49 th Parallel, Vol. 26 (Autumn 2011) Kienscherf ISSN: 1753-5794 (online) 1 Human Terrain: War Becomes Academic, dir. James Der Derian, David Udris and Michael Udris. Bullfrog Films, 2010. Markus Kienscherf * Free University Berlin Human Terrain: War Becomes Academic engages with the controversies surrounding the U.S. armed forces’ Human Terrain System – a programme designed to provide and produce knowledge about foreign populations by embedding social scientists (so- called Human Terrain Teams) with military units on the ground. Supporters of the programme maintain that it allows U.S. soldiers and marines to become better at winning local populations’ hearts and minds during “counterinsurgency operations”. Opponents, on the other hand, argue that by harnessing socio-cultural knowledge to the demands of military strategy, the Human Terrain System seeks to “weaponize” the social sciences. Human Terrain consists of four parts, each of which deals with specific ethical and political dilemmas raised by the Human Terrain System, and concludes with a short requiem. For part I, James Der Derian and his team were granted access to the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in the Californian Mojave Desert to observe how junior marines are drilled in “tactical cultural awareness” before deploying to Iraq. The training takes place in a vast virtual space, which includes a whole mock Iraqi town. What actually happens in Iraq is fed into the virtual training space, and the training in turn feeds back into what happens on the ground in Iraq. Virtual and actual realities blend almost seamlessly into one another. The main goal of this highly sophisticated, and forbiddingly expensive, training programme is to hammer home the point that in counterinsurgency operations the basic friend/enemy distinction needs to be replaced by a more nuanced division of local communities into three slots: “supportive,” “non-hostile,” “hostile.” But can a couple of weeks’ training actually instil a more nuanced understanding of the “human terrain” in young warriors who are trained to kill enemy soldiers? In fact, counterinsurgency’s more * Markus Kienscherf has just completed his doctorate at the Graduate School of North American Studies at Free University Berlin. He is currently preparing a monograph on U.S. domestic and international regimes of security. He published an article on the U.S. armed forces’ Human Terrain System in Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, and another article of his is due to appear in Security Dialogue later in 2011. The author can be contacted at markus_kienscherf@yahoo.com.