The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture

74 Chapter 3
dollars remained “limited largely to those matters which fall within our
statutory responsibility—that is, the development of the doctrine, tactics,
techniques and equipment employed by a landing force in amphibious
operations.” His testimony to the committee concluded with an emphasis
on combat readiness—the ability to “mount out on short notice and fight.”
The Marine degree of “readiness,” Greene argued, represented “a priceless
commodity, without parallel by any other nation.” 128
Leonard Chapman (1968–71), who oversaw the Marine Corps during
the thick of the Vietnam War and its near conclusion, continued to emphasize
the same two roles. Despite the role Marines were playing—years- long
counterinsurgency forces fighting alongside the Army—Chapman held fast
to “readiness” and to “amphibious” as Marine hallmarks. In a seminal
“State of the Corps” piece penned in 1969, Chapman reminded his Marines
of their true calling:
Despite the heavy impact of our Vietnam commitment on the rest
of the Marine Corps, we have managed with certain personnel and
logistic restrictions to maintain our readiness to meet other commitments
which could arise. As part of the Navy / Marine Corps
team, we never lose sight of the responsibilities inherent in our role
as this nation’s force in readiness for the projection of seapower
ashore or such other duties as our country may require.
Congressional legislation established our primary mission:
to prepare for and execute landing force operations as part of an
amphibious task force. 129
The Marine Corps continued to gain experience in complex, land- based
counterinsurgency operations while defining itself in terms of immediate,
short- burst combat readiness via advanced landing operations. Small wars
are thick in Marine heritage but had been experienced as nearly ad hoc episodes
with each round, never codified into doctrine until after the Banana
Wars and shelved to oblivion nearly immediately afterward. In a particularly
ironic twist, history records that Marine officers going to Vietnam were
schooled not by their own Small Wars Manual or their own antiguerrilla
history, but by the US Army doctrine of counterinsurgency in vogue in the
run- up to Vietnam. The Marine Corps was so far divorced from its own
small- wars heritage that the Small Wars Manual was left under dust in favor
of the 1962 Fleet Marine Force Manual 8- 2, Operations against Guerrilla
Forces, a collection of borrowings from Army doctrine. Combined Action
Platoon program Marine and scholar Michael Peterson points out that this
historical irony is all the more painful because the Army’s doctrine was a
less useful fit for Vietnam than the Marines’ doctrine would have been. The
Army doctrine focused on experiences fighting partisan irregulars attached
to external forces rather than homegrown insurgents of the sort the authors