In light of the counter-insurgency operations of the past decade, the need for cultural knowledge is now a widely accepted idea among the military. The ability to assimilate the cultural factor is an increasingly decisive element and a real force multiplier, even if it has brought additional complexity to the battlefield space.

The need to make use of cultural knowledge is today a widely held idea among the military. The operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have demonstrated this perfectly. The ability to integrate the cultural factor effectively is an increasingly decisive element. In view of the likely conflicts of the 21st century, understanding the opposing societies and recruiting cultural experts or advisers will help the war effort.

Although the pervasive effects of culture have brought additional complexity to the battle space, cultural understanding is a force multiplier that can mitigate the length and cost of conflicts. It enhances the ability and capacity to operate deep within the faults of adversaries and can help produce more appropriate and effective strategies.

Integrating cultural knowledge

While future engagements will most likely involve operations across all spectrums, how can cultural knowledge assist in mission accomplishment? To fully understand its potential in the battle space, we need to understand what it means and how to integrate it at the military and strategic levels.

Defining culture is not easy because there is no single culture. It is present at all levels within a society, a people, and even more so within several groups within the same society. Each of its members shares the same frame of reference of beliefs, values, behaviours and habits. In addition, culture has certain characteristics that help us to better understand it. First of all, it is not fixed, contrary to what one might think at first glance. It evolves through social interaction and follows a process that links past and present in a complex way. It is natural for people in the same society, but it is also arbitrary. The perception of right and wrong may differ from one society to another. For example, where revenge is forbidden by Western legal systems, it is allowed by Pashtunwali[1]. 1] Culture can thus be interpreted as a group's own code, more or less decipherable by outsiders. But most importantly, culture influences individuals and peoples in the way they think and act, thus having direct consequences on the environment in which the soldier will operate and on the way strategies and policies will be implemented.

The past decade has seen Western armed forces engage in distant projections where the success of the mission was significantly dependent on the interface with local populations. This interaction has become so important in military operations that success is often marked by a soldier's ability to operate within culturally diverse populations. Part of the key to success is therefore cultural knowledge of the environment. At this level, it is a real challenge that requires more finesse, diplomacy and communication than the direct use of force. In the absence of cultural knowledge, awareness is essential. It consists of the practical application of cultural knowledge in the theatre (culturalawareness). Its use has become important and unavoidable in counter-insurgency. Cultural awareness will deal more with do's and don'ts, the basics of local language and customs, thus improving the adaptation of deployed forces to their environment. It must be integrated into pre-projection preparation and ensure that it is adapted without falling into clichés, as inappropriate training can be counter-productive. Some soldiers serving in Afghanistan who believed that Afghans were very loyal to the principles of Islam no longer showed them respect when they discovered that they were drinking alcohol.

The cultural knowledge required at the tactical level is quite different from that required to formulate an ambitious strategy. These different levels of knowledge are interconnected and sometimes complement each other. Thus, a sound strategy based on a deep historical and social understanding of the adversary will result in appropriate and therefore more effective operations. Strategic thinking based on several foundations such as national and regional identity, political and strategic culture, political systems, globalization, it must be said that the study of history is a fundamental common denominator. History is both an agent and a process that determines different forms of culture. As an instrument of culture, history and historical memory can be distorted and used to serve contemporary causes. The successful occupation of Japan after the Second World War (1945-1952) is an excellent example of how cultural knowledge contributed to American long-term goals in Asia [2]. 2] On the contrary, the Bush administration has not measured how Sunni extremist groups have appropriated and reinterpreted Islamic texts and traditional belief systems to justify their own radical ideology. A dangerous amalgamation has been made, sowing incomprehension in the Muslim world, and which will tarnish the image and actions of the United States for a few more years to come.

Dominating the adversary

If war is a clash of wills, it is also a clash of cultures. In insurrectionary environments that are often very complex, the main contribution of cultural knowledge is to contribute to a better understanding of societies and the adversaries they may have engendered. Intelligence and training in their cultural dimension are supports for all levels of decision making and participate directly in the domination of adversaries.

It should first of all be stressed that lack of cultural understanding can exacerbate problems, lead to deadlocks or counter-productive solutions. The imposition of foreign rules and norms will be difficult to understand and present the risk of reinforcing the insurgency. A key lesson from the history of 20th ^century conflicts and crises is ^that one must adapt to the local culture, use pre-existing systems and not impose one's own solutions, otherwise the intervening force may quickly be perceived as an occupying force. Cultural ignorance can also endanger both civilians and the military. Where a Western soldier identifies a white flag as a sign of surrender, he identifies the black flag as having the opposite meaning, whereas it is merely a religious symbol in the eyes of a category of Muslims [3]. Often cited as a reference by specialists in insurgency warfare, FM 3-24 (US Army and Marine CorpsField Manual Counterinsurgency)[4] is one of the main doctrinal documents that underlines the fundamental aspect of cultural and social knowledge in such environments. It proposes to see culture as an entity influencing human actions, as its understanding allows for the adaptation of the intervening force's modes of action to achieve better results against the adversary.

The use of the cultural factor accelerates the ascendancy over the adversary.

"I was looking at the wrong card. I should have been looking at the tribal map, not the map. Wherever we are in the world, we have to take culture into account." Brigadier General David Fraser, commander of the Multinational Brigade in Regional Command South (Kandahar, Afghanistan) in 2006.

Convincing the population of the legitimacy of the force and not to support the insurgent groups requires above all persuasion, which is impossible to achieve without first establishing relationships of trust. Indeed, it seems difficult to persuade someone whose language, aspirations and fears are unknown. In this context, cultural understanding is a key element. It will make it possible to distinguish allies from enemies and to identify the levers that need to be pressed to "win hearts and minds" effectively. It was thanks to such understanding that, during the First World War, Colonel T.E. Lawrence was able to gain the confidence of Arab tribes and organize their revolt against the Turks, thus paving the way for the Allied campaign in Syria. Today, in Afghanistan, NATO is conducting VillageStability Operations, the concept ofwhich aims to provide greater security, development and governance by increasing the link between the population and the legitimate authorities. Implementation is based on small, autonomous special forces units immersed in villages and supported by local police. Achieving such goals is only possible by building trusting relationships that require a capacity to overcome cultural barriers.

While technology will always provide added value in the conduct of operations, in counter-insurgency social and cultural intelligence has taken precedence over technological intelligence. It is more difficult to provide detailed analyses of terrorist movements operating in Mali than to count the tanks and aircraft of a "vermilion enemy". The operations in Iraq and then Afghanistan awakened the military to the fact that the culture of the adversary mattered and that over-reliance was placed on technological intelligence. Confronted with an enemy deeply rooted in history and theology, the American armed forces had to radically change their approach and adopt an anthropologist's vision to understand that it is not states, but cultures that determine the basic structures of political life. This shift of interest has been a revolution for the US military. It has completely rethought its approach to operations by considerably increasing its capacity to take the cultural dimension into account. It collaborated with anthropologists to create "centres of excellence" dedicated to culture and languages [5]. These are responsible for disseminating cultural understanding of the different regions or areas of intervention at all levels of the hierarchy, from initial training to pre-projection preparation. In parallel, the Human Terrain System (HTS) programme was developed to support the command: linguists, specialists from the regions concerned and sociologists are integrated into the military teams.

Principles of warfare and strategy

The art of warfare and strategy cannot be developed without a detailed understanding of the nature of the conflicts and the specific context in which the military force must intervene. In insurgency contexts, it seems interesting to re-examine the principles of warfare and strategy through the prism of cultural understanding.

Defined as laws governing confrontation between the armed forces, the principles enable military commanders to draw up plans with the greatest chance of success. They have been developed since antiquity and have changed very little in more than half a century. Their persistence seems at first glance to be proof of a need to re-examine them, to which must be added changes in the nature of the adversary (asymmetry) and the battle space (integrating populations as active players). Yesterday it was a question of winning, today it is necessary to convince of the uselessness of continuing the fight. According to Foch, the principles are based on freedom of action, concentration of efforts and economy of means, but other strategists support their thesis on the surprise effect, the persistence of the goal, the support of morale, the unity of command, etc. Freedom of action allows for adaptation to the circumstances of combat, and in particular to the unknown that is necessarily the enemy. It is a question of protecting the freedom of action of the leader, but also of granting it to subordinates. This remains particularly difficult in counter-insurgency, because the intervening force is limited by its rules of engagement while the opposing movements have none or few. They therefore have more initiative and few limits to carry out their subversive actions. It is therefore essential to be able to understand the patterns of thinking of the opposing decision-makers, to anticipate their reactions, to know their limits and what they are capable of accepting. At the same time, the ability to focus on one's weaknesses, as well as the ability to economize, depends on understanding the opponents and their culture. Without this, all these capacities are impaired. Unity of command also requires a shared understanding of what the commander-in-chief wants to achieve and how he intends to achieve it. It is all the more difficult to share in international coalitions or alliances. It is then almost systematically achieved through consensus, which has the perverse effect of slowing down decision-making, or even achieving only part of the objective, in other words, limiting freedom of action. That is why there can be no common goal without a true mutual cultural understanding. To build a successful alliance, it is a matter of getting to know one's partners, establishing relationships of trust and knowing how far they are willing to go in their commitment. In "The Art of War"Sun Tzu writes: "know your enemy and know yourself; if you have a hundred wars to fight, a hundred times you will be victorious". He shows that the strategist who knows his strength and his limits, who knows the environment and his opponent, acquires the capacities for an almost assured victory. At this point in the analysis, the deep and intimate knowledge of the adversary is perhaps the oldest of the principles of warfare and finally the one that is primus inter pares [6].

The innovative ideas that cultural knowledge has brought at the operational level have not produced the same innovations on strategic goals. Yet cultural knowledge is a strong support for developing more precise and effective strategies. Rethinking war as a confrontation of societies is the logical first step. The second is to analyze how to isolate adversaries - divide and conquer. By identifying their cultural differences and exploiting their internal contradictions, it is then easier to force them to act in the criminal or political sphere. Another important factor is the building of strong support among friendly or allied states by taking into account their culture. Understanding how they assess risks, perceive threats and define their own security can only make a positive contribution to this achievement. The integration of anthropology into the design of national and foreign security policies is again an additional asset. Finally, there is a need to build support among civilian leaders and the population. Civilian and military authorities must coordinate and complement each other. This is even more true in counter-insurgency, as it requires a great deal of inter-ministerial cooperation. In this sense, mutual cultural knowledge between civilian and military institutions is therefore vital to make this coordination effective. Finally, citizens need to be informed and aware of their armed forces (their capabilities, their values, their historical, present and future role), in other words, the culture of their army!

Cultural knowledge and warfare are inextricably linked.

"As for Vietnam, we found ourselves defining a policy for a region that was terra incognita. Worse, our government lacked experts that we could have consulted to compensate for our ignorance" [7].

The changing nature of conflicts and operations requires a deeper understanding of the culture of the adversary. The more unconventional and far removed from the norms of Western cultures, the more we will need to understand its society and basic cultural dynamics. By arming ourselves with cultural knowledge, an insightful strategy can constrain and stifle it.

While counterinsurgency is only one of the challenges of the 21st century^{, these} challenges will require politicians to provide a new strategic vision for security. Is a foreign policy designed on a deep understanding of the forces of nationalism, identity and collective memory of our adversaries not a powerful tool for shaping their behaviour?

1] Pashtunwali is the customary code of the various Pashtun tribes on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border. Passed orally from one generation to the next, based on honour and pride, it governs tribal law by measuring punishment and compensation for offences.

2]The decision to preserve the Japanese imperial system by refusing to try Emperor Hirohito as a war criminal allowed the occupiers to rewrite the new role of theThe decision to preserve the Japanese imperial system by refusing to try Emperor Hirohito as a war criminal allowed the occupiers to rewrite the emperor's new role, which miraculously changed from one of the most brutal military leaders of the time to an innocent victim set up and manipulated by extremist militarists. Japan's astonishing and rapid democratic transition did not take place through the imposition of American democratic norms and values but through the manipulation of cultural and historical meanings and symbols.

3]The Black Flag or Al-Raya is considered by duodecimal Shiites as the future banner of Islam. Some of the Iraqi homes on which the banner was flown have been identified as enemies and treated as such.

4]Published in December 2006, FM 3-24 is the U.S. Army's counterinsurgency doctrinal document. The implementation of this doctrine in Iraq by one of its contributors, General David Petraeus, would explain the drop in the level of violence in 2007. The document is, however, the subject of some criticism and questions.

5]The USArmy has the TRADOC (Training and Doctrine Command) Cultural Center and the US MarinesCorps of the Center for Advanced Operational Culture Learning -CAOCL.

6] The former is an equal.

6] Robert McNamara, "...The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam»

A reserve officer ^cadet in the 3rd Marine Infantry Regiment, Battalion Commander LE ROUX joined the career officer corps through recruitment 15.3. Upon completion of his training at the infantry application school in 2001, he served in the Chadian marching regiment as a mechanised section commander. In 2004, he was posted to the Pacific Infantry Marine Regiment of New Caledonia where he was head of the Nandaï base detachment. From 2006 to 2009, he commanded the Lighting and Support Company of the Chadian Marching Regiment. During this period, the author benefits from a wealth of operational experience, including screenings in Afghanistan on two occasions, in Côte d'Ivoire and Lebanon. After a posting as an instructor at the Military Specialization School for Overseas and Foreign Countries, he served as a treating officer with the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers in Europe (SHAPE). He is currently a trainee at the War College.