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| Africa Subsaharan |
| The Niger Ambush - The Toxic Mix of AFRICOM and Human Terrain Operations |
| 2017-11-28 |
| BLUF: [Strategic Culture Foundation] What the Pentagon pulled out of its hat was the Islamic State in the Sahel, conveniently abbreviated as "ISIS." With the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, the original ISIS, on the run in the Middle East, the Pentagon saw an opportunity to give the terrorist group a rebirth in West Africa, while also blaming it for the deaths of the US servicemen. But the actual reason for the obfuscation from the Oval Office was to avoid having one of the Pentagon’s most fraudulent and discredited programs making it back on to the front pages of the newspapers. There is every indication that what transpired near the village of Tongo Tongo in Niger was the result of a decision by the Trump administration to bolster the costly and dubious Pentagon program called the Human Terrain System (HTS). Using anthropologists, sociologists, and linguists possessing higher degrees, the Pentagon created HTS to conduct ethnographic surveys of conflict zones in order to take advantage of inter-tribal conflicts to achieve quick military dominance over a targeted region. HTS has been charged with exacerbating tensions between various indigenous groups and tribes to create intelligence "opportunities" for the US military. In 2012, the Pentagon announced that HTS would be extended from South Asia, More on HTS at this Wiki link |
| Posted by:Besoeker |
| #5 GW Bush 2005 Human Terrain System |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2017-11-28 14:10 |
| #4 How many of these programs are holdovers from Obama or even Bush regimes? |
| Posted by: Abu Uluque 2017-11-28 11:28 |
| #3 #2Â anthropologists, sociologists, and linguists possessing higher degrees Referred to as the "squishy" parts of academia or the black arts. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2017-11-28 11:04 |
| #2 anthropologists, sociologists, and linguists possessing higher degrees As a member, I would say this community fails in good science by maintaining the false hope of 'What they are is what they do.' Not so from this soapbox. The many incursions into Eastern and Western Asia and now Africa continue to demonstrate cultures of differentiated behavior and decision making processes. Local normality is not Global rationality, no matter how much we should want to make it so. Tough to blame on the Oval Office when these facts have been ignored for hundreds of years. |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2017-11-28 09:44 |
| #1 HTS has been charged with exacerbating tensions between various indigenous groups and tribes to create intelligence "opportunities" for the US military. The "opportunity" to gather intelligence (by constantly stirring shi* up) is simply an intermediate objective. The long-term goal is political regime change. But of course the ownership of regime change resides not with the Army, but elsewhere. Evil Russian hackers and political election interlopers, they're everywhere I tell you. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2017-11-28 04:40 |