EMPATHY FOR CARNIVORES

Empathy is arguably a one-word summary of the rationale for Red Teams, Human Terrain Teams, and the U.S. military’s vast attention to culture over the last decade. Once the military must co-opt others instead of coercing them, empathy becomes a professional mandate. Properly understood and applied, empathy improves critical and creative thinking, campaign design, and operational assessments. It is not merely a trait contributing to good character; it also benefits professional competence.
Empathy differs from sympathy or compassion. It is not a “feeling for” another but an “understanding of” another. Empathy may result in sympathy, but the two concepts are distinct. In understanding another’s perspective, the process of empathy attempts to account for emotional as well as cognitive influences. Further, empathy involves only understanding another’s perpective; it does not require agreeing with that perspective.
Despite ties to military theory and doctrine, empathy remains an obscure concept largely disregarded in military culture. Leadership, counterinsurgency, and advising doctrine endorse it, but it remains absent from intelligence, information operations, and planning doctrine. It deserves more attention and a more central role in designing military operations, especially counterinsurgencies.