Operational Culture for the Warfighter: Principles and Applications

by Barak A. Salmoni, Paula Holmes-Eber, James N. N. Mattis (Foreword)

This textbook is a collaboration between the United States Marine Corps Center for Advanced Operational Culture Learning and the Marine Corps University. Originally published in May 2009 in limited numbers this book studies the role of cultural awareness in securing operational success in the battlespace. This book is designed to help link concepts of culture to the realities of planning and and executing military operations around the world. The book has three primary 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 the military are 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 the military at all levels to think systemically about culture, and to apply that thinking to learning about culture in both professional military education and pre-deployment training.

356 pages, Paperback

First published May 15, 2009

Reviews

[Brian Thorson]

This book provides a practical explanation of the importance of cultural context and understanding for military application. It provides the reader with numerous tools to assess, understand, and integrate culture into the planning and operations process.

It is the most practical and useful read on culture for the military I have encountered.

[Al]

I read this for the course I'm currently in, Red Team Member. It's an outstanding application of the elements of culture to the operational environment. It goes into some depth on the 13 critical variables of the joint operational environment, and shows how these variables feed into politics, social interactions, physical environment, military operations, information operations, economics and infrastructure. It also has several chapters on practical application, and is intended to be used in the area of operations. The only minus is that it uses doctrinal language that is no longer current, ie. kinetic and non-kinetic are no longer part of the doctrinal lexicon, and have been replaced with lethal and non-lethal.

[Dave Beeman]

What you need to know about an Area of Operations from the cultural point of view. Keys in on five area's - physical environment, the economy of a culture, social structure, political structure, and belief systems. Provides three excellent case studies that shows how the information is put together to produce a useful product.
While the title includes "for the warfighter" and was written for U.S. Marines 99% of the contents of this book could be used by any business looking to expand it's markets into foreign areas and would help them understand the cultural environment they are walking into.