They gathered all the men in the house in one room, for safety reasons, and to question them.

But the lone Iraqi woman in the house wouldn't enter the room with the men.

"She was obstinate," said Capt. Andrew J. Nelson, a company commander with the 1st Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment.

The Marines insisted. She refused. Ultimately she capitulated, but not until she had a veil to cover her face.

This piqued the young Marines: Why would the woman need the veil in her own home?

They took all six men in for questioning and ultimately learned three of them were the snipers they were looking for.

That quick-thinking and culturally aware sergeant - who remembered hearing that an Iraqi woman in another house insisted on wearing a veil around the Islamist fighters - is both the emblem and the goal for the Marine Corps.

This is who and what the Iraq war has come down to. For all the "shock and awe" of the opening days of the war and the $200 billion spent since, the Marine Corps says the war is on the shoulders of corporals and sergeants to an extent not seen in decades.

For 50 years the U.S. military has been oriented toward the big war, and operational concepts flowed from that assumption: massive ground forces dissected into divisions, broken down into brigades and so on, with each unit taking its orders from above and smaller units combining their arms into mass operations.

The Marine Corps, by virtue of its smaller size, is less beholden to that model, but the command hierarchy still shapes its operations.

"In Europe in the Cold War, it was the nuclear bomber and deterrence," said Navy Rear Adm. Robert Howard, deputy commander of Naval Special Warfare Command. "Here it's going to be that small unit that will set the stage for victory - do the warfighting, nation building, promoting democracy and freedom."

But, argue Marine Corps officials, the money and research efforts are not supporting those young troops in small units.

"It amazes me how much money we spend developing an ejection seat," said Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Michael Hagee at a conference Wednesday exploring small-unit operations. "I'd like to spend the same amount of money on the individual Marine, and why his combat load is 60 to 65 pounds - just what he has to carry.

"There is no peer competitor (to the United States) on the high seas, in space, and at 15,000 feet and above," said Hagee, referring to the dominance of the U.S. Air Force and Navy at sea and in the sky. "But there's a knee in that curve. Some of those resources might better be spent below 15,000 feet."

In a straight fight, U.S. ground forces easily beat the enemy in Iraq, Hagee said.

But the insurgency in Iraq is far from a traditional battle. More than half the nearly 1,200 combat deaths of U.S. forces are the result of improvised explosive devices placed roadside or packed into cars, often detonated remotely or by timer.

"We put a man on the moon. We should take the same energy to figure out how to put an end to IEDs," Hagee said.

The Marine Corps' vision is to spread its squads - about 13 enlisted Marines -- on the "distributed" battlefield to operate autonomously and give them the communications equipment, training and authority to call in fighter jets or tactical Tomahawk missiles when they need them.

"They sound like (Army Special Forces) A Teams and in some ways they are, but once they find a gap (in the enemy's operation) they coalesce back as a platoon or as a company and punch that combat power together and go after the enemy at their center of gravity," Hagee said.

"Fallujah is a significant example of what we're going to face in the future," he said. "It's about individual Marines with small arms going house to house killing."

A number of just such combat veterans - from a sergeant to a colonel who commanded 7,000 Marines - outlined problems with equipment and training.

The complaints ranged from a thermal-imagery sensor whose batteries died after 6 1/2 hours and couldn't see through fog anyway; insufficient ammunition during training; the lack of extensive battlefield medical training; to the paucity of cultural and Arabic language skills at the company level.

"I didn't know how important that was until I needed it," said Capt. Andrew J. Nelson, a company commander with the 1st Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment.

The sheer weight of what the Marines have to carry in the field works against them, said 1st Lt. Nathan Luge. In many cases insurgents can shoot at Marines and escape on foot.

"We can't catch them. They're in tennis shoes or sandals and man dresses, and we're in full combat load, and we cannot run them down," Luge said.

"The combat load is rapidly approaching the physiological limits of Marines, period," said Col. Craig Tucker, the 7th Marine Regiment commander who returned in March from 13 months of combat duty that included both Fallujah battles and major fights across Anbar province.

Troops who survive combat consider every day after the battle a bonus, said Lt. Gen. James Mattis, commander of Marine Corps Combat Development Command, who convened the conference in order to collect those complaints and address the deficiencies.

"In the intimate, close-combat dance with the enemy ... we want more of our young guys to come out of the fight with bonus days," Mattis said.

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