The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture

240 Chapter 9
Lessons Rewarded: Enabling the Anbar
Awakening, 2005–9
The set of counterinsurgency principles US forces pursued in order to take
advantage of al- Qaeda’s missteps and co- opt the Sunni Awakening movement
were not innovative in the sense of being brand new. They are readily
found both within the Small Wars Manual and the practices of the CAP program.
In several cases, however, these lessons were advanced and improved
on to an “innovative” degree, providing an opportunity for enhanced lessons
learned for the Corps.
Marines attempted a formal reinstitution of the CAP program during
their 2004 redeployment to Iraq, but the experiment was limited in scope
and short- lived. 121 Several structural features of both the Iraq War and the
modern Marine Corps made the original CAP program difficult to replicate.
Vietnamese Popular Forces (PFs) represented a preexisting security element
within a larger national military structure, which Marines co- opted
and trained as a force multiplier. Iraq’s security forces, on the other hand,
were being recruited by the US military from scratch. Given the need to
reconstruct a full- fledged national military force, CAP teams in Iraq were
partnered with an overwhelming number of recruits. In its few short months
in operation, the Task Force 2/7 CAP platoon put over seven hundred Iraqi
National Guardsman through one week of training. 122 With such lopsided
ratios, Marines were unable to engage in the “shared hardship, joint operations,
and close personal relationships” noted as essential to success in the
SULG and characteristic of the Vietnam CAP program. 123 The sheer numbers
of local forces recruited for training, alongside disruptions precipitated
by the larger operations in nearby Fallujah, meant that the nascent CAP
experiment did not have much of a chance to succeed.
In addition, structural features of the modern Marine Corps disrupted
many of the key advantages of the original CAP experiment in Vietnam.
From a force structure perspective, the primary impediment was rotation
schedule. Marines in a Vietnam CAP unit were not rotated in and out as
squads; they rotated their ranks typically one or two individual Marines
at a time. Tours in Vietnam were assigned individually, and high casualty
rates meant that new members were refreshed on a fairly consistent basis.
The upside of this brutal reality was that the relationships formed between
villagers and their CAP squad could be maintained across consecutive years.
New members of the CAP squad were introduced in ones and twos and
could be socialized and introduced to villagers by Marines who had been
there a while. This, combined with the willingness of CAP Marines to extend
their tours, meant that relationships in the village had the quality of genuine
continuity to a much higher degree than relationships established in Iraq.
Although attempts were made to establish continuity in Marine AOs
and to return units to areas where they had previously served, the result