Issue Date: March 15, 2004

Restraint is just as important as firepower

By James Holmes

Rivalry between the Army and the Marine Corps surfaced recently as I Marine Expeditionary Force prepared to relieve elements of the 82nd Airborne Division in the “Sunni Triangle” of western Iraq. The cause: reports the Marines were planning a fresh approach to occupation duty, predicated on reining in the use of force, stationing platoons among the Iraqi populace and showing sensitivity to Iraqi cultural practices.
Some Army officers took this as a backhanded swipe. “It is hardly advisable,” huffed one, “to denigrate the tactics of the sister service that preceded you in the trenches and to suggest that you are going to do a lot better.”

More likely, the Marines simply are going back to their heritage as a force skilled not only in high-intensity combat, but in the nonviolent chores associated with counterinsurgency warfare.

Marines’ history shows them that vanquishing the holdouts in Iraq depends as much on getting out among Iraqis and improving their lives as on bludgeoning the enemy. The Army, by contrast, has at times resorted to heavy-handed tactics such as large-unit sweeps and artillery barrages. By most accounts, the service conducted these actions with scrupulous effort to avoid civilian casualties, but such tactics send exactly the wrong message to Iraqis — that they are a subject people.

How did the Marines — who garnered the nickname “devil dogs” during World War I due to their ferocity in high-intensity battle — come to view unconventional war as an exercise in limiting the use of force?

For one thing, the Corps had its origin as a constabulary force during the Revolutionary War era. Embarked in sail-driven warships, they kept order among the crewmen and, during engagements, took to the rigging to rake the enemy’s decks with musket fire.

The result was a culture that prized flexibility and innovation as much as it did martial virtues such as courage and self-sacrifice. Now, as then, the Marine Corps goes to extravagant lengths to instill that culture in new recruits.

Between the world wars, these “police at sea,” as one historian called them, waged a series of so-called “banana wars” that helped them hone their doctrine of counterinsurgency warfare. The Marines codified the lessons of these operations, together with the campaign to subdue the Philippine Islands after the Spanish-American War, in their 1940 Small Wars Manual — still the definitive guide to this low-intensity but mind-numbingly complex brand of warfare.

The Small Wars Manual is remarkable for its sensitivity to politics. Indeed, the authors of the manual noted dryly that, because political considerations were so pervasive, many called the Marines deployed for these operations “State Department troops.”

Unlike conventional warfare, counterinsurgency operations required a psychology that emphasized not hatred of the foe, but mild treatment of the indigenous population. Nothing “should be said or done which implies inferiority of the status or of the sovereignty of the native people. They should never be treated as a conquered people.”

Instead, the “purpose should always be to restore normal government or to give the people a better government than they had before, and to establish peace, order and security on as permanent a basis as practicable.”

Hence the Marines’ preference for restraint in post-Saddam Iraq.

As counterinsurgency warfare gradually gave way to routine policing — approximately where the pacification of Iraq is today — the Small Wars Manual advised Marine commanders to take on the burden of patrolling urban areas and the countryside while recruiting and training a constabulary force made up of indigenous troops.

Posting small bodies of U.S. troops throughout the country, where they could deny the insurgents access to the populace — their main source of recruits and supplies — was the technique of choice for the Marines. Later, during the Vietnam War, they stationed combined-action platoons in South Vietnamese villages. Not one village that played host to a Marine platoon ever was overrun — a rare success story for the United States in Indochina.

The CAP program was curtailed prematurely in Vietnam — at the behest of Army commanders who deemed garrison duty unworthy of the American fighting man.

Now, the Corps plans to resurrect this concept for its Iraq deployment.

“Idea is that this platoon, similar to Vietnam, will live and work with police and [Iraqi Civil Defense Corps],” read the notes from a Marine planning conference.

With any luck, the new strategy will bring order to the Sunni Triangle at last.

James Holmes is a senior research associate at the University of Georgia Center for International Trade and Security and a former professor of strategy at the Naval War College.

http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/stor...ER-2655362.php


Ellie