a woman with gasoline being killed by one of her coworkers in a fit of rage. Should it have happened? No, absolutely not. But compared to the rest of the awful shit we did in Afghanistan, for me at least, it doesn't even raise an eyebrow. I'm not saying the dude deserved it, but he at least got a quicker and more painless death than the woman he burnt alive.
Greev
2025-07-10 04:07:51 +0000 UTCWhat are your favorite parks/natural areas/preserves?
Jsuman
2025-07-10 01:29:13 +0000 UTCI’m wearing my LLBD emblem shirt today, the one with the logo on the breast and a larger version on the back. I had two people compliment me on the “coolness” of the shirt and ask me about what it was. I explained the podcast, (with high praise included, of course.) This happens to me every time I wear the shirt. I hope I might end up leading a donkey to water, although I can’t make him drink, (so to speak.)
Phillip Alden
2025-07-10 01:06:56 +0000 UTCStraight White American Jesus
Matt
2025-07-09 21:58:36 +0000 UTCThat’s a bar so low it’s a floor.
Matt
2025-07-09 21:57:56 +0000 UTCIs white Jesus the same as American Jesus? I mean Israel proxy Jesus.
Animal Crossing Sovereign Citizen
2025-07-09 20:44:47 +0000 UTCMan hearing Duncan Hunter shot me back to listening to y’all make fun of him YEARS ago while I was driving cross-state
Manchineel
2025-07-09 20:06:56 +0000 UTCOh muscular christianity. That's not so weird it was big in Germany too.
Gil the Gilded Dragon
2025-07-09 19:37:01 +0000 UTCBarely restraining myself from rewriting "Bohemian Like You" by the Dandy Warhols about this lady
Loquin Britton-Herndon
2025-07-09 19:21:15 +0000 UTCThe guy who asked that bonus question must have seen Joe at the gym lol. It’s oddly specific
Jason Machacek
2025-07-09 19:18:43 +0000 UTCWhich I take as a feather in my cap that when I was an undergraduate the experiments seemed struck me as wrongly formed, deficient in their composition, & analysis & the behavior struck me as non organic (like seriously spontaneous crossdress humiliation?)
Gil the Gilded Dragon
2025-07-09 19:18:41 +0000 UTCNote that the Milgram experiment had rather... deep flaws. The scientists had to both gas up the subject with how important & good their participation would be, as well as really lean on the subject to get them to "hurt" the "subject" This was rather recently uncovered by someone going through the tapes. Ditto with the Zimbardo SPE tapes. These jackoffs projected their own sickness onto their students & test subjects & claimed it said something of humanity
Gil the Gilded Dragon
2025-07-09 19:15:35 +0000 UTCHow can you do this episode without talking about Ruth Benedict!?!?!?
HawkandQuail
2025-07-09 17:44:52 +0000 UTCGreat episode about HTS—no, not that one.
Allen
2025-07-09 16:17:02 +0000 UTCLeaded gasoline standing there in a checkered suit, holding a gun to the head of the hippie movement. "The game was rigged from the start."
Noblesse Oblahaj
2025-07-09 14:36:23 +0000 UTCAs a child, I once lived in a house that had central air. It's all been downhill from there.
Noblesse Oblahaj
2025-07-09 14:23:12 +0000 UTCHer husband Sean McFate is also the guy who thinks we need an American Foreign Legion so that we can stay in Afghanistan indefinitely. He also wrote thrillers with a self-insert protagonist who's an American mercenary. To his slight credit he does have a point about the lack of American grand strategy.
Adam Reynolds
2025-07-09 14:18:54 +0000 UTCOh goddamnit Sausalito boat royalty, I have known these fuckin people
ruin
2025-07-09 13:51:12 +0000 UTCI'm so pumped about this episode. Relatedly: I'm a medical anthropologist who has worked in West Africa for like 15 years, and I cannot tell you how many times I've been approached by shady foreign (white) guys (military, intelligence, paramilitary, or private security--I usually don't know, tbf) to just go have a beer and chat about mY eXpEriEnCeS. Nah, I'm good.
Dick Powis
2025-07-09 13:26:15 +0000 UTCThere was some of this with Marine CAPs in Vietnam too. That was the thing where they took a squad of Marines, integrated them into Vietnamese villages that weren’t turned into concentration camps, and had them work with Vietnamese police and locals - the Army bean counters fucking hated it because of how it didn’t help them drop more bombs and boost metrics based on tonnage of ordnance dropped or whatever. Also, why does everything always become sex trafficking?
Matt
2025-07-09 12:47:28 +0000 UTCAs a former social science student I'm proud to hear of the humanities getting in on defrauding the us government. It's a field that the stem fields have dominated for too long.
Thomas Layton
2025-07-09 11:44:00 +0000 UTCI actually wrote my Bachelor project on the American Hamlet Evaluation System during the Vietnam War and used Nagl's analysis of why America failed to win that war quite extensively. His Malaya stuff as Nate stated was far less sound than his Vietnam analysis in my opinion, but it's cool to see podcasters I like mentioning sources I've used in projects 😃
Teslin
2025-07-09 09:45:20 +0000 UTCPetraeus got a PhD from Princeton. You can find his thesis online, it’s all about US not learning from Vietnam, etc. He also married the daughter of the West Point Commandant. That helped his career when he would’ve been kicked out otherwise. Odierno’s stint in 4th ID that first tour changed him. He fully accepted he screwed up hard and change his entire outlook because of it.
Michael Davies
2025-07-09 06:16:56 +0000 UTCI have waited for this moment for a very long time. I'm one of the co-authors of the NDU study.
Michael Davies
2025-07-09 05:41:48 +0000 UTC
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