How should a historian be utilized by our military?

I recently assisted in a union organizing drive for civilian employees of the U.S. Army Center of Military History, including all of the civilian employees in the various Army Museums throughout the world. Although I played a small roll, I spoke with several Military Historians about the work they do. I learned they are understaffed, underutilized, lack cooperation, but are all highly dedicated to preserving history.
I urge all who have combat experience or have served in significant operations to contact the appropriate military history office and offer to share any knowledge you may have, as appropriate.
They are especially interested in hearing from Vietnam Veterans.

1LT (Join to see) So really fired up on a Saturday....This paragraph summed this up for me:

"What is not commonly seen is a historian who applies history and the related professional skill sets as an integrated member of the staff to enhance the operational effectiveness of the unit. This is not limited to just the Army; the historical field in general has trended away from applying its expertise in a utilitarian matter and has instead concentrated on producing academic history. The Army’s current practice of not integrating historians into the Army’s operational processes does the Army a disservice. This needs to change. Historians have unique capabilities and knowledge that can increase the Army’s ability to fight and win our nation’s wars."

This is a good article in that it articulates what we have and what they are supposed to be doing and what they could be doing. The problems I see are as follows:
- RANDOM: I have bumped into historians three times over 22 years. They show up at random. There is no time for introspection to provide them with something meaningful. So they get random ham hand handed comments they scribble down and leave. Example: I am eating lunch in our FOB DFAC and I happen to sit down with Richard Killblane. For those that don't know, US Army TC Historian and recognized historian and author. Probably the only one doing professional work on gun trucks. No IDEA he was in the AO. As a Sustainer directing all the distro operations in the Battlespace it should have "come up". Wasted opportunity.
- DENSITY: dovetailing with above, the density of these wonderful folks is so low, they tend to collect at "history making" HQs at the 3 and 4 star levels. Below that is hit or miss. The irony is that documentation is MORE likely to exist and survive at these levels vs the PLT, CO, BN, and even BDE. Maybe at DIV. Historians are too few and far apart to capture it "all".
- WHAT: So ALL the information. If you've worked a command post for a minute you know that there is a hierarchy of info routine, critical and exceptional (if you've never heard of this, google it). We captured barrels of routine information at the staff officer level. We capture and filter Commander's Critical Information Requirements to drive decision making (PIR, FFIR, EEFI, again google it). Exceptional info which is not anything you were tracking, but like porn, you know it when you see it. This is info that is so hot and unexpected it demands that the commander makes a decision. The problem with History is you don't know 20 years ago you were going to need to capture all of "these" to analyze "theses" to make decisions about "those". Google the concept of Known-Knowns (see picture).
- FRYING INFO IN THE NAME OF OPSEC: I was absolutely flabbergasted that units were directed to wipe hard drives and purge everything in order to leave theater with it. The Army's History Enterprise was either ignorant of this or they were quietly overruled. So now one is completely reliant on CENTCOM and SHAPE to provide granular detail. The great shame of this all is, particularly ground warfare services are very precise about WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE, HOW and sometimes WHY, trained observers from pups. Further, ad hoc JTFs and CJTFs are not enduring, when they go away, everything is lost unless there is a conscious effort to transition it or capture it. This is the exception and not the rule.
- UNIT LEVEL: The unit history program rides on some collateral duty LT, who may or may not know they are the unit historian. I have been drafted at the 11th hour to write than "annual history" which tends to look like 'arent we great' rather than what we do, what it feels like, what is the experience at all levels, how we do things and why, rich and tangible for future people. I have also aided the poor S1s who have been drafted to write this.
- WASTED OPPORTUNITIES: I have never seen a contemporary unit citation recommendation package published as history. Granted it is slanted a little, but capturing a unit's experience at the brigade or battalion level in the absence of anything else would be very important. Summaries lead trained researchers to find other sources, some of those "primary" which are critical to scholarly research. Besides, the ass-kicker of it all is they SUBMIT IT TO HQDA. We already have it.....and pissed away because its not in the right inbox. Make use of what we have!
- SWISSARMY KNIFE CRISIS: When you try and justify existence, the tendency is to pull in everything and anything you do, half-assed do, could do, etc to paint the picture of multi-disciplinary utility. See! no one does what we do!. What the hell is wrong with you people? Can't you see I have People skills! So according to the article these are special staff that could be leveraged for operations and MDMP in the historical dimension (not exactly a pervasive attribute); they can do unsolicited research and studies they see a need for; they can do historical collection (again not incredibly pervasive); they can do targeted research and studies on demand for a senior supported commander. According to the article they can do anthropology/cultural human terrain type work....yeah ok, how much, how far?

So wow, what a marvelous problem set. What do we do? I recommend the following.
- BIG DATA: We live in an age of big data, data mining, knowledge management, and shared archives. We need to leverage technology to capture the raw data and information before it is lost.
- Describe the history we capture. Are we capturing strategic level history? operational history? tactical history? plight of the average soldier? All have value at different levels with different audiences.
- IF YOU CAN'T GET THE CRAFTSMEN TO THE WORK, GET THE WORK TO THE CRAFTSMEN: We will never have sufficient depth of academically trained historians as long as there is a requirement for the 5X identifier, TAA and a force cap. So how do we maximize the work (present and future) of fewer highly skilled experts? You get the work to them. Much like the Calibration and Repair Pyramid of TMDE, you ship the hardest of the hard and most complex of the complex to the Primary Standards lab rather than give every Transfer Team the capability. We are talking about moving information which we may or may not have an immediate need for. This would require DEEP collaboration of time, money, architecture, and SHARING in general. We also can't be everywhere at once. So if we targeted the following and had the "rest" dumped into a deep archive that needed preparation for further exploitation:
---Capturing a monthly snap shot of the EXISTING unit manning rosters for the purpose of building focused, vetted interview lists. This would form the center of History Detachment visits
---Hard Drive contents: cyclic reports; story boards; C4ISR system data (like BLUFOR Tracker, CPOF and NATO's JOC Watch) that has units locations, patrol tracks (yes it exists), etc; Contract Statements of work; plans; orders; BUBs; CUBs; Sworn Statements; etc Looking to capture major unit operational artifacts that would be structure for data mining based on tiered key word queries.
---Specific Hard Drives: #1 Any "battle captain" "battle NCO" of "watch" officer/NCO. Staff Primaries. Commanders. Contracting Officers. You'll be able to figure out "noise level" of the events and then target searches down and across. LOGSTATS and logistics reporting at all levels to drive forecasting tools not depending on voluntary contributions. Rip it from the hard drives.
---Raw award recommendations to tie events to individuals. Personally a great tool to really look hard at the corrosive "got screwed out of it because I was a ______" bias narrative in the decorations zeitgeist.
- Archive the remainder of hard drives
- Announce the movement of History Personnel by FRAGO and unit announcements so they can receive personal accounts from people with something to say. Stick them in a DFAC and let the collection begin.
- CIO G6 and TAA would have to build an IT supporting team to integrate with the Historians. It would also be of value to have operations SMEs (forensics almost) for the period they are looking at to know WHERE and HOW that info would have been collected, especially in a tactical command post. Perhaps a lash up and enduring operational relationship with CALL.

Finally I would recommend doing the total mission analysis. What do we want our Historians to do that they will add value to. Is the human terrain domain something we expect from them, or is this more the realm of the Intelligence community? DO we go to a another provider? I think drafting academics for human terrain teams could have more value, as you get history and culture understanding targeted to the region instead of a generalist reading the same pile of books I could read as a staff officer or commander.

Its either important or it is not.

Unit histories are lost in the Army. Units don't stand for anything.