"human terrain" meaning in English

See human terrain in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Forms: human terrains [plural]
Head templates: {{en-noun}} human terrain (plural human terrains)
  1. The social and cultural aspects of an operational environment, especially in a military context. Categories (topical): Military

Inflected forms

Download JSON data for human terrain meaning in English (2.7kB)

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      "examples": [
        {
          "text": "2005 Montgomery McFate and Andrea Jackson, \"\"An Organizational Solution for DOD’s Cultural Knowledge Needs,\" Military Review, July-August 2005.\nPurpose: augment the military’s ability to effectively plan, train, and operate in the complex human terrain of weak states by conducting unbiased, accurate field research in countries of interest and administering related programs."
        },
        {
          "ref": "2008 Erik B. Eldridge and Andrew J. Neboshynsky, \"Quantifying Human Terrain,\" Thesis, Naval Postgraduate School, June 2008",
          "text": "The term “human terrain” encompasses a wide variety of concepts and meanings. It came into widespread use following the events of September 11th as a catch all phrase to describe the human dimension of the operational environment, including groups’ and individuals’ feelings and inclinations. However, as a stand alone term, human terrain has not been officially defined by the DoD [US Department of Defense]. Although its use is widely prevalent, human terrain is currently an imprecise term which is vague and nebulous."
        },
        {
          "ref": "2008, Barak A. Salmoni, Paula Holmes-Eber, Operational Culture for the Warfighter: Principles and Applications, Government Printing Office, page 34",
          "text": "This leads us to a definition of human terrain: Those cultural aspects of the battlespace that, due to their static nature, can be visually represented on a geographic map. Human terrain is static with respect to change over time; rigid with respect to fluid human relationships; and limited to representing behavior in only two dimensions.",
          "type": "quotation"
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        "The social and cultural aspects of an operational environment, especially in a military context."
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      "id": "en-human_terrain-en-noun-6XQS4WEi"
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          "text": "2005 Montgomery McFate and Andrea Jackson, \"\"An Organizational Solution for DOD’s Cultural Knowledge Needs,\" Military Review, July-August 2005.\nPurpose: augment the military’s ability to effectively plan, train, and operate in the complex human terrain of weak states by conducting unbiased, accurate field research in countries of interest and administering related programs."
        },
        {
          "ref": "2008 Erik B. Eldridge and Andrew J. Neboshynsky, \"Quantifying Human Terrain,\" Thesis, Naval Postgraduate School, June 2008",
          "text": "The term “human terrain” encompasses a wide variety of concepts and meanings. It came into widespread use following the events of September 11th as a catch all phrase to describe the human dimension of the operational environment, including groups’ and individuals’ feelings and inclinations. However, as a stand alone term, human terrain has not been officially defined by the DoD [US Department of Defense]. Although its use is widely prevalent, human terrain is currently an imprecise term which is vague and nebulous."
        },
        {
          "ref": "2008, Barak A. Salmoni, Paula Holmes-Eber, Operational Culture for the Warfighter: Principles and Applications, Government Printing Office, page 34",
          "text": "This leads us to a definition of human terrain: Those cultural aspects of the battlespace that, due to their static nature, can be visually represented on a geographic map. Human terrain is static with respect to change over time; rigid with respect to fluid human relationships; and limited to representing behavior in only two dimensions.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "The social and cultural aspects of an operational environment, especially in a military context."
      ]
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  "word": "human terrain"
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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-04-30 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-04-21 using wiktextract (210104c and c9440ce). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.