Those who continue to harbour a late 20th-century view of war and the armed forces would be surprised if they were to visit a Western military brigade-level or higher headquarters in any of the several fronts in what has recently been described as the ‘continuous war’ currently on-going. There are some strange people to be found there.

In addition to the professional – almost exclusively since the abolition or suspension of conscription in most Western countries – military personnel trained in infantry operations, fire-support, PsyOps and the host of other military specialities that one should reasonably expect to find, there are also anthropologists, archaeologists, art experts, the occasional theologian (in addition to the chaplains, who have other concerns), and representatives from disciplines that have apparently nothing to do with what is perceived to be the dirty business at hand: to wit, killing people and blowing things and people up.

The deployment of anthropologists with combat forces has probably attracted the most attention in the popular press since it became known that the US was using them in Iraq as part of General Petraeus’ counter-insurgency doctrine (see, for example, Rohde 2007). Their role as part of the Human Terrain System (HTS) (see US Army 2009) – which involves collecting and/or analysing information about the societies and groups within them in areas of combat operations and providing the results of that analysis to the local and higher-echelon commanders for consideration in their operations – has been discussed and criticised at length (see below).

Those who look favourably on the use of anthropologists in this way point out that the information they provide makes it possible for commanders to better understand the human side of the often extremely alien social environments in which they are operating and thereby to make choices that do not exacerbate through ignorance an already difficult situation. It can also help them to be more effective militarily, so that, for example, they target the actual combatants rather than indiscriminately selecting from a group all of whom – given the tendency of non-conventional forces to avoid the Geneva-mandated ‘fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance’ (ICRC 1949) denoting armed forces affiliation – dress alike.