I figured I'd pull together a few links about this JCTD and related efforts.

In 2006, the DSB summer study on 21st Century Strategic Technology Vectors cited "human terrain preparation" as the first of four critical capabilities to be acquired. An excerpt:

In the Cold War, significant intellectual effort was directed at understanding and developing strategies to counter the Soviet Union. The nation now faces a much more complex set of adversaries, both state and non-state actors, about whom a comparable understanding has not been developed. The terrorist threat, in particular, with its amorphous, loosely networked characteristics makes this an especially challenging problem. Since much of the action against both terrorists and insurgents will be conducted by small units, either special or conventional forces in situations other than major combat operations, decisions made at lower levels of command will have the potential for broad-reaching, even strategic consequences. Consequently, preparing the human terrain—both ours and theirs—is rapidly becoming a critical capability. The operational capabilities relevant to this critical capability affecting most of the five missions include: cultural and language understanding; modeling societal dynamics, stability, and influencers; strategic communication; and strategic shaping. While traditional technologies will contribute to many of these capabilities, there is also a significant opportunity to better leverage the social and neurosciences, particularly those analytic elements that create models to assist in understanding individual and collective group behavior.

The Human Terrain System: A CORDS for the 21st Century

[The Army] is overseeing the creation of the human terrain system (HTS). This system is being specifically designed to address cultural awareness shortcomings at the operational and tactical levels by giving brigade commanders an organic capability to help understand and deal with "human terrain"-the social, ethnographic, cultural, economic, and political elements of the people among whom a force is operating. So that U.S. forces can operate more effectively in the human terrain in which insurgents live and function, HTS will provide deployed brigade commanders and their staffs direct social-science support in the form of ethnographic and social research, cultural information research, and social data analysis that can be employed as part of the military decisionmaking process.

The core building block of the system will be a five-person Human Terrain Team (HTT) that will be embedded in each forward-deployed brigade or regimental staff. The HTT will provide the commander with experienced officers, NCOs, and civilian... [ Read More (1.2k in body) ]