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The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Departments of the Army and Defense, or the U.S. Government.
In 1965, R.L. Sproul, director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), testified before the U.S. Congress and stated, "It is [our] primary thesis that remote area warfare is controlled in a major way by the environment in which the warfare occurs, by the sociological and anthropological characteristics of the people involved in the war, and by the nature of the conflict itself." Later, a DARPA program called Urban Sunrise published findings that recent U.S. involvement in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq have confirmed this need for civil cultural intelligence collection, fusion, and effects-based analysis to support urban conflicts, peace-keeping, and stability operations. The conclusion of Urban Sunrise was that the success of our current and future operations will require expert culture awareness and competence in foreign social factor interpretation. Therefore, operational commanders who do not consider the operational factors of culture and religion during mission planning and execution invite unintended and unforeseen consequences, and even mission failure (Calvin Swain, Jr., The Operational Planning Factors of Culture and Religion). The lack of cultural intelligence support in foreign internal defense and unconventional warfare has caused troops and policymakers to make many uninformed decisions about the populations that support either the U.S. or its adversaries or a particular ideology that is less tangible and not based on choosing specific sides.
On the other hand, when cultural intelligence has been used, success is the predominant general outcome. In the RAND study, "Street Smart: Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield for Urban Operations," Jamison Medby and Russell Glenn arrive at this same conclusion where "population analysis, which includes both demographic analysis and cultural intelligence, should come to the analytic foreground." The very ideals relating to a need for more cultural intelligence are directly linked to fully understanding the nation of people increasingly engaged in combat and diplomacy, as opposed to direct fighting of uniformed soldiers on armed fronts and battlefields.
Cultural Evolution
Today's military has increased its embrace of demographics and cultural (sometimes called civil or social) intelligence's value to support strategic and tactical planning of the...