The colonel was Steve Fondacaro, an iconoclastic, wiry Army Ranger with close-cropped gray hair and the tenaciousness of a terrier, who had lately become convinced that the United States was its own worst enemy in Iraq. Fondacaro was determined to do whatever it took to defeat the arrogance and bureaucratic inertia that were suffocating the Army he loved, an Army that had defined him since West Point and given him thirty years of workaholic bliss. But he had another problem, one he couldn’t do anything about. Most soldiers are required to leave the Army after three decades of service. Fondacaro was staring down the barrel of forced retirement.
Born in New York to a mother of Puerto Rican descent and an Italian-American father, Fondacaro had grown up all over the country but mainly in Fresno, California. When he was born, his family had lived on 114th Street in East Harlem; but his father, a physical therapist, was soon drafted to fight in Korea, and the family moved to follow him. The elder Fondacaro spent twenty-eight years in the Army, retiring as a colonel. Steve Fondacaro was the middle child of three boys and the only one to reach a normal adult height. His brothers, Phil and Sal Fondacaro, are diastrophic dwarfs who played Ewoks in Return of the Jedi. But for as long as he could remember, Steve Fondacaro had wanted to go to West Point, and to war.
He entered the academy in 1972, toward the end of the Vietnam War, when public opposition to the military reached an all-time high. But Fondacaro had no reservations. He suspected that his antiwar peers knew less about the conflict in Vietnam than he did, having grown up in a military family, and he knew that to be young and hip and make conversation at a bar in those days you had to bad-mouth Nixon. “That’s where I first began to understand how little research anybody does,” he told me. “Wisdom is defined, in my view, as in the Chinese proverb: a wise man is a man who is fully aware of how much he does not know.”
At West Point, Fondacaro particularly enjoyed his classes in military history and Sosh, the academy’s independent-minded social sciences department. The department has long served as an intellectual incubator for officers willing to dispute the official line, and since the 1980s, it has been a particularly important site of debate over the Army’s role in Vietnam. As a result, Sosh recurs in the intellectual genealogies of today’s leading counterinsurgency advocates, many of whom have taught there. Fondacaro graduated from West Point in 1976, along with Stanley McChrystal, Raymond Odierno, David Rodriguez, and William Caldwell IV, all of whom would go on to hold command positions in Iraq or Afghanistan. David Howell Petraeus, whom everyone called “Peaches,” finished two years earlier. Instead of a fancy engineering specialization, Fondacaro chose the infantry. “It’s the most enriching life experience,” he told me. “Nothing else appealed to me other than being in combat.”
He went to Ranger school, then trained for two years as a platoon leader in Panama before joining the 1st Ranger Battalion. He made captain and was sent to Korea for what he thought would be a year of company command, but when he got off the plane, a general commandeered him to serve in a staff job normally given to a higher-ranking officer. There Fondacaro helped organize logistics for Team Spirit, a massive yearly U.S.–South Korean military training exercise. He eventually got his company command, at a post along the demilitarized zone, where he says he led combat patrols to stop North Korean infiltrators on sabotage missions. During this period, he met Insuk Kim, the Korean woman he would marry and with whom he would have two children.
By his own account, Fondacaro was a bit too sharp and outspoken for his own good. He pissed people off by being chosen, as a junior captain, for staff jobs that would ordinarily have gone to officers above him. His extended tour in Korea also meant that he missed the chance to jump into Grenada with his fellow Rangers in Operation Urgent Fury, one of the Cold War’s most celebrated combat missions. “The more experienced you get in Korea, the more they want to send you back to Korea,” Fondacaro told me. He spent thirteen years there, returning to the States intermittently for advanced courses at several Army schools and a two-year Pentagon tour in the Special Technical Operations Division, a largely “black,” or classified, organization.
Fondacaro’s immersion in Korea made him intimately familiar with the history of American policy failures in Asia. He began to understand why some people viewed the United States as the world’s leading hypocrite, a nation that preached democratic principles while supporting leaders like Ferdinand Marcos and Ngo Dinh Diem. He knew that Ho Chi Minh had begged the United States for support in freeing his people from the domination of the French, borrowing words from the Declaration of Independence to express Vietnamese aspirations for self-rule, and that American leaders had turned away. Like his Korean comrades, Fondacaro grew frustrated by the persistent shortsightedness of American foreign policy. “How is it that we get driven to a last-minute, midnight decision with two lieutenant colonels in the Pentagon that say, ‘Hey, 38th Parallel looks good to me, Joe,’ and we decide the fate of a nation?” Fondacaro asked me during one of our conversations. “This is our legacy.”
When Fondacaro returned to the States as a colonel in 2001, he was asked to conduct an Army-wide study to figure out what the capabilities of the twenty-first-century soldier should be. Later, he would view this as a sort of military ethnography, but he wasn’t thinking about anthropology then, not yet. He sent teams to survey, interview, and conduct focus groups with soldiers and officers around the world. The results convinced him of what he called the Army’s “tribal nature.” It was a sprawling organization atomized into cliques whose members identified primarily as logisticians or supply officers or engineers rather than as combat soldiers, but asymmetrical warfare was making those divisions obsolete. “Those days when you’re a logistics guy or you’re a transportation guy and all you do is move ammo from the rear, those days are over, because you can be attacked anywhere along the way,” he told me. “It’s a 360-degree battle. That requires a different kind of soldier.” The future soldier he envisioned would operate more like a Special Forces commando than a member of the conventional Army. Like the Marine Corps creed—“every Marine a rifleman”—this new brand of fighter should embody a “warrior ethos,” Fondacaro argued. Every soldier, no matter his job description, would need combat and small-unit leadership skills.
Then–Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki grew interested in the study and urged Fondacaro on, enlisting him as an informal adviser. But Shinseki was on the wrong side of power. He had testified before Congress that several hundred thousand troops would be needed for peacekeeping and reconstruction in post-invasion Iraq, angering then–Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who favored a much smaller force. Shinseki was more clear-eyed than his boss, but he was marginalized for disputing the official line, and he quietly retired in the summer of 2003. Fondacaro considered Shinseki his strongest supporter. He blamed his failure to make general on Shinseki’s fall, but the great majority of Army colonels never earn a star. After Army politics frustrated his attempts to land a job he coveted in Afghanistan, Fondacaro was sent to serve his last tour at a little-known organization called the Army Capabilities Integration Center, or ARCIC, under the Training and Doctrine Command. “Don’t ask me what they do,” Fondacaro told me. “I gave it the best I could for a year, but it was a waste of time.”
Then, just as he was about to leave the Army, Fondacaro was offered a job he really wanted. An acquaintance from his Ranger days, then-Colonel Joe Votel, had been tapped to head a new Army task force with a mission to target the homemade bombs that were killing soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Votel asked Fondacaro to lead a small group of Special Operations and other forces helping combat troops in Iraq. Fondacaro was in his thirtieth year of service, but he got an extension and headed to Baghdad. Part of his job there was to field-test the seemingly endless stream of gadgets and prototypes that defense contractors were developing to counter roadside bombs. They ranged from the useless to the bizarre. One device purported to find buried bombs and defuse them electromagnetically. The
machine became so highly charged that it had to be neutralized by soldiers walking up behind it with a giant wooden probe. You guys are on so much dope that I can’t help you, Fondacaro thought when he saw it. This was the job he held when McFate met him at the briefing in Tampa. Eventually the database project she was working on, Cultural Preparation of the Environment, found its way to Fondacaro’s testing unit in Baghdad. As he listened to the contractors pitch it, he knew it wouldn’t work. ‘This is a piece of crap,’ he told them.
In Fondacaro’s view, the creators of Cultural Preparation of the Environment had missed the point. They had built a laptop stocked with cultural and demographic information for a commander who already had more gadgets than he knew what to do with—a busy officer swimming in data, but with no one to help him interpret it. The creators of Cultural Preparation of the Environment seemed to think that the commander could have a conversation with the database as if it were a human being on his staff, but that was impossible, and anyway, he wouldn’t know which questions to ask. “That’s when the light went on for me,” Fondacaro recalled. What a field commander needed were “social scientists on his staff, belonging to him. Not a dial-a-social-scientist with a fifteen-thousand-mile screwdriver from Brown University on Saturdays. He needed somebody embedded with him, part of his mission, understanding what he and his staff were going through day to day, totally integrated into his decision-making process so that the solutions offered were relevant to the situation he faced.” That Arab brides painted their hands with henna before marriage might be of interest to a social scientist, but that marriages in many Arab communities were accompanied by celebratory gunfire was of critical importance to commanders in Iraq. “Do you think that’s something the commander maybe needs to know, so that the Apache helicopters flying over at the time the celebratory gunfire comes up don’t roll in on a marriage ceremony and kill everyone because they thought they were being fired upon, so that instead of one thousand insurgents, you now have five thousand or maybe ten thousand insurgents?” Fondacaro asked me.
By 2005, things were changing in the Army and in America. With violence intensifying in Iraq, President George W. Bush, who had declared his disdain for nation building, embraced it as the only way to avert disaster. Given the paltriness of America’s civilian diplomatic and development corps, no entity but the military could undertake such a giant task. That year, “stability operations” became one of the military’s core missions. It was a profound shift, particularly for an Army whose recent engagements had been shaped by the Powell Doctrine’s emphasis on overwhelming force and a clear exit strategy. In the short term, stability operations would provide security, “restore essential services, and meet humanitarian needs,” but their long-term aims were much broader: “to help develop indigenous capacity for securing essential services, a viable market economy, rule of law, democratic institutions, and a robust civil society.” The military’s expanded mission meant new intelligence requirements for all the services. Commanders were instructed to draft requirements for “numbers of personnel with appropriate language and cultural skills and proficiency levels.” Intelligence products had to bring together information from traditional sources as well as the social sciences, “including from sociological, anthropological, cultural, economic, political science, and historical sources within the public and private sector.”
That year, Maxie McFarland, a retired Army colonel and deputy chief of staff for intelligence at the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, published an article calling for more cultural training for soldiers. Even by the low standards of military prose, his appeal was written robotically, as if culture and the people who shape and inhabit it were not human but mechanized. Cultural knowledge had taken a long time to register as important in an Army made up of engineers and systems thinkers, in part because it had seemed incomprehensibly vague, impossible to master. In McFarland’s prose, it became a solid thing with hard edges, a tool of military art like a shovel or a gun.
McFarland had worked on the counter-IED task force with Fondacaro and Votel. At the Training and Doctrine Command, his oversight included the Foreign Military Studies Office, the Army think tank that had tried for so long to help the service better understand its enemies. McFarland heard about the ethnographic database project, Cultural Preparation of the Environment, and asked Kipp to look into it, so Kipp sent Lester Grau, the Soviet historian, to one of the regular project briefings, which were attended via video teleconference by a growing number of people in the defense establishment. ‘This dog won’t hunt,’ Kipp remembers Grau telling him. Grau’s concerns mirrored Fondacaro’s. Cultural Preparation of the Environment would also require soldiers to collect and record reams of data, which they had no time to do.
Nevertheless, Kipp saw enough potential in the project to want to keep track of it. He asked a young Foreign Military Studies Office staffer named Don Smith to sit in on the regular video teleconferences. Smith was an ambitious, fast-talking Army reserve captain with a background in management consulting. After graduating from the Citadel and deploying to Iraq with the 101st Airborne Division during Desert Storm, he had left the Army for business school, but the September 11 attacks had brought him back. Smith told Kipp that while Cultural Preparation of the Environment was far from perfect, elements could be taken from it and put together to build a working cultural knowledge program. Smith would become the Human Terrain System’s first program manager. He told me that he came up with the idea for the program at his kitchen table, and he wasn’t the only one with a catchy creation story. McFate talked about scribbling the concept on a cocktail napkin at a bar with her husband. Fondacaro claimed that he was the one who had pushed to send civilian social scientists into the field with soldiers.
McFate had written about the Army’s need for a social science entity that could be sent to the battlefield alongside soldiers, but the Foreign Military Studies Office was already exploring similar possibilities. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the office had developed or contributed to two undertakings that foreshadowed the Human Terrain System. Both projects were fascinating and largely unknown outside the small circle of military people, academics, and intelligence types who took part in them.
The first was the World Basic Information Library, a government-friendly database of open-source information to which Army reservists, including some with academic backgrounds, contributed research. The Library got its start in the 1990s, when some in the Foreign Military Studies Office and elsewhere realized that the nonmilitary skills of reservists could be used to vastly increase the military’s store of open-source intelligence. The project wasn’t designed for the battlefield; instead, it would rely on reservists at their kitchen tables to create a database about remote parts of the world in which the government and military increasingly operated. The reservists would dig up interesting unclassified documents and archive them. Many of these documents were so-called gray literature—public information that isn’t widely available, like scientific journal articles or the annual reports sent to shareholders. They might include street maps or detailed analyses of a foreign city’s transport infrastructure. Subjects of interest to the Library ranged from anthropology and culture to economics, politics, drug trafficking, and technology.
After the September 11 attacks, a retired Army lieutenant colonel at the Foreign Military Studies Office recruited some dozen reservists who had been contributing to the Library to join an “open source intelligence team” supporting homeland defense. The team included people who spoke three or four foreign languages, amateur pilots, a journalist, and a guy who lived and worked on the Mexican border. The group became so successful that some in the Army wanted to expand it, but the idea never got off the ground, in part because the demands of two wars soon drained the supply of qualified reservists. A few years later, when the Foreign Military Studies Office’s Soviet expert Lester Grau went on a fact-finding trip to Iraq, a female Arabic-speaking Air Force reservist from the Library served as h
is translator. Grau was initially taken aback to be traveling to Iraq with a young woman; in a heavily male-dominated society, he thought she would get in his way. But the reservist proved a great asset, especially in speaking with Iraqi women. When they returned, Grau and his traveling companion worked with a team of Arabic-speaking analysts at the Foreign Military Studies Office on a paper for the Center for Army Lessons Learned. Another reservist from the Library network was a medical officer who would serve on the first-ever Human Terrain Team in Afghanistan.
Since 2005, the Foreign Military Studies Office had also been funding the Bowman Expeditions, a grand undertaking that proposed to send professional geographers and graduate students from the United States to study every country in the world, at an annual cost of $125 million. Named for the geographer Isaiah Bowman, who had advised President Woodrow Wilson during World War I, the project was the brainchild of Jerome E. Dobson, a University of Kansas geography professor and head of the American Geographical Society, who had worked twenty-six years at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Dobson viewed geography as a key source of intelligence that the U.S. government and military had been ignoring for decades. During World War II, a third of America’s academic geographers had been summoned to serve in government agencies that were essential to war-related work, principally the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to today’s CIA. Now the United States was a superpower “crippled by abysmal ignorance of its vast global domain,” Dobson wrote. “Ignorance of foreign places and people guides U.S. policies toward them and their policies toward us.” In 2006, Dobson and other members of the American Geographical Society met for nearly two hours with General David Petraeus at Fort Leavenworth. Petraeus had long “recognized the need for better understanding of cultural landscapes,” Dobson wrote after the meeting. “At the conclusion of our visit, he said he had a new appreciation for geography as a source of such understanding.” With the Bowman Expeditions, Dobson sought to restore geography to the influential position in U.S. policy making that it had occupied in the early part of the twentieth century, before the discipline fell out of favor and the Vietnam War opened a schism between academia and the U.S. military and intelligence communities.
The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice Page 4