Decisive Point Podcast – Ep 5-26 – Daniel W. Henk and Allison Abbe – "Restoring Priority on Cultural Skill Sets for Modern Military Professionals"

In this episode, Colonel Daniel W. Henk (US Army, retired), PhD, and Dr. Allison Abbe discuss cultural education in the US military. They emphasize the importance of cultural capability across the competition and conflict continuum and address how the Department of Defense can build on service culture centers’ efforts to address the LREC skills military personnel need to work effectively across cultural boundaries, whether during conflict against an adversary or in interoperability with allies and partners.

E-mail usarmy.carlisle.awc.mbx.parameters@army.mil to give feedback on this podcast or the genesis article.

Podcast record date: August 27, 2024

Keywords: culture, human domain, cross-cultural competence, military education

Episode transcript

Stephanie Crider (host)

You are listening to Decisive Point. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the guests and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.

I'm talking remotely with Colonel Daniel W. Henk and Dr. Allison Abbe, authors of “Restoring Priority on Cultural Skill Sets for Modern Military Professionals,” which you can find in the Autumn 2024 issue of Parameters.

Henk, US Army retired, holds a PhD in social anthropology. His research interests include peace operations, human and environmental security, and civil-military relations. He was the founding director of the Air Force Culture and Language Center.

Abbe is a professor of organizational studies and the Matthew B. Ridgway Chair of Leadership Studies at the US Army War College. Her research focuses on [the] development of leadership and intercultural skills in national security leaders.

Welcome to Decisive Point, Dan and Allison.

COL Dan Henk (US Army, retired)

Thank you.

Dr. Allison Abbe

Thanks for hosting.

Host

Why are human relations skills important to US military operations or partnerships in today’s culturally complex environments? And, if you could, briefly cite a couple of specific examples to illustrate your answer.

Henk

A compelling argument could really be made that in conflict in the early twenty-first century, managing human relations has risen to a level of importance that we’ve never seen before. And for the military professional, doing the nation’s business really now means an ability to understand and to work very well with very diverse communities under the constant scrutiny and instant reporting of the information age and, often, unfortunately, with malign actors waiting and watching for our missteps. Poor command of human relations skills could very easily lead to mission failure at any level of responsibility and across the entire spectrum of military involvements.

If you don’t mind, let me just offer a couple of examples.

In 2004, not long after our latest intervention in Iraq, a very perceptive young Marine documented American military deficiencies in working across cultural boundaries at the tactical level in Iraq. His article appeared in Small Wars Journal and was titled “Marines Are from Mars, Iraqis Are from Venus.” He made the point, based on his observation, that it is very difficult to work with people when you are clueless about their take on reality, about their norms, about their values, about their expectations, and about their grievances and their insecurities.

But, you know, the same thing is true at a higher level, as well. In my role as an attaché and a researcher, I frequently overheard comments by host nation officials describing US military connections. Some were complimentary, to be sure. Many were not. In fact, American military personnel were really often characterized as impatient, insensitive to local dynamics, and much more inclined to operate on transmit than on receive. Now, the fact of the matter is a grounding in the more advanced skills of cross-cultural competence could have been a considerable help—both in avoiding offense and in discerning the true nature of the relationships.

We have had senior officials that have displayed really commendable cross-cultural skills at very high levels of responsibility. Particularly noteworthy were [Special Presidential Envoy] Robert Oakley and Director of Operations Marine General Anthony Zinni in Operation Restore Hope in Somalia in ’92 and ’93. These two men were true cross-cultural adepts. They were able to reconcile and work with extraordinarily diverse and difficult actors in one of the world’s most problematic conflict environments. They reached out, they communicated well, they reconciled hostile factions, and they achieved a remarkable cooperation. Sadly, their UN [United Nations] successors had no such motivation or capability, and their American peers generally lacked their cross-cultural proficiency.

The point here, again, is that the military profession in the twenty-first century will succeed or fail based on its ability to understand opponents, appeal to the uncommitted, and work effectively with partners and allies. And, cross-cultural competence is key to these capabilities.

Abbe

Looking forward, the National Defense Strategy does really rely on allies and partners in this strategy. And so, developing those relationships at all levels, from the tactical to strategic, is really important for success, especially in our relationships in the Pacific, where we might not have had the same level of experience, where military personnel serving now all have experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, now, we are looking to the Pacific, where they may not have as much cultural awareness or cultural knowledge. So, we need to rebuild that in personnel for another theater. And, more broadly, just for the strategy and facing all of our potential adversaries and competitors, it would be important to incorporate these cultural skills that we talk about in the article.

Host

The Department of Defense has identified language, regional expertise, and culture—the LREC rubric—as a body of related essential skills. Yet, you’ve chosen to focus on culture and, even more specifically, on cross-cultural competence. How do these skill sets relate, and why does your discussion single out culture?

Henk

Well, there has been, since the early twenty-first century, a new DoD focus on this new paradigm of LREC—language, regional expertise, and culture. Behind this formula is actually the explicit assumption that these are mutually reinforcing skills. We fully agree with that. Absolutely. But, imagine the best of all worlds—a military professional deploys to a contingency environment fluent in the local language, having a detailed knowledge of the region, [and] steeped in cross-cultural expertise. Of course, if these skills could be combined and harnessed in one person, he or she would have an unmatched ability to impact the social environment.

But, you know, that combination is an absolutely optimum scenario. It is conceivable but is very far from likely—simply because of the limitations of time and resources and human capacity. It is much more probable that real fluency in foreign languages and pockets of deep regional expertise will continue in our system to reside largely in specialized communities accessed as needed.

That being the case, here are a couple of observations.

Our need for foreign language speakers is so obvious that it hardly requires comment, and language-enabled service personnel are worth every penny we spend on them. And, we could do more—and should. But, no matter what inducements we use, we will never fully satisfy the language demand, particularly the requirements for sudden, newly needed languages. We all know that military professionals are not all able to learn languages or to learn them well, and very few of us will learn enough different languages to cover all likely contingency environments to which we may be sent.

Now, the same holds true for regional knowledge, actually. It is valuable stuff. We should produce more of it. But, when it’s held by one person, it’s simply not going to stretch far enough and deep enough to cover even the predictable, let alone the unforeseen, in the worldwide responsibilities of the general-purpose forces. The fact is we are devoting substantial resources to both language and regional expertise, but these two skill sets, despite their value, have significant limitations. That’s why, for us, the long pole in the human-relations tent has to be cross-cultural competence. Sure, that competence would be immensely enhanced if supported by language fluency and regional expertise in the right place and time—and again, if these were available. But of the three, cross-cultural competence is the only generalized set of skills that could be used anywhere. It’s the only set that could be instantly available. That’s why cross-cultural competence is an astute investment. If we can produce it, you can be absolutely assured we will use it everywhere all the time.

Abbe

I just want to emphasize that point about how difficult it is to scale language proficiency very rapidly—even getting personnel to limited proficiency for operations takes [a] substantial amount of time. And so, being able to scale that, as we found in previous conflicts, there’s just so many limitations on it. So, we’re not arguing against language skills per se but arguing for a more scalable skill set in helping personnel understand cultures and how to make sense of other cultures wherever it is that they find themselves in deployments.

Henk 

Well, most Western military establishments, certainly including our own, could offer at least occasional examples of senior leaders with remarkable cross-cultural skills. Anthony Zinni, we’ve already mentioned is a case in point.

We have had these examples of people who could do this stuff very, very well, but they did it as an art. Their background [and] maybe their experience all contributed to their personal ability to do this. We want to make this a replicable science that we can spread much more widely than the isolated artists that have practiced it well in the past.

Host

What institutional approaches would you recommend to embed and sustain US military cross-cultural skills?

Henk

As an organizational culture, we do, at times, exhibit a notorious fickleness, [a] tendency to chase butterflies, and a tendency to abandon promising initiatives that do not produce instant results. Now, these characteristics have worked against the culture initiatives in the past, but there are some significant differences now, and there is room for optimism here. The military need for culture skills is more evident today than it’s ever been. Any lack of these skills is much more quickly and graphically visible to a worldwide attended public than any time in the past. There’s lots of incentive for acquiring this skill set. Also, while the culture initiatives in the past two decades seem to have stalled, they did make some progress that appears to be, at least, somewhat durable. These initiatives did result in the recruitment of more culture educators than we have ever had in the past. They’re now at least thinly seated in military education.

These initiatives also produce more culture content in that education, even if it remains at a very foundational level. So, there is a nucleus of a constituency and a body of culture education that simply did not exist before. But probably much more significantly, the LREC development as a whole, including culture skill, is now embedded in Office of the Secretary of Defense [OSD] and Joint Staff mandates and is visible in OSD oversight infrastructure. If it’s given sufficient priority, resources, and teeth, these mandates could be powerful instruments to push the program along.

That said, as we argued in the article, we believe that the development of a cross-culturally competent force requires at least four additional essential initiatives to achieve a lasting status and impact. These, we argue, are a senior advocate in OSD—like the senior language authority but charged specifically with overseeing culture skills development. We think it’s necessary to have a strategic plan for culture development similar to the Language Transformation Roadmap of 2005, which provided, actually, a real strategy—ends, ways, and means. We think it’s important that we renew the emphasis of recruitment of culture subject matter experts, those with terminal degrees, into both military education and into the policy infrastructure. Most importantly of all, we think that a defense culture center similar in shape to the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute is necessary to push the science, connect the research to practice, and infuse it into the skills development that’s needed at all levels. 

It’s our firm conviction that these measures would finally embed cross-cultural competence in the collective American military mind as a critically important set of conceptual tools.

Abbe

I think that the Marine Corps’ Center for Advanced Operational Culture Learning, which is now no longer in existence, is a good example of an organization that was able to translate the social science into something actionable for Marines to use. So, that might serve as a model for how to reestablish some of these connections. The Department of Defense is funding social science through the Minerva program [Minerva Research Initiative] that may be relevant to this kind of professional development that Dan talks about, but there’s a missing link there to make that more accessible in military professional education or training programs. Some of the recommendations that we’ve made in the article would help bridge that gap between the research and the practitioners so that they can be better prepared to interact in those cultures when they find themselves in exercises or deployments.

Host

Your article also alludes to a long-term educational process to develop cross-cultural skills within the force. What would that process look like?

Henk

How would we acquire a cross-cultural competent military? It would not be quick. It would not be easy. But, culture skills could reach a much broader community of practitioners than the deep-language skills or the regional expertise. Now, building that competence is an educational process, but it’s an educational process that involves conceptual molding over a long period of time. [The] earlier it starts in life, the better.

Ideally, for at least military personnel, the start time should at least be pre-accession education, and the molding would continue through the whole professional lifetime. For this kind of education to be effective, it simply has to be empirically based, continuous, persistent, consistent, experiential—let me emphasize that. Experiential—and measurable. We will not get there if we try to base it on boutique seminars, culture hustler contractors, idiosyncratic educators, or unconnected learning episodes. The building blocks have to correlate with each other. They have to relate to the foundation.

If we expect the recipients of this learning to take it seriously and not dismiss it as superficial, subjective, and speculative, we are going to be obliged to prove that the skills are real, they are progressive, and they do impart a significant capability. Military cross-culture competence today might be a lot like military aviation in the 1920s. We see its potential, but we know we have a long way to go to realize it.

Abbe

I would just add that the professional development also has to be sustainable from the institution’s perspective. The Army adopted a culture and foreign language strategy in 2009 with some of these, outlining what some of the professional development would look like at different career stages. But, ultimately, that plan was not really sustainable from a resourcing perspective, and so, I think part of the job of culture scientists and a potential DoD culture center would be to look at what are most efficient ways to develop some of these skills so that it’s sustainable from a resourcing perspective over time.

Host

Listeners, you can download the article at press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters. Look for volume 54, issue 3. For more Army War College podcasts, check out Conversations on Strategy, SSI Live, CLSC Dialogues, and A Better Peace.

Thank you so much.

Abbe

Your time. Thank you, Stephanie. Appreciate you, too.

Henk

Thank you.