The Human Terrain System (HTS) is a U.S. Army program that recruits, trains, and deploys mixed military and civilian Human Terrain Teams (HTTs), which embed with military units in Iraq and Afghanistan. These teams conduct social science research about the local population to provide situational awareness to the military and "enable culturally astute decision-making, enhance operational effectiveness, and preserve and share socio-cultural institutional knowledge."¹ The teams rely on the HTS Research Reachback Center to provide secondary source research and the Mapping the Human Terrain Toolkit (MAP–HT) to support analysis, storage, and retrieval of sociocultural information.

With the emergence of the so-called new threats, the world's perspective on the use of force has changed, and new challenges have developed. Alternative roles for the military have been proposed, and even new philosophies have been developed with concepts such as population-centric warfare and network-centric warfare. All of these revolve around the idea of developing better relations with the people and seeking a better understanding of the environment.

The United States is confronted by a new class of complex, fast-moving challenges that are outstripping its capacity to respond and "win the future." These challenges are crosscutting: they simultaneously engage social, economic, and political systems. They require measures that extend the horizon of awareness deeper into the future, improve capacity to orchestrate both planning and action in ways that mobilize the full capacities of government, and speed up the process of detecting error and propagating success. The result is anticipatory governance.