Culture in Conflict: Irregular Warfare, Culture Policy, and the Marine Corps
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Culture in Conflict: Irregular Warfare, Culture Policy, and the Marine Corps
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Overview
In response to the irregular warfare challenges facing the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2005, General James Mattis—then commander of Marine Corps Combat Development Command—established a new Marine Corps cultural initiative. The goal was simple: teach Marines to interact successfully with the local population in areas of conflict. The implications, however, were anything but simple: transform an elite military culture founded on the principles of "locate, close with, and destroy the enemy" into a "culturally savvy" Marine Corps.
Culture in Conflict: Irregular Warfare, Culture Policy, and the Marine Corps examines the conflicted trajectory of the Marine Corps' efforts to institute a radical culture policy into a military organization that is structured and trained to fight conventional wars. More importantly, however, it is a compelling book about America's shifting military identity in a new world of unconventional warfare.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804791908 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford Security Studies |
| Publication date: | 05/21/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Culture in Conflict
Irregular Warfare, Culture Policy, and the Marine Corps
By Paula Holmes-Eber
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-9190-8
CHAPTER 1
"When the Boots Hit the Ground"
Studying Military Culture from the Ground Up
"One of the hardest things you have to do [as a Marine] is you have to go from being the combatant to the humanitarian worker," began Staff Sergeant Kukela. I am sitting in a stark wooden room on the Marine Corps base at Camp LeJeune interviewing a team of three staff sergeants about their challenges in training their Marines for the cultural aspects of the battalion's upcoming deployment to Iraq. We are seated at a rudimentary table surrounded by four wooden chairs in Battalion 2/6's staff room.
"You really have to switch," he continued. "[For example], I was at an entry control point. We had a vehicle that was on a pullout list, possibly a suicide vehicle. And it switched out of the search area and was driving toward the post [the entry to the base]—the same vehicle as on the pullout list. We ended up shooting—did an EOF [escalation of force] on the vehicle and shot the driver."
But, he explained, as they checked inside the vehicle it became obvious that the driver had no weapons. The staff sergeant leaned forward intently as he described the scene, "[So in less than a second], we went from being that combatant trying to defend yourself to now this guy is just a civilian being stupid. And now we're dealing with a guy who has just been shot."
Staff Sergeant Kukela frowns, "Yeah, so now we've got to save this guy's life. We just shot the guy because he was stupid and all he was being was a dumb driver. Now we have to switch roles and just totally change. Now we've got to save his life and if he had a family with him, we have to deal with his family now. He wasn't a combatant.
"If he was a combatant and you shot him, he's dead. Life goes on. But now you've got to—whoever did that has to deal with the fact that they just shot an innocent person because he was driving dumb. There's a big switch there sometimes ... the way the fight is going, the way the war is going and what we have to deal with."
To his right, Staff Sergeant Benson leans forward to explain the challenges of contemporary combat, of being a twenty or twenty-two-year-old Marine who is struggling to make sense of a strange new world where people speak incomprehensible languages in a culture that is radically different from theirs. Where simple hand gestures or actions can be misinterpreted with deadly results. A world where the rules are unclear, and switching from the role of warrior to emergency aid worker can happen in a second. "Hindsight is twenty-twenty. And anyone doing an investigation, they were not there. They cannot see in the situation that the Marine felt this way, and that is why he did it."
THIS BOOK IS ABOUT LOOKING AT THE WORLD FROM the Marines' perspective. It is not about whether, at the end of the day, what the Marines did was right or wrong or the best way. For the theoretical question for me, the ethnographer, is not what Marines do, but why. The goal of this study, as Staff Sergeant Benson so simply states, is to "see in the situation that the Marine felt this way, and that is why he did it."
Most studies of the military, written by those who are sitting on the outside—in academia, government, and policy-making institutions—tend to presume that those service members who live "on the inside" of the military look at and interpret the world the same way as the external civilian researcher. Since the military members come from the same society, the assumption is that while there may be a few occupational or organizational differences, ultimately, civilians and military service members share the same ideals, view and solve problems in a similar manner, and speak and behave in mutually comprehensible ways.
In the case of the U.S. Marine Corps, nothing could be farther from the truth. As I discuss in the methods section of this chapter, I suffered from intense culture shock upon my arrival as the new professor of operational culture at Marine Corps University (MCU) in 2006. Indeed, the experience was all the more exaggerated since I had assumed that I was simply taking another job as a professor at a military-flavored U.S. university. Consequently, while I had mentally prepared myself for the many cross-cultural and linguistic challenges typical of anthropological fieldwork during my previous research in North Africa, in Paris, and among the Navajo, I had absolutely no theoretical or mental preparation for the cultural challenges I would face while working with Marines. This study, in fact, was initially born from my obvious ignorance of Marine Corps culture and my urgent need to understand the way that Marines saw the world in order to communicate and teach effectively in the classroom.
Not only do the majority of studies of the military presume that civilians and military members from the same country share the same culture, but a large body of both political science and sociological research on the military explains changes in the military by looking at parallel changes in society and/or the state. In these studies, the dominant paradigm is of a "top-down" "outside-in" model of military change, in which change flows from the state and society to the military (but not vice versa).
However, as I discuss in the following pages, recently a small but growing body of literature, deriving primarily from organizational studies approaches to the military (with a smattering of anthropological research), provides a much more complex picture of militaries. These studies suggest that militaries are not monolithic, warlike mini photocopies of society or the state. Instead, even within the same country, different military services develop their own unique cultures, based on their diverse histories and operational experiences and their differing functions and technology. Furthermore, recent research indicates that military organizations themselves are not homogeneous: differences exist between those service members and units "in garrison" (at home) versus those who are deployed overseas; between officers and enlisted members; and between servicemen and women of different races, gender, or sexual preference. Most intriguing of all are the handful of studies that reveal variations between individual military units within the same service. This research suggests that across the same military service, different sectors may have separate subcultures, due in part to their differing histories and experiences. Several authors point to these findings to argue that military organizations are dynamic "learning" organizations—adapting and changing at the unit level from the "bottom up" as well as from the "top down."
As I discuss in this chapter, these new micro- and organizational level studies of the military form the basis for the methodological and theoretical approaches used in this study.
Military Culture, Organizational Change, and Policy Implementation
Over the past two decades, interest in and research on military culture and change has blossomed across a number of disciplines. Political science and historical perspectives have offered strategic macrolevel studies of national military cultures and the international and political implications of changing state policy and national "ways of war." Sociological and psychological (and occasionally, anthropological) research, on the other hand, has provided a more microlevel approach: focusing on military groups or individuals and the impact of social and policy changes on the sociopsychological and internal dimensions of military life and culture. A third literature has developed as an increasing number of researchers from across these disciplines have incorporated principles from organizational studies in their research. These organizational studies provide several in-depth, midlevel analyses of military organization and structure and the influence of organizational culture on the military's capacity to adapt.
Perspectives from Political Science and History: Strategic Culture, "Ways of War," and the Revolution in Military Affairs
In political science and history, a large and growing body of research has developed over the past twenty years revolving around the sources of military innovation, adaptation, and change. One concept foundational to many of these analyses of military change is the notion that strategic culture—a particular state's a priori approach to thinking about and conducting war and its international relations with other states—is intimately related to its resulting military culture. While various scholars in international relations and political science posit different sources for this strategic culture (ranging from a state's history, its strategic alliances and relations, its experiences in earlier conflicts, or the underlying national culture of the state), few would dispute that states and their leaders influence the ways that wars are fought. The ability of militaries to adapt and change, by corollary, is thus viewed as a product and reflection of national ideals, a state's history (and especially its strategic alliances and military history), and the perceptions and influence of members of a strategic elite. Thus, for example, Adamsky examines how the different strategic cultures of Russia, the United States, and Israel influenced the ability of their respective militaries to adapt to new communication technologies; Cassidy argues similarly for the influence of national history and operational experience on the adaptation of Russia, the United States, and the British to counterinsurgency; and the many articles in Farrell and Terriff 's volume The Sources of Military Change focus on the influence that national cultural norms, politics, strategy, and new technology have had upon the ability of militaries in different countries to adapt over the past century.
Paralleling this "top-down" approach examining national and strategic influences on military change is the dominant focus of a large portion of policy studies research on the role of government policy makers and external interest groups in influencing change through policy making, policy analysis, and the policy process. A simple examination of popular contemporary introductory texts on public policy reveals a strong emphasis on studying the roles of formal and informal policy actors in creating policy with a much more limited examination of the organizations and groups receiving the policy. Reflecting this perspective, one of the most influential texts on national security and the policy process observes that the military, because of its command and control structure and apolitical position in government, has little to no role in making policy, falling under the authority and jurisdiction of Congress and the U.S. president.
To the credit of the field of policy studies, and influenced in part by research in public administration and management, as well as contributions from sociologists, and, more recently, anthropologists, a secondary literature has evolved focusing on the challenges of policy implementation and the need to understand the perspectives of the recipient organizations and players. Inspired in part by Pressman and Wildavsky's landmark book Implementation: How Great Expectations in Washington Are Dashed in Oakland, studies of policy implementation have provided a more "bottom-up" perspective of what actually happens to policies as they reach the organizations and groups that must apply them.
Implementation research has forced scholars to look at the local political dynamics, multiple loci, and organizational networks influencing implementation as well as the challenges of realistically assessing policy outcomes. However, although many of these studies reveal the complexity and dynamics of the various players involved in policy implementation, the specific organizations implementing the policies are often still treated as "black boxes." In contrast, a handful of good and growing microstudies of these organizations (see, for example, Lipsky's Street Level Bureaucracy, Yanow's How Does a Policy Mean?, and Ingram's research on equal opportunity and the clothing industry in Ireland) suggest that the implementing organizations are neither internally coherent nor necessarily consistent; that the social and economic realities of work in these organizations may undermine the ability of workers to achieve the ideals of the organization; and that these organizations may have their own culturally biased interpretations of the intent of the policy. Such studies bring into question the assumption that implementing organizations are merely inert recipients of policy.
Cultural Variation Within and Between Militaries: Psychological and Sociological Perspectives
In contrast to the strategic culture approach in political science and history, which emphasizes the state and international actors, sociologists and psychologists have tended to focus their research on the internal variations within the military, processes of socialization and internalization of military roles and values, and the effects of military life and combat on individuals and military families and communities. These microlevel approaches provide a view of a military that is far from a homogenous "black box." Studies on diversity within the military illustrate the ways that such demographic and biological factors as gender, race and ethnicity, and sexual identity influence career progression, retention, acceptance within the military community, and even motivations for hazing.
In addition to examining demographic variations in military organizations, sociologists and psychologists have also studied how occupational, organizational, and experiential differences among units can create internal variations within the military. For example, scholars have described the differences between deployed versus garrison cultures in the military (a topic I touch upon in chapter 3). They also note the different branch and occupational cultures that arise in some militaries, such as in the U.S. Army.
On the other end of the spectrum, using an international comparative approach, a number of sociologists and psychologists have also examined cross-cultural differences across military cultures around the world. Reicht compares differing approaches to discipline across militaries from eighteen nations; Labuc compares military training between Soviet, Israeli, and British soldiers; and Soeters et al. compare North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) militaries using the psychological values model of Hofstede. Like the political science approaches, these studies explain difference between military cultures in terms of the differing national character and values of the various countries from which the militaries originate.
Extending this approach, Moskos and his colleagues have published numerous studies examining changes in Western militaries over the past century, relating these changes to shifts in the values of the surrounding culture. In contrast to the state-focused studies of political science, this research examines the internal cultural and organizational shifts within militaries as the result of parallel shifts in society: positing a postmodern shift in Western militaries from a more institutional to a more professional occupational identity and organization. However, both disciplinary approaches agree that the cause of these changes is due to external cultural shifts—whether "top-down" shifts in the nation-state and strategic policy or "outside-in" changes in the values, ideals, and orientations of the general public and society from which military members originate. As Moskos states, "The military can be understood as a social organization which maintains levels of autonomy while refracting broader societal trends."
In general, both political science and sociological/psychological approaches focus on the ways that military organizations are a reflection of or natural extension of the state and society. In such models, militaries are not viewed as separate or distinct from the state or society. Since such models presume that the state and society dictate military culture, changes in military culture, accordingly, are explained as the result of larger changes in the state or society. However, a small but growing number of organizational and "bottom-up" studies of militaries suggest that, in fact, military services have their own distinct histories, identities, and cultures that also may significantly influence the ability of a specific service or branch to adapt and change independent of the surrounding society or state.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Culture in Conflict by Paula Holmes-Eber. Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Figures and Tables,Acknowledgments,
Prologue,
Introduction,
1. "When the Boots Hit the Ground": Studying Military Culture from the Ground Up,
PART I Ideals: Corps Culture,
2. "Every Marine a Rifleman": The Egalitarian Military Service,
3. "Soldiers of the Sea": The Marine Corps Expeditionary Mindset,
4. "Honor, Courage, and Commitment": Instilling the Warrior Ethos at the Recruit Depots,
5. "Tip of the Spear": Leadership in the Corps,
PART II Realities: "Marinizing" Culture,
6. "Building the Plane as We're Flying It": Simplifying Solutions to Culture in Theater,
7. "The 80 Percent Solution": (Mis)-Translations from SME to Marine,
8. "Where's the 'So What'?" Processing Culture at the Center for Advanced Operational Culture Learning (CAOCL),
9. "There's No 'I' in Team": Reshaping Culture Specialists to Fit a Nonspecialist Culture,
Conclusion,
Appendix: Marine Corps Ranks and Organizational Structures,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,