The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture

Counterinsurgency Readiness 203
competence being carried out in business- as- usual fashion. The first article
of any length on the subject in the Gazette (beyond quick references on such
topics as the building of latrines or commemorations to fallen Marines) is
in December 1916, a year and a half after the Marines landed on Haitian
shores (in fairness, the Gazette had only been running since March 1916)
and after the first caco rebellion was already defeated. Rather than revisiting
the lessons learned in this conflict or formalizing some level of doctrine from
the experience, the first article on Haiti is written in a form very like a travel
brochure. 1 The writer dispatches advice to his fellow officers about the conditions
that their families would encounter should the families choose to
join the Marine adventure in Haiti. He addresses such vital topics as market
fare, climate, and the appropriate gut to choose for one’s tennis racquet. No
mention is made of military exploits of any kind.
The next submission on Haiti is equally lightweight. It is purportedly
on reconnaissance but reads more like a chatty diary entry, describing colorful
scenes along a patrol, interactions with villagers on a path, the food
eaten, the behavior of the burro, and a wide assortment of other entertaining
details one might write in a letter home. It is written in the spirit of a
lark, with no serious intent to convey advice or say anything much about a
manner of reconnaissance patrolling. 2 In short, early writings demonstrate
little tactical or operational curiosity about how the job is getting done
and if it is being done well. The Marine perception seems to be that the
situation is well in hand; it is small fare, and a serious discussion of such is
unwarranted.
By 1928, after having spent thirteen years in Hispaniola fighting consecutive
insurgencies, the Corps found itself still without a common body
of lessons learned. The Marine’s own Division of Operations and Training
observed: “This type of combat, which might well be called ‘bush warfare’
is the one which has been most frequently encountered by marine personnel
in the past, and yet is still unknown to many officers, either through a failure
to be a participant with some expeditionary force, or through a lack of any
available reports which might be studied.” 3
The naive perceptual lens regarding the ease of subduing “bandits”
and building economically sound and politically democratic nations was
eventually tempered by the Marines’ lived experience. These lessons, however,
remained locally learned and not shared across the service for many
years owing to the Marine valuing of field experience over formalized education.
The action orientation of the Marines was well entrenched in the
early twentieth century. In 1916 Col. Ben Fuller (later to become commandant)
described the Marine approach to education thus: “His education
as a marine has always been obtained mostly by practical methods; what
the older and experienced ones have learned in service is passed on to the
new ones by actual demonstration; in unaccustomed circumstances and
unfamiliar conditions he experiments for himself because of the lack of a