Tom Vanden Brook

USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — The Army misled Congress and taxpayers when it said it had killed in 2014 a program that embedded social scientists with combat units, according to a congressman, a Defense official and Army documents.

Last year, the Army said it had terminated the controversial battlefield anthropology program, known as the Human Terrain System, which had been plagued by documented time sheet fraud, racism and sexual harassment. It is not clear why the Army said the program was dead, according to a Defense Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity because officials were not authorized to speak publicly about the program.

Not only is the Human Terrain System alive, the official said, but the Army could expand it if more money becomes available.

Its continued existence and potential expansion outraged Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., a member of the Armed Services Committee.

“It’s absolutely astonishing that the Army wants to convince itself that it never killed HTS after it was publicly acknowledged that the program was done,” Hunter said. “Even if true, that the program was never killed, the Army was happy with members of Congress and the scientific community thinking and believing it was killed. The Army is evidently OK with taking people for fools.”

The Human Terrain System remains a program of record, which means it is designated to receive funding for years to come, the official said. Its current budget is about $1.2 million per year and employs two Army officers, two civilian employees and five contractors. Though there is no longer a requirement to deploy social scientists to battlefields, commanders have stated a need for social and cultural information in areas that they operate, the official said.

The program has spent more than $725 million since 2007, according to budget documents. Peak spending came in 2010 when the Army doled out $159 million as it rapidly expanded the effort during the height of the counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Contractors trained civilians with degrees in social science on how to advise commanders on avoiding needless fighting and on targeting aid to local populations.

Army kills controversial social science program

A USA TODAY investigation of the program, based on Army documents and interviews, found multiple problems. Many commanders scoffed at the reports from the teams and often relegated them to bases. Some team members were paid $280,000 annually for work that investigators suspected had never been done. A 2010 Army investigation concluded that the program had been “fraught with waste, fraud and abuse.”

The American Anthropological Association, the world's largest organization of the field's scholars, condemned the program at its outset for putting at risk its social scientists and the people they surveyed. Anthropologists could be used by the military to target insurgents, a violation of their ethics not to harm those whom they study, according to the association.

In light of the problems found in 2010, the Army required training on filling out time sheets, and fired personnel found to have been harassing trainees. Last year, then-Army Secretary John McHugh praised the program for providing information that was “actionable and useful for decision-making.”

However, the Army also announced in 2015 that the Human Terrain System had been terminated in 2014 as there “was no longer a requirement for HTS teams in theater.”

But documents obtained by USA TODAY show that Army officials had simply changed the program’s emphasis from deploying social scientists with troops to providing information to commanders from a group of experts based at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. They also began referring to the program as the Global Cultural Knowledge Network.

The Global Cultural Knowledge Network, the Defense official said, is not a replacement for the Human Terrain System but a part of it.

Army plows ahead with troubled war-zone program

Internal documents and emails show that officials at Leavenworth were aware of the controversy surrounding the Human Terrain System, how it could attract critics and what could be done to silence them. One memo instructs staff on how to create a presentation about the Global Cultural Knowledge Network that anticipated “Evil People Questions.”

“Smells like HTS?” the document asks. “How…is this different.”

At another point, the memo calls for staff to show how the Army's social science expertise is better for soldiers than other government sources or "any number of sites that I can Google?"

Email traffic also showed concerns about Hunter’s involvement and the need for the Army to influence him. An adviser on the program counseled top officials at Leavenworth that “work clearly needs to be done to, if not change Congressman Hunter's mind, then at least move him into the neutral category for future endeavors.”

The documents show that the Army was trying to trick critics into thinking the program had been killed, Hunter said.

“They reinvented HTS in the form of GCKN, and only now that they’re called on it are they saying that HTS never went away,” Hunter said. “So now there are two programs, constituting more waste and more opportunity for fraud. They’re wasting money and drawing attention away from other priorities, which disadvantages the men and women who serve in the Army. That’s a shame.”

Hunter’s chief of staff, Joe Kasper, said the congressman is still waiting to hear from the Army about questions he has raised about the program.

“That is one response that Rep. Hunter is salivating to receive,” Kasper said. “Either the Army takes ownership of its mistake and we work to a solution or we ratchet up the fight. Either way, this is one issue that certainly won’t wither on the vine.”