The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture

118 Chapter 5
and any battle, large or small, is chaos. Warfighting, as doctrine, is meant to
prepare Marines for this environment. It is a treatise on being able to thrive
in chaos—in the thick of friction, uncertainty, fluidity, disorder, and complexity.
“It is precisely this natural disorder which creates the conditions ripe
for exploitation by an opportunistic will.” 11 If sufficient disorder to destabilize
the enemy, and thus gain the advantage, does not exist, it is recommended
that Marines create it: “We must not only be able to fight effectively
in the face of disorder, we should seek to generate disorder and use it as a
weapon against our opponents.” 12 So what of a mission to stabilize rather
than create chaos? To engage in civic action and patiently cultivate intelligence
rather than pursue the enemy? The “small- twitch” muscles that perform
so admirably in high adrenaline, constant- motion environments may
threaten to short- circuit in stabilizing operations, which require restraint
and a calming influence.
Marines study the tempo of war as a dimension in which victory is won
by those with superior initiative and speed. Warfighting doctrine instructs:
“In general, whoever can make and implement decisions consistently faster
gains a tremendous, often decisive advantage.” 13 A well- trained Fick echoes
this mentality in his memoir: “Winning a firefight requires quick action by
leaders. The key is to make decisions about your enemy and act on them
faster than he is acting on decisions made about you.” 14 Speed as a weapon,
and as a stand- alone value, is so ingrained in Marine ethos that it often
comes at the cost of lives. Comparing Army and Marine strategies in the
Pacific, O’Connell notes that the Army was willing to conserve manpower by
using methods that were effective but slow. The Marines, however, “trained
for quick, decisive engagements.” For them, “speed of conquest was critical;
the carnage it produced was the unfortunate but necessary price for victory.”
The Army regarded the Marine approach as “reckless and unimaginative.”
The Marines, by turn, believed that the Army fell short in the key virtues of
audacity and tenacity. Across their combined operations, “the Marines had
higher casualty ratios but took more ground,” and “the Army worked more
slowly but conserved lives in ways Marine tactics did not.” 15
An insurgent force may also see the temporal sphere as a weapon but
in perhaps very different terms than the Marine Corps: one of protraction
and exhaustion. 16 An insurgent who knows Marines well may attempt to
bait them into rash action, causing them to trample political aims in pursuit
of the enemy. Maj. Jason Spitaletta characterizes the dominant personality
type in the Corps as “higher strung” and notes that this is not conducive
to “tactical patience.” Therefore, “if in stability operations the best action
is no action, it is counterintuitive” to enlisted Marines. Because of their
bias for action, they may “force things unnecessarily.” He notes that in a
foreign theater Marines “tend to want to assume the lead and dictate how
things are run,” even when the more effective long- term strategy might be
“enabling”—supplying support from behind. 17