COIN & Culture: Cross-Cultural Skills for Mission Effectiveness and Excellence

This paper is based on the US experience.
The US Army is active and present in many nations in the world today in a variety of capacities ranging from missions to operations. In every nation the US Army visits, they encounter that nations’ Culture and Worldview. Sometimes that encounter is positive and leads to easily built working relationships for a common goal, yet other times that encounter is very difficult leaving our soldiers and civilians experiencing extreme levels of culture shock (what occurs when two or more people groups that have vastly different worldviews encounter one another) which in turn makes the mission nearly impossible to accomplish. This paper is a joint attempt to combine cross-cultural skills gleaned from global Christian Missionary experience, Soldier deployed experience and Counter Insurgency (COIN) philosophy.