The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture

26 Chapter 1
responses to nontraditional mission sets. Should identity territory be
intruded on or role conceptions come under threat, service organizations
will push back: “Organizations fight hardest when they feel that their core
mission is being challenged. The organization will favor policies that promoted
the core mission, it will fight for autonomy in performing that core
mission, and it will seek to defeat any challenges to those functions that it
associates with its core.” Perhaps most important, “it will be largely indifferent
to functions it sees as peripheral to its core, even if those functions are
part of its assigned purpose. . . . It will try to push out, or reject accepting,
non- core missions as possible detractions from its core focus.” 41 Identifying
identity strands within a military institution may clarify why some strategically
important tasks are pursued with enthusiasm and others left to neglect.
Norms
The term “norms” encompasses a wide range of cultural practice. Authors
from a variety of disciplines have struggled with the concept of norms as
it seems to embody both a set of practices and the world of beliefs that
inform those practices. Theo Farrell focuses on the power of ideas when
he defines his use of the term: “Norms are intersubjective beliefs about the
social and natural world that define actors, their situations, and the possibilities
of action.” 42 Peter Katzenstein, in his seminal volume The Culture
of National Security, favors a slightly more behavior- oriented approach.
Norms are “collective expectations for the proper behavior of actors with a
given identity.” 43
In the final analysis, a strategist cares more about how organizations
and nations behave than any other aspect of the cultural package. The definition
employed here, therefore, captures both ideas and practice: Norms
are accepted, expected, and preferred modes of behavior and shared understandings
concerning taboos. Implicit in this definition is an assumption that
beliefs of varying strength and quality inform these norms. Both beliefs and
the behaviors they inspire are subject for consideration.
In his defining essay on military culture, James Burk points out that
although military and service norms are, in the main, born of an aspiration
toward warfighting and often influence when and what sort of wars
are fought, this does not render them inherently instrumental. Military traditions
may not always enhance warfighting capability. 44 Beatrice Heuser
sums up the general tendencies of military establishments regarding preferred
norms of behavior: The proclivity of armed forces is to fight wars
“not in ways that are most appropriate to reach the desired end state with
regard to the adversary. Given any say in the matter, they prefer to fight
the wars they have prepared for, for which they have acquired equipment,
for which they have configured and which they want to play out in reality.”
45 This does not mean that services asked to pursue battlefield practices