Download The U.S. Military and Human Geography: Reflections on Our

Annals of the American Association of Geographers
ISSN: 2469-4452 (Print) 2469-4460 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/raag21
The U.S. Military and Human Geography:
Reflections on Our Conjuncture
Joel D. Wainwright
To cite this article: Joel D. Wainwright (2016) The U.S. Military and Human Geography:
Reflections on Our Conjuncture, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 106:3,
513-520, DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2016.1145508
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2016.1145508
Published online: 17 Mar 2016.
Submit your article to this journal
Article views: 232
View related articles
View Crossmark data
Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at
http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=raag21
Download by: [Ohio State University Libraries]
Date: 24 August 2016, At: 09:22
The U.S. Military and Human Geography:
Reflections on Our Conjuncture
Joel D. Wainwright
Department of Geography, Ohio State University
In recent years, the U.S. military-intelligence community has shown a growing interest in human geography.
This article examines the available literature to consider this trend. I contend that the growing military-intelligence use of human geography, both as a concept and as a practice, deserves critical scrutiny. Although military
involvement in geographical research is a long-standing and well-recognized fact, the growing emphasis on
human geography per se marks a notable shift: not only a change in terminology—from anthropology of human
terrain to human geography and geospatial intelligence—but also a shift in underlying military strategy and
concepts. Because this shift has potentially profound implications for the discipline, substantive debate over
the military’s employment of human geography is urgently needed. Key Words: geospatial intelligence, human
geography, human terrain, U.S. military.
近年来, 美国军事情报社群对人文地理学的兴趣逐渐增长。本文检视可得的文献, 以考量此般趋势。我
主张, 军事情报逐渐增加同时作为概念与实践的人文地理学之使用, 值得进行批判性的探问。尽管地理
学研究的军事涉入是个长期且已受到认识之事实, 但逐渐强调人文地理学本身便标示出一项值得注意的
转变：不仅是术语的转变——从人类地域的人类学转为人文地理学与地理空间情报——同时也是根本
军事策略及概念的转变。由于此般转变对该学门具有潜在的深切意涵, 故对于人文地理学的军事运用之
实质辨论刻不容缓。 关键词： 地理空间情报, 人文地理学, 人类地域, 美国军事。
Desde hace poco tiempo, la comunidad militares-inteligencia de los EE.UU. ha mostrado creciente interes en la
geografıa humana. Este artıculo examina la literatura disponible para considerar esta tendencia. Sostengo que el
creciente uso de la geografıa humana en lo militar-inteligencia, como concepto y como practica, merece un
escrutinio crıtico. Aunque el compromiso militar con la investigacion geografica es un hecho de vieja data y
muy bien reconocido, el renovado enfasis por la geografıa humana por si mismo marca un cambio notable: no
se trata solo de un cambio de terminologıa –de la antropologıa del terreno humano a la geografıa humana e
inteligencia geoespacial– sino tambien de un cambio en los conceptos militares asociados. En la medida en que
este cambio potencialmente tiene profundas implicaciones para la disciplina, se necesita urgentemente un
debate sustantivo sobre el empleo de la geografıa humana por los militares. Palabras clave: inteligencia geoespacial,
geografıa humana, terreno humano, militares de los EE.UU.
n recent years, the literature on human geography
and the U.S. military has grown enormously.1 To
cite only a few strong examples, human geographers have analyzed the violent legacies of U.S. wars
(Tyner 2009, 2010), the geographies of U.S. overseas
military bases (Davis 2011) and the global U.S. military-logistics nexus (Cowen 2014), the spatiality of
drone warfare (Gregory 2011; Shaw and Akhter
2014), militarism and subjectivity (Cowen and Gilbert
2007), the geographical imaginations framing U.S.
counterinsurgency strategy (Belcher 2014), and much
more. This literature is buttressed by reflections on the
historical influence of the military on our discipline
(Barnes and Farish 2006; Farish 2010; Bowd and Clayton 2013; Barnes 2015) and a critical awareness of
ongoing collaboration between human geographers
and the U.S. military, particularly in the case of the
Bowman Expeditions (Wainwright 2012; Gilberto
I
Lopez y Rivas 2014a, 2014b; Bryan and Wood 2015).
To generalize, this literature seeks to discern the prospects for a more just, nonviolent geography. Consider
Inwood and Tyner’s (2011) collection on “nonkilling
geographies” as well as American Association of Geographers (AAG) President Eric Sheppard’s (2013)
appeal for a “geography of peace” and the responses it
engendered (Inwood and Tyner 2013; Wainwright
2013a).
All of this only refers to recent works by human
geographers who are critical of militarism, however.
There is another side to the geography–military relation, namely, research by those who treat human geography as a science with useful military and intelligence
applications. There are arguably two large, distinct
literatures here. One reflects research on military
geography by academic geographers (Russell 1954;
Woodward 2005; Galgano and Palka 2011). The other
Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 106(3) 2016, pp. 513–520 Ó 2016 by American Association of Geographers
Initial submission, October 2014; revised submission, July 2015; final acceptance, July 2015
Published by Taylor & Francis, LLC.
514
Wainwright
literature, written by and for nonacademic members of
the military and intelligence community, assesses the
merits of human geography for their purposes. To distinguish between these two literatures, I refer to the
latter as “gray.” In this article, I comment on selected
recent works in the gray literature. This literature has
seen a florescence of references to human geography
and the specification of this concept by the U.S. military-intelligence community. I contend that the growing military-intelligence use of human geography,
both as a concept and as a practice, deserves our critical scrutiny. Military interest in geographical research
is ancient. Yet, I argue, recent engagements by the
U.S. military-intelligence community with human
geography indicate a notable shift, one with potentially profound implications for the discipline.
Human Terrain and Human Geography
Consider the Human Geography Summits organized by the Institute for Defense and Government
Advancement (IDGA) in 2012 and 2013. These summits brought together academic geographers, military
and intelligence agents, myriad consultants, and salespeople from the various Pentagon suppliers to discuss
the prospects for harnessing human geography as a
military tool—or, to cite the slogan of the 2012
meeting, to “[m]aximiz[e] force efficiency through
intelligence in the human domain” (IDGA 2012). At
the 2012 Summit, one could participate in workshops
entitled, “Thinking Like the Natives: Cultural Immersion for US Special Operations,” and “Understanding
the Local Culture and History of Target Populations.”
At the 2013 meeting there were sessions to help participants with “Understanding Human Geography in
the Field” and “Ensuring Boots on the Ground Are
Combat Effective” (IDGA 2013).2 These titles reveal
something of the prevailing conception of human
geography among the U.S. military-intelligence community, but to obtain a fuller appreciation it will be
useful to cite a few relevant texts. Consider one recent
article that treats human geography as a “science” to
address “the world’s troubled spots”:
Human Geography is rapidly becoming one of the main
ingredients in the intelligence gathering processes associated with conflicts throughout the world. An understanding of where people are and why may be a
century-old social science, but only in recent years has
its application been utilized to accurately predict the
next development in a troubled zone. (O’Brien 2013;
compare Silverman 2013)
Such claims raise several questions: How did human
geography come to be used to characterize
“intelligence gathering processes associated with conflicts throughout the world”? What exactly makes
human geography so useful to the military?
A proper accounting of these questions would require a
detailed analysis of their place in the history of U.S. military and geopolitical strategy, among other topics beyond
the scope of this article. This article focuses on the relation between human geography and the analysis of
“human terrain.”3 Although the term human terrain rarely
appeared in U.S. military and intelligence documents
before 2005, by 2007 it figured prominently. Since 2010–
2011, the expression and concept of analysis of human
terrain has been increasingly equated with human geography. This shift merits scrutiny.
Let us briefly revisit the argument for mapping
human terrain circa 2005 to 2007 (McFate and Jackson
2005; Kipp et al. 2006; Petraeus 2006). These sources
suggest that the immediate inspiration for human terrain analysis came when U.S. military leaders, most
notably David Petraeus, concluded that the failure of
the United States to win hegemony in Iraq and Afghanistan was on the military’s lack of social and cultural
understanding. The insights of this work were incorporated into the Army’s newly revised Counterinsurgency
Field Manual 3–24 (Department of the Army 2006),
written at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, under Petraeus’s
tutelage. Kipp et al. (2006) explained:
[T]he U.S. military has not always made the necessary
effort to understand the foreign cultures and societies in
which it intended to conduct military operations. . . .
Many of the principal challenges we face in Operations
Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom . . . stem from just
such initial institutional disregard for the necessity to
understand the people among whom our forces operate
as well as the cultural characteristics and propensities of
the enemies we now fight. To help address these shortcomings in cultural knowledge and capabilities, the Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO), a U.S. Army
Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) organization that supports the Combined Arms Center at Fort
Leavenworth, Kansas, is overseeing the creation of the
Human Terrain System (HTS). This system is being specifically designed to address cultural awareness shortcomings at the operational and tactical levels by giving
brigade commanders an organic capability to help understand and deal with “human terrain”—the social,
The U.S. Military and Human Geography
ethnographic, cultural, economic, and political elements
of the people among whom a force is operating. (8–9)
Although the human terrain concept has been thoroughly criticized—by anthropologists (Gonzalez 2009;
Price 2011) and geographers (e.g., Belcher 2014)—it
was embraced in the military and civil society
(remarkably, Counterinsurgency Field Manual 3–24
became a best-selling book). Moreover, these arguments resulted in concrete policies and institutions.
After the U.S. Army created the well-funded Human
Terrain Systems (HTS) program in 2006, the concept
became ubiquitous throughout the military-intelligence community.4
This rapid diffusion of human terrain analysis was
stimulated by the intense desire to explain the failure
of U.S. forces to win hegemony in Afghanistan and
Iraq after conquering those territories. By 2005, a
rather formulaic explanation of this problem was on
offer: The United States failed to “win hearts and
minds” after sweeping across these territories because
the military lacked sufficient cultural understanding of
the people. In this period, human terrain was touted as
a tool to win the war—with culture. A U.S. Naval
Postgraduate College thesis from 2008 captures the
sense of promise and necessity:
Countless historical examples exist where in-depth
understanding of human terrain was the crucial difference between success and failure. . . . Human terrain can
indicate which courses of action will most likely produce
positive or counter-productive effects. . . . Pre-identifying
the asymmetric socio-cultural aspects specific to an operational area may determine if a planned military action
will be welcomed with cheers or bullets. (Eldridge and
Neboshynsky 2008, 30)
The authors’ reference to “cheers or bullets” calls to
mind Dick Cheney’s (2003) infamous claim that U.S.
forces would be “greeted as liberators” by cheering Iraqis. Against Cheney’s optimistic prediction, the violent opposition encountered by U.S. forces in
postinvasion Iraq created the conditions for a swing
toward a distinctly un-neoconservative approach.
The new narrative found expression in Petraeus’s
(2006) widely read reflection essay on Iraq, “Learning
Counterinsurgency.” In the ninth of his fourteen
“observations” on counterinsurgency, Petraeus wrote:
Observation Number 9, cultural awareness is a force multiplier, reflects our recognition that knowledge of the cultural “terrain” can be as important as, and sometimes
even more important than, knowledge of the geographic
terrain. This observation acknowledges that the people
515
are, in many respects, the decisive terrain, and that we
must study that terrain in the same way that we have
always studied the geographic terrain.
“Observation Number 9” marks the entry of cultural
and human terrain into Petraeus’s analysis of U.S.
strategy—one that helped him take charge of U.S.
military operations in Iraq and subsequently the Central Intelligence Agency. It also inspired the creation
of the HTS program (as well as the Bowman Expeditions; see Wainwright 2012).
Although human terrain analysis remains in vogue,
much has changed since 2008. The Army’s HTS program is now defunct (Price and Gonzalez 2015), yet
the Bowman Expeditions have expanded across Central America (Wainwright 2013b). Recent texts in the
gray literature are much less likely to equate human
terrain with culture or cultural mapping, and still less
to specify anthropology as a solution to its problems.5
Although it is perhaps too soon to explain this change,
two factors stand out. First, the well-organized resistance by anthropologists in the Network of Concerned
Anthropologists (NCA) and within the American
Anthropological Association (AAA) against participation in U.S. Army and HTS programs—the NCA
garnered more than 1,000 signatories condemning the
program—brought critical attention to the HTS program, complicating the Army’s relationship with
anthropology and creating difficulties for recruiting
top-quality anthropologists. Second, there has been a
backlash within the military against the HTS program
(documented in Stanton 2013). Internal critics contend that the human terrain program was essentially a
fad and that too much was expected of the incorporation of cultural awareness in military operations. In
this view, the military should study the enemy but not
with cultural anthropologists on the front lines: They
cause more problems than they are worth.
Human Terrain Analysis D Human
Geography
Into the breach stepped human geography. Rather,
human terrain analysis has been redefined as human
geography. The U.S. Army has taken the lead in
developing the concept. Thanks to the public release
of Grant’s (2011) “[s]elective overview of US Army
Human Geography Research Programs,” we can glean
a sense of the human geography programs under development since 2010 and 2011, at least within the U.S.
Army Engineer Research and Development Center
516
Wainwright
Table 1. Programs mentioned in Steven Grant’s (2011) “Selective Overview of U.S. Army Human Geography Research
Programs”
No.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Total
Name
US$ (millions)
Start year
Geo-Cultural Analysis Tool (GCAT)
Building Characterization Tools
Actionable Cultural Understanding to Support Tactical Operations Tools
GeoInt Exploitation in Man-Made Environments: Nations to Insurgents (GEMENI)
Rapid Model Prototyping for Infrastructure and Essential Services (IES)
Infrastructure & Essential Services Ontology
Cultural Reasoning and Ethnographic Analysis for the Tactical Environment (CREATE)
Grapevine [data mining]
Human–Water Environmental Complexities in COIN Environments (CMO-HEI)
Socio-Cultural Modeling
2.20
2.20
1.55
5.00
1.46
0.42
7.75
4.00
N/A
7.00
31.58
2006
2006
2007
2010
2010
2010
2011
2011
2011
2011
(ERDC). Grant specifically limited his discussion to
“projects executed by ERDC,” thus excluding
“relevant research, e.g., Mapping the Human Terrain,
Human Socio-Cultural Behavior Modeling, [and] Network Analysis” (6). His presentation describes ten distinct Army human geography research programs (see
Table 1). One illustration, outlining the GEMINI program, is reproduced here (Figure 1). Note that the
purpose of the GEMINI program, involving human
geographers from Arizona State University, is to
“[c]apture local cultural understanding to provide a
base . . . model for support to civil military operations”:
This is an illustration of mapping cultural terrain
redux, now characterized as human geography. The
funding for these ten ERDC programs comes to more
than US$32 million. Although relatively modest in
military terms, this level of funding is not insignificant
in relation to academic geography departments. (I
note in passing that this also far exceeds the budget of
the Bowman Expeditions.6) Notably, most of the
Army’s human geography programs were created after
2010. As far as I am aware, no critical studies of any of
these programs have been published to date.
This emphasis on human geography has reached
other branches of the military. A 2011 guide for
“interpreting the cultural landscape” produced at the
U.S. Marines’ Center for Advanced Operational Culture Learning is entitled, “Reading the Human Geography” (Jasparro and Jasparro 2011). Noting that
Marines are expected to be able to “operate immediately” in diverse battle zones, the guide explains:
[I]n addition to operational readiness, regional preparation and some language capability, Marines should be
equipped with tools to be able to learn quickly about an area
. . . once they arrive. The discipline of human geography
provides a variety of techniques (mainly visual) that can
facilitate the gathering, interpretation, and display of
human information—particularly in difficult and/or culturally unfamiliar operating environments. (Jasparro and
Jasparro 2011, 1, italics modified)
Human geography is used here in a manner consistent
with the earlier conception of mapping cultural terrain, albeit in a more expansive sense to incorporate
the gathering and analysis of geospatial data. In this
view, human geography includes human terrain analysis, but mapping human terrain is only one of the
potentially useful geographical techniques of interest
to the Marines.
Behind the military stands the National Geospatial
Intelligence Agency (NGA), responsible for collecting
and analyzing geospatial intelligence (or GEOINT).
The NGA is at the center of the military-intelligence
turn to human geography (see Crampton 2011). As
NGA Director Letitia Long explained in her remarks
to the 2012 GEOINT Symposium:
We have also begun making major changes using human
geography sources, including social media that delivers
context . . . information to tip other sources and a comprehensive understanding of the environment. . . . [I]n
areas of ethnic conflict, NGA analysts are spatially
enabling casualty, protest and ethnicity data at the
neighborhood level. This new information provides decision-makers with possible explanations for why something is happening. . . . Some may know that the DNI
designated NGA as the Intelligence Community Lead
for Human Geography. . . . [W]e have worked with many
partners—some outside of our traditional areas—to
increase the volume and quality of Human Geography
data. We will continue to work together to refine and
The U.S. Military and Human Geography
517
Figure 1. Illustration of one U.S. Army Human Geography Research Program (Grant 2011). (Color figure available online.)
establish data standards for the Human Geography tradecraft, as well as identify new sources and applications.
(Long 2012)7
What is the value of human geography to the NGA? It
produces “insight we could not have ‘seen’ before[,]
[i]nsight that makes a difference to those who rely on
us” (Long 2012). The NGA is a combat support
agency. “Those who rely on us” is a euphemism for the
armed forces of the U.S. military.
Conclusion: From Anthropology to
Human Geography
A shift is occurring in the relationship between the
U.S. military and human geography. To conclude, I offer
three interpretative remarks on this shift. First, the military’s turn to human geography reflects not only a change
in terminology—from anthropology of human terrain to
human geography and geospatial intelligence—but also
marks a modification in underlying concepts. What the
varied agents of the U.S. Army, NGA, and so on, invoke
with human geography is not the same as that promised
by McFate and Petraeus in 2006. To be sure, the mapping
of cultural difference has not entirely abated, but it has
been absorbed as one tactic within a broader conception
of commanding sociospatial relations, one that subsumes—or at least seeks to subsume—more varied forms
of human difference, sensed in more diverse ways. The
ethnographer still has a place in some battle zones, but
his or her subject position is far less significant to the military than the geospatial intelligence analyst, working at a
quiet desk in Virginia, equipped with training in human
geography and geographic information systems, sifting
through spatial data from satellites, soldier-sensors,
drones, cell phones, and so on.
518
Wainwright
Second, I emphasized the gray literature because
that is where the shift occurred. Consider, however,
the first academic paper by a human geographer to discuss the military’s human geography turn: Medina’s
(2014) paper “From Anthropology to Human Geography: Human Terrain and the Evolution of Operational
Sociocultural Understanding,” published in August
2014 in the journal Intelligence and National Security.8
Medina’s central claim is that
The nature of sociocultural understanding by the US is
evolving. What was once an ethnographic focus on
micro level human systems in post 9/11 conflicts is now
more directed toward studies of macro level systems.
This was driven by a disciplinary shift of efforts, primarily
from Anthropology to Geography, which resulted in a
change from face-to-face data collection to remote collection through authoritative and non-authoritative, as
well as sensor based sources. (3)
Thus, Medina rightly noted, “In many circles of government and industry, the term human terrain has been
replaced with human geography” (2014, 10, italics
added). In Medina’s view, one benefit of this shift in
terminology is that it “avoids negative connotations
from controversies tethered to the term [cultural or
human terrain]” (10).
Medina’s thesis is broadly correct.9 Yet, pace
Medina, I do not recommend that academic human
geographers accommodate ourselves to this shift. On
the contrary, I believe that this shift must be analyzed
and confronted. The singular importance of Medina’s
paper is that it represents the first scholarly attempt to
thematically define human geography as a tool for the
military-intelligence community, precisely in the fashion anticipated by the gray literature since circa 2010–
2011. With due respect to Medina, none of the arguments made in his paper are novel: They all emerge
out of the gray literature. What distinguishes his
paper is its affirmative celebration, in academic form,
of the military’s shift from anthropology to human
geography.
Last, notwithstanding the importance of the debate
over the Bowman Expeditions, arguably too much
attention has been given to them—particularly the
individuals involved—and not enough to the broader
conditions of possibility that created them. A substantive debate over the military’s employment of human
geography is urgently needed. I contend that the military’s turn to human geography (and the conception
of geography reflected in Medina’s 2014 paper) is far
more threatening to the present disciplinary formation
than the work of the Bowman geographers. What
makes it so threatening? The systematic use of human
geography by the U.S. military—both as rhetoric and
as practice—cannot but have effects on our discipline.
We should anticipate that this shift will reduce the
space afforded to critical work, in favor of those forms
of human geography that promise military applications. This is clearly a potential risk in those geography
departments that have created graduate certificates in
geospatial intelligence analysis, a development that
threatens to shift priorities and intellectual orientation
along with budget lines. More generally, if human
geography as a discipline comes to be seen as implicated in U.S. military and intelligence operations, it is
likely to influence how nonacademics the world over
perceive us and our work. This could result in the presumption that human geographers from U.S. universities are military-intelligence agents, which could have
grave consequences. For these reasons, it is past time
for a substantive study of these matters by the AAG.
This will require mobilizing the resources of the AAG
in a manner consistent with the steps taken by the
AAA in response to the creation of the HTS program.
To some this proposal might seem too modest, but
generating and institutionalizing a robust analysis of
U.S. military involvement in human geography would
comprise a useful step.
Acknowledgments
I thank Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro, Jim Glassman,
Will Jones, Richard Wright, and anonymous reviewers
for their criticism. I thank Eric Sheppard for facilitating discussions at the AAG meetings and in the pages
of the Annals.
Notes
1. See Woodward (2005), Bernazzoli and Flint (2009),
and Recha et al. (2015). It is beyond the scope of
this article to present a full literature review. My
emphasis in this article is restricted to human geography and the U.S. military and state. This is not to
deny the importance of geography for other states or
militaries but only to limit my purview to a manageable, and important, subset of the literature.
2. The IDGA (2013) brochure notes, “With an annual
operating budget of $18 billion, DoD Military Intelligence programs have been instrumental in the war on
terror. Human Geography has been at the forefront of
these intelligence programs, often embodied in the
Human Terrain Systems program. . . . In order for the
The U.S. Military and Human Geography
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
US Military to operate in theatres where conventional
warfare is not effective, Human Geography must be
readily understood and utilized.”
The meaning of the U.S. military’s use of the concept of
human terrain is disputed. For affirmative outlines of
the concept, see McFate and Jackson (2005), Kipp et al.
(2006), and Medina (2014); for critical genealogies, see
Gonzalez (2009) and Price (2011); on HTS’s antecedents in Korea, see Lee, Barnes, and Wainwright
(2015); in Vietnam, see Tyner (2009).
According to the U.S. Army’s HTS Web site, twentyeight HTS teams were deployed to Iraq by 2008 before
going into decline. “As U.S. and Coalition Forces in
Iraq began to drawdown in 2010–2011, Human Terrain
Teams began to reduce in number and by June 2011 all
Human Terrain Teams had departed Iraq” (http://
humanterrainsystem.army.mil/). Yet the HTS program
persists. Its Web site, relaunched on 11 December 2012,
quotes the mission statement: “US Army Human
Terrain System functions as the primary and enduring
social science-based human domain research, analysis,
and training capability, focused on enabling leaders to
remain adaptive when shaping current and future
complex strategic and operational environments which
support Unified Action Partners world-wide.”
For instance, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has
a “cultural mapping (CMAP)” program, led by a
geographer: http://www.erdc.usace.army.mil/Media/
FactSheets/FactSheetArticleView/tabid/9254/Article/
476690/cultural-mapping.aspx
Recall that the initial funding for the Bowman Expeditions came from the U.S. Army FMSO (Herlihy et al.
2006; see also Wainwright 2012). In 2013, Jerry Dobson
received an award for US$3 million from the U.S. military’s Minerva program to study indigenous communities throughout Central America (Dobson 2013; see
Wainwright 2013b).
Long was replaced as NGA director by Robert Cardillo,
who, like Long, came to the NGA from the Defense
Intelligence Agency (DIA). On 9 October 2015, Cardillo spoke in the Department of Geography at Penn
State University about their “partnership” with the
NGA. According to the NGA’s press release (Fouche
2015), “Penn State is NGA’s largest collegiate academic
partner,” with “one NGA University Research Initiative
Grant with Penn State, two Cooperative Research and
Development Agreements, . . . and 152 [Penn State]
alumni currently serving in the [NGA] workforce.”
Compare Medina and Hepner (2013), chapter 4.
I also agree with his contention that opposition among
geographers to the Bowman Expeditions was “smaller
than experienced in Anthropological circles toward the
HTS” (Medina 2014, 13), although I disagree with his
explanation for this divergence.
References
Barnes, T. 2015. American geography, social science and
the Cold War. Geography 100 (3): 126–32.
Barnes, T., and M. Farish. 2006. Between regions: Science,
militarism, and American geography from World War
519
to Cold War. Annals of the Association of American
Geographers 96 (4): 807–26.
Belcher, O. 2014. Staging the Orient. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104 (5): 1012–29.
Bernazzoli, R., and C. Flint. 2009. Power, place, and militarism: Toward a comparative geographic analysis of militarization. Geography Compass 3 (1): 393–411.
Bowd, G., and D. Clayton. 2013. Geographical warfare in
the tropics: Yves Lacoste and the Vietnam War. Annals
of the Association of American Geographers 103 (3): 627–46.
Bryan, J., and D. Wood. 2015. Weaponizing maps: Indigenous
peoples and counterinsurgency in the Americas. New York:
Guilford.
Cheney, D. 2003. We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.
Meet the Press 16 March 2003. http://www.information
clearinghouse.info/article5145.htm (last accessed 12
August 2014).
Cowen, D. 2014. The deadly life of logistics: Mapping violence
in global trade. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.
Cowen, D., and E. Gilbert, eds. 2007. War, citizenship, territory. London and New York: Routledge.
Crampton, J. 2011. Arthur Robinson and the creation of
America’s first spy agency. Presentation at the 2011
meetings of the International Cartographic Association, Paris.
Davis, S. 2011. The US military base network and contemporary colonialism: Power projection, resistance, and
the quest for operational unilateralism. Political Geography 30 (4): 215–24.
Department of the Army. 2006. Counterinsurgency field
manual 3–24. Chicago: University of Chicago.
Dobson, J. 2013. The human geography of resilience and
change: Land rights and political stability in Central
American indigenous societies. Research proposal
submitted to Minerva Research Initiative, 4 January
2013.
Eldridge, E., and A. Neboshynsky. 2008. Quantifying human
terrain. Unpublished thesis, U.S. Naval Postgraduate
School, Monterey, CA.
Farish, M. 2010. The contours of America’s Cold War. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.
Fouche, E. 2015. NGA, Penn State partnership
highlighted during leadership visit to university.
https://www.nga.mil/MediaRoom/News/Pages/NGA,
-Penn-State-partnership-highlighted-during-leadershipvisit-to-university.aspx (last accessed 13 October 2015).
Galgano, F., and E. Palka, eds. 2011. Modern military geography. London and New York: Routledge.
Gonzalez, R. 2009. American counterinsurgency: Human science and the human terrain. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm.
Grant, S. 2011. Selective overview of US Army human
geography research programs (PowerPoint presentation). Vicksburg, MS: U.S. Army Engineer Research
and Development Center.
Gregory, D. 2011. From a view to a kill: Drones and late
modern war. Theory, Culture & Society 28 (7–8): 188–
215.
Herlihy, P., D. Smith, J. Kelly, and J. Dobson. 2006. Executive summary of Mexico Indıgena: Mexican open-source
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) project final
report, year one. Unpublished manuscript, Radiance
Research Team for the FMSO and the AGS.
520
Wainwright
Institute for Defense and Government Advancement
(IDGA). 2012. Human Geography Summit brochure
and schedule. Washington, DC: IDGA.
———. 2013. Human Geography Summit brochure and
schedule. Washington, DC: IDGA.
Inwood, J., and J. Tyner, eds. 2011. Non-killing geographies.
Honolulu, HI: Center for Global Nonkilling.
———. 2013. What’s so funny about peace, love and understanding anyway? Antipode. http://antipodefoundation.
org/2013/10/15/whats-so-funny-about-peace-love-andunderstanding/ (last accessed 15 August 2014).
Jasparro, V., and C. Jasparro. 2011. Reading the
human geography: An operational guide to interpreting the cultural landscape. U.S. Marines Center for Advanced Operational Culture Learning.
https://www.mca-marines.org/files/READING_THE_
CULTURAL_LANDSCAPE_WHITE_PAPER.pdf
(last accessed 21 August 2014).
Kipp, J., L. Grau, K. Prinslow, and D. Smith. 2006. The
Human Terrain System: A CORDS for the 21st century. Military Review September-October:8–15.
Lee, S.-O., T. Barnes, and J. Wainwright. 2015. Mapping
human terrain in the Joint Army–Navy Intelligence
Study of Korea (1945). The Professional Geographer 67
(4): 663–75.
Long, L. 2012. Remarks by NGA Director Letitia
Long. Orlando, FL: GEOINT Symposium. https://
www1.nga.mil/MediaRoom/SpeechesRemarks/Documents/
2012_GEOINT_DNGARemarks_AsPrepared.pdf (last
accessed 25 August 2014).
L
opez y Rivas, G. 2014a. Estudiando la contrainsurgencia de
Estados Unidos: manuales, mentalidades y uso de la
antropologıa. Tercera edici
on ampliada [Studying U.S.
counterinsurgency: Manuals, mentalities and the use of
anthropology. Third expanded edition]. http://www.
rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=157900 (last accessed 11
May 2014).
———. 2014b. Silencios y complicidades sobre las Expediciones Bowman [Silences and complicities about
Bowman Expeditions]. La Jornada (Mexico City),
9 May. http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2014/05/09/opinion/
019a2pol (last accessed 11 May 2014).
McFate, M., and A. Jackson. 2005. An organizational solution for DoD’s cultural knowledge needs. Military
Review July–August:18–21.
Medina, R. 2014. From anthropology to human geography:
Human terrain and the evolution of operational sociocultural understanding. Intelligence and National Security
31 (2): 137–53.
Medina, R., and G. Hepner. 2013. The geography of international terrorism. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.
O’Brien, M. 2013. Human geography: Appliance of science in the world’s troubled spots. http://www.idga.
org/intelligence/articles/human-geography-appliance-ofscience-in-the-world/ (last accessed 12 August 2014).
Petraeus, D. 2006. Learning counterinsurgency: Observations from soldiering in Iraq. Military Review January–
February:2–12.
Price, D. 2011. Weaponizing anthropology: Social science in
service of the militarized state. Oakland, CA: Counterpunch/AK.
Price, D., and R. Gonzalez. 2015. Remaking the human
terrain: The US military’s continuing quest to commandeer culture. Counterpunch 31 July. http://www.
counterpunch.org/2015/07/31/remaking-the-humanterrain-the-us-militarys-continuing-quest-to-commandeerculture/ (last accessed 8 October 2015).
Recha, M., D. Bosa, K. Jenkings, A. Williams, and R.
Woodward. 2015. Geography, military geography, and
critical military studies. Critical Military Studies 1 (1):
47–60.
Russell, J. 1954. Military geography. In American geography:
Inventory and prospect, ed. P. James and C. Jones, 485–
95. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University.
Shaw, I., and M. Akhter. 2014. The dronification of state
violence. Critical Asian Studies 46 (2): 211–34.
Sheppard, E. 2013. Doing no harm. AAG President’s Column, 24 June. http://www.aag.org/cs/news_detail?press
release.idD2490 (last accessed 18 May 2014).
Silverman, A. 2013. Human geography: What the future holds
for U.S. security forces. http://www.idga.org/government/
articles/human-geography-what-the-future-holds-foru-s-secu/ (last accessed 12 August 2014).
Stanton, J. 2013. US Army Human Terrain System 2008–
2013: The program from hell. Lexington, KY: Stanton.
Tyner, J. 2009. War, violence, and population: Making the
body count. New York: Guilford.
———. 2010. Military legacies: A world made by war. London
and New York: Routledge.
———. 2013a. “A remarkable disconnect”: On violence, military research, and the AAG. Antipode. http://antipodefoun
dation.org/2013/10/10/on-violence-military-research-andthe-aag/ (last accessed 15 August 2014).
Wainwright, J. 2012. Geopiracy: Oaxaca, militant empiricism,
and geographical thought. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
———. 2013a. “A remarkable disconnect”: On violence,
military research, and the AAG. Antipode. http://
antipodefoundation.org/2013/10/10/on-violence-mili
tary-research-and-the-aag/ (last accessed 15 August
2014).
———. 2013b. Misunderstanding, militarized. Public Political Ecology Lab. http://ppel.arizona.edu/?pD225 (last
accessed 15 August 2014).
Woodward, R. 2005. From military geography to militarism’s geographies: Disciplinary engagements with the
geographies of militarism and military activities. Progress in Human Geography 29 (6): 718–40.
JOEL D. WAINWRIGHT is an Associate Professor in the
Department of Geography at Ohio State University,
Columbus, OH 43210. E-mail: [email protected]. He
is author of Decolonizing Development: Colonial Power and the
Maya (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2007) and Geopiracy:
Oaxaca, Militant Empiricism, and Geographical Thought (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan).