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The 21st-Century Turn to Culture: American Exceptionalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 October 2014

Rochelle Davis
Rochelle Davis*
Affiliation:
Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University, Washington D.C.; e-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

The U.S. Military's turn to culture in the 21st century occurred largely because of its inability to achieve its stated objectives in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through conventional military force. Building on a long history of military strategies concerned with the cultural differences of others, the U.S. military crafted a warfighting strategy in 2006 based on a counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine of using cultural knowledge to battle the enemy. Charting how and why culture was embraced as a 21st-century “weapons system” shows us how technopolitical systems inside the military-industrial complex are envisioned, built, and then dismantled. Close tracking of these changing 21st-century strategies of war reveals, deep within the counterterrorism discourse, a fundamental belief in American exceptionalism. The principle that emerged from this ideological environment is that the enemies to be fought are not only terrorists or the ideologues of al-Qaʿida but also the countries and cultures that produced them. The implementation of this principle, despite its obvious failures, reveals the ideological underpinning that has justified the incredible destruction and securitized implementation of warfighting.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 4: World War I , November 2014 , pp. 794 - 796
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

NOTES

1 See, among others, Porter, Patrick, Military Orientalism: Eastern War through Western Eyes (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Khalili, Laleh, Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2013)Google Scholar; and Jureidini, Paul A., Casebook on Insurgency and Revolutionary Warfare (Washington, D.C.: American University Press, 1962)Google Scholar.

2 Frontline proponents of this strategy were Gen. David Petraeus, David Kilkullen, and Montgomery McFate. Army Field Manual 3–24, Counterinsurgency (2006), was revised in 2014 and is now FM3–24, Insurgencies and Countering Insurgencies MCWP 3-33.5, http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-24.pdf (accessed 28 June 2014).

3 F. Rochelle Davis, “Culture as a Weapon System,” in Middle East Report 255 (summer 2010); González, Roberto, American Counterinsurgency: Human Science and the Human Terrain (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

4 “Language and Culture Training: Opportunities Exist to Improve Visibility and Sustainment of Knowledge and Skills in Army and Marine Corps General Purpose Forces,” Government Accountability Office 12–50, 31 October 2011, p. 0.

5 Laleh Khalili, “Coin vs. CT,” Middle East Report and Information Project, 9 January 2012, http://www.merip.org/coin-vs-ct. See also a New York Times Magazine article on AFRICOM's personnel and activities, 15 June 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/15/magazine/can-general-linders-special-operations-forces-stop-the-next-terrorist-threat.html?nl=todaysheadlines&_r=0.