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hair pixie-short and carefully coiffed. She must be a bureaucrat, Cabayan thought, but within ten minutes, she’d won him over. McFate didn’t look the way Cabayan had expected an anthropologist to look, and she didn’t think like most anthropologists, either.She had gone to Harvard Law School, married an Army officer, and held a string of research and policy fellowships. Before joining the Office of Naval Research, she had worked as a contract researcher for the CIA.
    Cabayan enlisted McFate to work on a project that would later be called Cultural Preparation of the Environment. It was a piece of technology: an ethnographic database that could be loaded onto a laptop and used by soldiers in the field. They began to build a prototype, concentrating on Diyala Province, where Adamson had served. McFateand her colleagues put out a call for information to all the intelligence agencies in the U.S. government, asking about society and politics in Diyala.“About tribes alone, we got back fifteen totally different answers,” McFate told me later. The military was gathering intelligence, but it was “mainly on bad people, places, and things.” Like the Army, intelligence agencies in the aftermath of September 11 had turned their attention to targeting the enemy, paying far less attention to the demographics, politics, economies, and cultures through which he moved.
    Cultural Preparation of the Environment was an open-source intelligence tool designed to reduce violence by understanding the sea in which the enemy swam.McFate had been intrigued by the common ground between anthropology and intelligence since she was researching her doctoral dissertation about British soldiers and Irish Republican Army fighters and realized that anything she wrote about how either side operated could help its adversary. It struck her then that as an anthropologist interested in war, her work could be read by “anyone, anywhere and used for their purposes,” she told me. Since Vietnam, many anthropologists had grown highly suspicious of the U.S. military’s adventures in far-flung places, whose people were often the subject of ethnographic study. But McFate viewed these concerns as naïve. “If you really want to control or constrain the ability of people to use anthropological materials for the purposes of war, you should not write” ethnographic studies, she told me. “And you certainly shouldn’t publish” them.
    McFate lost no time advancing her view that the military needed anthropology in the worst way. She organized a conference on the national security benefits of knowing your enemy and wrote a string of military journal articles in which she emphasized the role of anthropology in the colonial conquests of the nineteenth century and its necessity for contemporary military commanders.The U.S. military and policy community’s ethnocentrism had led to miscalculations in Vietnam, theSoviet-Afghan War, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and Iran, McFate argued. In Iraq and Afghanistan, cultural misunderstandings had proved absurdly simple and deadly.Coalition forces arrested Iraqis for having weapons, but they didn’t understand that most Iraqis had weapons. They detained hundreds of people because they couldn’t make sense of kinship systems, and lost track of detainees because they misunderstood Arabic naming conventions.Shia Muslims who flew black flags for religious reasons were viewed as enemies by marines, who associated white flags with surrender and black flags with its opposite. At checkpoints, the American hand signal for “stop”—arm extended, palm out—meant “welcome” to Iraqis, who hit the gas and got shot. “Across the board, the national security structure needs to be infused with anthropology, a discipline invented to support warfighting in the tribal zone,” McFate wrote.She was briefing military officials in Tampa one day in 2005 when a colonel in battlefield camouflage walked in and sat at the back of the room.