The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture

Identity and Role 69
The first commandant to set a mark for Marine Corps role identity in the
pages of the Gazette was the highly popular and articulate John A. Lejeune.
Writing in 1922, he urged: “But let us not forget the object of our existence,
which is to make and keep the Marine Corps a great fighting machine—the
greatest on earth, bar none.” 100 It was he who cast the Marines as a legion
of hardened combat veterans “grown grey in war with very few intervals of
peace” and immortalized this image by weaving it into Order 47, read every
year on the Marine Corps’s birthday. 101 Clear in Lejeune’s mind, however,
was that his Marine fighters were doing so as “part and parcel of the naval
service.” The heroic land duty performed in World War I was a necessary
exception—the Marines’ key roles remained within the traditional naval
sphere. In addition to protecting Navy yards, Lejeune’s 1920s- era leathernecks
acted as guards for American legations in foreign countries, as landing
forces to “protect American lives, rights and interests,” as forces of occupation
to “restore order and to maintain peace and tranquility in disturbed
countries,” as administrators in garrisons, as detachments for “service on
board the vessels of the Fleet” and in aviation, and as “Expeditionary forces
for service with the Fleet in war.” 102
In 1930 Commandant Ben Fuller assumed command of a Corps emerging
from nearly two decades of small- wars conflict. 103 His tenure was largely
captured by a tug- of- war between those in the Corps advocating further
development of small- wars competency and those championing a more
amphibious role: landing operations and the securing of advanced bases. Felt
strongly among Marines was the need to differentiate themselves from the
Army and to carve out distinctive space. 104 Fuller’s speeches reflect, but do not
reconcile, the doctrinal tension between these two distinctive roles. He opens
his primary contribution to the Gazette with an impassioned attachment to
expertise on the seas—“Cut the ancestral knot that binds us to the waters of
the oceans, seas, bays, gulfs, rivers, lakes and other wet spots and with the
same motion you cut the throat of the Corps”—and to the Navy—“Do not
let the Naval- Mind of the Corps be changed to any other type of mind, that
will leave only a memory, a history, of our grand and glorious Corps of the
Ocean.” At the same time, he heralds the essential role played in small wars:
“Major wars, beginning with the Revolution and ending with the World War,
have proved the splendid usefulness of the Corps to the Nation. But the magnificent
record of constructive achievements, and successes in minor wars,
during a period of over one and a half centuries has conclusively proved that
the Corps is a necessary part of the United States Government.” The bridge
between these two banks is a claim to “versatility”: “We know what our job
was yesterday and we are struggling faithfully to do our work today, but
who knows what it will be tomorrow? Probably something new and unique.
It may be anything. Our job is intricate—diffused. It requires versatility.” 105
It was Fuller’s successor, John H. Russell, who tipped the scales in
favor of landing operations and amphibious doctrine. A longtime “fervent”