Montgomery McFate

Early life McFate was raised in the houseboat community in Sausalito, California, at the time a "hippie" community. Her parents were artists and associates with such figures as Jack Kerouac and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. She grew up in poverty, living on a converted barge with no plumbing. In high school, McFate spent much of her time in the burgeoning early-1980s San Francisco punk scene, but at the same time, was a strong student with an academic focus, earning numerous scholarship that helped put her through college.

Academic career She went on to study anthropology at UC Berkeley and as a graduate student at Yale University. McFate developed an interest in the conflict studies and the culture of insurgent groups, and did her doctoral dissertation on Irish Republican social networks and cultural narratives and the role that these played in maintaining the Irish Republican Army insurgency. As part of this research process, she spent several years living among IRA supporters and later among British counterinsurgents. After earning her PhD in anthropology in 1994, McFate went on to study law at Harvard Law School, earning a Juris Doctor in 1997.

Defense career It was after the September 11 attacks that McFate found what she describes as her "mission": to get the military to understand the importance of "cultural knowledge". McFate has stated that she became "passionate about one issue: the government’s need to actually understand its adversaries". In McFate's opinion, during the Cold War, the United States defense establishment developed a very good understanding of the Soviet Union, with the ultimate result of that the US triumphed in that conflict. On the other hand, she holds that the military and defense establishment has a very poor understanding of the cultures of the Middle East, resulting in such debacles as the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse scandal.

McFate is alleged in several magazine articles to have been the blogger "Pentagon Diva", who briefly ran a blog called "I Luv a Man in Uniform" where she commented on the "hotness" of various Department of Defense officials and analysts.

Publications Books Montgomery McFate and Janice H. Laurence, Social Science Goes to War: The Human Terrain System in Iraq and Afghanistan. Oxford University Press, 2015. Montgomery McFate, Military Anthropology: Soldiers, Scholars and Subjects at the Margins of Empire. Oxford University Press, 2018.

Articles (as Montgomery Sapone) Ceasefire: The impact of Republican culture on the ceasefire process in Northern Ireland, Journal of Conflict Studies, 21(1), 2001. (PDF) Anthropology and counterinsurgency: The strange story of their curious relationship, Military Review, March–April 2005, p 24–38. Iraq: the social context of IEDs, Military Review, May–June 2005, p 37–40.. (with Andrea Jackson) "An Organizational Solution for DoD's Cultural Knowledge needs", Military Review, July–August 2005, pp. 18–21. ; ; British Library Document Supply Service . The military utility of understanding adversary culture, Joint Forces Quarterly, Summer 2005, p 42–48. (with Andrea Jackson) The object beyond war: counterinsurgency and the four tools of political competition, Military Review, January–February 2006, p 13–26.

Controversy

Anthropology and the military The relationship between anthropologists and the military has long been the subject of controversy. Nevertheless, by the late 1960s, most Western anthropologists had come to reject such collaboration as a breach of trust between anthropologist participant observers and the people they study, endangering the welfare of both parties. The American Anthropological Association eventually adopted a policy against such collaboration.

McFate sought to reverse this trend, holding that it was possible for a mutually beneficial relationship to emerge between the US military and the populations that insurgency sprang from. This approach, however, has largely been negatively received by the anthropological community, and the American Anthropological Association issued resolutions in 2007 and 2008 condemning the kind of military/anthropological collaboration McFate had called for.

The Human Terrain System was condemned by the American Anthropological Association in November 2007, which called it an "unacceptable application of anthropological expertise." The program also came under fire for allegedly poor organization and execution and limited effectiveness.

A 2010 audit by the Army's Auditing Agency (AAA) identified weaknesses in the program's execution. The final AAA investigation, completed in the summer of 2014, did not uncover any significant weaknesses in the program's execution, and found that the program offered significant value to military units.