Army Social Scientists

This Wired article discusses the controversial U.S. Army program to embed social scientists into combat units - so called the 'Human Terrain Team'(HTT). This is, apparently, the military's effort to give battlefield commanders a set of cultural advisers:

The idea behind HTTs is to take what a brigade already knows about the local population and combine it with social-science research, to produce a sense of how the society around them really works. The Army has set aside $41 million for the effort, which aims to deploy 150 social scientists, software geeks, and experts on local culture, split up and embedded with 26 different military units in Iraq and Afghanistan over the next year. Six HTTs are already on the ground.

Social scientists beware of the new press gangs!

Read post - 'Army Social Scientists Calm Afghanistan, Make Enemies at Home'