The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture

Introduction 3
by service instinct rather than codified doctrine, a combination that represents
a best- case scenario for examining the impact, and limits, of serviceculture
influence on irregular warfighting practices. The results indicate
that even a service culture as self- aware and dedicated to innovation as
the Marine Corps is significantly constrained in the lessons- learned process
by preferences endemic to the larger cultural contexts within which
it operates: US military culture and American national culture. Across its
small- wars history, strategically advantageous innovations distinct to the
Marine Corps often fit within its own organizational culture but ultimately
became “lessons lost” rather than institutionalized and learned owing to
their misfit with traditional US military preferences or the demands of
American national culture. In other cases, the influence of Marine cultural
preferences on counterinsurgency practice was powerfully reinforced by
matching preferences within national public culture and the cultures of
its sister services. 7 When compounded in this fashion, some culturally preferred
operational practices persisted even when they proved a dysfunctional
fit with the security environment. In a few important areas, some counterinsurgency
innovations have survived and represent the ways in which
Marine Corps service culture offers a distinctive instrument for small- wars
practice apart from the Army. The resultant package of Marine counterinsurgency
instincts, therefore, is not easily reducible to service culture but
is, rather, a negotiated outcome that has survived the collisions and constraints
of multiple cultural layers.
As the United States considers additional engagements in peripheral
wars of sometimes steep consequence, it would be well served to understand
its own predispositions and habits of practice in irregular battlespace. 8 Most
counterinsurgency theorists who recite Sun Tzu’s admonition to “know thyself
and know thy enemy” do so solely with the “enemy” bit in mind. 9 This
book makes plain chronic deficits in the “know thyself” component and
argues the necessity of strategic introspection as a prerequisite to planning.
Recognition of which aspects of comprehensive counterinsurgency warfare
the US military is able and willing to perform, and perform well, and which
have persisted as national shortcomings must feature in any future decision
to fight irregular war.
This volume engages three distinct veins of scholarship. From a methods
standpoint, it offers a fresh approach to strategic culture studies, applying
an analytic tool proven within intelligence circles—the Cultural Topography
Framework—to an introspective study of the US strategic community. 10 The
Cultural Topography Framework is grounded in an interpretive approach
that requires deep immersion in multiple sources of data in order to identify
patterns in identity, norms, values, and perceptual lens for the group under
study. The emergent patterns within each of these four categories are coded
into distinct cultural traits and are cast in a dialectic with the particular issue
in question—in this case, counterinsurgency—in order to assess relevance.