The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture

Chapter 9
Counterinsurgency in Iraq
Experiencing the Learning Curve
Iraq would prove to be a critical test bed for Marine counterinsurgency
instincts. The war the Marines had prepared for was over in three weeks. The
First Marine Division demonstrated unmatched speed and logistical excellence
in its push to Baghdad in 2003. Alongside their US and Coalition partners,
Marines rapidly accomplished the immediate mission of defeating Iraq’s military
forces and toppling the country’s leadership. Marines celebrate this early
phase as an operation apart, a battlefield success in its own right. The larger
strategic objective pursued by the US political administration, transforming
the Iraqi polity into a functioning and stable democracy, remained ahead.
Baghdad’s descent into looting and chaos and then into full- blown
insurgency was not a contingency that received serious attention from US
civilian or military planners in advance of the invasion. The rapid actualization
of this problem set forced Marines on the ground to improvise
their response. This process—dependent as it was on adaption by individual
commanders on the ground and absent clear doctrine or universally agreedupon
strategy—resulted in significant variations in operation. Identifying a
distinct Marine pattern during this early era in Iraq is further complicated
by the initial sharing of operational space with US Army and other Coalition
partner units. The approach employed by one unit was often scrapped
by the next that rotated in. 1 Attempts to remedy this discontinuity came in
ensuing years when areas of operation (AOs) were more clearly delineated
and every effort was made to rotate units back in to areas where they had
served on previous deployments. 2
Approaches to the enemy differed not only because of the beliefs and
inclinations of individual commanders, but also because of the sometimes
dramatically different Iraqi subpopulations with whom the Marines worked.