Army withdraws culture manual over plagiarism, bad content claims

For the past 10 years, the U.S. Army has tried to integrate cross-cultural awareness and education across all levels of training. The capstone of that effort was the release in April of Army Techniques Publication (ATP) 3-24.3, a training manual entitled “Cultural and Situational Understanding” produced by the Army’s Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.

But last week, the Army abruptly withdrew the manual after the website BuzzFeed circulated it to a number of cultural anthropologists and military experts who sharply criticized the way it seemed to present complex cultural interchange as something that could be reduced to a series of checklists dealing with everything from table etiquette to religion. But perhaps more significantly, the experts who reviewed the manual found numerous examples of plagiarism.

“After taking a closer look at the content in ATP 3-24.3, we have pulled the ATP from circulation and it is no longer an approved doctrine publication,” Bill Ackerly of the Mission Command Center of Excellence at Fort Leavenworth told BuzzFeed by email last week. “The ATP will not be re-released until the content issue has been resolved.”

Although the Army’s statement suggests the manual’s content created the problem, several military experts told me they believe the accusations of plagiarism carried the most weight in the Army’s decision to withdraw the document.

“They probably could have left it out there and just made product improvements if it were just the content criticisms,” said Steve Bucci, a retired Army Special Forces officer and a military analyst with the Heritage Foundation. “But once you throw the plagiarism on there too, it’s such bad press that it would be dumb not to pull it back, kill it, re-craft the whole thing and do it academically correctly from the documentation standpoint.”

The Army has a long history of recycling its own military training and doctrinal materials without attribution, Bucci told me. But academic or other material should be cited using footnotes or endnotes, he said. The accusations of plagiarism in ATP 3-24.3 suggest the practice of citing sources without attribution is not uncommon in military doctrine and training publications—primarily because of the writing process.

“These are doctrinal and training manuals and they’re always a group effort,” said Ben Connable, a retired Marine intelligence officer and an analyst with RAND. “So it would be almost impossible to attribute and cite and give credit for everything in these manuals because usually more than 100 people have contributed to them.”

Connable told me although the plagiarism allegations warrant a military-wide debate on the topic, he believes there is a larger concern about using non-attributed material in doctrinal publications: “We don’t know where this is coming from, and especially in very sensitive cases like this, it can be dangerous.”

Roberto Gonzalez, a cultural anthropologist from San Jose State University and one of the manual’s critical reviewers, described it as a “dumbed-down Anthropology 101 textbook.”

“It includes bizarre over-generalizations and stereotypes that one would never find in an anthropology text,” he wrote on his blog.

The implication is that reducing cross-cultural and intercultural engagement to such stereotypes could prove counterproductive to the very thing the manual is trying to produce: soldiers who are skilled and capable when dealing with non-Americans in a combat or security cooperation environment.

“Ideally you’d love to have every soldier … have the kind of cross-cultural skills and the ability to move into another culture and deal with it appropriately if you could,” Bucci told me. “Unfortunately, that’s kind of a really heavy lift. You’re asking a bunch of young kids … to do something that in the past has only really been done by some of the higher order Special Ops guys.”

Bucci thinks the Army’s intent was good, but its execution was flawed.

“I’m not sure we can get there at the training mode,” he said. “Maybe we ought to be satisfied with just giving good briefings and hoping for the best, and then leave the actual cross-cultural communication stuff to the folks who have a little more experience with it.”

Despite its flaws and even the allegations of plagiarism, Bucci and Connable applauded the Army for even attempting to write a definitive doctrinal manual on an important topic that was bound to become the target of criticism.

“In defense of the Army, you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t,” Connable said. “And no matter what you say about culture, you’re wrong. The most fundamental general issues about culture are far from settled.”