The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture

Know Thyself 19
Applied and refined over the last ten years, the cultural topography
approach has proved a useful and illuminating tool for intelligence analysts.
It is being exercised here for the purposes of the strategist: Rather
than studying alien cultures, its lens is being trained on our own. A strategist
interested in ascertaining organizational “fitness” for counterinsurgency
within his service ranks would employ the cultural topography method
in its most robust form, conducting individual cultural mapping exercises
across services (Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps) bound to the
issue of counterinsurgency practice and assessed across time. The pooled
result would deliver a textured topography of service orientations—areas
of common ground, likely sources of resistance, individual strengths, and
potentially debilitating cleavages—within the service community on this
issue. This book represents the first iteration within that process.
Strategists may use the insights derived from cultural mapping exercises
for a variety of purposes: anticipating organizational resistance to norm
changes, improving messaging strategies, smoothing interservice tensions, or
guiding the immediate task of matching service organizations to the operational
set for which they are best suited. When pooled cultural topography
results indicate that a strong service match is not possible, the informed
strategist can plan for the friction he is likely to encounter when mission
tasks run counter to service culture. Sometimes the key finding from a cultural
mapping exercise is that the organizational culture in question has no
clear script for action on the issue selected. If discovered early, this undetermined
cultural space may be used to advantage by strategic planners in
forging interservice consensus on best practices. If discovered late—when
operations are already under way—it may be flagged by planners as an area
of uncertainty likely to be characterized by diverse performance.
The insights derived from employing the analytic tools of the Cultural
Topography Framework aim for practical utility—namely, to supply the
strategist with a range of probable behaviors in order to enhance efforts
at planning, creating doctrine, manipulating the context in which security
policy is forged, and possibly highlighting strategic deficiencies that need to
be addressed. Understanding cultural preferences should provide opportunity
to exploit the strategic habits of adversaries, to plan toward smoother
relations with encultured allies, and to hedge against habitual vulnerabilities
in oneself.
The Cultural Mapping Exercise
A cultural mapping exercise represents one iteration of the Cultural Topography
Framework’s analytic process. A single group is selected from among
the constellation of actors relevant to an issue of policy concern and is targeted
for study through the framework’s analytic method. The patterned