Human terrain: 'culture maps' becoming essential tools of war.

• Author: Jean, Grace V.

The U.S. military has access to the world's best topographic maps. It is now trying to build "culture maps" that include details such as a region's tribal affiliations, ethnicity, religion and language.

The commander of U.S. Central Command, Army Gen. David Petraeus, in a number of speeches has repeatedly said that "human terrain" is the decisive element in counterinsurgency operations.

"His remarks have had a rippling effect across the intelligence community," said Jesse Wilson, who works at the command's Afghanistan Pakistan Intelligence Center of Excellence. Officials there are pairing human terrain analysts with traditional intelligence teams.

Traditional intelligence, based upon satellite and aircraft imagery of the geophysical environment, worked well in past wars where open battle spaces far removed from civilians were the norm. Commanders needed to know the lay of the land in order to attack the opposing force. But in current conflicts, they are relying upon soldier interactions with the local people to gather information.

"They're told to walk the beat and make friends with the population," said Navy Lt. Cmdr. Shane Halloran, who in December returned from a five-month deployment to Afghanistan.

The socio-economic climate of a region and the cultural norms, values and attitudes are qualities that the nation's intelligence agencies in the past have overlooked.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency "is not set up to collect this type of information," said Joel Maloney, director of the military operations group within the agency's analysis and production directorate.

Intelligence analysts collect all the relevant geospatial information over an area, including the mapping, terrain elevation data and the latest imagery, and then analyze the terrain looking for culverts or other physical features that might lend themselves to an ambush or an improvised explosive device, or IED, attack, he said. They also include data from other intelligence disciplines such as signals or human intelligence.

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At Central Command, the human terrain specialists work side by side with the geospa-tial-intelligence analysts to produce maps of a different vein, said Wilson, team chief of regional commands south and west in the human terrain analysis branch.

For example, if analysts plot on a map military reconstruction or development projects in Afghanistan with roadside bomb attacks during the same period, they may see correlations that show an increase or decrease in the number of those attacks over time.

Human terrain analysts are trained to hone in on cultural facts quickly and fuse them with geospatial data to make maps that traditional analysts wouldn't normally consider, said Swen...