The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture

218 Chapter 9
The Marines’ first area after the invasion was largely inhabited by Shi’ites,
who were relatively happy to be liberated. The generally successful and
largely peaceful leatherneck experience there did not reflect what they would
face when they were redeployed to the hotbed of Sunni insurgency in Anbar
Province in 2004.
Identifying and analyzing the operational effects of the counterinsurgency
lessons Marines chose to implement in Iraq is further complicated
by the involvement of civilian US actors overseeing the same space. Iraq
represents a profoundly different case than that of the Banana Wars, where
Marine service instinct could be readily identified and evaluated since it
overwhelmingly dominated in both the political and security arenas, and
that of the Vietnam War’s Combined Action Platoon (CAP) program, where
Gen. William Westmoreland left Marines to their own devices in the CAP
AO. In Iraq, US civilian political leadership made decisions that sometimes
upended Marine plans or significantly shifted the operating context. Disbanding
the Iraqi military, dismantling the Ba’ath Party bureaucratic structure,
and ordering both the start and then the premature end of the First
Battle of Fallujah were all political decisions either made outside consultations
with the military services or, in the case of Fallujah, made in direct
contravention of Marine leadership advice. An evaluation of Marine success
in stabilizing the areas under their jurisdiction is therefore not a story that
can be told as a consequence of Marine methods alone or even, in cases
such as those mentioned previously, as a consequence of Marine inclination
at all. It is therefore with great care and an eye toward those spaces of
time and place where Marines did exercise primary control over shaping
the counterinsurgency environment that the lessons they chose to employ or
innovations they pursued might be recognized and extracted for evaluation.
The Iraq War serves as an important reminder to all services that some of
the decisions and “best practices” most critical to strategic success may not
rest entirely within military operational control. It is the civilian leadership
they serve that determines the length of time allotted to engage the enemy,
train indigenous security forces, and fulfill promises made to the population.
This chapter will first examine the small- wars “lessons learned” that
the Marine Corps as an institution made available to its recruits during
the post–Vietnam War years and was prepared to implement in the early
years of the Iraq War. Key concepts emphasized during the 1990s provided
guideposts to Marines who found themselves improvising in the highly chaotic
environment of unraveling of civic order in 2003. They also paved the
way for the stability operations Marines practiced in Shi’a territory for the
remainder of their first deployment.
The chapter will next evaluate the extent to which these lessons were
reinforced and built on in the interim period before Marines returned for
a second deployment in 2004. Once it became apparent that the war in
Iraq had become a counterinsurgency, what approach did Marines take in