Posted on 07/26/2008 5:33:42 PM PDT by GreenCell
According to sources, United States Army brigade commanders privately believe that the US Army's TRADOC Human Terrain System (HTS) program is a “joke” and completely unnecessary. The HTS program is publicly supported by brigade military commanders, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, only because it is a “pet project” of the currently politically popular US Army General David Petraeus.....
(Excerpt) Read more at english.pravda.ru ...
Yep This is the TRUTH
Pravda? That’s like the NYT, but slightly more centrist, right?
Yep - PRAVDA is the best source for information on US defense systems....
/sarcasm
Sounds like a pile of NIH (not invented here) b1tch1ng.
It’ll be interesting to see how long it takes for the MSM in the US pick up on the “issue” of deficiencies in the HTS.
Coming soon to a nightly news broadcast near you...
Complete Bullshit
You should try “The Voice of Justice” Tehran, Iran
If that’s what Pravda is saying, then that’s an indication that the technology worries them
HTS is a new proof-of-concept program, run by the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), and serving the joint community. The near-term focus of the HTS program is to improve the military’s ability to understand the highly complex local socio-cultural environment in the areas where they are deployed; however, in the long-term, HTS hopes to assist the US government in understanding foreign countries and regions prior to an engagement within that region.Considering how successfully the Iraq situation is turning around as a result of our improved ability to work with local people, I'm guessing the program is showing some results
Pravda is not the best source, but I’m not sure that the Human Terrain Teams will be a great success. For starters, the Academic World has loudly condemned this effort for reasons that they despise the military and hate Bush and that this effort will actually require that they use their academic pursuits to a purpose in opposition to their dream of world communist hegemony.
I think that the real problem is that these academic pukes have proven to be hopelessly clueless in the real world of the War Against Terrorisim. To reach this conclusion, I draw upon my own experiences in the War against Communist Aggression in Southeast Asia. As a young infantry troop commander in that effort, I quickly learned much more about the cultural landscape than some numbnuts anthropologists could ever understand in an entire career of academic endeavour. I learned who were the bad guys and who were the good guys. I killed the bad guys and helped the good guys. Saturday morning TV translated to real life.
I expect that our soldiers have figured all of this out. They know who the bad guys are and they likewise know who represent the good guys. The anthropoligists who get parachuted into this melieu are completely clueless. They spend their time collecting data while the young Lieutenants and Captains get about the nasty job of killing the bad guys.
There’s no izvestia (news) in Pravda (Russian Newspaper) and no pravda (truth) in Izvestia (Soviet news agency).
You can always trust Russians to be Russians.
There is something the military needs next time, in a situation like Iraq, that would have been of immense help throughout the occupation: Big Brother.
As much as we disdain Big Brother here, it would have been very helpful in stabilizing and restoring Iraq. But what do I mean?
We have all kinds of tools for identifying, cataloging, databasing, data mining, profiling, quantifying and qualifying people. We should have done that with every Iraqi we met from day 1.
In practical terms, it means that every combat and many combat support units have a small team that acts as an ID unit. A single device, like a hand held grocery store scanner, would be a combination camera, fingerprint scanner, and sound recorder. The soldier would approach a group of Iraqis, then one at a time, take their picture, fingerprints, and a voice recording of their full name. They would also take a DNA sample to have on record.
When plugged into a laptop, all this data would be transmitted to a central location to be added and cross checked with the database. Then each Iraqi would get a laminated ID with their picture on the front and a heavily encrypted data matrix pattern on the back, so it would be unusable to the enemy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_matrix_(computer)
All at once, this would have given us a census, DNA and criminal records database. Eventually the Iraqi government could have used these IDs for ration cards, voting, drivers licenses and any number of other reasons.
The more people in an area with the ID cards, the easier to identify criminals, terrorists, outsiders, and those who shouldn’t be there.
Anyone without a card could be instantly checked, and if the bad guys forced everybody to burn their cards, it would indicate that the bad guys controlled the area. Replacements would be easy.
Had we done this, we might have shaved a lot of time off the occupation.
Two such devices, the Biometrics Automated Toolkit (BAT) and the Handheld Interagency Identity Detection Equipment (HIIDE) are currently in widespread use by U.S. Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. These devices capture fingerprint, iris scan, and digital photos, and can also collect voiceprints though this capability is not in general use.
I’m glad to hear they’re doing it. Imagine if a system like that was used throughout their nation, literally an effort to census the entire population. The more it was done, the faster order could be restored across the board.
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