I finally had time to sit down and read the George Packer article that has been making such a buzz. And I can see why. I was underlining and scribbling in the margin throughout. The article brings together several important themes that I’ve touched on over the past year and synthesizes them with a strong social science knowledge. I’ll be addressing these themes individually over the course of a few posts. The first theme I’ll examine is the legacy of Vietnam.

Packer illustrates two ways in which the current strategic challenges dredge up the ghosts of Vietnam that our nation has been attempting to repress for the past three decades.

First, regarding counterinsurgency operations:

More than three years into the Iraq war and five into the conflict in Afghanistan, many members of the American military—especially those with combat experience—have begun to accept the need to learn the kind of counterinsurgency tactics that it tried to leave behind in Vietnam

As I have written earlier, this attempt to avoid counterinsurgency operations instead of adapting to them was obscured by our success in the first Gulf War. OEF and OIF have revealed the underlying and still unaddressed counterinsurgency trauma of Vietnam.

Second, Packer profiles the return of social scientists to strategic discussions. He profiles Montomery McFate, and anthropologist who explains her help for the war effort as “a massive act of rebellion against my hippie parents.” McFate goes on to explain that,

Academic anthropolgists hate me for working with D.O.D… This is fundamentally about the broken relationship between the government and the discipline of anthropology. What broke that relationship is Vietnam. And people still haven’t recovered from that.

Packer goes on to describe an anthropologist who supports the Cultural Operations Research Human Terrain project:

I end up getting shunned at cocktail parties… I see that there could be misuse. But I just can’t stand to sit back and watch these mistakes happen over and over as people get killed, and do nothing.

America’s need to actually understand its adversaries forces us to confront the still raw wounds of Vietnam.

Part II will examine the strategic perspective this article provided.