Human Terrain Teams

Human Terrain Teams are an organizational innovation intended to improve the U.S. military's capacity to acquire "sociocultural knowledge" in conditions of irregular warfare. Although the Human Terrain System, the larger organization that has responsibility for creating, educating, fielding, and learning from the human terrain teams, has been described elsewhere on wikipedia, little has been written on wikipedia about the human terrain teams themselves. A recently published book by Christopher J. Lamb, James Douglas Orton, Michael Davies, and Theodore Pikulsky—Human Terrain Teams: An Organizational Innovation for Sociocultural Knowledge in Irregular Warfare—focuses attention on the 81 human terrain teams deployed to Afghanistan between 2007 and 2012. The discussion of human terrain teams—especially the known determinants of their effectiveness and ineffectiveness—needs to continue.