CULTINT

CULTINT — cultural intelligence — is the assessment of foreign cultural, social, religious, ethnographic, and behavioural factors relevant to military operations, intelligence operations, and policy formulation. The category is principally a US military-doctrinal usage that emerged formally in the post-2001 Afghanistan and Iraq operational frame, where the institutional inadequacy of the prior US military's understanding of the cultural and social context of its area of operations was identified as a substantial operational deficiency that the doctrine of counterinsurgency (the 2006 FM 3-24 manual under the supervision of David Petraeus and James F. Amos) attempted to address.

The category sits at an unusual point in the disciplinary taxonomy. CULTINT is not a collection discipline in the conventional SIGINT/HUMINT/IMINT/MASINT/OSINT sense — it does not name a distinctive collection methodology — but rather an analytical-product category produced through the integration of HUMINT (in-country debriefings, area familiarity reporting, anthropological-style HUMINT), OSINT (foreign-language press, local social media, academic and ethnographic literature), and the substantial academic-area-studies corpus on the country or culture in question. The institutional consumers of CULTINT product are principally military commanders, civilian policy-makers operating in or on a particular country, and the intelligence-community country and regional analytical desks themselves.

The Human Terrain System programme (active 2007–14, terminated by the US Army in 2014) was the principal institutional vehicle for an attempted operationalisation of CULTINT in deployed contexts. HTS embedded teams of social scientists with US military combat units in Iraq and Afghanistan to provide on-the-ground cultural and social-network analysis to brigade and battalion commanders. The programme was substantially controversial within the academic anthropological community — the 2007 American Anthropological Association statement on the programme objected to the use of academic anthropological methodology in combat-support roles — and the programme's institutional outcome (high cost, mixed operational return, sustained academic objection) became part of the broader institutional retrenchment from the 2006-13 counterinsurgency moment.

The post-2014 institutional treatment of CULTINT has substantially shifted away from the deployed-team Human Terrain model toward the production of CULTINT product through conventional intelligence-community analytical desks integrating academic-area-studies expertise. The category remains in operational use in Department of Defense doctrine but no longer has a dedicated dedicated-team institutional vehicle equivalent to HTS. The longer-term institutional question that CULTINT raises — the relationship between intelligence-community analytical work and the academic-area-studies and ethnographic research on which much of its base material rests — is unresolved at the policy level and continues to surface in periodic disputes over funding, classification, and academic-research access.

See also

• HUMINT — provides much of the in-country source material that supports CULTINT analysis
• OSINT — provides the foreign-language press, social-media, and academic-literature inputs
• Intelligence cycle — CULTINT is an analytical-product category within the broader cycle