The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture

Know Thyself 25
Identity
Identity is a group’s self- assessment—its view of group character, its strengths
and weakness, and its intended role, now and in the future. In sharp contrast
to the assumption posited by neorealism—that actors proceed according to
their relative position in global power configurations and will respond similarly
to similar external stimuli—the cultural mapping exercise is founded
in the strategic culture assumption that actors have diverse goals based on
a normative understanding of who they are and the role they should be
playing. 36 Theo Farrell draws the link to military organizations: “Culture, as
both professional norms and national traditions, shapes preference formation
by military organizations by telling organizational members who they
are and what is possible, and thereby suggesting what they should do. In this
way, culture explains why military organizations choose the structures and
strategies they do, and thus how states generate military power.” 37
Service cultures possess distinct identities sought after and then
defended by the human agents who claim them. Services do not just provide
occupations—they provide particular personas and identities to those
who rate membership. Thomas Mahnken makes the key point that “people
join the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps, not ‘the military’ in the
abstract. . . . They join because they identify—or want to identify—with a
service’s values and its culture. It is therefore not surprising that two decades
after the passage of the Goldwater- Nichols Act, which sought to promote
jointness, an officer’s service affiliation remains the most important determinant
of his views, more than rank, age or combat experience.” 38
Writing more than three decades ago, Carl Builder argued much the
same and pointed out that the personal “identity goods” derived from service
culture are an inhibiting factor for organizational change: “Many who
choose a particular military institution and dedicate their lives to it make
their choice because there is something about the service—who it is or what
it is about—that appeals to them. They see something in that service attractive
or admirable and make an implicit contract with that service to serve
in exchange for the associative benefit they perceive.” Preset expectations
and the self- selection process are part of what keeps organizational culture
robust from one generation to the next: “If impending changes in their service
then threaten that which [members] found attractive, they will exert
a restoring or stabilizing pressure. With tens or hundreds of thousands of
such implicit contracts outstanding, the potential for voluntarily changing
the institution is very small.” 39 If successful change to the institution comes,
it must be within an acceptable identity package. 40 At the end of the day all
bright strategic ideas, from whatever source, will be lost on a service that
finds them anathema to its own identity orientation.
Jim Smith notes that the same cultural bonding that gives an organization
its sense of mission, identity, and commitment can inspire unproductive