The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture

Conclusion 263
these wars are not being addressed with the serious attention they deserve.
One points out that updated inclusion of these lessons in doctrine would
be the right first step but that real institutionalization is found in “a general
dynamic in which the tactical lessons of a decade’s worth of COIN
becomes ingrained in the living, rather than textual, institutional memory of
the Marine Corps.” 29 This would include significant emphasis in curriculum
at the Basic School (TBS), an emphasis that remains absent and is protested
by a number of concerned first lieutenants:
If TBS is to serve as the foundation of every Marine Corps officer’s
basic warfighting education, then why do we completely exclude
from that education the type of battles we fought for the last
decade and are likely to fight again in the future? Despite having
spent the last 13 years conducting counterinsurgency and stability
operations, TBS students receive only 3 hours of instruction and a
dense, lengthy handout on the topics. The counterinsurgency lecture
does little to discuss the strategies and tactics the Marine Corps
and Army used during OIF and OEF and, instead, simplifies stability
operations into a dated case study on Marines in Haiti or the
French in Algeria. 30
Lack of curriculum notwithstanding, future Marines will benefit from
established counterinsurgency doctrine, doctrine that was both produced
and applied during the course of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and that
provided the foundation for a more general acceptance of new practices
across US services. Both the Army and the Marine Corps vested their institutional
support in seeing it through. The serious crafting of combinedservice
“COIN” doctrine in a manner timely enough to see it applied is
an event unprecedented across prior Marine Corps small- wars experience.
Also unprecedented is the amount of public attention the doctrine received.
These “artifacts” of this century’s counterinsurgency experience will make it
harder for its doctrine to fade from memory.
No One COIN Formula
One lesson that future Marines might glean from the Iraq experience is that
despite helpful new doctrine offering time- tested best practices, there is no
one formula for creating counterinsurgency success across diverse AOs. The
successes of varied units across the Anbar Province demonstrates that while
many core principles are consistent across cases, these were applied with
an eye toward a local area’s specific operational context—a point Alford
himself makes in an article assessing the transferability of methods from
Iraq to Afghanistan. 31 Thus, one takeaway for sound pedagogy in service