This thesis extracts organizational lessons from the U.S. Army's Human Terrain Teams. In the past, the Human Terrain Teams have been the topic of various debates, but none discussed their performance. Studying what influences how Human Terrain Teams perform is important to the National Security System to improve its use of socio-cultural knowledge during conflicts. A contextual narrative of team members formally involved with Human Terrain Teams and information from journalistic articles tells the story of what organizational characteristics affected the performance of the U.S. Army's Human Terrain Teams. / Master of Arts

Human Terrain System has been describes as: “Not since World War II has a military consulting been endorsed so publicly; not since Vietnam had it been condemned so fiercely.” The purpose of this essay is to describe what the controversy and the critique presented against HTS consists off and to see if there is a beginning to a solution in some way. HTS is embedding socials scientists within military deployed units and it is argued to violate the ethic codes of research. Pauline Kusiak has presented a solution to the conflict. By analysing the arguments in the public debate between the anthropologists against and HTS’s advocates the purpose is to answer if the U.S. Military recognise the tensions between anthropology methods and their embedding in HTS? To measure ‘recognition’ the model of ‘The Feedback Stair’ is used. The answer is that the tension is not recognised and it supports the hypothesis that the U.S. Military are not at the first step one the solution presented by Kusiak to diminish ‘the civilian-military gap.