Lawmaker says Army misled Congress about closing project
Service spent $726M on fraud-marred social science program
The Army issued a false statement about its controversial program to embed social scientists with combat units and failed to correct it for months in order to mislead Congress, according to a letter to the Army on Wednesday from Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif.
The Army has spent $726 million on the Human Terrain System since 2007, sending civilian social scientists with cultural expertise to battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan to advise commanders on how to avoid needless bloodshed. The program, at its height in 2010, was plagued with documented incidents of fraud and sexual harassment. In 2015, the Army announced it had killed the program in 2014.
In a letter to Hunter on March 10, acting Army Secretary Patrick Murphy wrote that the Army’s combat-anthropology program remained active, and the Army planned to expand it. The program had been renamed the Global Cultural Knowledge Network, Murphy wrote, and no longer sends social scientists to war. Instead, it offers training to troops before they deploy and employs experts in the USA who can advise commanders in the field. In fiscal year 2016, the Army intends to spend $1.3 million on the program.
Hunter blasted the Army for issuing the statement that said the program had ended in 2014 “as there was no longer a requirement for teams in the field.” He demanded to know why the Army let that statement go uncorrected for nine months.
“Given the contradictions in statements and consistently misleading information, it is my belief that HTS is alive and well — in the form of GCKN,” Hunter wrote.
Hunter wrote that he was “unconvinced” that the rebranded social science project provides a “new and unique capability” and won’t be “subject to the same failures and shortcomings.”
The American Anthropological Association, an organization representing academic and professional anthropologists, issued a statement after USA TODAY reported that the social science program had not been killed.
The association concluded that the “Army’s Human Terrain System needs to be buried once and for all.”