Seed Magazine's Jonah Lehrer thinks that having anthropologists engaged in the Army's doings in Afghanistan is "a really good thing." I have to disagree. Yes, on balance it's probably beneficial for the United States military to have culturally-literate guides, just as it would probably be super for them in the short-term for journalists to be repairing to base each night to share the latest news on the ground. But it's ultimately destructive for both the individual anthro/journo and the usefulness of their respective fields. The trade-off you have to accept is that the world is better off having those professionals able to do their work in challenging environments for years to come. Here's how Dustin Wax puts it on Savage Minds, my favorite anthro blog (referencing an older post):

Montgomery McFate, an anthropologist at the Office of Naval Research, thinks anthropological knowledge is essential to modern warfare, and is on a campaign to bring this Gospel to the Department of Defense. Her long article at RedNova -- originally published by the Military Review -- is a backhanded compliment to stubborn anthropologists whose knowledge and expertise is "urgently needed in time of war" but who, "bound by their own ethical code and sunk in a mire of postmodernism", "entirely neglect U.S. forces".

I’ll leave the long history of anthropological involvement in wars of conquest and national defense to Ms. McFate and cut straight to the chase: a functioning anthropology can never be on the side of "U.S. forces". This is a practical as well as an ethical argument -- it simply is not possible, even were there enough anthropologists who shared McFate’s priorities.

Also, anthropologists in the field often have to labor under the suspicion that they're CIA informants, particularly in Latin America and other places where there's a history of CIA involvement. Working in a war zone while getting a paycheck from the United States Army is unlikely to help matters on that front.