What my time as a Green Beret taught me about community building in the U.S.
Translating Jim Gant's "One Tribe at a Time" to renew America, one community at a time
Ian Kennedy is a friend, former Green Beret, and aspiring contemplative with whom I’ve spent countless hours talking about everything from reading Wendell Berry essays to building mountaintop Jedi schools. In our first guest essay, he reflects on how the strategies used by Green Berets can be translated to strengthen civic life in America’s communities. It’s an outside-the-box take on community building, and I’m excited to share it with y’all. - Sam
PS: If you want to get in touch with Ian, you can reach out to him directly at ian@contemplativeprimate.com. And if you want to pitch us on a guest piece, feel free to email us at theconnectivetissue@gmail.com.
Unconventional warfare. It’s the mission of the Army Special Forces, and as a young recruit, it captivated me. Green Berets are among the most well-known and highly-trained soldiers in the military, and by training and leading a thousand indigenous soldiers, twelve of them can have an outsized impact on the battlefield. In addition to mastering combat skills, they are expected to be culturally sensitive and to learn the language of their partners, to build rapport and trust, and, ultimately, to win the hearts and minds of the local population.
As Green Berets, our attention was focused primarily on the threat of terrorism abroad. Towards the end of my Army career, however, I became convinced that we were facing a far greater threat back home. Rates of depression, suicide, and drug overdoses have soared over the last decade, and at the root of each is a loss of meaning precipitated by the decay of community life. Although we are not at war in the US, I believe that we must adopt the ethos of unconventional warfare if we are to reverse that decay. Supported by highly-trained civilian advisors embedded within communities and working closely with local leaders, we can rebuild civic life one community at a time.
One Tribe at a Time
The approach I envision is inspired by One Tribe at a Time, a paper written in 2009 by a Special Forces officer named Jim Gant. In it, Gant critiqued America’s top-down strategy in Afghanistan and proposed a new, bottom-up strategy based on intense engagement with the country’s tribes. For most Afghans, life revolved around the tribe. Therefore, Gant believed the incumbent strategy that was focused primarily on building a national government, army, and police force was doomed to fail. Instead, he thought we should focus on training, equipping, advising, assisting, and leading tribal militias in combat against the Taliban.
Gant believed in this approach because he had already put it to work. On deployment, he and his team had built rapport with their tribal partners by listening deeply to their elders, getting to know their families and playing with their children, providing medical care and building infrastructure, and courageously fighting alongside them against the Taliban. It was unconventional warfare to a T.
The advantages over conventional warfare were clear. They developed genuine trust and fostered cooperation, not dependence. Their local tribal partners provided intelligence that was far superior to that received from centralized sources in Kabul. The team felt safer while in the village — surrounded by the tribe — than they did in their own base. And for the Afghans, the tribal militias offered an alternative to what the Taliban offered as lures to young men - fame, glory, and purpose.
Gant emphasized that national-level efforts were important but only if they incorporated the bottom-up development of the tribal militias. Eventually, the tribal militias could be stitched together, but without trust, the tribes would never submit to a higher authority. Hearts and minds — and the war itself — would have to be won locally, one tribe at a time.
From Tribe to Community
So how do we get from One Tribe at a Time to the task of community renewal? The high-level picture is clear: engage intensely at a local level first, and then stitch the local pieces back together into a larger coalition. This will require collaboration between cultivators — locally rooted leaders who do the consistent work of regenerating their communities — and outside advisors, who would be the community analogues to Green Berets.
The importance of cultivators is self-evident, but what do outside advisors have to add? Similar to Afghanistan, existing community leaders will know far more about the local context and aspirations of the people.
But part of the premise of this newsletter is that there are things to be learned about community building. Those who are on the ground may be so busy with their work that they have little time to find the most relevant information. Moreover, there is often a vast difference between the language of community and the languages of government and the national corporations that affect communities. Advisors can help to bridge these gaps, both by equipping cultivators with knowledge, skills, and practices to strengthen their community-building work, and by serving as translators between local communities and national organizations.
Where will we find people with the requisite skills and experience to excel as community advisors? Once again, a military analogy is instructive. Prospective Green Berets are first screened for physical fitness, perseverance, and team orientation in a grueling, multi-week selection. Few begin training with the mentality required for unconventional war. Most grew up in the conventional Army where the ethos of warfare is dominance and firepower, not hearts and minds. Their first steps towards becoming an unconventional warrior are taken during the rigorous, two-year training course.
The pipeline for community advisors could mirror that for Green Berets. Many types of candidates could work, but one that I encounter frequently in Silicon Valley is the young professional with fancy educational credentials and work experience in law, finance, or technology but who is now disillusioned by the region’s individualistic culture. They have the raw attributes needed to succeed as advisors — drive, specialized knowledge, and a desire to do good — and they recognize that community is important, but they don't know how to apply their skills at a more local level. Moreover, if they are to succeed as community advisors, they will have a lot to unlearn from years in hyper-competitive academic and work contexts, such as biases towards self-advancement over service, analytical thinking over emotional reasoning, and top-down over bottom-up solutions. A rigorous training program would help to show them a different way.
As with the training of Green Berets, however, a formal program can only go so far. The most important training would have to happen on the job. In One Tribe at a Time, Gant lists the four tasks that a good Green Beret must do to engage with tribal partners: listen, understand, learn, and influence. Their civilian analogs would have to do the same:
Listen deeply to local cultivators and neighbors;
Understand the local context, prevailing beliefs, and the accumulated pain and frustration of struggling communities;
Learn from local experts, such as elected officials, school administrators, social workers, police officers, and clergy; and
Influence upwards to state and national organizations, laterally to local cultivators and experts, and downwards to the next generation of cultivators.
All of these tasks would require a deep understanding of human nature. By engaging in them wholeheartedly, they would not only benefit the community but also finish their training under the guidance of senior advisors and local leaders.
Learning from Failure
The most important lesson from our foray into Afghanistan may lie in its failure. Gant’s greatest fear was that we would engage with the tribes and then withdraw, leaving them in a far more precarious position, as the Taliban would then target them as American collaborators. Tragically, this is exactly what happened. Our bungled withdrawal left Afghanistan riddled with broken promises and firmly back in the hands of the Taliban.
Afghanistan is emblematic of America’s contemporary approach to problem-solving. Both internationally and domestically — and whether delivered via government, corporations, or nonprofits — we craft a solution from afar, send in outsiders to execute the plan, and withdraw when either the prize has been won or the costs become too high.
Our approach to community building cannot afford to make the same mistakes. While we do not have a domestic Taliban to worry about, the consequences of broken promises are similar, as desperate and frustrated communities are more susceptible to demagogues who offer glory, meaning, and revenge against common enemies. Commitment from the advisors is therefore essential.
The right people for the job would believe that they have nothing more important to do than dedicate all of their attention to their immediate surroundings. Over time, advisors could integrate into the community more fully, becoming a local cultivator and mentor to the next generation of advisors. Such an approach would not only strengthen the connective tissue between communities and outside organizations, but also offer sincere young people who have spent too long in individualistic pursuits a path to rediscovering the joys of community life.
The mission of the Green Berets — and the story of Gant’s foray into Afghanistan more specifically — offers many lessons for an advisor-centric approach to community building. It will take trial and error before we know how to best translate those lessons to the training of advisors and the structure of community engagement. Yet some of the details should be left intentionally vague. The advantage of unconventional warfare has always been that well-trained individuals with minimal guidance and authority to operate can adapt to the local context far more quickly and effectively than centralized organizations. Unlike in Afghanistan, however, we need no authority to operate peacefully on our home soil. We can begin now, rebuilding our country one community at a time.
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