George w. casey jr. - Federation of American Scientists

culturation, and one of its consequences is the transmission
and development of global culture, or what
can be called human civilization writ large upon the
earth, for technology knows no cultural boundaries,
but breaks these boundaries down through processes
of cross-cultural influence, cultural erosion,
trans-cultural tectonics, and non-linear patterns of
transformational development.
A central challenge in the operationalization of
definitions of culture has been the fact that all people
are themselves bound not just by a stratified set
of cultural realities, but by our universal cultural
dependency upon its larger collective realities in
shaping both our world and how we see that world.
Scientifically, in the objective definition of culture, it
becomes the case that if indeed culture shapes how
and what we know of our world in basic ways, then
we must confront the anthropological relativity of
human intelligence, and the fundamental dilemma
of not only our bounded knowledge of culture, but
of our very capacity to know and understand any
or all culture in a completely disembodied and nonsubjective
manner.
How do we operationalize the definition of human
culture, or its cultural intelligence, rapidly transforming
itself and our world, in a manner that will
be of service to the military in the future? Each
branch of the U.S. military has its own definition of
culture, sometimes more than one, and each serves
critically, well or otherwise, how that branch approaches
the problem of culture in its training, doctrine
and operational application. In a critical sense
as well, how we finally come to agreement in the
operational definition of culture will play critically
in serving to define the role played by the U.S. military
in future global politics of conflict, resource
competition and the inevitable human struggle for
power and freedom. This role will become increasingly
acute in the face of Malthusian realities as the
global human population swells to carrying capacity,
as energy demand outstrips energy supply, as
food prices rise around the world and attendant environmental
degradation and circumscription continues
inexorably and unabated to make food less
and less available to more and more people.
The operational definition of culture hinges critically
upon differentials of sharing of human patterns
of response that result in coexistence and competition
of alternative collective and corporate social realities.
Shared patterns of response upon multiple
levels of being and social interaction provide consonance
and coordination for our behavior in relation
to the world, and these patterns, internalized
since early childhood, become sanctioned and constrained
through secondary institutions and formally
embedded and reinforced within a common
stock of knowledge, conventions of collective representation,
and a shared, received symbology of
meaning about the world, or “world view.” The integration
of our reality, both behaviorally and symbolically,
upon multiple psychological and social levels,
depends fundamentally upon this process of institutionalized
sharing of common knowledge and associated
native cultural intuitions.
Behind this definition looms the question of “what
is human intelligence” and, in the structure of the
large and the long run, how can collective human
intelligence (civilization) be best served and serve
through military endeavor and dedicated service.
Old models of culture, whether our own or others,
whether of law, or morality, of economy or politics,
do not necessarily serve well new transnational situations
and patterns of globalized culture. We are
all struggling to catch up to the globalization of cultural
human realities, and all that we knew or have
known before becomes subsumed under a new aegis
of globalized realities and alternative transnational
possibilities.
Human intelligence permits us to see the changing
world, and ourselves in relation to the changes
of the world, in ways we would not have otherwise
or previously seen, and hence by so seeing, to adapt
to that changed world in a manner that serves our
best long term interests. It permits us the freedom
to act outside of the constraints of received, tradition-bound
culture, and provides us the operational
edge over those who cannot escape the boundaries
of their own cultural boxes. We may never be able to
ultimately escape the consequences of the cultural
realities of our own making, but we can seek to
shape those consequences in a manner that serves
our greater mutual long term interests in the world.
68 Military Intelligence