The Human Cost of Military Operational Aggressiveness: The Effects of Institutional Culture on the Combat Performance of the United States Marine Corps and the United States Army

Abstract

In the Pacific Theater of World War II, Marines sustained casualties at a much higher rate than American Army troops. Past scholarship and official Marine Corps statements have contended that this phenomenon resulted from the service receiving more challenging military assignments than other branches. This thesis counters this assumption by demonstrating the relationship between the institutional culture inherent to the Marines and their more costly battlefield outcomes. After utilizing studies to establish that militaries psychologically transmit certain values on soldiers through a blend of top-down influence and socialization in training, the features that differentiate the identities of the Marine Corps and the Army are revealed. While Marine doctrine appears to promote more exclusionary and aggressive rhetoric, Army manuals are centered primarily around meticulous planning and operational cohesiveness. Collectively, the quantitative and qualitative evidence presented in this thesis corroborates the claim that these fundamental differences in institutional culture are responsible for the elevated casualty rates of the Marine Corps. Data collected primarily from operations reports, after-action summaries, and military histories confirm that Marines were more likely to become casualties both during individual campaigns in the Pacific Theater of World War II as well as in more recent wars in the Middle East. Subsequently, the behavior of the Marine Corps and the Army in these engagements is scrutinized. This section presents the bulk of the central position of the thesis: the Marines display a level of risk tolerance, a focus on speed, and a disdain for interservice communication that Army soldiers generally do not. Because of this, the former branch takes heavier casualties. These findings can direct future policy on the reform or reorganization of the Marine Corps, increasing operational efficiency and reducing casualties.