During United States involvement in the Vietnam War, the decision by the United States Marine Corps (USMC) to emphasise counter-insurgency operations in coastal areas was to cause of considerable friction between Marine and US Army commanders, the latter wanting the Corps to conduct more conventional operations. This volume will examine the background of USMC decision-making and place it in the context of its institutional doctrine, infrastructure and logistical capability. For the first time, it brings together the Marine Corps’ background in counterinsurgency and the state of contemporary counterinsurgency theory in the 1960s -- combining this with the strategic outlook, role, organisation and logistic capability of the Marine Corps to provide a complete view of its counterinsurgency operations. Further to this, it argues that the USMC successfully employed counterinsurgency as a means to achieve its primary aim in Vietnam – the defence of three major bases in the coastal area in the north of the Republic of Vietnam – and that the Marine Corps decision to emphasise a counterinsurgency approach was driven as much by its background and infrastructure as it was by the view that Vietnam was a ‘war for the people’. Moreover, this volume is also an important contribution to the current debate on counterinsurgency, which is now seen by many in the military doctrine arena as a flawed or invalid concept following the perceived failures in Iraq and Afghanistan -- largely because it has been conflated with nation-building or democratisation. Recent works on British counterinsurgency have also punctured the myth of counterinsurgency as being a milder form of warfare -- with the main effort being the well-being of the population -- whereas in fact there is still a great deal of violence involved. Spreading Inkblots will bring the debate ‘back to basics’ by providing a historical example of counterinsurgency in its true form: a means of dealing with terrorist or guerrilla warfare at an operational level to achieve a specific aim in a specific area within a specific period of time.