Making the Corps by Thomas E. Ricks

Author:Thomas E. Ricks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 1997-02-26T16:00:00+00:00

Culture is important in all the U.S. military services, but nowhere so much as in the Marines. It is, after all, all they really have. And it is what they pass on at boot camp. When 3086 came out of the woods after “Warrior Week,” they really didn’t know a lot about how to fight a war. But they knew a lot about how to be Marines.

From the outside, the U.S. military may look like a monolithic establishment. Indeed, its critics, and many in the media, still tend to treat it that way. But knocking around inside the American military—at the Pentagon, on Army exercises, on Air Force transports, aboard Navy ships, and on deployments to Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia—it is striking how much it feels like a group of tribes, sometimes allied to face a greater enemy, but frequently at war with one another. An old Pentagon joke hints at the different perspectives of the services: Each service is told to “secure” a building. The Marine Corps wants to destroy it, the Army wants to establish a defensive perimeter, the Navy wants to paint it, and the Air Force wants to lease it for five years.

Probably the most insightful analysis of U.S. military cultures is The Masks of War, a reflective, sometimes playful book by Rand Corporation analyst Carl Builder. Oddly, he didn’t include the Marines in the book. But he remedied that omission in a 1994 lecture at the Army War College. In that analysis, he described the Marines as consistently standing apart from the Army, Navy, and Air Force. He saw the three larger services as obsessed with self-measurement: the Navy with the number of its ships, the Army with the number of its troops, the Air Force with the performance capabilities and number of its aircraft. The Marines, by contrast, were not so much concerned with size as with their culture—that is, the preservation of an independent identity and the capability of being self-sufficient, “taking more pride in who they are than what they own.” Of course, this makes the Marines less threatened by the post-Cold War cuts in the defense budget—but more worried by social changes, including those relating to gays and women, imposed on the services.

Builder also discerned deep distinctions within each of three larger services. In the Navy he saw an “exquisite sense of rationalized pecking order” of at least eight clear levels: At the top, carrier-based aviators, carrying within it a subhierarchy of fighter pilots, attack pilots, and antisubmarine pilots; then submariners, with attack sub types over the “boomers,” or nuclear missile boats; finally, surface ships, with surface combatants at the top, followed by amphibious warfare ships (that carry and support Marines), and, dwelling at the bottom, mine warfare. In the Army, Builder perceived extensive distinctions between infantry, armor, artillery, and support services, with “clubs, tiers, and exclusive inner circles” within each branch. One reason the Army has had a harder time than the Marines in adjusting to the post-Cold War era,

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