The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture

Norms and Values 99
nearly one hundred years) yielded fewer than twenty articles. Commandant
James F. Amos’s “war on sexual assault” prompted by the DOD’s searing
internal report examining the problem in 2012 has demanded far more
attention be paid to the issue. 81 Writing with passion in 2014, Lt. Col. David
Bardorf acknowledged that the Pentagon’s findings regarding the scope of
the problem within the Marine Corps “gashed the soul of a Service that
prides itself on its core values of honor, courage, and commitment.” Further
acknowledged is that “prevention will require cultural change and engaged
leadership” and will likely be achieved only over an extended time horizon.
82 Rallying as a response to the Marines United scandal, female Marines
publicly rededicated themselves to speaking up, to providing more attentive
mentorship to female recruits, and to not allowing fear of ostracism or retaliation
to keep them quiet. They know they are playing the long game: “We
have no illusions. Changing a culture is even harder than changing policy.” 83
The discursive habits among Marines are a likely contributor to the cultural
environment now under scrutiny as too permissive of sexual offenses. 84
While tightly scripted in what is said to officers and how one addresses
civilians on base, Marines’ repartee with one another—often projected into
public view (in forms such as memoirs, blogs, comics, and YouTube videos)—is
rife with base, sexually charged references interwoven with gratuitous
profanity. Marines would not disagree with this charge. They take
a certain pride in it. Flexing creative and witty muscle by inventing a new
form of even further degraded insult is part and parcel of the alpha male
brotherhood. In this, Marines have become genuinely “desensitized” to the
impact of exceptionally coarse language and sexually explicit references.
They tend to scorn the offended and discount the prospect that some of their
bumpier relations with foreign nationals may stem from this practice. The
ban on cursing that exists for DIs (and recruits) at Marine Corps boot camp
indicates that, at some level, the Corps recognizes that profoundly offensive
language is offensive and a signal of indiscipline. Nonetheless, queries
regarding the possibility that Marines might apply the same clean- cut standards
to vocabulary that they do to haircuts are most often met with quick
rebuke: “It will never happen.”
Teamwork and “The Individual Marine”
The unique brotherhood of the Marines presents another set of paradoxical
values that make up an essential component of their Corps: the tension
between valuing teamwork and valuing the individual Marine. Marines do
indeed value the team, a concept drummed into them both psychologically
and physically in boot camp. Spooner’s legends continue this theme into the
field. Despite the availability of larger- than- life Marine heroes, his collection
of tales, for the most part, focuses on the ordinary Marine and his unit. 85