By MATT HILBURN, Associate Editor

A crucial tactic in the war on terrorism is being developed at a nondescript, temporary office in a dusty corner of Marine Corps Base Quantico, Va. A small education center here will lead the way toward the creation of Marine expeditionary forces much more adroit at dealing with the populations native to the areas where Marines will be deployed in the future.

Officially opened Oct. 1, the Center for Advanced Operational Culture Learning (CAOCL) has a straightforward task: make Marines familiar with the language, customs and mores of the populations they are likely to encounter.

In terms of battlefield prowess, senior Marines consider this step at least as important as the development of new hardware. Lt. Gen. James Mattis, commander of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command, said, “Our Marines must be comfortable operating in austere, very complex environments including those where firepower is not the primary means to victory, or may even be counterproductive.”

Marines steeped in the lessons learned from the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts agree that cultural awareness is an important asset in the kinds of wars being fought in the post-Soviet era.

Staff Sgt. Simon Lemay, a two-tour veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom temporarily assigned to the center, said, “Now we’re understanding that culture is important to our kinetic war all over the world. Our job is to better educate Marines right here, right now so that we don’t have the problem we had in Iraq with not understanding the people and not understanding the culture; so we’re not offending people and making more enemies.”

The new emphasis on cultural awareness is symptomatic of a fundamental change within the service. Gen. Michael Hagee, commandant of the Marine Corps, said in an April All Marine Message: “We will place renewed emphasis on our greatest asset — the individual Marine — through improved training and education in foreign languages, cultural awareness, tactical intelligence and urban operations.”

In recent months, the Marine Corps has doubled the number of officers enrolled in the Defense Language Institute, Monterey, Calif., and is assessing the purpose and assignments of its foreign area officers, who are specialists in the language, culture and political life of a geographic region. CAOCL, a part of the Marine Corps Training and Education Command, was founded to take a broad-brush approach to the education of Marine officers and enlisted men and women.

Dr. Barak Salmoni, the deputy director of CAOCL and a former program director in tactical culture at the Naval Postgraduate School, said that from November 2004 onward there was an understanding at every level, from the commanding general of the division down to company commanders, that understanding the basic components of the Iraqi experiences that make Iraqis conduct themselves in certain ways toward each other and toward Americans was essential in a stability and support operation.

In Iraq, for example, 95 percent of the Marines’ intelligence about insurgent activities comes from the Iraqi people. Therefore, it is critical to foster goodwill among Iraqis or local populations wherever Marines might deploy, Mattis said.

During one of his tours in Iraq, Lemay was involved in training Iraqi Security Forces where he encountered a potentially tense situation that would have been impossible to imagine for most Americans.

“I was never made aware of how unhappy an Iraqi man would be if you stand or sit behind him,” he said. “As I was in a group discussion, I walked up behind one of the Iraqis, and he was very upset. He made it abundantly clear that I was not to stand behind him.”

Lemay did some research and found that since Iraqi culture has been so violent for decades, someone approaching from behind could often be interpreted as a prelude to an execution.

“I teach those things to Marines, and they pay attention,” he said.

Prior to CAOCL’s founding, the bulk of operational culture and language training was the responsibility of the operating forces, usually during predeployment training. The burden was often too much to bear, and results were decidedly mixed.

“At the same time you’re getting up-armored Humvees, you have to think about, conceptualize, source and provide, and, in some cases, evaluate what kind of culture training you’ve got,” Salmoni said. “It sometimes boiled down to a battalion commander giving a phone call to someone he happened to know, or met at a meeting. There was a lot of hitting the target and a lot of missing the target. The burden is tremendous.”

As the Marine Corps culled through lessons learned, it was clear there needed to be a center for operational cultural training to develop concepts, products, source the training, plan a realistic way of providing training, and find and vet assets outside of the Marine Corps.

CAOCL serves both as a clearinghouse of cultural information and a curriculum development center units from around the Corps can lean on. Whether it be, for example, a report on Ramadan prepared for an officer invited to “break fast” with Iraqis, primers on the importance of family structure in Iraq or MP3 audio files of basic Arabic streaming off its website, the center aims to provide Marines easy access to the Corps’ ever-growing base of knowledge.

The center works closely with units and teams gearing up for deployment to develop tailor-made, operationally relevant training modules that account for unit function and area of deployment. CAOCL holds debriefings with units returning from deployment. That feedback is then cycled back into the training in the hopes of further refining it to suit Marines’ needs. CAOCL also provides ongoing support for the Foreign Military Training Unit.

“We did culture learning before we went over for the war,” said Col. Jeff Bearor, the center’s director. “It just wasn’t a lot of it. We may not have thought it out as well as we needed to. It might have been good for what it was, but it didn’t go in depth enough.”

According to Lemay, early training consisted of basic greetings, a bit about Islam, some Iraqi history and learning not to use your left hand or show the soles of your feet.

Although CAOCL has not been around for long, its website (www.tecom.usmc.mil/caocl) hints at what the center eventually will become and what it will offer Marines. While it’s very Iraq-centric, the resources available span the entire globe.

Currently, the center offers the bare bones linguistic familiarization in Iraqi Arabic, African French and Dari, with Kurdish and Pashto in the works. For career Marines, the center offers higher-level language learning opportunities in specific regions of expertise. For heritage speakers and Marine linguists, materials are available for Arabic, Russian, French, Spanish, Turkish and Uzbek.

There are also reports available on crowd control, transcripts from post-deployment debriefs, suggested readings and even an article entitled “Marines Are From Mars, Iraqis Are From Venus.”

CAOCL’s funding is fairly meager in the grand scheme of military spending; $1.2 million was spent in the latter half of fiscal year 2005, with $3.4 million earmarked for this year. Bearor said the current staff is seven, but he expects that to grow to 15-20 in the future.

In addition to the center’s permanent staff, it draws expertise from Foreign Area Officers, Marine Corps Intelligence Activity, civil service experts, contractors and the input of recently deployed Marines such as Lemay.

Bearor said Hagee, who made a visit to the center in late October, has set high goals for it. The first priority is to continue to support the operating forces.

“This is predeployment training in particular. We do this at home station through a series of instructional periods. We train everybody from the MEF (Marine Expeditionary Force) staff down to individual squads and platoons,” he said. “Obviously the training is sculpted. Some of this is pretty straightforward: the memorization of certain phrases in Arabic. Some of it is at a higher level on how to incorporate culture into planning and executing operations.”

According to Bearor, the center helps supervise the predeployment training package at Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms, Calif., a 30-day program, a third of which centers on urban warfare and stability and support operations training.

“That’s supported by role players who accurately depict what’s going on on the streets of Iraq,” he said. “We do that with a mix of contractors and Marines.”

Bearor said the center also is going to be engaged in the mission rehearsal exercise that the Marine Air-Ground Task Force staff training program was to conduct in December with I MEF at Camp Pendleton, Calif., giving that training program a “culture plug.”

The second priority for the center is to get operational cultural and language training into the Marine Corps’ schoolhouses.

“We’re providing oversight and input to the training program at The Basic School, Expeditionary Warfare School, and Command and Staff College,” Bearor said. “Next up are the Staff NCO (noncommissioned officer) academies. That will occur sometime early next year.”

Providing regionally focused, distance learning training for career Marines, will follow after that.

“The way we’re going to do that is basically sergeants and lieutenants will get what we call the ‘Culture 101’ course,” Bearor said. “Basically [it’s] the bedrock course to help inculcate a Marine on how to use culture to their advantage instead of having it as a disadvantage. Every career Marine is going to study some small region of the world. We hope to get that going toward the end of the third quarter or early fourth quarter next year.”

The final goal of the center is to give Marines more and better language familiarization.

“We’re not going to turn them into language professionals,” Bearor said. “That’s DLI’s (Defense Language Institute’s) job, but we want to ensure the maximum number of Marines possible, in particular those Marines in the operating forces who are about to deploy someplace, have at least some understanding or familiarization with the language that they’re going to be operating in.”

For instance, for those Marines going to Iraq now, the center helps provide several levels of language training. The first is in the predeployment training package. It’s rote memorization from a card. They’re given, for example, “the seven phrases you’ll need to run a checkpoint.”

That initial, bare-bones familiarity is backed up by CD sets that expand on the capability to tune Marines’ ears to what they’ll hear on the street.

Bearor said it should allow Marines to be able to distinguish between normal background noise on the street and those situations where a Marine can key in on something important and then enlist the help of a translator.

In the future, CAOCL may take advantage of II MEF’s success with a program it calls the “survival Arabic course.”

“It’s about 20 days of training, about 160 hours, that they provided to well over 2,000 Marines,” Bearor said. “That’s about an intermediate level with the goal of having one to three members of every platoon having some increased level of language learning. At some point, we’ll take that over and incorporate that into our products.”

If all goes well, operational culture and language learning will be an integral part of professional military education.

“It will not be an exotic thing. It will not be an added consideration. It will be mainstream,” said Salmoni.

While the benefits of language ability — no matter how basic — are fairly self evident, the advantages of operational cultural understanding are perhaps more difficult to grasp.

Bearor offers an example: “Americans tend to be results oriented,” he said. “Here’s the problem, detail the problem, come up with a plan, and fix the problem. Iraqis, on the other hand, want to sit down and get to know you first. If you just try to run over them in typical American fashion, you’re going to have some problems.”

Personal relationships are so vital, a source close to the Marine Corps said, the service is considering extending the tours of Marine Civil Affairs Groups and Marines involved in training Iraq Security Forces from seven to 12 months.