When the Marines head back to Iraq, they will be adopting “new” tactics according to the Washington Post. What are these new tactics? More interaction with Iraqis, respect for peaceable civilians and religious and cultural etiquette, and Marine platoons scattered throughout the region living among the people in towns and villages to facilitate training of the Iraqi police and civil defense forces. For Iraq, these may be new tactics, but they really come pretty much straight out of the Marines Small Wars Manual (available here for download, which was written in 1940 and summarized the counter insurgency experience of the Marine Corps in such places as the Phillipines, Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua. An excellent account of the experience can be had by reading Max Boot’s The Savage Wars of Peace, as well as the use and applicability specifically to Vietnam alluded to in the WaPo article in Lewis Sorley’s A Better War.
Both books are excellent reading and well worth your time, and if I had any, I’d write and post reviews of them over on Blogcritics.
