7 - In-Theatre Soldier Training through Cultural Heritage Playing Cards: A US Department of Defense Example

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Cultural heritage protection has been a long-standing challenge for the US military during deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq, one perhaps typified by the wellpublicised military damage to the site of Babylon and the equally notorious looting of the Iraq National Museum, both of which occurred at the start of the conflict in Iraq. These and many other transgressions have been explored in considerable detail in recent edited volumes which together provide a ‘lessons learned’ guide to what went wrong and what might have been done better (Rothfield 1988; Stone and Farchakh Bajjaly 2008; see also Cogbill 2008). Some would place blame for these incidents on an intentionally callous disregard for the cultural heritage of other nations by the US military, while others (eg Armstead 2008; Cogbill 2008) place blame squarely on the lack of pre-war planning for heritage protection. While we agree that adequate prewar planning is key, we argue that the overriding culprit in this instance is a lack of formal pre-deployment awareness training – at all levels of the military hierarchy – on issues related to cultural property protection in foreign theatres of operation. Without a basic awareness of the issue, it is unlikely to be made a priority in pre-war planning efforts.

This situation is somewhat paradoxical and counter-intuitive when considering the large measure of success that the Department of Defense has had with its compliance and stewardship responsibilities for cultural heritage resources on its own military installations throughout the United States. Unfortunately, those very responsibilities were never translated to in-theatre operations by war planners at the outset of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq and no thought was given to international or host country law in this regard. Even the current awareness training project discussed in this chapter originated at the installation level (Fort Drum, NY) as a proof-of-concept project awarded by the Department of Defense Legacy Resource Management Program through a competitive proposal process. Now in its fourth year of funding, the project has met with considerable success and it is hoped that many of the gains that have been made in raising DoD awareness of cultural property protection in foreign operations can be institutionalised in a more permanent manner (Rush and Bogdanos 2009).