Crooks and Liars:
Danger Room is reporting that Prof. David Price has looked a little more closely at Dave Petraeus’s COIN manual and found a lot of theft cribbing has been going on…read on
While some in this group are producing interesting quality studies of the military and intelligence community, the Manual shows the sort of low quality work that can pass as "innovative" uses of anthropology for the military. Chapter three reads like the work of lazy C students, taking phrases and sentences promiscuously from various sources, cobbling them together into a sort of Cliffs Notes version of anthropology, which the University of Chicago Press has now laundered into a book posing as an object of academic respectability.
It seems the General "Integrity" Petraeus copied a whole bunch of other peoples' work and printed it up. Like I said before, I wondered who the hell asked him to rewrite the thing anything. Its not like he was an expert. Hell, now its clear he didn't know enough about it to actually come up with anything original in the first place!
The Manual's PR campaign has been extraordinary. In a Daily Show interview, John Nagl hammed it up in uniform with Jon Stewart, but amidst the banter Nagl stayed on mission and described how Gen. Petraeus collected a "team of writers [who] produced the [Manual] strategy that General Petraeus is implementing in Iraq now." When Jon Stewart commented on the speed at which the Manual was produced, Nagl remarked that this was "very fast for an Army field manual; the process usually takes a couple of years";-- counterpunch.com
I saw Lt Col. "Tightass" Nagl on the daily show. Stiff doesn't begin to describe this guy. Now he is running around trying to defend Petraeus. I love how to big up Petraeus, the COIN manual was portrayed as Petraeus' work, but now that there are some questions they are saying, "oh, no, it was a bunch of guys who wrote it."
Price describes the failure to cite all sources used in the manual as evidence of “shoddy academic practices”, but in fact he is applying the standards of one society to those of a very different one—a violation of the anthropological norm of cultural relativism as I understand it. To paraphrase von Clausewitz, military Field Manuals have their own grammar and their own logic.
They are not doctoral dissertations, designed to be read by few and judged largely for the quality of their sourcing; instead, they are intended for use by soldiers. Thus authors are not named. -- DangerRoom
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