The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture

246 Chapter 9
That this approach is more risky sits fine with a Devil Dog organization that
identifies with being in harm’s way as a matter of course. Across all scholarly
and military accounts not one Marine unit, in contrast to some within
the Army, listed “protect the force” as a top mission objective. 146 Birdzell
explains: “Fighting irregulars at their level may result in our taking higher
short- term casualties in certain circumstances. However, we are an organization
whose mission is to win, not just survive.” 147
Alford’s dispersed battle positions and the constant patrolling of joint
Marine and Iraqi Army units facilitated outreach to sheikhs, imams, and city
councilmen. 148 Building on a lesson learned the hard way in Vietnam, Alford
rejected the typical military measurements of success—insurgents dead,
weapons found, and dollars spent—in favor of a metric more illuminating
of Marine advances in winning the support of key sectors within the population.
Dubbed “eats on streets,” Alford required his Marines to report the
number of meals they had been invited to eat in households. 149 Gradually,
increased security and efforts at making inroads with local leaders produced
results: The battalion’s officers recruited over a thousand local men to join
the police force. This augmented and locally constructed security presence
meant a significant uptick in intelligence from the population. Alford’s battalion
skillfully pooled these inputs to create a “fused and nuanced” intelligence
picture of their AO. The net result was a locally supported security
situation that led to a dramatic decline in sniping and IED attacks and created
a context stable enough to sustain civil affairs and reconstruction. 150
Many of the practices employed by Alford have parallels with lessons
successfully learned and implemented in the past. These include organizing
Marines into dispersed small- unit outposts that are manned by combined
US and indigenous security forces that engage in continual patrolling
and outreach to the community. These units avoid large- sweep and heavyhanded
kinetic operations and work to win allies within the population by
protecting collaborators, acting quickly on local intelligence tips, empowering
local partners in their own efforts to achieve security, and providing
valuable civic action.
Alford advanced a number of these familiar principles through particularly
effective implementation. A few lessons that had been recognized as
important in past counterinsurgency experiences but may not have been effectively
implemented were given new life by Alford and others in the Anbar
experience and honed to fine degree. For instance, advances in intelligence
included a system for coordinating and fusing the inputs received from both
technological and human sources. These were pooled in a way that effectively
enabled more precise targeting of insurgents. In addition, the cooperation of
locally based allies was shored up through weapons supply, training, and strategically
channeled civic action. Alford masterfully leveraged his use of civic
action resources to create unity of effort across key leaders within his AO.
On the sound advice of his cultural adviser, Alford held reconstruction funds