Operational Culture for the Warfighter
Principles and Applications, 2d edition
Barak A. Salmoni and Paula Holmes-Eber
ABOUT THE BOOK
This textbook is designed to help Marines link concepts of culture to the realities of planning and executing military operations around the world. The book has three primary goals:
- To provide a theoretically sound framework of five basic cultural dimensions, based on clear, academically accurate definitions, which are relevant to military missions.
- To apply these basic cultural principles to actual environments to which Marines and other members of the U.S. military have deployed, or may deploy in the future, showing how the principles of Operational Culture can be applied across the geographic and kinetic spectrum of operations.
- To develop a capacity among Marines at all levels to think systematically about culture, and to apply that thinking to learning about culture in both professional military education and predeployment training
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Part I. Terms of Reference
Chapter One: Context
Chapter Two: Defining Culture
Part II. Five Operational Culture Dimensions for Planning and Execution
Chapter Three: Dimension I –The Physical Environment
Chapter Four: Dimension II – The Economy of a Culture.
Chapter Five: Dimension III – Social Structure
Chapter Six: Dimension IV – Political Structure
Chapter Seven: Dimension V – Belief Systems
Part III. Toward Applying Operational Culture
Chapter Eight: From Models to Dimensions to Observable Realities
Chapter Nine: Operational Culture Learning in Training and Education
Chapter Ten: Incorporating Culture into the Marine Corps Planning Process
Conclusion
Appendices
Appendix A: Glossary
Appendix B: Culture Operator’s Questions
Bibliography