The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture

Chapter 1
Know Thyself
Turning the Strategic Culture Tool Inward
The idea that warring groups often behave according to distinctive practices
is not a new one. Classical writers took note of particular “ways of
war” practiced by Scythians, Persians, Huns, Saracens, and Turks, among
others. 1 Theories that draw linkages between the peculiarities of a particular
ethnonational group and its resultant way of war are not novel to this
century or the last one. So it may be with some ignorance of the past that
most strategic culture literature has accepted the late 1970s as the concept’s
starting point. It was in 1977 that the term “strategic culture” was coined by
Jack Snyder and defined as “the sum total of ideas, conditioned emotional
responses and patterns of habitual behavior that members of a national strategic
community have acquired through instruction or imitation with each
other with regard to nuclear strategy.” 2
Despite the multiplication of definitions that have emerged since Snyder’s
writing, a slight adjustment to his original nuclear- oriented definition—
replacing “nuclear strategy” with “national security”—manages to capture
the essence of most strategic culture literature today. Snyder was part of the
first generation of strategic culture theorists who devised this concept as a
supplement to, or amelioration of, the shortcomings of prominent theoretical
constructs such as realism and neorealism. 3 Snyder’s peer, Ken Booth,
championed Snyder’s concept of strategic culture to a greater degree than
Snyder did himself, insisting that neorealism’s rational- actor model and use
of game theory were “unhistorical approaches.” 4 At a baseline, Booth and
other first- generation scholars rejected the “black box” theory espoused by
neorealism: the assumption that the behavior of states on the world stage
may be predicted according to a metric of universally understood rationality
that supersedes and therefore renders internal state dynamics irrelevant.