The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture

Chapter 7
Contrasting Nation-
Building in the Caribbean
and Vietnam
Efficiency and Order as Enemies of Democracy
Held in high esteem within American culture and elevated to near sacred
regard with the US military are values of efficiency and order and norms
that privilege quantifiable results. Marine efforts at both civic and kinetic
counterinsurgency tasks were, and continue to be, heavily influenced by this
reinforced cultural formula. Their efforts in the Caribbean reflect the wellmeaning
pursuit of order and stability but with strategically undermining
consequences. Order and efficiency were privileged over messy attempts to
encourage indigenous self- governance, and pressures to achieve tangible
and quantifiable improvements in state- building produced strong incentives
to diminish local involvement in order to speed up results.
There is no substantial evidence that the Marines’ pursuit of efficiency
and order during Banana Wars nation- building stands in contrast to what
other branches of the US military might have done. The prioritization of
efficiency and order within Marine organizational culture, supported and
rewarded by the larger framework of US military culture, was only encouraged
by the valuing of the same in most of American society. In this sense,
it is more appropriate to cast Marine actions as a natural outgrowth of
American national culture and US military culture rather than leatherneck
culture alone. Marines, raised in a democratic system that they viewed as
exceptional and superior, attempted to duplicate this system by undermining
nearly every principle on which it is founded. Marines built the
states they oversaw, not according to the principle every American school