Had an interesting conversation this morning with the chief of counter terrorism for the State Department, Amb. Dell Dailey. It was part of the Defense Writers Group breakfasts that I go to periodically and I wanted to point out something that might interest you all.
Asked a question about surveillance technologies, aviation assets and other gadgets his office might need to more effectively counter terrorist movements, Dailey had an interesting answer. He said the department always needs more aircraft, but the surveillance tech is already good enough for his needs. Instead, he needs a comprehensive map of the human terrain he’ll encounter.
“During the Cold War we mapped the floor of the oceans for our submarines to move around and not bump into underwater mountains. We ought to take that same mentality and apply it to the humans that may end up coming after us that are terrorists.”
Basically Dailey is asking for an extremely detailed, layered map of tribes, religions, cultures, races, politics, history and languages for key areas and their interaction with the geography.
“Human preparation of the environment rather than physical preparation of the environment… We need to map the human terrain in those sensitive areas as thoroughly as we mapped the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. That will allow us in the future not to go into a post-9/11 scratching our heads ‘should we go kinetic, should we go non-kinetic? Should we go after this tribe or should we go after that tribe?’ It allows us to have a foundation in place already to move for our government actions. I don’t see that right now.”
Dailey said several think tanks, universities and some offices within the US Gov. are working on some kind of variation of his human terrain map, but there lacks the “Manhattan Project mentality” that pushed the sea floor mapping during the Cold War.
– Christian
Of course an intelligence agency would need to understand people in depth. Without that understanding, what good are data obtained by spy planes and gadgets?
that would be one dynamic map! you’d need a pretty vigilant team to keep it updated in today’s political world.
Sounds brilliant. Not only would you need to crack open history books, you’d probably have to divide each section into demographics, and if a database was built, it’d probably provide more than one answer.
For example, it might say this about Iraq:
–Sunnis and Shiites intermarried and some tribes were of mixed composition.
HOWEVER,
–If put into duress things may fracture along religious lines.
OR, depending on X,
–Things may fragment tribally.
Then you get things like…
“The elders do X“
“while the young would do Y“
And this would be just one family or one village, etc.
And then as the scope expands and the number of cross interactions increases…yeech.
Probably need a data mining component to use people’s blogs to supplement data from their biased, first-person perspectives.
or he could get a general view by reading Salzman’s “Culture and Conflict”
We need to create surveillance balloons to loiter in areas, or schedule Globalhawks to scan terrain on a daily basis. If we layer on infrared data we can compare and overlay images taken the day, hour, minute before and figure out where the movements were. All of this needs to be automated. If we can get there. We can find all the roadside bombs before they find us. We can also use ground penetrating radar to look for metals and geo sensing equipment to look for explosive elements to better map the deadly stuff, mine fields and such. This same equipment is already in use on satellites and is used to look for mineral deposits and such.
Why aren
Yes must have for counter terrorisim
Love the idea.
Have enough IT & AI power to achieve in the DoD alone aside colleges & Univs.
Neat.
Low cost to fund.
Doable.
EZ do.
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I’m a little worried as an anthropologist, because what I’ve seen from the HTS Project in the past has been overly simplistic descriptions of highly complex societal normals, mindsets, and epistemological differences.
I hope that Dailey gets the level of detail that he requires. Anything else, even little mistakes have the potential to cause extreme misunderstanding.
AHOY, we don’t need new terms every time someone comes up with some Idea. it’s call demographics and its based on various census.
AHOY, I say people in general are creatures of habit, and much easier to track/map than one might think and the odd ones would be the targeted ones, i.e. did not deposit a check today as usual would be noted or dose not have a bank account etc. However I agree that ultimately were talking lets say think “Quantum Leap” TV show remember that one, the guy with the invisible friend and his computer “squigy” I believe. And since that aired a decade ago I say those in charge are way ahead of the curve. Big brother is all grown up.