text: Chapter 3
  Culture
  3-1. This chapter addresses culture and its role in a counterinsurgency operational environment. Culture
  forms the basis of how people interpret, understand, and respond to events and people around them.
  Cultural understanding is critical because who a society considers to be legitimate will often be determined
  by culture and norms. Additionally, counterinsurgency operations will likely be conducted as part of a
  multinational effort, and understanding the culture of allies and partners is equally critical.
  3-2. Insurgents from a local area generally understand local culture, the perspectives of the population,
  and the population’s concerns and grievances much better than any foreign military forces understand
  them. Therefore, culturally, the insurgent may have an enormous advantage over a foreign military force.
  This may not be true if the insurgents are not from the local area. If a military force is to succeed in gaining
  support of the population, it must seek to understand the local people and their culture and incorporate the
  perspectives and concerns of the population in their plans and operations as well as, if not better than, the
  insurgents incorporate them.
  3-3. There are many definitions of culture in use by the United States (U.S.) military. As a starting point,
  this publication understands culture is a web of meaning shared by members of a particular society or group
  within a society.
  UNDERSTANDING CULTURE
  3-4. To be successful in interacting with the local population to gain information on the enemy, or to
  understand their requirements, military members must do more than learn a few basic facts or “do’s and do
  nots.” They must understand the way that their actions can change the situation for the local population
  (both positively and negatively) and the resulting perceptions of the population towards those actions. To
  be successful, commanders and staffs consider four fundamental aspects of culture when planning and
  executing military operations:
  * Culture influences how people view their world.
  * Culture is holistic.
  * Culture is learned and shared.
  * Culture is created by people and can and does change.
  3-5. The way that a culture influences how people view their world is referred to as their worldview.
  Many people believe they view their world accurately, in a logical, rational, unbiased way. However,
  people filter what they see and experience according to their beliefs and worldview. Information and
  experiences that do not match what they believe to be true about the world are frequently rejected or
  distorted to fit the way they believe the world should work. More than any other factor, culture informs and
  influences that worldview. In other words, culture influences perceptions, understandings, and
  interpretations of events. Soldiers and Marines need to know that U.S. interpretations of events are often
  quite different from the perceptions of these events by other people in an area of operations. If Soldiers and
  Marines assume that the local population will perceive actions the way that they do, they are likely to
  misjudge their reactions. The U.S. military refers to this pattern of assuming others see events in the same
  way the U.S. does as mirror imaging. Mirror imaging is dangerous because it leads Soldiers and Marines
  into thinking that their assumptions about a problem and its solution are shared by the population and
  multinational partners, rather than employing perspective taking, and looking at the problem from the
  population’s perspective.
  3-6. Holism is based on the principle that all socio-cultural aspects of human life are interconnected.
  While interacting with people in other cultures, Soldiers and Marines may be tempted to say their problems
  “are all about [fill in the blank: tribalism, corruption, lack of work ethic, and so on.].” In truth, very few