The Marine Corps is a complex, tribal organization. Although Marines pride themselves on “every Marine a rifleman,” subcultures, in particular that of fixed-wing aviation, present a challenge to the organization. Another issue that influences Corps organizational behavior is its partnership with the US Navy in amphibious operations. Gender and ethnicity changes have challenged “Old Corps” cultural norms. The first challenge was racial integration, which began in the 1950s and continues today. Another complication is gender integration, given the masculine dominance values in varied ethnic communities. There is also a potential cultural clash between part of the officer Corps and junior enlisted personnel. A more important potential issue is a cultural clash among Marines at the cutting edge of the Corps’s technological transformation, as well as cultural differences between millennials and older generations. Boot camp is designed to overcome these cultural differences and make every recruit a Marine. The Marine Corps uses its heroic, manufactured past to instill in its personnel a unique identity, that of spartan warrior dedicated to fighting and destroying the nation’s enemies. The Marine Corps must blend two cultures, both important to its political existence and self-image – that of its public warrior image and that of its growing technological reality.

Introduction

The interrelated issue of military structure and effectiveness confronts planners and commanders with some of the most intractable intellectual issues associated with organizational behavior. The realities of preparing forces to kill and to face death in the service of the state create problems with no analogues in other forms of social interaction. It is easier to define the behaviors one wishes to discourage in individuals – cowardice, flight, and non-cooperation – than to define the positive performance of complex organizations, which all armed forces inevitably become. ‘The primary object of organization,’ wrote General Sir Ian Hamilton, ‘is to shield people from unexpected calls upon their powers of adaptability, judgment, and decision.’ Yet other commanders have observed that individual and organizational flexibility is essential to military success.

Despite a sizeable theoretical literature on organizational efficiency, military effectiveness remains an ill-defined concept. For some civilian and military analysts, effectiveness is tied to the social structure of military organizations. The sociological approach focuses on factors such as unit cohesion, group solidarity, small–unit leadership, and Kameradschaft. Similar research seeks to link effectiveness to non-material factors like esprit, staying power, and the will-to-fight. Outside of the small-unit focus, the sociological focus– regardless of whether the methodology is quantitative or descriptive – may provide special insights into the likely performance of large-scale military organizations, since it focuses on such problems as the normative aspects of officership, recruitment, military socialization, morale and political attitudes, and troop trainability.

More than a quarter of a century ago in the spring of 1982, the two of us wrote Andrew Marshall, the Director of Net Assessment, Office of the Secretary of Defense, that we believed that a comparative, historical case study of the effectiveness of military institutions in the first half of the twentieth century would contribute considerably to an understanding of the problems the American military confronted in the 1980s. We also believed that a transnational analysis of the world's most powerful armed forces would reveal certain persistent problems in the creation and employment of them.

We began this study on the effectiveness of military institutions in the belief that historians have an obligation to examine the issues involved in why some military forces succeed, while others fail. If we have not succeeded fully inour goal, we believe that the essays in this volume have at least suggested the dimensions of the issues. There are no easy answers, no quick fixes, no simple formulas for the achievement of military effectiveness. While one of the authors of the summarizing essays in Volume 3 suggests that ‘one can doubt whether any other profession [than the military] in these seven nations during the same period would have received such poor ratings by similarly competent outside observers,’ these studies also suggest how intractable,complex, and resistant to analysis and calculation are the problems raised by war.

This study involves seven nations over three distinct time periods: the First World War (Volume 1), the interwar period (Volume 2), and the Second World War (Volume 3). We have asked each one of the historians examining these twenty–one case studies to follow the direction provided in a guidance essay (the first chapter in Volume 1). That essay asked our historians to examine what we believe to be the four distinct levels of war: the political, the strategic, the operational, and the tactical from the point of view of their national case studies. Thus, there are consistent themes running through all of the essays.