The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture

Introduction 7
Positive blind spots represent opportunities lost. These are often make- do
innovations of the moment that yield strategic benefits not fully recognized
by those pursuing them. These potential lessons learned remain blind spots
for the service culture—lessons unrecognized and not carried forward—not
only because of lack of identification, but often because of strong cultural
preferences or habituation toward a more traditional course of action.
The research conducted here examines aspects of Marine identity,
norms, values, and perceptual lens as part of a larger cultural context that
helps explain the Corps’s counterinsurgency footprint: the lessons it has
learned and incorporated, those it has lost, and those to which it remains
blind. Within the Cultural Topography Framework, identity is defined as
the distinguishing traits a group claims for itself and the role and reputation
it pursues. Norms are accepted, expected, and preferred modes of behavior
(as well as taboos). Values are identified as admired goods that may be ideational
(such as key features of honorable character) or material (an excellent
rifle) but are designated as values owing to their power to increase one’s
status within the group. The group’s perceptual lens is the filter through
which this group views the world and the specific actors in it. It is colored
by default assumptions about how the world works, the nature of human
beings, and the motivations of specific others. These four dimensions of culture
do not represent an exhaustive list of important cultural factors but do
represent core features within the cultural constructs that groups fashion for
themselves. For research purposes, each of the four angles is distinct enough
to inspire a separate set of research questions but elastic enough to accommodate
a wide range of often overlapping data. It is the overlap between
categories—a cultural trait manifesting itself in multiple ways, as both an
aspect of identity and an attendant norm, for instance—that acts as a signal
of robustness and helps the researcher narrow down the most salient traits
for examination.
For the purposes of identifying relevant patterns across Marine identity,
norms, values, and perceptual lens, the research that informs this book
is of a “deep immersion” sort. In keeping with the analytic design of the
Cultural Topography Framework, I examined a host of diversely arrayed
data sources. My multisource approach includes a compilation of published
memoirs of boot camp by both drill instructors and the recruits who became
Marines; systematically reviewed submissions from the two primary Marine
Corps publications, Leatherneck and the Marine Corps Gazette, during periods
of counterinsurgency engagement (1916–34, 1965–72, and 2002–5); a
close read of key speeches by Marine Corps commandants, submitted to
the Gazette or Leatherneck across the time frame of concern (1916–75);
content analysis of three key doctrinal publications, the Small Wars Manual,
MCPD- 1 Warfighting, and the contemporary Small- Unit Leaders’ Guide to
Counterinsurgency; a complete survey of Marine recruitment posters from
1913 to 1974 and television commercials from 1970 to 2003; 22 visits to