The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture

8 Introduction
local recruiting offices, the National Museum of the Marine Corps, and the
Marine Corps Historical Division; insight derived from Marine “classics” on
the commandant’s reading list; and a wider net cast in the spirit of Geertzian
“thick description” that includes documentaries, Marine blogs, published
humor, YouTube videos, and scores of conversations with both officers and
enlisted personnel across the Corps. 23 The research also included content
analysis of the Marines’ most celebrated narratives—those that have found
their way into material culture and are stenciled on mugs, clothing, vehicle
decals, and other overtly displayed identity markers.
Marines do not shy from opportunities to talk about their Corps and
the life it provides. The result is a rich supply of oral histories and interviews
from active- duty Marines. Forty- five contemporary oral histories were provided
through the Veterans History Project sponsored by the American
Folklife Center within the Library of Congress. This collection captures
the military experiences of Marine Corps veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.
These men and women are of diverse regional US origins, rank, time in the
Corps, and military specialties. A second set of over one hundred oral histories
recorded in audio form and in real time before departure from Vietnam
from 1966 to 1968 was provided by the Marine Corps Archives and Special
Collections division and subsequently transcribed for ease of comparative
analysis. 24 In addition, twenty- one veterans of the CAP program supplied
contemporary interviews for this research in order to provide hindsight
views on their service. 25 Plan of the Book
The chapters that follow are divided into two parts. Part I offers insight into
the various cultural layers that affect Marine behavior. Chapter 1 leads by
introducing the strategic culture paradigm, some of the useful strides it has
made over the years, the various pitfalls to effective analysis and forecasting
that remain, and the remedies to such offered by the Cultural Topography
Framework. Chapter 2 provides a look at the key cultural factors within
American public culture and military culture that surfaced across research
as pivotal in understanding Marine choices and behavior in counterinsurgency
theaters across time. This chapter becomes especially critical as subsequent
analysis highlights instances when the Marine Corps stepped out on
its own—sometimes through brutal practices and sometimes in productively
innovative fashion—during irregular conflicts. In several cases the institutionalization
or abandonment of these practices had less to do with Marine
Corps organizational culture and more to do with receptive fit with notions
of “Americanness” held by the American public.
Chapter 3 starts an engaging journey through Marine Corps identity
formation and role conception. The transformative process of becoming a