Earl H. “Pete” Ellis is not well known outside the United States Marine Corps. Even in the Marine Corps, he is known only for predicting war with Japan and its highly amphibious nature decades before World War II. His name is trumpeted at the recruit depots and at Quantico as an example of Marine intellectualism at its best. But he was more than just a prophet. His ideas on amphibious warfare are the bedrock on which the modern Marine Corps is built. Pete Ellis’ legacy is grounded in the document Advanced Base Operations in Micronesia, written as the Marine Corps’ contribution toWar Plan Orange. But Ellis had written much before that. Between his time as a junior captain at the Naval War College in 1911 and his death as a lieutenant colonel in 1923, Ellis wrote a number of works, most of them forgotten, many of them prescient. The concepts described in “Bush Brigades” will be familiar to any serious student of counterinsurgency, but it was written when the men we consider to be the giants of counterinsurgency theory – David Galula and Robert Thompson perhaps foremost among them – were small children.
Earl H. “Pete” Ellis is not well known outside the United States Marine Corps. Even in the Marine Corps, he is known only for predicting war with Japan and its highly amphibious nature decades before World War II. His name is trumpeted at the recruit depots and at Quantico as an example of Marine intellectualism at its best. But he was more than just a prophet. His ideas on amphibious warfare are the bedrock on which the modern Marine Corps is built. Pete Ellis’ legacy is grounded in the document Advanced Base Operations in Micronesia, written as the Marine Corps’ contribution toWar Plan Orange. But Ellis had written much before that. Between his time as a junior captain at the Naval War College in 1911 and his death as a lieutenant colonel in 1923, Ellis wrote a number of works, most of them forgotten, many of them prescient. The concepts described in “Bush Brigades” will be familiar to any serious student of counterinsurgency, but it was written when the men we consider to be the giants of counterinsurgency theory – David Galula and Robert Thompson perhaps foremost among them – were small children.
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