Teaching culture to the USMC
Posted By Marc on January 10, 2010
NPR just carried a nice story about Dr. Paula Holmes-Eber on teaching culture at the Marine Corps University (hat tip to Kerry Fosher who sent out the link over MilAnthNet). I’ve had several chances to talk with Paula about her teaching there, and I have been quite impressed with both what they are teaching and how they are doing it. Listen to the story and see what you think.
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Missed this when you first posted it. This is awesome. This is exactly what we need to be teaching troops. I hope that something similar is being done with the enlisted ranks. This is a bit of an extreme example, but after we rolled into Baghdad in 2003, pointing a weapon at someone was as casual as waving. Soldiers were doing it way too often, not realizing the impact it had on the people. I caught myself doing it early on and had to consciously stop myself from doing it. Going from high intensity combat to police work is like going from a knife fight in an alley one moment, to chatting with your grandmother the next.
In addition to what Holmes-Eber is doing, we need to spend more time educating troops on the unspoken messages that they send with their posture, body language, facial expressions, and so on – and help them to understand how the specific culture that they will be interacting with will interpret this. It can often mean the difference between a neutral man on the street giving you critical intel or him being unreasonably detained because you spooked him and misinterpreted his actions.
It’s a really good summary of what Paula (and others) are doing there. If you get a chance, you might want to try and track down “Operational Culture for Warfighters”, which is the text they are using; it’s pretty good!