The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture

Conclusion
Lessons Learned and Lessons Lost
Marine counterinsurgency practice across one hundred years of fighting
time is characterized by both marked continuities and some impressive
innovations. The operational cultural narratives that shaped Marine
behavior in each counterinsurgency round were influenced by US national
and military cultures situated within the times, as well as by the internal
identity, norms, values, and aspects of perceptual lens that continued to
evolve within the Corps.
The experience of the Iraq War has added variety and depth to the collection
of counterinsurgency lessons Marines can claim. How these will translate
into future practice will depend on which lessons Marines themselves
extract from their recent experience and institutionalize into training. The
vast assembly of potential lessons learned accumulated over the last decade
and a half are present but analytically unaccounted for in a Marine “lessons
learned” data repository. Attempts to identify the “right” lessons from Iraq
and Afghanistan have met with internal friction and have, for the most part,
fallen flat. Much like during the post–Banana Wars experience, the preservation
of lessons learned has taken place largely through informal channels
and through the voices of authors within the Marine Corps Gazette. Its
articles that referenced both “lessons” and “Iraq” since the Marine pullout
in 2009 are evaluated here alongside other source material (including memoirs,
scholarly accounts, reports by embedded journalists, and interviews of
those overseeing Marine Corps programs) in order to understand the way in
which Marines have ingested their Iraqi counterinsurgency experience and
to identify the lessons most likely to be learned through reinforcement in
training and doctrine, as well as those in jeopardy of being lost.
Lessons Learned
In assessing its own lessons learned, America’s First to Fight force is most
at home when commenting on conventional capabilities that fared well
in Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) and Operation Enduring Freedom
(OEF). These include the performance of the Marine air- ground task force