The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture

4 Introduction
The cultural components that emerge from this process as both robust and
relevant are situated within the larger cultural outlay experienced by members
of this group. For Marines this includes their own service culture as
well as components of US military and US national cultures. This cultural
mapping process illuminates the importance of exploring tensions between
layers of culture existing simultaneously within a strategic community and
examining the dynamic relationship between them, exploring why one yields
to the other and in which circumstances it does so. The results offer insights
concerning which cultural predilections are likely to “win out” when placed
under stress. The importance of this complex dynamic in projecting security
behavior, while implicit in other works, is made explicit here.
This text also contributes to scholarship examining counterinsurgency
history, principles, and practice. Counterinsurgency scholarship includes
volumes on doctrine, comparative texts looking at lessons drawn from
diverse conflicts across history, in- depth texts looking at the experience of
the US military across time or within one particular counterinsurgency theater,
and John Nagl’s work looking specifically at the learning experience of
the Army in the counterinsurgency context of Vietnam. 11 The assumption
that underpins most counterinsurgency scholarship to date is a reasonable
and admirably optimistic one: that there is a right formula for counterinsurgency
that may be discovered and trained into new doctrine by one
nation studying and learning vicariously from the successes and mistakes of
others. The research presented here is seeking not to restructure or add significantly
to the debate concerning sound counterinsurgency practice but
rather to pose serious questions about the character of a nation’s learning
curve: its ability to learn from another’s experience or even from its own.
By examining organizational and national cultures as organic “goods”—
supplying identity, sense of place, and cherished modes of behavior to its
members—this research allows a weightier role for cultural goods in human
decision making than is typically assumed within realist and neorealist
modeling. The analysis offered within this volume examines the Marine
Corps brotherhood—the identity, norms, values, and perceptual lens that
make up its ties, as well as its relationship with the nation that sends it
abroad—providing a new lens on historical lessons learned and lost, as well
as a cautionary tale concerning future irregular engagements in which the
United States may be involved.
The analysis of Marine Corps culture leads to engagement with a
third body of literature—that which seeks to understand the compelling
and vibrant brotherhood of America’s Spartans. Most of this work is constructed
as a stand- alone portrait, meant to acquaint the reader with the ins
and outs of Marine life in order to prepare for entry into its ranks, 12 to glean
lessons from its leadership structure for commercial endeavors, 13 or simply
to satisfy native martial interest. 14 Very little of this literature is written by
scholars outside Marine active or retired ranks, although serious endeavors