AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL EYE ON THE SOLDIER
U.S. left Australia in ’45 or ’46, they left a lot of stuff behind.
THINKER IN THE MAKING
Bell was born and raised in Australia and is now a Thinker in Residence for South Australia. This photo shows her as a young girl in the mid-’70s in an aboriginal community of Central Australia that was then called Warrabri and is now called Ali Curung, in the Northern Territory. (Photo by Dr. Diane Bell)
Q. Given that humans acquire culture through socialization, people living in different places or different circumstances develop different cultures. How do you think that might apply to the Army and the way it organizes and equips units, spe- like the military police, artillery, etc.?
It’s really quite common across Asia, whether you’re in Singapore, India, Malaysia, even China, to have govern- ments link technology to citizenship in kind of explicit ways: “The citizens use the Internet. The Internet is our future.”
Even Australia has made a strong invest- ment in a broadband network.
Q. R&D funding in the Army and the Armed Forces as a whole is dominated by engineers who design weapon systems and equipment for Soldiers to use. Much of the focus is on how best to counter current and emergent threats. How could - pological approach and looking at the Soldier who uses technology?
A. Taking an anthropological approach here would involve looking at more than just the Soldiers. I think it would involve thinking about the whole ecosystem in which Soldiers operate, right?
Q. Certainly.
A. And then I imagine there is a piece that says Soldiers aren’t just Soldiers when they are at war. How do we understand the life
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of Soldiers at home? I’m sure it extends to the communities they operate in, the bases they’re on, their families, their extended families, those communities as
I think an anthropological approach may also ask questions about what is the nature of defense? There are certainly multiple models for what defense looks like, both symbolically and actually. But there would probably be a number of frameworks of thinking about that one, where it wasn’t just about any particular long-term perspective.
It’s not, “Are we equipped in the battle we’re in now?” but “What does it mean to think about war, defensive and offensive? What would it look like 10, 15, 20 years from now?” I know some of those conver- sations go on inside the military, about the Army and the future.
Some of the conversation [the Army] must be having is about, okay, now that we’re sort of working out our relationships with Afghanistan and Iraq, the equipment that we have to get back from there, what does that look like?—you know, as opposed to the model that was certainly true when I was growing up in Australia; when the
A. Organizational culture is slightly dif- ferent than the traditional way I think about cultures. It’s also not just about the formal mechanism, it’s about infor- mal stuff, too, but it’s the symbolic, tacit domain. The American military is shaped as much by the experiences of troops on the ground as the men and women who lead it, whose lives were shaped mostly in a post-Vietnam era, at West Point and other kinds of institu- tions and experiences.
I think you have to remember that as organizational cultures are shaped, it’s not just about what people say, it’s also about what they do, the alignment of what they say and what they do. And then it’s about all the symbolic stuff. And the symbolic stuff runs the gamut from actual things we pick up as being the passive stuff that people sometimes try to regulate away, the names people paint on their airplanes, … the kind of language that people use to talk about
I think the challenge in all organizations— it’s true in Intel, as I’m sure it is in the military—is that organizational cultures need to grow and adapt, and that is some-
Q. That’s true. What could Army acquisition learn from the way
Army AL&T Magazine
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