The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture

10 Introduction
locals on Hispaniola. The overtly racist behavior of the Banana Wars era
contrasts markedly with what were often warm and respectful relations
between Marines and Vietnamese villagers in the CAP. Given the vulnerable
position of CAP personnel, what often began as instrumentally inspired
good behavior resulted, for some, in heartfelt and gratifying relationships
over time. Lessons from the CAP program were drawn on and reinforced
by top Marine leaders as they sent their enlisted warriors forward in Iraq.
The treatment of locals there, however, remained uneven—a product of the
tension between the “first, do no harm” expectation set by leadership and
the combat default settings bred into America’s action- oriented shock troops.
Chapter 7 explores functional themes across the Marine Corps’ counterinsurgency
experience, including a special focus on the repercussions of the
Marines’ martially inspired values when applied to nation- building. Marines
in the Caribbean embraced their tasks of governing and training national constabularies
in very typical military fashion: by prioritizing order and efficiency.
This approach served to establish the infrastructure and material health of the
state with often unprecedented speed but also modeled—in ways Marines did
not clearly foresee—authoritarian rather than democratic rule.
The Caribbean efforts are contrasted with the limited state- building
activity within the CAP program—a happy accident of resource deprivation
rather than conscious choice—in which the relative poverty of Marines and
their much closer association with villagers yielded a selection of strategic
advantages that had eluded Caribbean forebears. The fate of this potential
lesson learned—the operational benefits of frugal civic action—within the
CAP is examined through the lens of American strategic culture, one bent on
measuring success through quantifiable achievements and notable changes
to infrastructure.
Chapter 8 examines the impact on counterinsurgency readiness effected
by the strong preference within US forces to prepare for and fight conventional
conflicts. The first part of the chapter examines the effect of this preference
on small- wars doctrine and follows by tracking the trajectory of a
few key Marine innovations, including the Marines’ small- unit force structure
and penchant for constant patrolling. The chapter ends with a focus on
the Marine Corps’s decentralized leadership patterns. This lesson, already
a part of Marine training and conscious practice by the end of the Banana
Wars era, received a boost from the Corps’s CAP experience in Vietnam and
remained a signature feature of Marine practice in its post- 9/11 counterinsurgency
fights.
Chapter 9 concludes part II by examining the Marine experience across
the Iraq War in order to identify which of the lessons learned through the
Marines’ formative counterinsurgency experiences persisted into the modern
era. The range of lessons learned, as well as lessons lost and persistent
blind spots, is cast against the multilayered context of Marine Corps culture,
US military culture, and American public culture in order to extract