Sea Control - Sea Control 287 - Small Wars & More with Dr. Mark Folse

Episode Date: October 24, 2021

Links1. "Never Known a Day of Peace," by Dr. Mark Folse, Naval History Magazine, August 2021. 

Hey folks, Jared here. We have Walker Mills hosting today. He's joined by Dr. Mark Foles to discuss early 20th century Marine Corps history. This episode was edited and produced by Dr. Ed Salo. We recently conducted our SimSec Forum for Authors and Readers in conjunction with the Center for Naval Analysis. You should be able to find a link on our main website and see a few of our great contributors presenting their work, as well as answering audience questions. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast Network, the Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of our own brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. On that note, I'll turn it over to Kimber's men.

Welcome back aboard the Sea Control Podcast from the Center for International Maritime Security. Today, we're talking with Dr. Mark Foles, who's a researcher at the U.S. Army Center of Military History, and he was also named the 2020 Naval History Magazine Author of the Year, which you might have seen. Today, we're going to be talking about his essay, Never Known a Day of Peace, about the Marine Corps experience in small wars at the beginning of the 20th century. We'll make sure to put a link to the article in the podcast notes. Mark, welcome aboard. Can you introduce yourself a bit more formally to our listeners? Yes, Walker, thank you very much. I'm very happy to be here. I'm Mark Fultz. I am a Marine Corps historian by training, I guess. I don't know if

training is the right word. That was when my dissertation was on, and I taught Marine Corps history at the Naval Academy for two years when I was the class of 1957 postdoc there. Marine Corps history is something that I look into frequently and write on frequently and have written on and published about frequently, and I'm here to talk about it today, and I'm looking forward to it. Awesome. And before we start, I'd like to remind our listeners that the opinions presented here are solely our own. It should not be taken as representative of any of the institutions that we're associated with. Mark, can you start us off by kind of giving us a bit of a timeline about the events that you cover in your article? And what are the major small wars

that seems kind of like an oxymoron that you're talking about in this piece? Yes. So this is a hard piece to write uh because of the the word count was kind of condensed i think i was allowed i had to beg borrow and steal for 4 000 words and the reason why that was so hard is because the broad period of time that i'm covering um so i think uh that the first uh conflict that i cover is the spanish-american war which is not really a small war but there's going to be counterinsurgency and contingency operations that are going to spin off of that so that was 19 that was 1898 And I guess this is the Philippine-American War in 1900. And I leave off with 1933-1934 when the United States pulls out of both Haiti and Nicaragua. So I'm covering a 35-year span of time here. And if you want to count the references that I make to the American-Indian Wars and the Civil War, I mean, I'm trying to cover a lot of time here in one breath.

So, yeah, there's the Philippine-American War, there's the various interventions in Cuba, Nicaragua, Panama, there's Haiti, Haiti and Dominican Republic, two simultaneous occupations that go on at the same time, more or less the same time they overlap. And I ended with Nicaragua. So there's a lot of, I mentioned China, I mentioned Veracruz, which was in 1914. So covering a lot of ground, I've mentioned a lot of different conflicts between 1898 and 1935, to really just give readers kind of a broad, hopefully useful overview of just how busy the Marine Corps was and how the things that they did and the things that they learned were very much things that the Army did and the Army learned.

And there was a lot of, I think there's a lot of things that the Marines learned from the Army at the time, which from what I've seen in the literature, there's not a whole lot of historians have made those connections. They haven't really made the connections between what the Army was doing,

what the Marines were doing. You know, more historians are exploring that, that's coming to light. But for the most part, it's kind of a it's a part of the literature that hasn't been explored as much as people would think. Yeah, I mean, that was one of the things that definitely struck me in the essay is just the amount of stuff that the Marine Corps was being asked to do in that roughly 40 year period. And so how did how did these missions fall to the Marine Corps? Because if I'm remembering correctly, they were serving kind of as ships detachments and the Marine Corps was pretty small at the time. So how did they end up being the ones to do these missions that one would think of as perhaps a more traditional Army mission or perhaps the Army was better prepared for?

If I was forced to use one word, it would be the Navy. Okay, so the Army has this long history. By 1900, let's just use 1900 as a date. By 1900, the U.S. Army has a long history of quote-unquote small wars or counterinsurgency operations. If you look at what they were doing on the American frontier. And I'm not just talking about the 1870s. Try 1607 upwards into the closing of the frontier in 1891. American armed Americans have been on the frontier fighting against Native Americans, some of them in what we would classify as counterinsurgency operations for decades. OK, the Seminole Wars of the 1830s, you can probably throw in there that conversation.

Archibald Henderson's Marines were involved in that as well. I don't really talk about that very much. I don't talk about that at all in this article, but that is a conversation to be had. So the Army has a long history of doing these things. They're not all that great. Although that's not really fair. I was going to say they're not all that great at documenting these things. They are. They didn't really do doctrine the way that we think of doctrine these days. You know, their ways of learning and passing on information was much more informal. I do love to point out, however, that one of the great thinkers and promulgators of this type of military thought, the study of small wars and things like that, was a guy by the name of Mahan. alfred thayer mahan's father taught at west dennis hart mahan had a class on uh small he didn't i

forget the exact name of the class but he had a class on what we today would call small wars and he would teach it to uh young west point soon to be army officers because part of their job was going to be manning the force on the frontiers and fighting against you know native americans so the army had a long history of this the marines get end up doing this kind of stuff because you Starting in the 1890s, back to Alfred Thayer Mahan, people really start buying into the idea of a two-ocean Navy, having a first-rate Navy that can compete with Great Britain and all the rest of them to protect maritime commerce and all the other kind of stuff, showing the flag. You have the Great White Fleet that comes out in the 1908, 1909 timeframe. Teddy Roosevelt's a big proponent of this. And so the Navy starts going, you know, has a history of operating, forward operating, right, in these different stations around the world.

And they always have a contingent of Marines with them. And whenever there's an issue that they need to go ashore, there's countless instances of Marines going ashore for contingency operations. They're going ashore with sailors, too. You know, that's how the Marines get involved with this kind of thing is because, you know, the U.S. Navy had always had a ready group of Marine infantry on board. And that could be as long as they didn't go ashore and get drunk and, you know, start an international incident, which did happen. They could be very, very useful going ashore and participating in these activities. So that's how the Marines initially got involved with it. And I think another part of it is simply that, you know, the Navy is usually the first one on the scene with international incidents.

That's the case with Haiti. That's the case with Veracruz. That's the case with the Dominican Republic. And the Marines are usually with them. The Philippines is a different story, really, because it's a much bigger operation. The art, you would necessarily have to have the army there to try to pacify an island as large as Luzon. right you know the Marine Corps of 1900 I think was allowed to expand to 10,000 Marines for the first time ever and that was the largest they ever were up until that point so the Marine Corps is a very small organization it's spread out all over the place because it's spread out and it's with it's on these ships attachments it gets into these situations where they're called upon to respond to civil unrest, defending the honor of the flag overseas.

So that's really interesting. I would have thought that there was kind of a dichotomy between shipboard, ship detachments, and sending people ashore. But I guess it sounds like it was really because they had them on the ships, then they were the easiest ones to send ashore rather than bringing the Army in. Yeah, the Marines always had kind of a... That's why I kind of bristle at the talk of of a the Marines primary mission, simply because the way I see it, I have kind of a long historical view of the Marine Corps.

And to me, the Marine Corps has always had a cluster of missions, even when its main mission was just being on ship and had a cluster of missions on ship as well. You know, there were ship's guards. They were kind of like onboard police and all that other kind of stuff. But they were also the ones that were supposed to look spiffy and with shiny brass buttons and all other kind of stuff to look nice for foreign dignitaries. So the United States looked like this disciplined kind of military group. Now, they're all they have all those jobs on board ship. But yeah, so when but when the Navy goes places and they have to respond to things on land, you know, there's not they have command of the sea. They don't they're not they're not going up against a huge Navy at the time. but they need to land somewhere. Marines tend to be the core landing unit that goes on, that goes

into town or goes ashore and starts pacifying the area or securing the area, right? Whether it's to take over a customs house or to defend a railroad, you know, having a ready group of imagery on ship traditionally has been a useful thing. That being said, I mean, the army was, the U.S. Army was all over the place during this period of time. They were like, not to mention just the Indian Wars. I mean, they had the Mexican Punitive Expedition in the early 1910s. They were in Panama. They were in North Russia. They were Siberia. They were in China, too. They were with the Marines in China. They were in the Philippines. They were in Cuba. They were in Puerto Rico. They were in Panama. And the Army was everywhere. Very, very busy. And you think about how the Army was

huge huge body of of military force they're much bigger than the marines so the the army overwhelmingly has the the vast majority of experience doing these things i think however the marines were a bit better at uh advertising that they were doing these things and they were a bit better at uh in the 1920s and 1930s they were a bit better at collecting all of this stuff into one kind of coherent singular volume that was comprised of everything that they learned from the Army and from their experiences in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua. The Army had some, like I said, they had some articles in the Infantry Journal. They had some professional articles that they published, but it was all kind of informalized.

It was all kind of informal doctrine. It wasn't like official U.S. doctrine that they promulgated. And that didn't happen until much later. So I think you're kind of teasing me here to ask you about the small wars manual. So because I think that's what you're referring to. So yeah, can you go ahead and tell us a little bit about that? And then I also want to kind of ask, was the Marine Corps better just at advertising that they were doing these things at the time? Or I mean, I think also now they're they're kind of better at advertising it or do you have kind of the longer the perspective on that let me let me deal with the first question first so the first question was about

the small wars manual i actually got something wrong in this article um i i forget where it was but my boss is his name is john hoffman and john hoffman wrote uh the book on chesty puller if i have it somewhere in here um the book is called chesty okay so my boss is the chief of the chief historian at the U.S. Army Center of Military History, but he's like a legit, like a very famous Marine Corps historian. So he reads and he goes, you made one error. And one of the errors was Utley and Harrington that had a lot to do with putting together all the material to form the original Small Wars Manual in 1935. It was Edson who came later and published the one that I think we both have our shells in 1941 1940 1941 time frame so i made that mistake uh but essentially

all three of these guys what they did was they the marine corps also published some informal i guess doctrine if you will in the marine corps gazette because the marine corps gazette came out for the first time in 1916 uh the inaugural kind of debate for the marine corps gazette was this idea of advanced base seizure and defense lejeune was a part of this russell was a part of this A lot of the field grade officers in the Marine Corps were part of this discussion. And Marine Corps Gazette is also going to host conversations about small awards. Pete Ellis, who is usually associated with advanced base seizure and defense, you know, his operations in Micronesia, all that kind of stuff. He published an article on it's called Bush Brigades in the Marine Corps Gazette.

What they did was they they took everything that they that they knew and they had learned from all these experiences in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. and they created this small wars manual. The interesting thing about that was, is that the Marine Corps had pretty much bought into the idea of advanced space seizure and defense with the creation of the tentative manual for landing operations. And that, and I mentioned this in the, in the article, the Marine Corps really throws all this weight behind that future. Right. And they pitched this idea to the Navy, Hey,

we can be the fleet Marine force and maybe signs off on it. um and then you have the fleet marine force and the flex exercise of the 1930s and all that kind of stuff and that has led people to believe that the marine corps is just this amphibious assault institution that's all it is it's all it does that's been its history and everything going into the 1930s has led up to this pinnacle of marine corps achievement and i think that's all bs i think a more accurate way to look at the marine corps is a is a uh an institution that has made room for uh different types of subcultures one culture can is going at advanced based seizure and defense learning about logistics and support by fire and all that other kind of

stuff hitting the beach uh transferring as much uh firepower and manpower from ships offshore to the beach as quickly and efficiently as possible and the other one is the small wars by by the 1930s, I argue that the Marine Corps has more institutional experience doing operations short of war than they do with any other type of combat. I think World War I is kind of an anomaly in this context. They almost didn't, nowhere was it written that the Marines were going to go over to France, by the way. It was kind of fortuitous that they did, but that's a different discussion. so the the small wars made it came out of this context right russell who was the uh who's going to be coming out soon uh john russell allowed this to happen russell never went to um france

he missed france he uh he was in charge of marines in haiti and he served some time in the dominican republic he missed out on france and thought it was going to ruin his career it didn't thankfully but he you know when the tmlo was was written you know he gave the green for the um small wars manual as well so i find that very very interesting thing about the marine corps is it allows for different kind of cultures to exist within itself i hope that answers that part of the question you can move over to the public relations aspect of all this yeah no that was a great answer i think that's like super relevant to the kind of in in force structure in the colonel's force design project but yes now you've got my permission to move on to the

second half of the question okay so uh the marine corps is incredibly small during this period of time i don't have to sell it like during the surge in 2007 2008 i think the marine corps got up to somewhere north of 200 000 marines or something like that right i think At the height, the Marine Corps, it was in World War II, the Marine Corps was 485,000 Marines on paper, six operating divisions, huge. The Marine Corps in 1900 was less than 10,000. I think going into the Spanish-American War, it was like around 6,000 Marines, something like that. I think the New York City Police Department was bigger, just to kind of put this into perspective. I might have to double check that, but they were small. They were very small. They were small, but they had to recruit nationally. And they thoroughly believed that everybody was out to get them. They faced threats from the Army, and they faced threats from the Navy.

uh william fulham a naval academy grad was arguing to get marines off the ships and he argued this twice in the 1890s to get the marines off the ships and then leonard wood in the first decade of the 20th century uh you know general leonard wood u.s army he's really good friends with teddy roosevelt says hey yeah the baby's gonna kick him off and we can just uh just give him over to us and we'll make them like artillery, coastal artillery troops. And the Marines were like, what? The institutional insecurities

that the Marines have to this very day go back to that time period when people were actually talking about getting rid of the Marine Corps. The whole, you know, sir, who am I debates that came out in the spring of 2019 were nothing compared to like the actual threats that the Marine Corps faced in the 19th century,

in the early 20th century. OK, so everybody walking around, Johnny Lejeune, Ellis, Thorpe, LWT Waller, Barnett, all those old school Marine officers were actually walking around with that stuff hanging in their heads. And so one of the ways they try to get around that is, one, volunteering for just about everything, right, doing as much as they can, staying as active as they could, but also advertising, public relations. They set up the Marine Publicity Bureau in New York City, which was brilliant because if something happened in New York City in the early 20th century, it had national significance. Everybody was paying attention to what was going on in New York City. That's where all the PR firms were. So they set up a public relations bureau there in New York City. They make friends with a lot of journalists. They make friends with a lot of newspapermen. They even recruit former newspapermen to become Marine officers, and they start pushing out Marine human interest stories.

And this is where this term, the Marines have landed and have the situation well in hand, comes out of this relationship that the Marines developed with journalists. And so it looks like Marines are just landing all over the place and kicking butt whenever there's, you know, an American sugar company in trouble or an American railroad that's being attacked or, you know, a civil war or a rebellion. It seems like the Marines are landing. Well, the Army is landing, too. They are. They're doing a lot. The Army's doing a lot. Marines just seem to get a lot of press.

and these small wars interventions were part of the press that they got for a long time the marines were able to spin all of this stuff to make the marines look you know really really good but i talked a little bit about this article i published elsewhere instances where that press bit them uh in the behind because um there's this idea that marines and soldiers learn that the longer you stay in tropic climes like the philippines or haiti or the niger republic the worse it is on your health and there's all kinds of instances of marines and soldiers getting sick they probably didn't know as much about hygiene as we do today i think that probably had a lot to do with it there's much more it's hotter more humid in these regions and they were

dealing with people that were very different from culturally and very different belief systems and that was really kind of frustrating so that's bound to create some clashes uh and uh in haiti Dominican Republic especially where there were no soldiers it was all just the Marines. The Marines are going to be guilty of some illicit behavior and that's going to get leaked to the press and when the press finds out about it in the early 1920s lose late 1919 early 1920 the Marines are going to be dogged by bad press until about 1922. There's going to be a senate investigation hearing there's going to be a naval investigation there's going to be a marine corps investigation uh it starts with haiti and then it expands out to the dominican republic

uh and it's it's going to be really bad for public relations for the marine corps so it's a sword that cuts both ways just to follow up on that what kind of stuff were the marines getting investigated for i mean what kind of illicit activity or crimes were going on um down there in haiti in the dominican republic okay so a lot of these crimes came out in the senate investigation hearings where U.S. senators went down there and questioned and recorded testimony of lots of local Haitians and Dominicans. And they accused Marines working with gendarmes and working with the Guardia National of all kinds of things. They accused them of rape. They accused them of murder. They accused them of burning people alive. They accused them of indiscriminate

shootings and killings now that's just the accusations part uh reading the incentive investigation hearings is really luring brutal stuff the crimes that the marine corps knows happened um there's in haiti major clark whale wells uh was working in the northern uh part of haiti and he reinstated not he but marines reinstated the corvée labor system uh i think i'm pronouncing that correctly and it's essentially uh the corby goes back to france right it's you know um basically this idea if you can't pay for the road with taxes you pay for your own labor anybody knows anything about the long history of haiti they have kind of a uh hang-ups about slavery in haiti so any kind of forced labor is going to be construed as trying to reinstitute

slavery uh so the corby system was wildly unpopular in haiti uh and the military governor at the time. I don't remember if it was Butler or if it was Russell at the time. It might have been Russell. No, it wasn't Russell. I'd have to get back with you on that. And the Corvée system. Bandit. Well, Major Wells brought it back for unknown

reasons and allegedly executed a dozen or so Haitians on the side of the road. And whenever these executions took place, whenever Marines executed locals, the Marines, without fail, would always say, well, they were trying to run away. They were trying to escape, so we shot them.

And that was always the excuse. Well, in this particular instance, he was investigated, and I believe he was charged, and he was relieved of his command, and the Corvée system was officially done away with. But it was too late. Charlemagne Perrault had used the Corvée system as an example of American imperialism, and he's going to lead an insurgency against troops, against the Marines in Haiti. So it wasn't just bad press. It was actually really bad for their mission in the area doing these things. So that's Haiti. In the Dominican Republic, the most notorious example is a guy named Charles Merkel. I wrote an article about Charles Merkel in the Marine Corps history several years ago. And long story short with him, his battalion commander was a guy named George Thorpe. George Thorpe wrote a book called Pure Logistics. You may have heard of it. Very, very smart guy, very, very interesting. But in the Dominican Republic, George Thorpe saw his war in the Dominican Republic as an extension of the Great War.

So he started seeing German espionage everywhere. And so what the Marines had was on their hands was kind of a grassroots resistance to the Marine occupation. and partly because these guys were profoundly racist by today's standards they thought there's no way these locals could execute or do this really strong really deadly really complex insurgency against us there's no way they could the germans must be behind this right so that's what they thought and so they kind of they really got really strict and started using the stick as opposed to the carrot more in august july august september 1918 um and charles merkel was a company commander uh and during the month of august they reinstituted this this this old campaigns old tactic that they learned from the army and the army learned from the spaniards uh reconcentrationist

tactics like concentration you take the large forces of the population you concentrate them in urban areas you put them under guard and the idea is anybody outside of those concentration areas are bandits or or uh insurgents right so they concentrated all these people in these urban areas while that was going on merkle operated under the impression that everybody outside of the concentration area was a bandit and so he whoever he encountered he treated as such he tortured them uh he allegedly executed a bunch of them um there was one instance where he captured one guy cut crosses into his chest and poured orange juice into the cuts and all that other kind of stuff and just did some really bad lord stuff to people uh and then he was captured he

was arrested by his uh by his chain of command and he committed suicide uh in a cell in early october of 1918 i've got a whole article about this that instance never made it to the papers the reason why i think it didn't was because it never went to a court martial i think that's and he says in his suicide letter he's shooting i'm doing this in order to save the marine corps from disgrace. I'm paraphrasing there, but I found a suicide letter where he verbatim says, where he, where he says that. Um, so those are just two examples of what was going on, but there was accusations against lots of different Marines. Um, and, um, there isn't going to be a whole lot of course, Marshall coming out of it. Uh, Lejeune, Barnett,

Alberta's Caitlin, uh, senators, judges, uh, they're all, most of them are going to come out in defense of the Marine Corps. The Washington, but there's going to be some journalists that come out against the Marine Corps. African-American newspapers are going to come out pretty staunch against the Marine Corps during this period of time. They're going to get beat up in the press pretty bad, but ultimately the Marine Corps gets defended fairly well, and they're going to survive all of this. So, you know, to sum all of that up, the Marine Corps to this day relies very, very much on good public relations. And so I think that's one of the ways, that's another way in which these small wars can be very, very instructive is how they dealt with the good and

the bad press that came out of these things. And it's an interesting thing to explore and to consider. So was the Marine Corps kind of able to incorporate some of these experiences? I mean, I know you talked about the small wars manual, but did those experiences come into play then in the second world war or did it kind of maintain a separate subculture um in the marine corps i mean were these uh experiences in the caribbean does that come up again in in the marine corps history that's a great question and it's one of the interesting things about world war ii is i think people when they when they think about the pacific in world war even if they think about the european theater if you're talking about american troops or american uh combat operations

we're talking about higgins boats we're talking about the navy we're talking about hitting the beach right and you know unless we're talking about the airborne when you know they landed you know they they parachute into normandy um you know we're mostly we're talking about some large-scale amphibious ops right and so that that in the large battles they like tarawa or uh manila or um you know take your pick of these really really large battles that took place just in the pacific theater what's often forgot is just man a lot of those battles were much more very big and they're much more complex than people realize i think a lot of those battles had elements to them that can be traced back to experiences that both the army

and the marine corps had uh in the philippines and haiti and the dominican republic um small unit patrols out in the jungles, hunting down other small unit patrols of the enemy, reconnaissance patrols, getting up really, really, night patrols, all that kind of stuff. That was stuff that the Marines learned in their small wars experiences. Close air support, ring a bell. I mean, that was used in Nicaragua. That was used in Haiti, the Dominican Republic. Marines very much pioneered that kind of stuff the army in the philippines so the the recapture of luzon uh i think that lasted from january to august 1945 the army was the eighth army was was fighting a hellacious conventional campaign against japanese troops on the island of luzon it took eight to nine months

uh there was a heat there there was uh there was fighting out in the uh out in the wilderness There was a huge urban battle in Manila, but there was also a very significant insurgency operation waged by the by U.S. soldiers and by Filipinos against the Japanese. And I say all that to say that if you look at Guadalcanal, you know, probably the first major offensive that the Marines and the Navy are involved in against the Japanese and the Solomons. the tentative manual landing operations didn't really matter a whole hell of a lot to all of those troops that are patrolling these dark jungles of guadalcanal okay what they're relying on is their leaders at this point and who are their leaders their leaders are edson their leaders are chesty puller you know their their leaders are uh these guys who had all these all this experience uh fighting in nicaragua fighting in uh these quote-unquote small wars you know

generation before um so i think that's where a lot of the influence comes with so we don't even have to talk about the small wars man we're talking about guys officers who had experience uh in jungle fighting and reconnaissance patrols and small unit actions and you know these long range patrols we're talking about famous marines like polar who were who did those things and they brought them with them to guadalcanal and then to gloucester and then to subsequent battles herman hannikin who uh was the guy who led a special operation to kill charlemagne perrault in 1919 he was he disguised himself infiltrated charlemagne perrault's camp and killed the guy and then posted his body up took a picture of it spread it around haiti he led one of the uh

And he was a high-ranking officer for Peleliu. I forget which – he was in the 1st Marine Division. I forget which regiment he was leading, but he was in command of one of the regiments landing at Peleliu in 1944. So you see how there's – a lot of these guys that fought in the Small Wars and World War era were still around in World War II, and they brought all that command experience and combat experience with them. now to what extent the actual small wars manual uh affected day-to-day operations in places like lox now or uh gloucester i don't know i can't really speak to that um but i think there's an interesting connection there i think there's a very interesting connection there and then it's important to remember that the pacific had this the pacific war was very much a war that was fought

up and down the spectrum, conventional operations, short of war operations, humanitarian operations, all that kind of stuff. The Pacific War was hugely complex. Well, yeah, I think that's a really interesting way to think about it, that even though these guys were fighting the big conventional World War II, they were still using the experience that they had gained kind of in the Caribbean and in Central America. So I think kind of a question to end on is, do you think there are parallels or lessons between kind of the shift from a small war focus to a big war focus, from a counterinsurgency focus to an amphibious operations focus that the Marine Corps did, you know, in the first half of the 20th century and to what's going

on now? Or would you say that, you know, they're kind of distinct and not necessarily the same thing? In preparing for both, the Marine Corps has to be ready. You know, all the military branches have to be ready. The Marine Corps has to be ready for anything that gets thrown at it. Whatever the combatant commanders need, it's the commandant's job to make sure that he has Marines ready to meet that need, right? I think part of that need is going to be, is going to continue to be small wars, counterinsurgency operations. That's going to have to be a tool the Marine Corps is going to have to keep sharp. Conceptually speaking, however, when it comes to training and teaching classes on this kind of stuff, it helps to keep them separate. It helps

to keep them separate conceptually. Okay, so now I'm studying, today I'm studying amphibious warfare and EABO and all that other kind of stuff. And after lunch, I'll study, I'll look at, you of small wars it helps to keep them distinct um however it's there's some interesting parallels between what the marine corps is going through today the challenges that it's facing today and what it and what it was going through exactly 100 years ago exactly 100 years ago um the marine corps 100 years ago uh really uh started to invest heavily into education uh john a legion you know consolidates Marine Corps schools at Quantico. Quantico really does become the intellectual hub of the Marine Corps then, and that sets the Marine Corps up to create the Tendon Manual for

Landing Operations and to create the Small Wars Manual. Once again, the Marine Corps is very, very interested in education. Not that they haven't been, but I mean, they're, you know, they just, you know, published a doctrinal manual on learning, right? Of all the naval services, I think the Marine Corps is the most interested in education, and you can quote me on that. The Navy, despite having the Naval Postgraduate School and the Naval War College, they seem to just not value that as much. The Marines care very much about education, so that's good. And it's again, it's the shift from the small wars mindset operating, doing these counterinsurgency operations and all that other kind of stuff towards thinking about peer competition. A hundred years ago, peer competition looked like Japan. Today, it looks like China.

I would caution everyone, however, in thinking that these are this is the same thing. And and one context mirrors the other completely. China is much bigger economically and population wise. I think they're much more they're much more of a powerful potential adversary. I don't even like to speak those words because, frankly, a war with China just kind of makes me lose sleep at night. I've got a four year old and I've got an almost two year old and they're girls and they're going to be eligible for the draft. And a war with China and the next generation just scares me. It scares me. There are big differences between China and Japan. I think there's big differences, you know, technological-wise with technology and to consider switching over to advanced base operations, expeditionary advanced base operations.

You know, it's a different – it looks similar, but it's a different ballgame in terms of technology, in terms of terrain, in terms of the islands that are going to be involved. There's some similarities in terms of, you know, it's in the Pacific. It's going to be naval. The campaigns are going to be inherently naval. So I would caution against that, drawing too many parallels. However, I would simply say that the Marine Corps has done a lot of counterinsurgency stuff. I mentioned this in the article, and I kind of left off with this. I personally think that the Marine Corps' history is dominated by, not really by war so much, but by operations short of war. Haiti, Dominican Republic, Iraq, Afghanistan. That doesn't mean there wasn't heavy combat involved in any one of these places. There certainly was, but it's not the same thing as conventional military combat that we think of, like storming Tarawa or Haiti Island or things like that.

I think it's different. That being said, I think it's much more likely that somewhere one of these U.S. combatant commands is going to need a quick reaction force somewhere to suppress or deal with some sort of civil unrest. Look at what just happened in Haiti with the assassination of the Haitian president. I can easily see Marines getting involved in something like that sooner than something against China. so uh and you know i think the brains are on top of this i think they're ultimately they're ready for it i think what a lot of the public sees and a lot of what the people that pay attention to the sea is everybody going to expeditionary advanced base operations when hopefully the marine corps is keeping their counterinsurgency tools sharp because i think that's more likely what's going to be required of them in the future no i think that's a really really apt uh kind of cautioning of of the force design and and i think that's certainly an argument that i've heard some

other um smart minds making as well and so uh i think unfortunately we're we're out of time for today but um before we go i just want to uh give you an opportunity to tell us what you're working on what we can see from you next and uh where our listeners can find you online yeah i really enjoyed this like i said i'm working at the u.s army center of military history now uh learning about i told you i was a marine corps historian now i'm learning how to be an army historian and that has got some aches and pains with it my god the army is a very complex huge huge we're talking very big organization uh that i'm learning about on a daily basis and i am uh working on the center of military history's tan book series i'm tasked with researching and writing the u.s

army in operation and during freedom the first six months of operation during freedom so october to march october 2001 to march 2002 is what i'm working on right now eventually that will become uh a book a part of their tan book series so that's what i'm working on now and i can be found on twitter uh m-r-f-o-l-s-e-1 because i don't have a very creative twitter handle but that's where i can be found i'd like to thank my guest again dr mark foals for joining us today to talk about Marine Corps history and his essay, Never Known a Day of Peace. Take care. ¶¶