Staging the Orient: Counterinsurgency Training Sites and the U.S. Military Imagination

Abstract

This article is a descriptive narrative of the U.S. military's “cultural awareness” training for counterinsurgency doctrine at the Muscatatuck Urban Training Center (MUTC) in Indiana. Within the narrative, I show how the “Arab,” “Afghan,” and “culturally sensitive soldier” are constituted within the U.S. military imagination through the practices and spaces of MUTC. Drawing on recent work in “new materialism” and the material geographies of late-modern war, the article argues that the circulation of “culture” within the U.S. military is not an indifferent exercise in familiarity with an occupied population, nor a mere knowledge production. Rather, cultural awareness must be understood as an instrumental activity through which identities are positioned and habitually put to use, like tools, to orient strategic and tactical operations in counterinsurgency contexts. Counterinsurgency training sites such as MUTC are ideal for interrogating how cultural identities acquire a status of serviceability akin to what Heidegger (1962) once called “equipment” or “paraphernalia” that inform the practices of everyday military occupation in Afghanistan and Iraq. In my thick description of the MUTC, I examine the function and silences of the site of the U.S. military's imagination, which I deliberately leave vague here but whose orders, phantoms, and figures I elaborate fully in the narrative.

本文是对于位在印第安纳马斯卡塔塔克城市培训中心 (MUTC) 的美国军队为了反叛乱政策所进行的 “文化意识” 训练之描述性叙事。在此叙事中, 我将呈现 “阿拉伯”, “阿富汗” 以及 “具文化敏感性的军人,” 如何透过 MUTC 的操作与空间, 在美军的想像中建构之。本文运用 “新物质主义” 的晚近研究, 以及晚现代战争的物质地理, 主张在美国军队中流传的 “文化”, 并不是熟悉佔领人口的中立实作, 亦非仅只是知识生产。反之, 文化意识必须被理解为一个工具式的行动, 认同藉此被安置, 并惯性地如同工具般被使用, 以在反叛乱的脉络中, 指导策略性和战术性的操作。诸如 MUTC 的反叛乱训练基地, 对于探问文化认同如何取得类似海德格 (1962) 曾称之为 “装备” 或 “用具”, 并贯穿阿富汗与伊拉克每日军事佔领实作的有用状态而言, 是为理想之地。在我对 MUTC 的深描中, 我将检视美军想像场域的功能和沉默, 而我对此慎重地留下模煳之处, 但却将在叙事中充分阐述其规律, 幻象以及形态。

Este artículo es una narrativa descriptiva del entrenamiento en “conciencia cultural” de los militares de EE.UU., dentro de la doctrina de contrainsurgencia del Centro de Entrenamiento Urbano Muscatatuck (MUTC), en Indiana. En la narrativa, indico cómo se construyen en EE.UU. en la imaginación militar expresiones como “árabe”, “afgano” y “soldado culturalmente sensible”, por medio de prácticas y espacios del MUTC. Con base en trabajos recientes sobre “nuevo materialismo” y las últimas geografías materiales de la guerra moderna, el artículo sostiene que la circulación de “cultura” dentro de lo militar en los EE.UU. no es un ejercicio indiferente en familiaridad sobre una población ocupada, ni una producción de mero conocimiento. Por el contrario, la concientización cultural debe entenderse como una actividad instrumental a través de la cual las identidades son posicionadas y habitualmente puestas en uso, como herramientas, para orientar operaciones estratégicas y tácticas en contextos de contrainsurgencia. Los lugares en donde se imparte entrenamiento contrainsurgente, tales como el MUTC, son ideales para averiguar cómo las identidades culturales adquieren estatus de elemento servible, parecido a lo que alguna vez Heidegger (1962) llamó “equipo “ o “parafernalia”, subrayando las prácticas cotidianas de la ocupación militar en Afganistán e Irak. En mi abultada descripción del MUTC, examino la función y los silencios del lugar en la imaginación militar de los EE.UU., la cual dejo aquí deliberadamente vaga, pero cuyas órdenes, fantasmas y figuras elaboro in extenso en la narrativa.

Key Words:

• counterinsurgency
• critical war studies
• new materialism
• postcolonialism
• U.S. military

关键词:

• 反叛乱
• 批判战争研究
• 新物质主义
• 后殖民主义
• 美国军队

Palabras clave:

• contrainsurgencia
• estudios críticos de guerra
• nuevo materialismo
• poscolonialismo
• militares de EE.UU

Notes

Needless to say, such measures in Iraq and Afghanistan have been neither successful in establishing stability nor sustainable “security” by any definition, including the U.S. military's, despite any short-term gains. Instead, both counterinsurgencies have resulted in population displacement, massive refugee crises, demolished homes, corrupt police forces, and acute daily insecurity and vulnerability, both in terms of basic resources needed for living (food, employment, health), and the persistent threat of everyday violence posed by insurgents as well as U.S.-trained forces (see Belcher 2013).

For a discussion on the distinction between threat and military intelligence in counterinsurgencies, see Kilcullen (2010).

In a scathing internal critique of intelligence gathering processes by the former head of U.S. military intelligence in Afghanistan, Major General Michael Flynn wrote in 2010 of the “inescapable truth” that comes with focusing military resources on violence over cultural awareness: “The tendency to overemphasize detailed information about the enemy [comes] at the expense of the political, economic, and cultural environment that supports [the insurgency] … killing insurgents usually serves to multiply enemies rather than subtract them” (Flynn, Pottinger, and Batchelor 2010, 7–8).

In October 2007, the American Anthropological Association issued a statement condemning the use of anthropologists for military purposes. Unfortunately, and despite the strong efforts by some, notably Dr. Joe Bryan and Dr. Joel Wainwright, no such statements have been forthcoming by the Association of American Geographers (see Network of Concerned Anthropologists 2009; Sheppard 2013; Wainwright 2013).

These attributes of “obviousness, familiarity, directionality” are borrowed from Heidegger's (1962) discussion of “signs” and their involvements as equipment in “referential contexts” as discussed in Being and Time (1962, 107–12; on language as “ready-to-hand,” see 201–10), which informs my argument through this entire paragraph (cf. Heidegger 1985, 186–89).

Leading counterinsurgency thinker Kilcullen (2010) noted that cultural intelligence gathering has an inevitable “observer effect,” where “the observer's presence and actions alter” the targeted environment, which generates new conditions, which in turn become the new intelligence-gathering context.

Importantly, by culture I mean both the cultural materials used to navigate the operational context (manuals, books, fact sheets, PowerPoints, television, movies, video games, etc.) as well as the interactions of soldiers with others understood to be essentially different as they are in their stereotyped identities—what Gregory (2004) once called the phenomenon of “folding distance into difference.”

My understanding of practices follows Schatzki's (1996) Heideggerian interpretation: “practices are the site where understanding is structured and intelligibility articulated” (12).

For a discussion of how the stereotypes U.S. military and policy brought to Iraq transformed the operational environment, see Rosen (2010, especially 21–22).

This is how the dialogue appears in the script distributed to onlookers on hand, including me, in the Civilian Expedition Force, Field Exercise Facilitator Guide, All Vignettes, Muscatatuck Urban Training Center, September 20–22, 2010.

Writing on asylum design in 1854, Kirkbride argued that seclusion from the stresses of urban civilization “allow[ed] adequate and appropriate means of exercise, labor, and occupation, for these are … recognized as among the most valuable means of treatment” (quoted in Buorke 2010, 57).

Trent (1995) suggests that “a shift in the 1840s from mental retardation as a family and local problem to a social and state problem” (2) partly explains the invention of the category of the “feeble mind” as a category not only for the unemployed, but of citizenship more generally.

“The Tribe of Ishmael: A Group of Degenerates Found in Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, and Iowa” (1921) American Philosophical Society, ERO, MSC77, Ser I, Box 64, available at http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/html/eugenics/static/images/713.html (last accessed 31 August 2012).

The numbers of sterilizations at Muscatatuck is likely much higher. As Stern (2007, 28n.86) noted:

I derived the figure of 2,000 by adding up the 1,576 sterilizations reported by the Indiana Department of Mental Health for the period 1936 to 1962, the 308 operations listed in the Fort Wayne annual reports for the fiscal years 1927–1928 to 1935–1936, the 144 sterilization orders approved by the Muscatatuck Board of Trustees from 1937 to 1953, the 35 sterilizations listed in the Logansport annual reports from 1931 to 1943 (when they appear to end), the 7 salpingectomies listed in the Indiana Girls’ School annual reports from 1927 to 1933, and several redacted Fort Wayne patient records listing sterilizations dated 1933 to 1975. Although the total comes to 2,072, I use the more conservative estimate of 2,000 because some of the Muscatatuck inmates were transferred to Fort Wayne for sterilization and it is unclear how these operations were counted. (emphasis added)

According to a remarkably thorough online project, “Compulsory Sterilization in 50 American States,” carried out by sociology students working under Dr. Lutz Kaelber at the University of Vermont, the sterilization facility at Fort Wayne “can be considered the heart of the eugenics movement in the state of Indiana” (see http://www.uvm.edu/∼lkaelber/eugenics/IN/IN.html, last accessed 27 August 2012).

At the time of my visit, Army officials told me that the produce grown on the Afghan farm was sold at the local farmer's market in nearby Columbus, Indiana.

This formulation is influenced by Butler's (1990) account of the distinction between being and having an identity: “This is an Other that constitutes, not the limit of masculinity in a feminine alterity, but the site of a masculine self-elaboration” (44).

Perhaps ironically, in the Name-of-the-Father and under the Symbolic Law, he becomes the “father” (cf. Lacan 2007, 218).