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.