The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture

78 Chapter 3
Where domain- optimized forces have experienced friction is
at the seams between the domains and in responding to sudden
changes from the expected character of conflict. Unlike the other
Services, the Marine Corps has not relied on a single geographic
domain to ensure our place in national defense and service to the
Nation. This distinction has at times been an institutional vulnerability
that has led to attempts to reduce or eliminate the Corps
based on perceived redundancy. It has, however, also been a source
of great strength that has fueled competitive innovation, strategic
and operational foresight, and the ability to view the battlespace
“where four map sheets intersect” with a perspective not tied to
a single cultural or domain bias. The Marine Corps has repeatedly
demonstrated its institutional and operational adaptability
by effectively bridging the nation’s most critical seams between
domains. 146
General Amos, who was commandant during the last two years of
Marine service in Iraq, provided a slightly more defined approach in public
speeches: “We Marines don’t really have a domain—we have a lane, and
that lane is crisis response. I told my fellow Service chiefs, I’m not interested
in poaching on your domain at all. But ours is a lane that cuts across all
of these domains. If there is some duplication, I think it’s not only affordable,
it’s necessary.” 147 Grounding the Corps’s sense of self through its rather
turbulent search for a “lane” in the “seams” has been a set of commonly
founded and consciously cultivated norms and ritualized values. Marines
know who they are—how Marines look, how they behave, and what they
believe—even if the role they perform remains a consistently open question.
Notes
1. The Marine Corps Gazette was begun in March 1916 as a publication for the
officer corps. Leatherneck, begun in November 1921, is aimed at the enlisted
ranks.
2. “The Epic of Dixmude,” Marine Corps Gazette (March 1917): 85.
3. Cooling and Turner, “Understanding the Few Good Men.”
4. Ricks, Making the Corps, 185.
5. Builder, Masks of War.
6. Ibid., 9. See Frank Hoffman’s defense of the Corps’s strategic voice: “Marine
Mask of War.”
7. Ricks, Making the Corps, 188–89. The Army War College does not have a
record of this event or a transcript of Builder’s speech (which is not totally
unusual per its operating procedures). Rick’s accounting of the lecture appears
to be the only published record of it.