MILITARY GEOGRAPHY
    FOR PROFESSIONALS AND THE PUBLIC

PART TWO: CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY

9.  POPULATIONS

Mao Zedong
On Protracted War

MAO'S REMARKS WERE NOT RESTRICTED TO UNIFORMED COMRADES WHO, IN 1935, COMPLETED THE LONG March from Jiangxi Province to the Shaanxi caves near Bao'an (map 3, page 19). He also meant the Chinese people, peasantry in particular, whose sturdy stock was his primary source of strength. Mao still planned to "drown [invaders] in a hostile human sea" even after the nuclear-armed Soviet Union turned against him a quarter-century later, steadfast in his belief that "modern long-range weapons, including atomic bombs," would be "helpless and ineffective" in any protracted war when opposed by industrially backward but ideologically indoctrinated masses who were not afraid to die for their homeland.¹

Soviet leaders never put Mao's premise to the test, but most authorities generally agree that the human element in military affairs is huge. Strategists and tacticians who concoct plans and conduct operations in the absence of sound knowledge concerning the demographics, cultural characteristics, and social structures of coalition partners as well as opponents are on shaky ground. Sun Tzu, who was Mao's mentor many times removed (circa 500 B.C.), took that contention one step further: "Know the enemy and know yourself," he counseled, "in a hundred battles you will never be in peril. When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your chances of winning or losing are equal. If ignorant both of your enemy and yourself, you are certain in every battle to be in peril."² Population patterns, the racial-ethnic-tribal mix, languages, religions, customs, tempers, attitudes, and loyalties are everywhere important.

DEMOGRAPHY

Demography deals with the size, density, geographic distribution, composition, and other vital statistics of populations the world over. Military practitioners concentrate on demographic conditions that influence current plans, programs, and operations. Birth rates, life expectancies, the practice of polygamy, and percentages of married persons, for example, are less important than sex and age profiles that determine the number of individuals eligible for military service and the size of local labor pools. Relationships between minorities and majorities are more important than relative percentages of the population that each represents.

PERTINENT HEAD COUNTS

Approximately 5.8 billion people populated Planet Earth in 1997, of which four-fifths lived in the least developed countries (figure 28). China and India alone contributed two billion, while the Western Hemisphere, Africa, Europe, and Central Asian states that belonged to the former Soviet Union divided most of the remainder. Populations in the poorest regions will expand disproportionately before the year 2025, most of them in Asia and Africa, if projections prove correct, which is by no means a foregone conclusion considering the unpredictable impact of AIDS, widespread starvation, and wars.³

Militarily important statistics include total populations in any given country, the number of men and women of military age (generally ages 15 to 49), and percentages that are fit for active service. Israel (population 5.7 million, of which 15 percent are Palestinians⁴) cannot maintain large active forces in "peacetime," must mobilize reserves from the civilian work force to meet military emergencies, could ill afford extensive casualties, and would face economic collapse in a protracted war of attrition. Armed services fed by much larger societies are better able to replenish heavy losses before they become combat ineffective, as several major powers demonstrated during two World Wars in the 20th century. Even the winners, however, paid a higher price than table 13 reflects, because figures therein exclude civilian casualties, military personnel rendered permanently ill or disabled, horrendous Chinese losses from 1937 through 1941, and incalculable deprivation of latent talent.⁵

Table 13. Military Dead and Missing, World Wars I and II

DISTRIBUTION PATTERNS

A few favored nations ideally distribute many cities, towns, and villages over large land masses and keep a high percentage well removed from unfriendly frontiers. Countries cursed

Figure 28. Present and Projected World Populations

with population patterns that afford fewer safeguards are more vulnerable to invasion unless blessed with benign neighbors (as Canada is) or topographic barriers (such as those that shelter Switzerland). Russia's territory, for example, is immense, but its people are predominantly located on flatlands west of the Ural Mountains in positions that have been overrun repeatedly. Syria, Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, and Iran are even more vulnerable, because most residents occupy capital cities--Damascus, Tel Aviv, Amman, Cairo, Riyadh, Kuwait City, Baghdad, and Teheran--plus a sprinkling of other centers such as Hama, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Jiddah, Basra, Meshed, and Isphahan. Even one well-placed tactical nuclear weapon delivered by an aircraft, missile, motor vehicle, or other means might instantaneously put any of those countries politically, economically, and militarily out of commission. No amount of dispersion could provide any nation with complete protection against such attacks, but population patterns that require enemy marksmen to hit many targets instead of one or two increase the costs of aggression and reduce dangers that accompany excessive concentration.

POPULATION DENSITIES

Overpopulation can lead to armed conflict if pressures cause intolerable spillovers or internal combustion. Real or imagined inabilities to support preferred life styles often act as catalysts, as Adolph Hitler confirmed early in World War II when he seized Slavic lands partly to satisfy Germany's alleged need for Lebensraum (literally "living space"). Japan invaded Manchuria in 1937 and later established a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere for much the same reason.⁶ Spontaneous overflows may inadvertently instigate strife that no one intended, which happened in 1971 when nine million refugees from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) flooded into already overcrowded India to escape massacres by West Pakistanis and thereby precipitated a brief three-way war. Population pressures also can cause or contribute to civil wars contained within national borders. Prominent observers of Burundi, for example, contend that wholesale slaughters in that country twice occurred because too little room exacerbated political and class rivalries between the Tutsi and Hutu tribes, first in 1972 and again in the 1990s.⁷

PHYSICAL ATTRIBUTES

National and regional populations consist of individuals who differ considerably with regard to strength, endurance, hardiness, and health. Military commanders and staffs function most effectively only if they fully understand the collective implications of such characteristics, which may be positive, negative, or neutral.

COMPARATIVE PHYSIQUES

Not many militarily significant physical attributes distinguish one people from another. Heavily built, lightly built, and moderately built men and women perform equally well under most circumstances, whether they are tall or short, dark or light skinned, blond, brunette, or red-headed, given proper equipment, equal training, and periods of acclimatization when shifted from familiar to unfamiliar geographic regions. Two exceptions seem to stand out.

Military personnel whose skin or hair color is different than those of opponents find it difficult to operate behind enemy lines if the civilian population is hostile and, if caught and incarcerated, rarely elude recapture. Every U.S. prisoner of war (POW) who slipped out of a North Korean stockade between 1950 and 1953 was apprehended, as was every fugitive from a permanent camp in North Vietnam (1965-1972), partly because black and white faces were conspicuous in hostile territory. Only one made it home from Laos and very few escaped from Viet Cong cages in Communist-controlled territory within South Vietnam. ⁸

Operations at very high altitudes comprise the second exception. Lowlanders seldom (some say never) seem to attain the same stamina in rarefied atmosphere as mountaineers born and raised above the tree line, no matter how long they remain.⁹ Few battles, however, have been fought at extreme elevations since Francisco Pizarro defeated the Incan Emperor Atahualpa early in the 16th century and Peruvians ousted Spanish forces 300 years later. Chinese regulars and Tibetan resistance groups clashed sporadically in the 1950s before Beijing crushed a hopeless revolt.¹⁰ Chinese, Indian, and Pakistani troops have periodically skirmished along Himalayan heights since then, most notably over control of Jammu and Kashmir, but never have conducted sustained campaigns despite repeated threats to do so.¹¹ Troops that descend from lofty homelands to do battle near sea level experience no adverse effects, if the legendary Gurkha Rifles of Nepal are anywhere near typical. They have served the British Crown well since 1817 under every geographic condition from steaming jungles to the frigid Falkland Islands.¹²

PUBLIC HEALTH

Poor public health conditions and endemic diseases can undercut military capabilities just as surely as enemy actions. Potentially fatal maladies such as malaria, typhoid fever, typhus, cholera, plague, and influenza, together with nonlethal miseries that drastically reduce proficiency, have taken a terrible toll on armed forces throughout history. Serious problems remain despite intensive and extensive searches for solutions, as U.S. statistics from World War II, Korea, and Vietnam illustrate:¹³

Table 14. Causes of U.S. Wartime Casualties

U.S. medical intelligence specialists catalog diseases in 140 countries according to short (less than 15 days) and long incubation periods. Anthrax, AIDS, and ebola are relatively recent additions to an already long list that runs from African trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness) to yaws and yellow fever. Acute respiratory diseases as well as penicillin-resistant strains of syphilis and gonorrhea are rampant worldwide. Mosquito-borne Rift Valley fever, tick-borne hemorrhagic fever, and leishmaniasis, a parasitic disease deposited by sand flies, are a few among many tropical afflictions.¹⁴ Countermeasures emphasize immunizations and sanitation, with particular attention to purified water for drinking, cooking, shower facilities, even field laundries; vermin-free kitchens, chow lines, and living quarters; disinfected latrines; periodic "delousing" whenever appropriate; insect and rodent control; and proper waste disposal.

CULTURAL CHARACTERISTICS

Some large populations are nearly homogeneous, but most mingle majorities and minorities with assorted languages, religions, traditions, customs, mores, likes, dislikes, and life styles that create internal or international tensions. Former Yugoslavia, for example, is a crazy quilt of ethnic, religious, linguistic, and cultural animosities. Serbs, who are Orthodox Christians, and Roman Catholic Croats are the most prominent entities, followed by Slovenes, Slavic Muslims, Albanians, Macedonians, and perhaps 15 smaller groups. Serbo-Croatian is considered one language, although Serbs use the Cyrillic alphabet while Croats prefer Latin letters. Slovene and Macedonian are two other official tongues.¹⁵

MAJORITIES AND MINORITIES

Heterogeneous nations generally contain genetically dissimilar racial stocks and culturally distinct ethnic groups that sometimes subdivide into clans or tribes. Table 15 displays representative relationships that commonly are complex. Racial, ethnic, and tribal factions that enjoy a marked quantitative majority do not necessarily dominate, as relatively few European colonists long demonstrated in heavily populated Asian and African countries. Minorities may mesh well (witness the former U.S. "melting pot") or be anathematized (witness the former pogroms against Jews in Europe). Military strategists and tacticians should study racial, ethnic, and tribal connections in assigned areas of responsibility, because root causes of conflict, potentials for escalation, countermeasures, and probabilities of success are situationally specific from place to place and case to case.¹⁶ Racial tensions, for instance, precipitated irreconcilable troubles in Black Africa as long as whites held the upper hand, while religious and cultural factors presently predominate in Bosnia, where all belligerents are essentially Slavic, and in the Middle East where Arabs as well as Israelis are Semitic. Three waves of racial, ethnic, and tribal conflict have caused incalculable suffering in the 20th century. The first onslaught began shortly before, accompanied, and followed World War I, when Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian rulers lost control. Atrocities against "starving Armenians" were among the most terrible.¹⁷ An anticolonial wave washed across southern Asia and almost all of Africa in the wake of World War II. The third wave hit the Third World wherever weak replacement governments seemed vulnerable or strong ones were repressive. The bloodletting in Biafra (southeastern Nigeria) that pitted powerful Fulani and Hausa tribes against the Ibo minority between 1967 and 1970 took more than a million lives and briefly made banner headlines,¹⁸ as did genocidal operations that the Khmer Rouge

Table 15. Representative Racial, Ethnic, and Tribal Relationships

conducted against city dwellers in Cambodia (1975-1979).¹⁹ Former Yugoslavia caught fire a few years after Tito's death, largely because successors were unable to keep the lid on ancient animosities. Other collisions traceable to racial, ethnic, or tribal rivalries have occurred since 1990 in hot spots such as Peru, Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, and Liberia. Motivations include communal violence, various abuses, secessionist movements, irredentism, actions to retrieve lost territory, and hypersensitivity, often in combination.²⁰

LANGUAGES

Linguistic cohesion tends to solidify societies whereas fragmentation pulls them apart. Small wonder, therefore, that inability to communicate effectively often leads to armed conflict. Nine language families currently exist: Indo-European (Slavic, Germanic, Romance, Iranic, Indic); Hamito-Semetic; Altai; Niger-Congo; Malayo-Polynesian; Uraic; Sino-Tibetan; Austro-Asiatic; and a miscellaneous family that includes Aborigine, Amerind, Dravidian, Eskimoan, Khoisan, Nilo-Saharan, Paleosiberian, Papuan, and Tai. Perhaps 6,000 tongues were recognizable at the end of the 20th century, of which only a dozen boasted more than a hundred million speakers (table 16).²¹

Many lesser languages at that time numbered a few million to a few thousand adherents (a few hundred for some primitive tribes), sometimes clustered so tightly that they form "shatter zones" similar to the Caucasus, where 51 languages persist in an area roughly the size of Florida (table 17).²² Russian troops deployed to keep that volatile region under control found it hard to communicate effectively with the local populace. Native Americans (mainly Navaho "Code Talkers") transmitted messages in their arcane languages during World War II, confusing enemy cryptologists, to whom Amerind variants were unfamiliar.²³

Armed forces deployed in foreign countries must be able to participate in peacetime training with indigenous troops, interrogate prisoners of war, eavesdrop electronically on enemies, communicate with refugees, and interact with coalition partners. U.S. Special Forces reasonably fluent in Arabic accompanied more than 100 Middle Eastern formations during the Persian Gulf War of 1991 to facilitate coordination with English speaking units on their flanks, arrange U.S. artillery and air strikes, and reduce the likelihood of casualties from "friendly fire."²⁴ Textbook command of any language seldom is sufficient, because dialects, slang, local idioms, and argot abound, along with arcane military lingo. Figures of speech moreover are subject to frequent change--few in the United States still refer to marijuana as "grass" or police as "pigs," although "flower children" and "hippies" found both terms fashionable in the 1960s. Pidgin, which is popular in the South Pacific, rules out all but the most rudimentary conversations. Military "visitors" in foreign lands find reading and writing less important than spoken words wherever most people are illiterate or semiliterate.

U.S. citizens as a rule are reluctant linguists, partly because many officials, shop keepers, and hotel employees in foreign lands understand English, which additionally is the official language of NATO and air traffic controllers everywhere. Needs for expertise in Native American tongues are next to negligible throughout Latin America, where most people speak Spanish, except for Brazil where Portuguese takes precedence--although Quechua, which is common in Columbia, Peru, and Equador comes in handy for armed forces engaged in counternarcotics operations.

Proficiency in foreign languages nevertheless is useful in most places. U.S. Central Command currently covers 17 countries in northeast Africa and southwest Asia, plus Afghanistan and Pakistan, where Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, Pashtu, Dari, Amharic, Somali, and Swahili prevail. U.S. Pacific Command's area of responsibility, which embraces East Asia, most of the Indian subcontinent, Australia, and adjacent islands, contains 30 million people who speak 18 main languages and countless dialects. Strict priorities based on the best possible requirement forecasts are essential, because no command could possibly muster enough well-qualified linguists for every occasion (only 16 U.S. military linguists on active duty had studied Iraqi dialects before Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990). Somali speakers were in such short supply when Operation Restore Hope erupted in December 1992 that warlord Mohammed Farah Aideed's son, a U.S. Marine corporal, served as a translator until his presence became impolitic. Foreign language specialists, produced at great expense in time and money, consequently should be considered prized possessions.²⁵

Table 16. Ten Leading Languages (1990s)

Source: L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, ed., The History and Geography of Human Genes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 162.

Table 17. Linguistic Clutter in the Caucasus

RELIGIONS

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, which first appeared in that sequence, constitute "global religions" whose adherents spread far beyond their original regions. Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and Shinto are confined largely to East Asia, Hindus and Sikhs concentrate in India, and various traditional religions (ancestor worship, animism, shamanism, and voodoo) are most prominent among Haitians and in Black Africa (table 18).²⁶

Table 18. Principal Religions and Selected Denominations

Every religion tends to unify its followers, whereas "we against the world" syndromes tend to tear societies apart whenever they pit gentiles against Jews, Muslims against infidels, Christians against pagans, and "true believers" against agnostics.²⁷ Religious conflicts in fact can be incredibly cruel. Christian Crusaders between 1095 and 1270 were just as merciless toward nonconformists close to home as they were toward Muslims in the Holy Land. When Simon IV de Montfort asked the emissary of Pope Innocent III how he might identify heretics in the French city of Béziers the response was, "Kill them all. God will know his own."²⁸ The Thirty Years' War, which devastated Western Europe between 1618 and 1648, began as a Roman Catholic backlash against the Protestant Reformation in Germany.²⁹ Christian officers employed by the British East India Company in Bengal precipitated the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 through failure to respect religious taboos--newly issued Enfield rifles furnished the catalyst, because indigenous troops had to bite paper cartridges that allegedly were greased with fat from cattle, which Hindus consider sacred, and fat from swine, which Muslims consider unclean.³⁰ British General Charles "Chinese" Gordon later crushed the theocratic Taiping Rebellion in China, but not before 20 million people perished between 1850 and 1864. Sudanese dervishes devoted to Muhammad Ahmad Ibn Assayyid, a self-proclaimed Mahdi (messiah) who sought to "purify" Islam, inflicted widespread casualties and slew Gordon two decades later before reinforcements reconquered Khartoum.³¹

One need not delve so deeply into the past to discover religious atrocities with profound military implications:³²

• Peacekeepers must separate Christian Greeks from Islamic Turks on Cyprus, Jews from Muslims in the Sinai, and Muslims from Christians in Bosnia.
• Christian Armenians and Azerbaijani Muslims cannot seem to coexist in the Caucasus.
• Buddhist Sinhalese and Hindu Tamils in Sri Lanka profess little interest in peace.
• Interdenominational disputes spill blood by the barrel in Northern Ireland, where Catholics and Protestants are at each other's throats, and in Iraq where President Saddam Hussein prompts the Sunni majority to slaughter Shiite minorities.
• Religious warfare repeatedly desecrates hallowed grounds: hundreds have perished at the Sikh's Golden Temple in the Punjab; rioting at the temple where Rama reportedly was born left 2,000 Hindus and Muslims dead in 1992; and Jews battled Palestinians on Jerusalem's Temple Mount in 1996.

Military commanders and staffs who overlook religious traditions and temperaments risk wrong moves in at least two regards. First, they may inadvertently offend friends and neutrals who might mistakenly interpret their behavior as intentional disrespect (U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia abstain from alcoholic beverages because Islam forbids imbibement). Second, they may miss opportunities to exploit religious practices. Egyptian troops, for example, caught Israeli defenders flatfooted when they crossed the Suez Canal in 1973, because the attack not only coincided with Yom Kippur, a Jewish high holy day, but occurred during the month of Ramadan, which Muslims normally reserve for fasting and prayer.³³ North Vietnamese soldiers and their Viet Cong accomplices took similar advantage in 1968 when they triggered the Tet offensive while lunar New Year festivities with religious overtones were in full swing south of the demilitarized zone.³⁴

CURRENT ATTITUDES

Moods of the masses play a pivotal role in political-military affairs, regardless of the size, distribution, density, and cultural characteristics of any population. Loyalties, morale, temperaments of the moment (aggressive, pacific, neutral, apathetic), discipline, laws, ethics, and values all are relevant.

LOYALTIES

Armed forces that hope to influence friendly, enemy, or neutral populations favorably in peacetime as well as war must understand where primary loyalties lie, because nations, regions, races, religious preferences, ethnic groups, tribes, political parties, social castes, and other affiliations may stake first claim when interests conflict and the chips are down. Communism currently dominates in North Korea, Canadians of French extraction cling to their ethnic heritage, and Somalis coalesce around clans. Predilections, moreover, may change over time. Stephen Decatur's stirring words, "Our country . . . may she always be right; but our country right or wrong" currently resonate less in the United States than they did when delivered in 1816. Allegiances, in short, strongly condition popular responses to external stimuli and strengthen tendencies to solidify or crack under pressure.

MORALE

General George C. Marshall, speaking at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, on June 15, 1941, described public morale as a state of mind. It is steadfastness, courage and hope. It is confidence and zeal and loyalty. It is élan, esprit de corps, and determination. It is staying power, the spirit which endures to the end--the will to win. With it, all things are possible, without it everything else, planning, preparation, production count for naught.

Leadership, discipline, community ties, and group self-respect commonly buttress morale. So can pain and privation coupled with steadfast belief in a worthy cause, provided they encourage civilians as well as uniformed personnel to produce more, consume less, and stand fast in desperate situations. That happened during the Battle of Britain in 1940, later in Leningrad, Stalingrad, and Berlin, and later still in heavily populated parts of Vietnam, where courage persisted despite a rain of bombs. Fascist Italy, in contrast, capitulated early in World War II because the urge to compete expired.³⁵

Moods of the masses may be consistent or vacillate from liberal to conservative, hawkish to dovish, idealistic to realistic, rational to irrational. Shifting opinions sometimes create a pendulum effect similar to that experienced by the United States during the Vietnam War: indifference in the early 1960s; avid involvement in the mid-1960s; disillusionment in the late 1960s; and return to indifference after the last U.S. ground forces withdrew in 1972. Political-military leaders attuned to such trends are best able to exploit resultant enemy weaknesses and limit their own vulnerabilities.

MORAL AND LEGAL CONSTRAINTS

Legal, ethical, and moral codes of conduct designed to limit the way armed forces wage war were nearly nonexistent in olden times, when life belonged to the meat eaters. Every man, woman, and child, male or female, young or old, combatant or bystander who owed allegiance to or merely resided in rival territory was an enemy to be eradicated. Triumphant troops commonly slaughtered prisoners of war or sold them into slavery. Entire civilizations disappeared. Bloodthirsty Assyrians under Sennacherib obliterated Babylon in 689 B.C. Medes and Chaldeans shortly thereafter sacked Ninevah, the Assyrian capital, and sowed the site with salt.

Tighter ground rules apply today. Most nations, in principle if not in practice, approve controls contained in two Hague Conventions (1899, 1907), as well as the Geneva Conventions of 1864, 1906, 1929, and 1949, which, taken together, distinguish between uniformed combatants and bystanders, proscribe inhumane techniques, and prescribe humane treatment of POWs.³⁶ Dictators, firm in their conviction that might makes right, routinely match ends with military means as they see fit without much regard for legality, but leaders in free societies seldom can conduct sizable military operations for any purpose without the consent or passive acquiescence of people they represent. Fingers on the public pulse at home and abroad consequently can furnish useful clues concerning courses of action that either or both sides might adopt or discard.

NATIONAL PERSONALITIES

Political scientists eternally debate degrees to which (even whether) any nation possesses a collective "personality" that military planners and operators can safely include in their calculations. Disputants might well apply similar arguments to large racial and ethnic groups within any given society.

One school of thought insists that national personalities not only set peoples apart and condition the way they behave but strongly resist change. Patience, stoicism, and dogmatic devotion to the homeland, for example, remained dominant Russian attributes despite huge upheavals that wracked national institutions and values at every level of life after Communist dictators replaced tsars in 1917 and again after glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) programs started to transform that closed society in the late 1980s. Cambodians as a society consider themselves to be warriors, whereas Lowland Laotians, their next door neighbors, are gentle; many in mortal combat seek to scare off enemy spirits with near misses rather than shots aimed to kill. Disciples of this school, who contend that nearly every nation displays equally distinctive characteristics, see Germans as group-oriented, industrious, disciplined, and amenable to governmental authority while U.S. citizenry, in contrast, is individualistic, innovative, violent, generous, gullible, and protective of personal rights.³⁷

A second school scoffs at these generalizations as stereotypes, challenges the permanence of national personality traits, and cites historical examples to support its contentions.³⁸ The German General Staff, headed by Prussian generals who prided themselves on "a genius for war" for 200 years, disappeared after World War II.³⁹ Japan, which long honored Bushido (the way of Samurai warriors), still subscribes to a 1946 Constitution that renounces war forever.⁴⁰ U.S. sentiments switched from isolationism in the 1930s to international involvement the following decade and have remained so ever since. Consistency, in short, is less characteristic than change, according to skeptics.

Spokespersons for school three see a middle ground. Different peoples, they assert, do "tend to be more like each other than they are like members of any other nation," members of a given culture do "tend to respond in similar ways," cultural pressures will "impose a more or less common direction on individual differences and mitigate them to some extent," and "large areas of near uniformity" will emerge.⁴¹ Thoughtful statesmen and military commanders who seek to reconcile ambiguities tread carefully, because none of those three schools seems entirely correct or erroneous.

CROSS-CULTURAL SKILLS

Military personnel who work closely with counterparts in foreign countries must be familiar with local folkways and possess cross-cultural communication skills that include reasonable fluency in prevalent languages and dialects, plus reading and writing abilities wherever their contacts are literate.

FAMILIARITY WITH FOLKWAYS

Familiarity with folkways takes precedence over familiarity with foreign languages. Cogent considerations cover a broad spectrum that includes traditions, customs, values, motivations, hopes, fears, and taboos; religious beliefs; rites, rituals, and holidays; manners and mannerisms; behavior; social hierarchies; lines of authority; relationships between men and women; moral codes and sexual mores; work ethics, competition versus cooperation, and punctuality; views about bribes and official corruption; and dietary regimes.⁴²

Dealings with unfamiliar cultures demand patience, self-control, abilities to cope with frustration, and tolerance for unfamiliar ways of life. An excerpt from instructions in Saudi Arabia: A Soldier's Guide, which the United States Army issued to troops during Operation Desert Storm, illustrates items that, properly modified, might apply almost anywhere:

Greetings

DO—

• Shake hands when you meet and leave Arab men
• Rise to show respect when an esteemed person enters the room
• Feel free to return a hug or a kiss on the cheek initiated by an Arab man

Working with Arabs

DO—

• Train officers and enlisted men separately if possible
• Refer any serious problems to an Arab leader

DON'T—

• Criticize an Arab. Give corrective guidance privately and positively, if required
• Overpraise an Arab in front of others
• Lose your temper
• Expect Arabs to be punctual for administrative meetings

Conversation

DO—

• Open conversation with small talk (How are you? How is your family?)
• Talk to Arabs as equals; avoid arguments; maintain eye contact
• Look for subtle meanings, since Arabs often answer questions indirectly

DON'T—

• Initiate talk about politics, religion, or ask questions about female family members
• Patronize or talk down to an Arab
• Move away from an Arab who stands very close to you during conversation
• Point the soles of your feet at an Arab when you are sitting with him (it is insulting).⁴³

FOREIGN AREA SPECIALISTS
Senior military staffs, attachés, foreign liaison cells, teams that train troops in foreign countries, psychological operations (PSYOP) forces, and civil affairs units all require foreign area specialists, because none can perform assigned missions most professionally without full appreciation for cultural contexts.

Military instructors, advisers, and mobile training teams, who need to know about foreign political peculiarities, pecking orders, and "eccentric" social practices, find that no amount of schooling and second-hand accounts can prepare them as well as onsite assignments. There is, in fact, no substitute for close association with people on the spot, where local leaders and the led possess assorted personalities, pursue personal or group agendas, and often as not live in separate worlds, segregated by rank, age, sex, color, education, and class barriers.

PSYOP specialists seek to influence the opinions, emotions, attitudes, and behavior of friends, neutrals, and enemies in ways that assist the accomplishment of national, international, or intranational objectives before, during, and after hostilities. They must master many political, economic, cultural, and topical subjects before they can tailor campaigns, themes, and messages that muster and maintain the attention of any given group and refute countermeasures, because each foreign audience has different interests, predispositions, vulnerabilities, and susceptibilities to various persuasions. Otherwise, they could only guess what pictures and colors on PSYOP leaflets might appeal to particular audiences and which would repel or be received derisively. ⁴⁴

Civil Affairs (CA) forces also covet cross-cultural skills, without which they cannot most competently arrange the acquisition of indigenous labor, transportation, communications, supplies, other resources, and miscellaneous services for use by armed forces in foreign lands; minimize civilian interference with military operations (refugee control is one related concern); help military commanders fulfill legal/moral obligations to civilians within assigned areas of responsibility; and, as directed, exercise executive, legislative, and judicial authority in occupied territories. U.S. CA units, in collaboration with Arab counterparts, performed most of those missions when they directed the delivery of emergency food, water, and medical supplies to Kuwait City on liberation day in 1991, then helped the Government of Kuwait restore health, sanitation, transportation, and electrical facilities, repair utilities, reestablish police forces, and extinguish fires in neighboring oil fields.⁴⁵

FAMILIARITY WITH FOREIGN LANGUAGES

Culturally attuned foreign area specialists need a reasonable command of the language(s) and dialect(s) prevalent where they perform. They sometimes can rely on a substitute tongue such as English, French, or pidgin, but abilities to communicate in the local vernacular gain much greater respect (a senior Japanese official once said to the author, "I expect to speak English when I'm in the United States, but I'm outraged when I must speak English to U.S. emissaries in my own country"). Conversational fluency moreover expands contacts immeasurably among citizens who are not bilingual. Face-to-face communications are most effective if presenters have a good feel for preferred tones of voice, emphases, inflections, and delivery speeds. Appropriate facial expressions and gestures also differ considerably from culture to culture. Americans who form a circle with thumb and forefinger, for example, signal "OK," whereas Greeks consider that gesture impolite and Brazilians believe it is obscene. The same sign signifies money in Japan and zero in France.⁴⁶

Foreign area specialists who lack linguistic skills must employ interpreters, even though that practice is less than completely satisfactory under best case circumstances. Cockneys, Scots, Cajuns, and Connecticut Yankees all speak English, but unique accents, regional dialects, and colloquialisms make it hard for them to understand each other. Problems compound when messages filter through the minds, value systems, and lips of third parties who may have ulterior motives and hidden agendas. Interpreters cannot transmit meanings along with words unless their competence includes military jargon and technical terms as well as local patois. Those with impeccable linguistic credentials moreover must conform well with cultural prejudices and caste systems, lest audiences pay more attention to who he or she is rather than what is said. Women, for example, make poor choices in societies where their status is low. Enlisted interpreters offend military officers in many countries, while commissioned interpreters tend to intimidate enlisted trainees and thereby impede learning processes.⁴⁷

Finally, it seems worth noting that foreign area specialists who can read and write as well as speak local languages learn much more about cultures and current events than those who cannot. Their capabilities and usefulness to assigned commands increase commensurately.

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