Military Review English Edition November-December 2015 | Page 115

CRITICAL THINKING

I

t was a special kind of failure. Of course, members of human terrain teams—sociocultural
research teams deployed with U.S. and partner
forces in Iraq and Afghanistan—had no monopoly
on cognitive rigidity. Nor were all team members
guilty of it. But as he stood there in the waning heat
of October in Baghdad, Dr. Marcus Griffin, the team’s
lead social scientist, found himself confronting an
extreme case of rigid thinking. It was 2008, and the
team was struggling to come up with recommendations about how to promote reconciliation between
Sunni and Shia.
Someone recommended that the team should
consider interviewing families who had married their
sons and daughters across the sectarian divide as a
starting point for understanding how families reconciled sectarian differences and tensions. The reasonable assumption was that marriage and family were
the basic building blocks of communities, and since
Iraqis usually arranged their children’s marriages,
knowing how and why some would knit diverse families into a new whole could yield insight.
As they discussed the recommendation, one of the
team’s analysts, an Arab Christian who had immigrated
to the United States after the first Gulf War, quickly
spoke up, “Sunna and Shia do not marry each other.”
“What do you mean?” Griffin asked. “Of course
they do. There is a long history of it.”
“Well they don’t do that anymore,” he stated
authoritatively.
“How do you know?” Griffin asked, knowing that
Hussein, the Shia interpreter sitting across the room
studying, had married his son to a woman from a
Sunni family the previous year.
“I’m Iraqi,” said the analyst. “You can ask me anything. I know everything about Iraq.”
And there it was: “I know everything about Iraq.”
Not only was this trained analyst wrong, but he was
so sure of himself that he was not open to new information and, in essence, he was incapable of learning.

Good Classes, Poor Results
It was displays of this type of rigid, overgeneralization based on knowledge of a small or nonrepresentative sample, or premature acceptance of an idea
as fact, coupled with the persistent adherence to a
belief even in the face of evidence to the contrary, that
MILITARY REVIEW  November-December 2015

caused the Human Terrain System training and education program to reexamine its curriculum, method
of instruction, and academic assessment process. Like
virtually all Army education programs, the curriculum already included classes in critical thinking skills.
Also like most Army education programs, not only
did the instructors enjoy teaching the critical thinking classes, but also, for the most part, the students
provided very positive feedback about the classes on
student surveys.
However, despite both instructors and students
enjoying the critical thinking classes, many graduates were failing to think critically where it mattered
most—on the job.

Critical Thinking Education for
Complex Cultural Interactions
An experimental program quickly created in 2006
in response to a Joint Urgent Operational Needs
Statement ( JUONS), the Army’s Human Terrain
System aimed to provide a soc iocultural analysis
capability to Army and partner forces in Iraq and
Afghanistan. The program recruited and trained
civilian and former military personnel who attended
a training program at Fort Leavenworth.1 Individuals
would deploy after training, joining teams already
embedded in Army or coalition partner staffs. The
teams conducted research and interacted with the
local peoples to help their military leaders better understand the dynamic and complex societies in their
areas of operation.
Team members needed effective cross-cultural skills they could apply well beyond a traditional
two-dimensional model. They needed to be able to
communicate and work effectively with individuals
and groups (both homogeneous and heterogeneous)
with a wide range of cultural backgrounds, including
their own diverse team members, U.S. and coalition
military commanders and staffs, host-nation forces,
and diverse civilian populations.
Team members needed to recognize and interact
with numerous individual and collective cultural
frameworks, all the while being aware of how their
own cognitive lenses and filters influenced their
understanding. Success in these complex interactions,
illustrated in figure 1, page 110, would depend on
applying critical thinking skills.
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