The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture

Setting the Stage 163
fluent in the local language—was celebrated for his intrepid and successful
patrols and efforts to capture bandits alive. “A reformed bandit does us
more good than a dead one. Dead men tell no tales, but live ones, treated
right, tell tales and they tell the tales we want them to tell. They told that
the white man wasn’t such a bad lot and that the Haitian people could have
confidence in them, but they must behave themselves.” 128 Unfortunately, Sergeant
Darmond’s techniques did not catch on.
Marine intelligence efforts instead involved comprehensive mapping
(none had yet been done of several areas), aviation reconnaissance, ground
patrols, quizzing foreign nationals living in the region, and attempts to glean
information from natives by either pecuniary rewards or force. 129 Drawing
from an identity favoring offensive action and a national heritage that
believes all things can be solved with money, the Marines initially saw intelligence
as something to be bought with straight cash: “In the employment
of natives, either regularly or for a given occasion, money is usually the
keynote of the Intelligence system.” 130 When short on cash, Marines used
force: “It is safe to say that at least 50 per cent. of the so- called harsh measures
used in bush warfare could be eliminated by providing the troops with
adequate information money.” 131 Marines assumed that the bandits benefited
from intelligence freely offered up by the population. The Small Wars
Manual accepts this as a steady state, lamenting that Marine “operations
are based on information which is at best unreliable, while the natives enjoy
continuous and accurate information.” 132
Racism tinged even this perspective. Rather than attributing the absence
of useful voluntary intelligence from the population to their own abusive
actions, Marines often blamed this failure on deficient local intellect.
Marines paid cash for what they regarded as intelligence of very wobbly
reliability, citing the limited morality of the natives in question: “Name the
information you want and pay for it when verified. Natives invariably, when
they talk, tell you what they think you want to hear. Their sense of right and
wrong, time, distance, etc., is usually about zero per cent., but by sticking
and striking averages fair results can eventually be obtained.” 133 Utley, in
one of his seminal small- wars pieces written for the Gazette, cites the logic
of British small- wars expert Col. C. E. Callwell: “Callwell says that the ordinary
native found in the theaters of war peopled by colored races lies simply
for the love of lying.” Even when attempting the truth, “his ideas of time,
numbers and distances are of the vaguest. My own impression is that he will
exaggerate numbers and minimize distances in nearly every case.” 134
The logical fallacy is striking. Locals, in the Marine perception, were
capable of providing the enemy with perfectly accurate and detailed advice
about where Marines resided and intended to patrol but were intellectually
incapable of providing the same sort of information about the enemy back
to Marines. The double- layer perceptual lens—one layer racism (low esteem
for the mental acuity of the population) and one layer insular egocentrism