U.S. Army intelligence has produced a handbook (pdf) that is intended “to provide soldiers with a basic overview of Arab culture.”
It begins with “Where is the Arab World?” and “What is an Arab?” and proceeds onward to brief and elementary discussions of Arabic language, culture, and politics.
Viewing the Arab world in this way, Army intelligence also puts itself on display in the questions it poses and the answers it offers, but it does so with some self-awareness and with nothing more offensive than an occasional cliche.
“It is impossible to talk about groups of people without generalizing,” the document explains. “It then follows that it is hard to talk about the culture of a group without generalizing. This handbook attempts to be as accurate and specific as possible, but inevitably contains such generalizations.”
A copy of the new Handbook was obtained by Secrecy News.
See “Arab Cultural Awareness: 58 Factsheets,” DCSINT Handbook No. 2, Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, US Army Training and Doctrine Command, January 2006.
To tune into the action on the ground, we convened practitioners, state and local officials, advocates, and policy experts to discuss what it will actually take to deploy clean energy faster, modernize electricity systems, and lower costs for households.
From grassroots community impacts to global geopolitical dynamics, understanding developing data center capacities is emerging as a critical analytical challenge.
Over the past few months, the Trump administration has been laying the foundation to expand the use of the Defense Production Act (DPA) for energy infrastructure and supply chains.
Get it right, and pooled hiring becomes a model for how the federal government decides what to do together and what to do apart. That’s a bigger prize than faster hiring. It’s a more functional government.