Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - *PREVIEW* The Human Terrain System

Episode Date: July 9, 2025

In this episode, we revisit the 2000s warrior-scholar fixation of famously-unproblematic guys like David Petraeus with the advent of the Human Terrain System, or what you might politely call "military anthropology." Is it ethical? No. Did it work? No. Was it run by someone named Dr. Montgomery McFate? Yes. Get the whole episode on Patreon here! https://www.patreon.com/posts/bonus-episode-133688496 We've got merch available! Check out our store here: llbdpodcast.com/

Now, obviously, these scientists were not going to be in the military. Instead, they would be civilian contractors through one of two companies, though the vast majority were contracted through BAE Systems, an absolutely massive arms company involved in everything from bribes to alleged industrial spying to, of course, personal payments to Augusto Pinochet, amongst other things. If I'm not mistaken, help me out here. BAE is British, what is it? Aerospace Electronic Systems. Didn't they build the RG-31? I don't remember.

I'm pretty sure that the BAE systems are among many, many, many, many other things, are the people who built the RG-31 MRAP, or maybe one of their subsidiaries from South Africa built it. But yeah, they suck. Bower Industrial. It's from South African Land Systems, but designed by BAE. I was not wrong. I love when I'm not wrong. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So the vehicle that I was in the most often in Afghanistan was designed by the same people. Wow. I really hate that. That's something that BAE designed absolutely saved my life one time. I wish you hadn't.

It was the military version of design by a Virgil Abloh. I was like, yeah, he was in the room and it's kind of like kind of has his input. But really, it was a lot of guys in short. And one thing I find really funny, though, about the RG 31 as a side note really quickly is that like we could literally the radio would dump and fuck up so bad with the antennas that we would wind up having more luck talking on our man pack radios to the other cars or other vehicles in the convoy versus the powered antenna, everything in there. And I didn't, I was like, wow, maybe my vehicle is just a lemon.

I was like, oh no, no, no, no, no, it's a British vehicle. The electrics are always fucked. That's something I didn't know until I moved to the United Kingdom. That is also true. But because it was designed by South Africans, you have to use Bower radio, which is a very complex encryption system where you can only speak at racial slurs. Yeah, exactly. You have to have one member of the ant board on the transmitter side and another member on the receiver side. Exactly. It's like Code Talkers.

You don't realize the radio is powered by built-on. You have to put the built-on in the radio for it to work like a coin in the coin machine. I didn't realize that everyone from South Africa was from the Dominican Republic. I really hate the idea that in an episode about human train systems in Afghanistan, we've come up with Bower code talkers. Yeah, the wind talkers. Yeah. Fucking Christ. The Pret the wind talkers. Yeah, the fucking- Fucking Christ.

The Pretoria wind talkers. Yeah, it weirdly, it only works in Perth and some weird suburb of Ohio now. Yeah, and if you take contact, you just say, poos. What's more interesting here is that the first teams were getting ready to be sent to Afghanistan and Iraq in 2007. And it quickly became clear that

HTS's other job was selling the civilized scientific approach to war to the American people at home. And McFate was the perfect person for this job. She was touted as a quote, radical academic, a child of hippies and literally called a Bohemian bad girl. Oh, Christ. Yeah. Manic pixie war criminal. Bohemian bad girl sounds like the worst fucking 2000s French electro band you've ever heard. All these articles point out that she'd like to wear big hats, smoke

American spirits, and still had a little scar on her nose from what she used to have, a nose ring. Oh my God, I would have been so damn bad for her in 2011. Man, we all would have. It's fine. Her face and work were splashed across every piece of corporate media from coast to coast. She was fully embraced by every sector of the mainstream. She was everywhere, like a hype man, but she was an academic. And she was also embraced by the new commander in Iraq, David Petraeus. Now he was considered, you know, he, well, not anymore, I will say, but there was a period of time where he was considered like the thinking's thinking man's officer,

the thing like the warrior general poet guy. I can give you a quick one. I don't know a ton about his academic background, but I'm pretty sure he had, I'm pretty sure he had a, he had at least a master's, but what David Petraeus basically got recognized because he was the commander of the division commander of the 101st in the invasion of Iraq. And then they were in charge of the Northern sector, including Mosul. And specifically in Mosul, he was like, oh, what if we paid the shopkeepers to keep their

shops open or just gave them money, even though no one's buying shit in their stores to create the semblance of normality. And it's like when you compare it with somebody like Rayo Di Erno, who besides being the chief of staff of the army, his biggest claim to fame as being in charge of, I think it was 4th ID or first CAV was like, hey, some guys in your unit decided to take the curfew enforcement so seriously they threw some people off a bridge and drowned them. So like, yeah, compared to Ray Odierno, David Petraeus seems like, wow, smart man who can do smart wars. But at the end of the day, he still got... I'll be real with you. He went to West Point and got to where he was from being

really, really fast at running. Like every senior officer in the US military, he also had great hair because you had to. Odierno, the rare exception. So bald. Odierno looks like a cop. It looks like a thumb. Now, it's important to remember that any war fighting population, Imperial or otherwise, always wants to feel good about what their country is doing. They want to be convinced that they're the good guys. And the HTS program was that feel good program. They wanted people to believe this was the new American military, a thinking military who wanted to deeply understand not the people they were occupying, no no no, but our allies in the region to better serve their needs. See what I did there? That's pretty much what they were doing with Montgomery and McFade at the time. Also, sorry to do

this again as a tangent, but Petraeus and what eventually would become the Petraeus Doctrine, something that the HDS system and program was heavily attached to, are absolutely full of shit. Petraeus' idea of what he called population-centric warfare boiled down to wide-scale, massive bribery to the elements of society that would mean to resist the ongoing occupation. We'll pay you money if you don't attack us. Therefore, attack slow down or stop. It makes command metrics look good, which means people must like us. And then you can put those numbers into media fluff pieces and then project them back home. There are less combat operations, therefore less

civilian casualties. Everyone in Washington is happy, even though the underlying issues at play are never addressed. The insurgency has not been figured out. You just pay them to stay at home. I mean, famously, Petraeus is lauded for the so-called awakening in Iraq and the sons of Iraq. He paid people off and then was like, this is not what this episode is about, but he, he bribed groups in Iraq to attack other groups in Iraq that would not take the bribes effectively. And it was met with success. There was also a degree to which like people got really fucking sick of like basically international tour groups of jihadis coming and just like basically killing everyone.

So there was also that yeah, part of the M bar awakening was the fact that like it had been let to fester so long that you had these situations where people were really tired of civilians uninvolved in any side. Sunni civilians being killed by Sunni jihadis and this created enough grievance. Then the US was like, well, I know you guys have made really, really bitching fucking Nishid videos of killing our guys, but what if we paid you to do that to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia? Hey, Juba, what if we gave you 20 bucks? Yeah, who didn't exist before the Iraq war started?

Yeah, I mean, this is not the wormhole to fall into, but it effectively boiled down to bribing groups to kill each other and not American soldiers. It created better metrics on paper and did not solve any of the underlying issues of the insurgency. And in fact, many studies have shown that only actually made it worse because they centralized that money and spent

it on better weapons and training to use later down the road. We're winning the war of hearts and minds by giving someone 20 quid on a bootleg copy of Sony Vegas is just incredible. Well, I mean, I was just thinking about it too that like, yeah, we want to make it into the thinking man's army. And it's like, if you actually could commune with the hive mind of the US military in the 2000s during the global war on terror, like it would coalesce into one single thought. And that thought would be, if I go crazy, then will you still call me Superman?

God damn it. Look, I'm not gonna lie. You got me with that one. I didn't see that one coming. Now, Petraeus accepted the HTS teams with arms wide open. There you go. And due to his command style of that being a fucking tyrant, anyone who brought up the inherent problems of just paying off militant groups and bringing anthropologists Saw their careers ruined or slowed down. So as Patreus rammed this shit home into the army hard People around him just accepted it because he was David Patreus. He would ruin them However, a small problem began to pop up BAE began to discover that just because the army suddenly wanted to hire a thousand social scientists Didn't suddenly mean that those people a wanted to hire a thousand social scientists, didn't suddenly mean that those people A. wanted to work for BAE or B. existed at all in that

number. Hey look, you know, it's hard to get a job in the humanities. Like sometimes you know, you have to go work for BAE systems. Sometimes you have to go to Afghanistan and like profile people and bribe people, you know, you gotta make a living somehow. In fact, the American Anthropology Association wrote to all of its members outlining their issues with the program. Most importantly, like we pointed out, it's terribly unethical, brings up the questions

of consent, and you cannot do research in the military with military goals in mind and, most importantly, surrounded by armed soldiers. Other groups circulated a petition of refusal, gathering thousands of signatures of scientists who refused to work for BAE or the government in this capacity. It kind of goes without saying there aren't exactly thousands of academics whose field of study in America covers Iraq and Afghanistan. And it's a very, very small field. And other than a few individuals, absolutely none of these guys would work with BAE. But that did not mean BAE was going to tell the government, hey, we can't

fulfill this $1 billion contract you gave us. I guess you could have your money back. We've got an expert with on the ground, real world life civilian experience in Iraq, advising us. His name is Varg Vikrnus. I forgot he spent time in Iraq. He lived in Iraq because his dad was doing a project under Saddam's government as an engineer. So he lived in Iraq for like a year in the seventies. Yeah, Varg Vikrnus, bathyseric. He calls it his like origin a year in the 70s. Yeah, Vartvik and his bathys. He calls it his origin story about white supremacy.

You must imagine the enemy, Uronomus.