The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture

54 Chapter 3
According to Ricks, Builder thought better of it by 1994 and offered a
lecture on Marine Corps culture at the US Army War College. He noted that
the other services tended to measure themselves in numbers: the Navy by
counting its ships, the Army its troops, and the Air Force the performance
quality and number of its aircraft. The Marines, by contrast, focused on
their internal culture: their ability to preserve an independent identity apart
from the other services and remain self- sufficient, “taking more pride in
who they are,” Builder argued, “than what they own.” 7 Ricks agrees: “The
Air Force has its planes, the Navy its ships, the Army its obsessively written
and obeyed ‘doctrine’ that dictates how to act. Culture—that is, the values
and assumptions that shape its members—is all the Marines have. It is what
holds them together. . . . Theirs is the richest culture: formalistic, insular,
elitist, with a deep anchor in their own history and mythology.” 8 Marines,
in a measure significantly above the other services, recognize the essential
nature of fostering allegiance to their own traditions and history and have
made the practice a part of their doctrine. The handbook for noncommissioned
officers (NCOs) emphasizes that “these traditions give the Marine
Corps its spirit. . . . As our traditions, our institutions, and even our eccentricities—like
live coral—develop and toughen, so the Corps itself develops
and toughens.” 9
The examination of Marine Corps culture that follows explores identity
and role within the Corps, with an eye toward understanding the implications
for the full spectrum of counterinsurgency tasks. Understanding core
components of Marine Corps culture and comparing them to operational
practice across counterinsurgency campaigns may shed light on why some
lessons have been learned and integrated over time and others lost to history.
Identity is an appropriate starting point. Of the four aspects of culture
examined across these chapters, it carries disproportionate weight, often acting
as the deep anchor to which norms, values, and perceptions are bound.
Identity
Marine Corps identity indoctrination starts well in advance of boot camp.
Recruitment media, Hollywood films portraying Marines, Marine legends
that permeate the national consciousness, family ties to former Marines,
and exposure to Marine material culture (bumper stickers, T- shirts, decals,
tattoos) are all part of the presetting of American notions about what it is
to be a Marine.
Those identity narratives that are consciously cultivated by the Corps,
specifically through recruitment posters and commercials, capture the narrative
the Corps intends to send, the image it means to cultivate, and the
sort of young person it hopes to draw in. A systematic review of Marine
advertising since the early years of the twentieth century reveals a set of