by Tom Clancy
Two: Every Marine has to be qualified as a rifleman. Every Marine is a fighter. We have no rear area types. All of us are warriors.
Three: We feel stronger about our traditions than any other service. We salute the past. This is 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 f
ight 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 didn’t take easily to its subtlety and intellectual sophistication. There was a lot of controversy and many camps; and all kinds of people misunderstood the new ideas; but the Marine Corps eventually grasped them and adopted them — though it took several years for that to happen.
When General Gray was named commandant, he came in as a strong proponent for Maneuver Warfare. We had someone at the top advocating change in operational thinking, the way we fight, and the way we train and educate our leaders. This generated a tremendous upheaval as we transitioned over into the 1990s; but acceptance did come (though with holdouts).
Years earlier, in the spring of 1975, Tony Zinni had been hit by a double blow. Shocked and sickened as South Vietnam crumbled, he’d followed the remnants of his Vietnamese Marines as they fought on in the hills north of Saigon until all radio transmissions ceased.
The day Saigon fell, he took off from work, and then for several hours immersed himself in what you could call “a warrior’s meditation”… thinking about all the troops — and the many friends — that had been lost, and about the fate of the many Vietnamese he had known.
As these thoughts pressed down on him, he had a sudden flash: He had been a Marine for ten years, halfway through a normal career, and he had never made a conscious decision to stay in… or even given staying or leaving much thought. It was always just a matter of not leaving because he couldn’t do that while there was a war to be fought. It was always the war — and his connection with the guys on the ground fighting it — that had given his life in the Marine Corps meaning. And now that meaning was gone. His whole purpose for being was ripped away.
Fortunately, it was not a lasting depression, and as it faded, he came to realize that an era had ended for himself, for his nation, and for the Corps. It was time to move on.
With that came a deeper realization: He was going to stay in for as long as the Corps wanted him. He could think of nothing else he could ever do.
As the years passed, Zinni’s career followed a more or less traditional pattern, considering his antipathy to staff jobs: a year at the Marine Corps Command and Staff College at Quantico; operations officer for the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marines, at Camp Lejeune (beginning in August 1978); battalion executive officer, 1st Battalion, 8th Marines; regimental executive officer (1979-80); and in April 1980, he took command of the 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines (initially as a major, which was very rare; he was selected for lieutenant colonel during his time commanding the battalion). Battalion command was, in Zinni’s mind, a perfect completion to his third tour in the 2nd Marine Division. He had deployed several times to significant NATO exercises and Mediterranean commitments with the Sixth Fleet and was proud of the superior achievements of his battalion by virtually every administrative and, more important, operational measure.
Zinni’s promotions and command experiences were great sources of pride; but his high spirits were deflated when his father passed away in 1980. He was able to see his father one last time before he lost him.
In 1981, he went back to Quantico as an instructor at the Marine Corps Command and Staff College to teach operations and tactics (and to earn a master’s degree in management and supervision). And during the 1983-84 school year, he attended the National War College.
In October 1983, while he was at the War College, the Marine barracks in Beirut was suicide-bombed by Hezbollah terrorists — a horrific event that impacted heavily on everyone in the Corps. The growing threat of terrorism not only in the Middle East, but also in Europe and Latin America, began to increasingly occupy Zinni’s interest and attention.
The disaster in Beirut put a lot of scrutiny on the Marine Corps (many asked if they were to blame for the security failures that allowed the tragedy to happen), but it also pointed up how little understood was the terrorist threat to U.S. forces abroad. Terrorist groups were becoming more active and deadly throughout the world, and U.S. military personnel were an attractive target.
In the spring of 1984, a few months before graduation, Zinni got a call from his old Vietnam battalion commander and mentor, Mick Trainor, now a lieutenant general and the deputy chief of staff for Plans, Policies, and Operations at Marine headquarters. After the War College, Zinni had been told he would be a plans officer in the Marine Corps Headquarters dealing with European and NATO issues. “That’s not going to happen,” Trainor explained. “We have other plans for you.”
“After the Beirut bombing, there’s been enormous pressure to get our act together on the terrorist threat,” he continued. “I need you to follow through on an effort we’ve started to develop a program aimed at dealing with that threat. We want to beef up our counterterrorism and security efforts and to educate the Corps into a far greater awareness of the threat we are facing; and we also want you to work on the emerging programs and issues regarding special operations.” (By this time, the Marine Corps had begun to use the term in the now commonly understood sense — as referring to all forms of unconventional warfare.)
“So you can forget about the plans officer assignment. We’re going to make you the Special Operations and Terrorism Counteraction officer at headquarters.” This sounded like exciting and interesting business to Zinni. He knew the Marine Corps had been hit hard in Beirut and was serious about dealing with this new threat of terrorism.
“Yes, sir,” Zinni replied, his brain churning. He knew how hard it was going to be to get himself up to speed on both terrorism and special operations.
Since he had not taken any of the elective courses on terrorism offered by the War College, opting instead to study Europe and NATO (since that was the area of expertise he had expected to use next), he had to scramble to pick up anything he could on the subject from literature and faculty experts. Thus armed, he reported for duty to Marine headquarters immediately after graduation.
Soon his five-man section had built a program that aimed to make every Marine aware of the new threat. It provided realistic training and education on countering it; developed the concepts, tactics, and special equipment needed to fight terrorists; improved the Corps’ intelligence capability in this area; and improved security at Marine installations.
Meanwhile, as the Marine Corps’ special operations officer at headquarters, Zinni represented the Corps in the joint arena on all matters dealing with that ever-more-important area.
A Marine sailing into these seas knew they were infested with dragons, for the Corps had long rejected special operations forces and capabilities. The aversion to special units comes from a belief that the entire Corps is “special”; it does not need elites within elites.
Ever since the disaster at Desert One (the tragically failed special operations attempt to rescue the American hostages held in revolutionary Tehran), developing a credible joint special operations capability was a top priority. In a 1983 memo from the Deputy Secretary of Defense, all the services were directed to designate special operations forces for this capability. When Zinni put on the Marine special operations hat, the Army, Navy, and Air Force had already designated their own “special” units, and the controversial issue of organizing them into a joint force was being dealt with in Washington. This action would eventually lead to the creation of the Special Operations Command, a separate unified command with its own budget authority (making it not quite a separate service). This ensured the services would evenly support their force contributions to this command.
The Marine Corps chose to ignore the directive, and, true to its long-standing policy, refused to create or designate any “special” units or capabilities.
This policy went back to the Second World War, when the Corps had created Raider Battalions at the insistence of President Roosevelt, but had quickly disbanded them and other special units.
Later, when President Kennedy attempted to persuade the Marine Corps to form special capabilities to deal with counterinsurgency missions, General David Shoup, the commandant, countered that the Marines could handle these missions as they were currently structured; they didn’t need special units. Kennedy, not impressed with Shoup’s answer, turned to the Army and supported the development of Army Special Forces.
By 1984, it was clear that the Marine Corps could no longer avoid taking on a special operations capability… in some form. The question was: How? In what form?
When at one point a powerful congressman actually proposed putting all the special operations forces under the Marine Corps, the Marines had to scramble desperately to make a reply. A Marine study came to the (un-surprising) conclusion that there were obvious benefits to having all the special capabilities under one service, and the Marine Corps was the ideal service for that; but taking that course would be prohibitively disruptive and create animosities and disadvantages that would outweigh the benefits.
The Marine Corps efforts to dig in their heels ended there. The growing pressure for a special capability caused the then commandant, General P. X. Kelley, and Lieutenant General Trainor to relook at developing a special capability.
As the Corps’ action officer on special operations, Zinni attended all meetings, briefings, and joint sessions on the subject; observed all training; and visited all service units with these capabilities. He soon knew special operations as well as any other Marine.
He was charged with developing the initial study, which concluded that the Marines needed some “special” capabilities, and proposed several options, including the formation of special units. Some of the “special” missions the study looked at were the Corps’ amphibious raid and amphibious reconnaissance capabilities (missions the Marines were already very good at), as well as counterterrorism operations and direct action missions like oil platform takedowns, noncombatant evacuation operations, raids, and other highly specialized missions.