not merely ritual or pageantry. It is part of the essence of the Marine Corps. One of the essential subjects every Marine has to know is his Corps’ history; he has to take that in and make it an essential part of himself.
Four: We carry a sense of responsibility for those who went before us, which ends up meaning a lot to Marines who are in combat. We don’t want to let our predecessors down or taint our magnificent heritage.
Five: We make the most detailed and specifically significant demands on our people in terms of iron discipline and precise standards. Yet of all the services, we probably have the greatest tolerance for mavericks and outside-the-box thinkers. In other military services, if you don’t fit the usual pattern, you rarely succeed. You punch all the right tickets, and you move up. In the Marines, you’re much more likely to find people who succeed who don’t fit the usual pattern.
This means also that we are encouraged to speak out… to let it all hang out, no matter whose ox gets gored. Outside the Marine Corps, I have a reputation for being outspoken. This has always sort of surprised me, because within the Corps being outspoken is the expectation.
This also means that we are an institution where people are judged on their performance and not their opinions.
Six: We have a reputation for innovation. After the Battle of Gallipoli in World War One, a badly blundered amphibious attack, the instant wisdom became: “You can’t accomplish an amphibious operation under hostile fire against a hostile beach.” But the Marine Corps decided, “We don’t agree with that,” and we created the nation’s invaluable World War Two amphibious capability.
Later, we looked at the traditional separation of air, ground, and naval power, and we came up with the idea of integrating all three capabilities at a much lower level. So today, we don’t need much artillery; we rely on our own close air support, closely integrated with ground actions into a single focused force.
We were the first to recognize the value of helicopters and used them effectively as early as the Korean War. Now we have the tilt rotor MV-22. Though it has been controversial, it will end up adding greatly to our mobility.
We’ve always gone after innovations like these.
Seven: Unlike other services, we aren’t tied down to fixed techniques and doctrines. We have never been hidebound doctrinaires. We are more flexible and adaptable; concepts based rather than doctrine based. That is, we really believe in the individual. We don’t like big proscriptive structures. We really believe that if we educate and train our leaders and our officers to take charge, and give them broad conceptual guidelines, but don’t bind them to these as a strict “doctrinal” necessity, they’ll do a better job.
Eight: We are by our nature “expeditionary.” This means several things. It means a high state of readiness; we can go at a moment’s notice. It means our organization, our equipment, our structure are designed to allow us to deploy very efficiently. We don’t take anything we don’t need. We’re lean, we’re slim, we’re streamlined. We don’t need a lot of “stuff”—whether it’s equipment or comforts. We can make do with what we have, or else live off the land. We are the taxpayers’ friend.
It’s a mind-set, too, about being ready to go, about being ready to be deployed, and about flexibility. We can easily and quickly move from fighting to humanitarian operations.
There are also systems we have to know, either to board ship or get into airplanes or get our gear ready to go; and there are computer programs that tell us what we need and how we can load it rapidly. The Marine Corps has perfected all these systems.
Finally, it is how we organize, prepare, and train.
All of this came home to me most powerfully back when I was lying in the hospital after I’d been wounded in Vietnam. It wasn’t a conceptual thing then, but an overwhelming feeling. It just sort of hit me: This is my home. These are my guys.
In the hospital, I was seeing how my Marines were dealing with their own wounds. And on TV I was watching images of my Marines fighting for other Marines. I was watching how we all care for each other, and how they cared for me.
The moment took my breath away. Suddenly, all of what the Marine Corps means in itself and as an institution came home to me. These were my Marines. That’s the only way I can put it. These were the guys I wanted to lead and to care for. I loved my Marines. They’re the greatest treasure America has.
There were times later on when I was tempted to get out. But, ultimately, that’s why I stayed in.
Meanwhile, in 1974, ’75, and ’76, those of us within the Marine Corps recognized that we had to change. The battle was over how.
Some defense thinkers began talking about the Marine Corps as an institution that had passed its prime. In today’s world, they believed, light forces were fading into extinction. The future was with heavy forces.[31] In their minds, we could neither adapt nor contribute to the kind of fighting we could expect in the Fulda Gap (the plain in Germany where it was expected the battle for Europe would be decided). Their solution was for the Marines to make itself over into a very different kind of organization… to “heavy up”—“mech up”—with many more tanks, armored personnel carriers, and heavy artillery pieces.
Others felt: “No, that’s the wrong way to go. It’s going after what’s trendy and not what’s necessary and right. It’s not our mission to duplicate the Army’s heavy units. They do that job just fine. Yes, we’ve got to change; and yes, we’ve got to find ways to make ourselves more relevant in Europe; but we shouldn’t dump our expeditionary nature doing it. The nation still needs a highly expeditionary and ready crisis response force, and that’s what the Marine Corps does best.”
This was another area that really fascinated me: How the Corps could mech up and fight tanks and infantry in this new environment but not lose its expeditionary character. And I got caught up in these debates and injected myself into them wherever I could.[32]
Meanwhile, a number of thinkers inside and outside the Marine Corps were beginning to look at ways to fight that differed from the traditional force-upon-force, attrition-type models. Though these people came to be called “maneuverists,” the term was not used in its normal technical military sense — the movement of forces to gain position. Rather, it was a mind-set, where you weren’t necessarily looking to apply brute force and then grind your enemy into submission. The idea was to find innovative — and unexpected — ways to checkmate the other guy. The concept became known as “Maneuver Warfare.”
In history, there have been many cases where small forces have defeated much larger ones after creating a situation that convinced the opposing commander that he had lost, or that made the larger force’s situation untenable, by outpositioning it, or by disrupting, dislodging, or destroying what Clausewitz called “a center of gravity”—anything essential to a force’s ability to operate. There are many centers of gravity: It can be a person, like an indispensable leader; a place, like a national capital or other strategic location; command and control; transportation; fuel supplies; and much else.
The Maneuver Warfare advocates looked to discover an enemy’s centers of gravity, pick one that would cause the enemy’s eventual unraveling, and focus on it.
The primary objective was to get inside the enemy commander’s decision cycle and mess him up — gaining both a psychological and a physical advantage by gaining control of the tempo of operations, conducting relevant actions faster and more flexibly than the other guy can.
Accomplishing these aims became quite complex, sophisticated, and subtle. It was not easy to correctly blend the components of maneuver, fires, control and protection of information; and then to sustain and secure the force and put it into action. We had always been too rigid about the standard organization of units, thinking it had to fight that way and only that way. Instead, the maneuverists began to realize that we might have to break units down and modify them in the field in a more flexible and adaptive manner.
I took to these revolutionary ideas like a duck to a pond.
Naturally, the old thinking was very hard to change. Not only did senior officers feel challenged because these ideas were new and different, but these same ideas challenged an entire operational culture which
