The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture

Counterinsurgency in Iraq 241
was still disruptive to relationships between Iraqi civilians and US troops.
If detailed and ongoing familiarity with both terrain and village residents
were key to the CAP program’s successes, these were lessons unavoidably
interrupted by the wholesale rotation schedules of the modern US military.
That said, the operations template eventually adopted by US forces, including
the Army, which emphasized getting out of forward operating bases
(FOBs) and into Iraq’s neighborhoods, partnering with local security forces,
initiating positive interaction with residents as a means of diminishing insurgent
influence, and accepting a higher degree of risk to US troops while
doing so, represented significant steps toward a CAP- like approach across
the force. For the Marine Corps as a service, it is significant that these CAPlike
duties became widely accepted as behavior expected of all Marines, not
relegated to a side program populated by those who were “a breed apart.”
The “doing windows” mentality consciously cultivated in the post- Vietnam
era, alongside a general appreciation of the CAP program and commandantchampioned
concepts such as three- block warfare, all culminated to provide
for wider receptivity toward this approach. The “normalization” of these
lessons learned must be noted as a remarkable step in the Marines’ institutional
march forward.
In 2005–6, Anbar Province could not have looked less promising. Comprising
one-third of Iraq’s territory and less than 10 percent of the population,
Anbar was nonetheless producing 34 percent of Coalition causalities. 124
In an attempt to halt the downward spiral, a selection of officers across both
the Army and Marine Corps took a new tack, spearheading an effective
combination of counterinsurgency practices that departed from the default
settings then cycling for US forces. These were put into play in advance of
both the publication of counterinsurgency doctrine and the “surge” of US
forces to the region. The later introduction of FM 3- 24, therefore, alongside
a modest infusion of surge troops to the area, built on momentum already
under way and tipped nascent successes “over the top.” 125
The clear match between the new and highly publicized counterinsurgency
doctrine forged by the Army and Marine Corps and the “innovative”
practices emerging from Anbar helped validate the “new” methods
and persuade a critical mass of US forces operating across Iraq to accept
and implement changes to their approach. This occurred early enough in
the counterinsurgency timeline to make a real difference—a success story
that eluded the majority of US forces in Vietnam. Weston, alongside others,
claims that this process, often attributed primarily to the US Army, ought
to be credited in large part to the Marines. While much of the literature on
the turnaround in Iraq justifiably credits the Army for new doctrine and for
co- opting the Sunni Awakening in Ramadi,
it was US Marines who had most effectively and most persistently
engaged Anbar tribes throughout the war in Iraq’s Sunni