Victory Point - Ed Darack [19]
Some of the most significant U.S. Marine Corps COIN campaigns occurred early in the twentieth century, in the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Panama, Honduras, and Haiti, in what would become known as the “Banana Wars,” a name derived from American agricultural interests (foremost the United Fruit Company) having benefitted from the outcomes of these interventions against destabilizing insurgencies. For the Marines (and other service branches that would establish units to engage in counterinsurgency operations in years following the Banana Wars), one of the most significant outcomes of this era would be the codification of their unique style of fighting small guerrilla armies and bands of insurgents into book form: the Small Wars Manual. First published in 1935, the Small Wars Manual covered a wide range of diverse topics including tactics, psychology, supply plans, the occupation of towns, armed native organizations, light artillery, and animal transportation, among a series of other topics. The counterinsurgency precepts outlined in the Small Wars Manual, combined with the U.S. Marine Corps institution pioneered by O’Bannon of working closely with local fighters aligned with American interests, founded the conceptual warfighting framework on which ⅔ would build its success in Afghanistan. In the words of Major Rob Scott, ⅔’s executive officer during his address to the battalion’s officer corps while training for their Afghan deployment, “Gentlemen, the Small Wars Manual will be our Bible in this fight.”
Despite the achievements of the U.S. Marine Corps over the course of more than two centuries in places like the remote Pacific, Europe, Vietnam, the Caribbean, North Africa, Central America, and beyond, most American civilians (and even many in other branches of the U.S. military) don’t know what a U.S. Marine really is, or how Marines achieve their stunning victories. Stated simply, Marines are naval infantry—ship-borne troops historically moved throughout the globe by naval vessels, then delivered to terrestrial hot zones by amphibious landing craft. A force of highly trained and disciplined “soldiers of the sea” who emerge from crashing surf to charge into the fight, Marines have also been historically tasked with boarding other vessels and maintaining security on their own ships.
Marines have traditionally not only fought alone in battlefields and confrontations unsuitable for larger and hence less nimble armies, but side by side with conventional soldiers in a joint task force in conflicts where their fighting proved not just an augmentation of combat power, but a synergistic “force multiplier.” Much smaller than the U.S. Army, the Marine Corps can mobilize at the bark of an order for deployments of all types and sizes, and having been born and raised with their naval brethren (the Second Continental Congress established the Continental Navy less than one month prior to the birth of the Marine Corps), Marines historically have been able to deploy anywhere in the world, granted some proximity to a coastline. On ship, Marines aren’t just passengers, they are every bit as integral to a Navy flotilla as the sailors who command the craft, maintain those crafts’ engines, and navigate the flotilla through the high seas. And while Marines share slices of doctrine, tactics, and terminology and even some cultural foundations with both the Army and Navy, and although they administratively fall under the Department of the Navy, the U.S. Marine Corps represents a unique and distinct force with ever-evolving capabilities irreproducible by others, casting them as the tip-of-the-spear embodiment of the concept