From 29 October through 1 November 2007, Commanding General, Marine Corps Training and Education Command (TECOM) convened the conference "Pedagogy for the Long War: Teaching Irregular Warfare," at the Alfred M. Gray Research Center at Marine Corps Base Quantico. The conference's purpose was to identify specific problems and recommendations for TECOM and attending organizations, with a focus on the conceptual, structural, intellectual, and methodological aspects of teaching and learning skills for the long War, in both the schools and operating forces of the military, and at both the officer and enlisted level. The conference was also intended to introduce the Marine Corps' new Center for Irregular Warfare to the service and joint community.

"Operational Culture for the Warfighter: Principles and Applications" is a comprehensive planning tool and reference. It addresses the critical need of the Marine Corps to provide operationally relevant cultural teaching, training, and analysis. This book links social science paradigms to the needs of Marines using an applied anthropology approach. The text explains how fundamental features of culture (environment, economy, social structure, political structure, and beliefsystems) can present challenges for military operations in different cultures around the globe. Drawing on the research and field experiences of Marines themselves, "Operational Culture for the Warfighter" uses case studies from past and present cross-cultural problems to illustrate the application of cultural principles to the broad expeditionary spectrum of today's and tomorrow's MarineCorps. This new and expanded second edition of "Operational Culture for the Warfighter" extends the concepts of the original edition to the Marine Corps Planning Process. New sections on transportation and communication, law and ethics, and culture and planning will assist both military planners and operators with the practical aspects of incorporating culture into military decision-making.

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 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 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.