The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture

Know Thyself 33
strengthen what had been an organizational deficit. When short- term training
is unlikely to instill the desired factors (perhaps the desired factors are
the product of a deep- seated worldview or value set particular to a socioeconomic
class or region of the country), strategists will have to become far
more serious about tailored recruiting strategies and screening applicants
for key leadership positions. 73
The cultural mapping method also holds promise for improving efforts
toward jointness. When the mapping exercise is repeated across services,
creating an analytic view of the joint cultural topography, a strategist is provided
a keen sense of where the services are likely to cooperate and where
their distinctive service cultures will cause rifts. Applied to combined contexts—with
allies and regional partners—the same utility applies.
Researchers must bear in mind the uncomfortable fact that any “cultural
analysis is intrinsically incomplete.” 74 The “soundness” of the insights
derived from this method is assessed by their ability to be further validated
rather than undermined by the continued consumption of data. 75 In the real
world of the strategist, there is often a sharper test: direct application to the
field. The cultural inferences generated will be put into operational play and
will either prove insightful or fall flat. One of the beauties of creating forecasting
mechanisms for the policy sphere is that one does not need to wait
the length of a career to see if the offered method is valid and useful. The
“proof,” so to speak, is usually measured in rather immediate time frames.
With this in mind, the following chapters attempt to offer some measure
of utility to the strategist on one targeted front: what cultural analysis has
to tell us about the US Marine Corps’s relationship with counterinsurgency
and its likely practice in the future. The critical cultural factors that emerged
as significant across research for this study were mapped across three key
cultural domains: American public culture, US military culture, and the distinctive
culture of the Marine Corps. Chapter 2 will examine key inputs
from the first two.
Notes
Portions of this chapter previously appeared in Jeannie L. Johnson and Matthew T.
Berrett, “Cultural Topography: A New Research Tool for Intelligence,” Studies in
Intelligence 55, no. 2 (June 2011): 1–22.
1. Heuser, Evolution of Strategy, 19.
2. Snyder, Soviet Strategic Culture, 8.
3. The tenets of realism championed by Hans J. Morgenthau can be found in
Morgenthau, “Six Principles of Political Realism,” 7–14. Criticism of realism
and neorealism from second- and third- generation strategic culture scholars
may be found in Katzenstein, Culture of National Security, and Glenn, Howlett,
and Poore, Neorealism versus Strategic Culture.