NO WORSE FRIEND – AN INQUIRY INTO THE PRIORITIZATION AND MOVEMENT OF KNOWLEDGE THROUGH U.S. MARINE COUNTERINSURGENCY PRACTICES IN RAMADI, IRAQ 2004-2009

I am a former Marine infantry officer who spent fourteen months in Ramadi, Iraq during the Second Iraq War. This project was born from my reflections on the palpable conflict between the objective of the Marine mission in Ramadi, Iraq, beginning in 2004; the practices applied to achieve that objective; and the impact of those practices on local Ramadi civilians and the city itself. I believe Marine practices caused unnecessary harm to the local Iraqi population and the Marine quest to ‘win the fight’ rendered the local population invisible and vulnerable to Marine practices which were primarily designed to find and kill the enemy while preventing Marine casualties. The purpose of this project was to better understand the emergence and persistence of Marine counterinsurgency practices that caused physical and psychological harm to the local population in contradiction to prevailing counterinsurgency theory centered on protecting the local population and gaining their support. In this study, specific Marine practices, such as observation posts, vehicle checkpoints, particular ways of patrolling, and escalation of force measures are understood as technologies designed to be repeated to produce particular outcomes. In this way, the ‘knowledge’ of who Marines are, what Marines do, and how Marines act, was embedded in and transmitted through Marine practices that were learned, taught, and tested on the battlefield. Similarly, the ‘knowledge’ of what it means to be a Marine was generated by, produced through, and inseparable from those same practices. Knowledge Management Theory was used to investigate Marine counterinsurgency practices in Ramadi, Iraq from 2004-2009 to explore how knowledge was organized, prioritized and transmitted between individual Marines and units. Knowledge management theory explores how knowledge is created, accessed, shared, and retained within an organization and tends to privilege the tacit knowledge embedded in the culture, people, processes, and technologies of an organization. This research affirms Knowledge Management theory that predicts suboptimal outcomes resulting from misalignment of an organization’s culture, people, processes, and technologies. This study was oriented on the lived experience of junior Marines, at and below the company-level, who lived and operated daily on the streets of Ramadi. Through thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews conducted with dozens of Marines, I sought to understand what they believed about what they were doing in Iraq and how they made sense of why of they were doing it. Ultimately, I hoped to better understand what knowledge was privileged, embedded in, and transferred through which Marine counterinsurgency practices to better align those practices with strategic objectives in the future.

Author

• Hickman, Twayne Ryan

• Counterinsurgency
• Knowledge Management
• Marine Corps
• USMC

Identifier

hdl:1920/14342

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:MARS:1920/14342