The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture

Know Thyself 27
contrary to their preferred tactics will refuse, but it may mean that service
members tend to view the battlefield through a lens that focuses on opportunities
to engage in preferred practices at the expense of more effective but
less familiar tactics.
Jack Snyder’s addenda to realist thinking argue for the weight of
bureaucratic habit as a companion to, and perhaps infringer on, “rational”
thinking. In his words, “once a distinctive approach to strategy takes hold,
it tends to persist despite changes in the circumstances that gave rise to it,
through processes of socialization and institutionalization and through the
role of strategic concepts in legitimating these social arrangements.” 46 Kerry
Longhurst calls this “path dependency”—a label she uses to describe the
cultural inertia of policies that made sense at one point in time but, owing
to heavy initial investment (both intellectual and material), tend to bias their
makers toward continued investment, even after that path becomes insensible
because of changed strategic realities. 47
Her research, alongside others’, indicates that humans may not, in fact,
weigh each decision separately and project its long- term consequences but
may very often rely on habit as the locus of behavior. 48 Valerie Hudson argues
that national habits of this sort might be termed “foreign policy action templates”
that represent “a repertoire or palette of adaptive responses from
which members build off- the- shelf strategies of action.” 49 Even if habitual
solutions are somewhat suboptimal, they may be less “expensive” in terms
of time and energy costs than pausing before each decision to carefully
weigh options. This approach to rationality goes some distance in explaining
“cultural inertia” or bureaucratic practices that seem to have limited fit
with current security realities. 50
Habitual solutions might be considered a service’s “default settings.”
These organizational norms may take a beating when applied to the battlefront,
especially in those conflicts for which they are not a good fit, but
may reappear in surprisingly robust form in the next go- round. The battlefield,
and wars generally, offers an opportunity for the rational cleansing
of unfit practices, but services are perfectly capable of ignoring the diagnosis.
As John Nagl noted in his rigorous study of the US Army in the Vietnam
War context, the pressures for change exerted by an ongoing military
conflict may be insufficient: “A strong organizational culture can prohibit
learning the lessons of the present and can even prevent the organization’s
acknowledging that its current policies are anything other than completely
successful.” 51
Sometimes the norms of the general public intervene to shape or inhibit
military action. Greg Giles explores the power of national norms on security
policy in a number of places in his work on Israel. One particularly
poignant example focuses on the conclusions drawn by the Israel Defense
Forces (IDF) when responding to the 1987 Intifada. The IDF concluded that
it could not eliminate the Intifada without violating social norms. There