The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture

Chapter 3
Life in the Seams
Establishing Marine Corps Identity and Role
Although an observer of the Marine Corps today might see Marines as
possessed of an obvious and clearly defined sense of identity apart from
soldiers, sailors, and airmen, it has not always been so. A review of the discourse
penned by Marine officers in their earliest published journals reveals
a service struggling between two service identities—Army and Navy—and
still searching for ground to call its own. 1 Marines in the first decades of the
twentieth century most often referred to themselves as “soldiers” (a label
for which even well- meaning civilians will be reprimanded for applying to
them today) and confessed that although they bunked on ships, they had
far more in common with a French infantryman than an American sailor. 2
Marines speak in a lexicon born of the Navy (doors are “hatches,” walls are
“bulkheads,” beds are “racks”) but early on drew manuals, doctrine, rank
structure, and training from the Army. Thus, the historical influence of these
two sister services (much more so than the Air Force) cannot be dismissed
as formative in the evolution of today’s Marine Corps. “Marines fight like
soldiers, talk like sailors, and think like both.” 3
Most of the work done on Marine culture is by Marines for Marines.
Tom Ricks is perhaps the best- known outsider to have conducted systematic
observations of culture within the Corps. He defines service “culture”
in succinct fashion: how members treat each other and how they fight. 4
Ricks notes Carl Builder’s omission of the Marine Corps in his classic work
Masks of War, which details US service cultures. 5 Builder profiled the cultural
characteristics of the Army, Navy, and Air Force and their projected
strategic impact on warfighting but dismissed the Marine Corps and the
Coast Guard as “colorful” institutions with limited strategic voice in military
force planning. 6