Mapping The Earth's Trouble Spots And The People Who Live There

By: John M. Doyle

There's more to geography than maps or the statistics on population and exports that are found in almanacs.

In an era of low intensity conflicts and asymmetric warfare, grassroots diplomacy and cultural sensitivity can be as important as attack helicopters, night vision goggles and satellite imagery.

“You can't understand economics without understanding the culture, how the society is organized, what are the power relationships,” said Lt. Col. Andrew Lohman, an associate professor in the Geography Department at the US Military Academy at West Point, NY.

At a human geography conference last fall in Arlington, Va. Lohman explained how the study of geography is making a comeback in Army circles. Its popularity is growing at West Point where every year 50 to 60 cadets pick it as their major, he said.

 Human geography is a multi-discipline study of the Earth and how people move across it, where they gather and how they interact there. It combines numerous fields including history, political science, economics, geology, urban studies and anthropology. Studying human geography can be very important for soldiers, Lohman said, noting on-the-ground knowledge can indicate what is normal and what is out of place in a society, a province or a village.

In five deployments to Iraq with Special Forces, Lohman said, “we learned everything about an area before going there.” The important part of that learning, wasn't just the facts like what percentage of the populations was urban or who the local power players were, but “how is this going to affect what we're doing when we're there.” In short, area analysis and mission analysis, he said.

While human geography isn't a panacea for every military challenge, “it can provide a greater understanding of this world we live in and hopefully, we'll make fewer mistakes,” he said.

A cultural misunderstanding can lead to a confrontation that can get you killed, but it can also lead to the failure of assistance and development programs – even ones as basic as agriculture education.

After decades of war, farming is still the largest source of income in Afghanistan – although only 12 percent of the land is arable, and only half of that is currently under cultivation. Fruit orchards were cut down or bombed out during the Soviet occupation in the 1980s. Forests were decimated and irrigation canals destroyed or allowed to deteriorate.

Now, the Afghans lack everything, says retired Army Lt. Col. Craig Beardsley, including basic education in agriculture. Beardsley is administrator of a program at Kansas State University that trains National Guard teams from farm states how to teach better farming and livestock raising to the Afghans.

The National Agricultural Biosecurity Center has trained four Kansas National Guard Agribusiness Development Teams and two from the South Carolina National Guard. They have also trained several units assigned to the 1st Infantry Division – including a Female Engagement Team.

The emphasis is on keeping instruction simple and practical – something the Afghans can continue and maintain after the US advisors leave. For example, Beardsley said, it's a mistake to assume the introduction of US agricultural techniques, equipment and seed “will solve all problems.”

Beardsley said the teams his school send to Afghanistan are educated in Afghanistan culture and economics. They're also trained in business development and business management to help Afghan farmers market their products and manage their resources.

“In the home, the women have more influence than we give credit for,” Beardsley said, noting that's where the Female Engagement Teams – squads of female soldiers or Marines who accompany patrols – prove their value. The can glean a lot of information, both military and economic, by talking to Afghan  women, something their male counterparts cannot do because of cultural taboos.

While doing research years ago at the US Naval Historical Center on a possible naval solutions to piracy off the Horn of Africa, Gary Weir says he learned that one factor that drove many fishermen in Somalia to take up piracy was the collapse of their government and its inability to deter large commercial foreign factory ships from coming in and taking away their livelihood.

“Now this does not justify piracy,” Weir, chief historian of the National Geo-spatial Intelligence Agency (NGIA), told a recent conference at the Council on Foreign Relations.

But he noted, it illustrates that a solution to East African piracy has got to be on land, not the sea. “The land is the problem, the political instability and difficulties they've had there. That's the real problem,” Weir said, stressing that he was not speaking for the NGIA or the US government.

He noted that NGIA had a major pilot project on human geography in Africa, “understanding the people of the region as intimately as we possibly can, because strategic threats emerge in those areas, and that knowledge is an advantage.” NGIA also has a support team at US Africa Command “giving them the advantage of our human geography work and all the other things that we do so well that I can't possibly talk about here,” he said.

The integration of technology and cultural studies were among the issues that were discussed at the Human Geography conference sponsored by the Institute for Defense and Government Advancement (IDGA) in Arlington, Va. May 6-8.

John M. Doyle is a Washington-based defense and homeland security writer. A former congressional editor at Aviation Week & Space Technology, he has written about military and homeland security issues for Defense Technology International, Seapower, Smithsonian Air & Space and Unmanned Systems. Before that he was an editor and reporter with the Associated Press in the Midwest, New York and Washington. He now blogs about unconventional warfare and where it crosses paths with terrorism, technology, energy, international development and disaster relief at 4gwar.wordpress.com. He can be reached at 4gwarblog@gmail.com