The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture

Chapter 8
Counterinsurgency
Readiness from Haiti
to Vietnam
The Consequences of Craving Conventional War
The overwhelming preference toward conventional warfare within the US
military has served both to impede the development of counterinsurgency
doctrine and to squelch some of the innovations Marines produced. The
slow dawning of recognition in the Marine Corps that small- wars doctrine
was needed and then the shockingly quick disregard of that which was
laboriously forged are both products of this preference. Tactical innovations
fared a little better. Marines tended, in each Caribbean case, to start
with default conventional approaches against irregular enemies. Failure
along the same repeated learning curve, rather than predeployment training,
served as the educational device in each round. Gradually, Marines
came to the same tactical conclusions in each theater and evolved toward
small, aggressive patrols and decentralized leadership—tactics adopted
early in the Combined Action Platoon (CAP) program and carried forward
as Marine instinct into the campaign in Iraq. Other innovations slipped
into lessons lost.
Doctrine Slow to Dawn, Quick to Fade
The total absence of discussion of the insurgency problem in Haiti and the
Dominican Republic within the pages of the Marine Corps Gazette during
the early years of the occupations there implies an air of already achieved