The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture

206 Chapter 8
and kept US forces from clearheaded analysis of the contextual motives of
new insurgent recruits. Maj. E. H. Ellis, one of the most influential writers
on Marine small- wars doctrine, demonstrates this blind spot in his own
seminal piece on “bush brigades.” He describes the adversary as typically
“outlaw bandits (bandits, ladrones, cacos) who rob and murder members
of the forces of occupation and their own people indiscriminately.” 20 Then
he notes two sentences later that “the enemy will have moral support from
most of his own people, material support from many, and will operate in
their midst.” 21 Ellis does not seem bothered with the apparent contradiction
this logic seems to present or prodded with the need to unravel the nature of
popular support in such a situation.
The bandit mentality persisted within the Corps, even after facing off
with a genuine revolutionary in Nicaragua, and became enshrined in doctrine
in the Small Wars Manual: “The mission of our forces usually involves
the training of native officers and men in the art of war, assisting in offensive
operations against organized banditry and in such defensive measure
against threatened raids of large organized bandit groups as are essential to
the protection of lives and property.” 22 One line in the manual offers some
glimmer of insight that adversaries of the future may be of a more sophisticated
nature: “If marines have become accustomed to easy victories over
irregulars in the past, they must now prepare themselves for the increased
effort which will be necessary to insure victory in the future.” 23 The bulk of
assessments in the Small Wars Manual concerning the character of smallwars
adversaries, however—born out of the leathernecks’ tropical experience
and validated in the Marine mind by overwhelmingly lopsided casualty
rates in their favor 24 —did little to prepare Marines for the dedicated insurgents
they would face in Vietnam. 25
Learned the Hard Way: Small Patrols
and Decentralized Decision Making
Despite the opportunity to do otherwise, Marines started each of their irregular
Caribbean fights in highly regular fashion. Although Marines had no
counterinsurgency doctrine of their own, they did have access to the Army’s
Landing Force Manual, which offered advice on small- patrol tactics and
night patrols. 26 Rather than resort to them, however, Marines leaned on
more familiar operational norms and started their counterinsurgency duties
in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua by garrisoning the major
population centers first and situating themselves on the operationally defensive.
Their initial offensive forays were in the conventional form of large
columns marching in regular fashion. 27 Not all of these were disasters, but
neither did they solve the “bandit” problem. Over time, Marine moves to
protect towns became increasingly more aggressive and pushed farther into