Call Sign Chaos

by Jim Mattis

In my military judgment, President George H. W. Bush knew how to end a war on our terms. When he said America would take action, we did. He approved of deploying overwhelming forces to compel the enemy’s withdrawal or swiftly end the war. He avoided sophomoric decisions like imposing a ceiling on the number of troops or setting a date when we would have to stop fighting and leave.

Under his wise leadership, there was no mission creep. We wouldn’t discipline ourselves to be so strategically sound in the future.

If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you.

Once he’s removed from direct interaction with his troops, a commander must guard most rigorously against overcontrol, compounded by the seduction of immediate communications. That is, any senior officer or staff member can dash off a query and numerous officers will hasten to respond. Digital technology—instant questions demanding instant responses—conveys to higher headquarters a sense of omniscience, an inclination to fine-tune every detail below. When you impose command via that sort of tight communications control, you create “Mother may I?” timidity.

The very brittleness of detailed orders that cannot possibly anticipate unknowns sucks the initiative out of them, suffocating their aggressiveness and slowing operational tempo, a problem doubled if hobbled by risk aversion. Success on the battlefield, where opportunities and dangers open and close in a few compact and intense minutes, comes from aggressive junior officers with a strong bias for action.

Leave the “how” to your subordinates, who must be trained and rewarded for exercising initiative, taking advantage of opportunities and problems as they arise.

Subordinate commanders cannot seize fleeting opportunities if they do not understand the purpose behind an order. The correct exercise of independent action requires a common understanding between the commander and the subordinate, of both the mission and the commander’s intent of what the mission is expected to accomplish.

This acting without orders, in anticipation of orders, or without waiting for approval yet always within the overall intention, must become second nature in any form of warfare.”

“Acting without orders…yet always within the overall intention.” That was how Colonel Fulford had led the 7th Marine Regiment in Operation Desert Storm. Looking back, I realized that in the open desert of Kuwait, he had ideal communications. Yet he rarely called me, and his staff stood ready to help my battalion, not badgering me for information.

I sat in more meetings than I can count, and the whole experience brought home to me in an even more elevated context how critical it is to delegate decision-making authority or face paralyzing chaos.

“How’s it going, lads?” “Oorah! Fine, sir, terrific. Living the dream…” I never accepted that stock reply. “Nah. We both know that’s bullshit. We’re stuck in the middle of nowhere while we want to be killing Al Qaeda. Level with me. Give me something I can fix.”

doctrine is the last refuge of the unimaginative. The Marines taught me that it is a guide, not an intellectual straitjacket. Improvise, adapt, and overcome; I was going to do whatever it took to carry out the admiral’s intent.

Throughout my career, I’ve preferred to work with whoever was in place. When a new boss brings in a large team of favorites, it invites discord and the concentration of authority at higher levels. Using skip-echelon meant trusting subordinate commanders and staffs. I chose to build on cohesive teams, support them fully, and remove those who didn’t wind up measuring up.

Amen!

Business management books often stress “centralized planning and decentralized execution.” That is too top-down for my taste. I believe in a centralized vision, coupled with decentralized planning and execution. In general, there are two kinds of executives: those who simply respond to their staffs and those who direct their staffs and give them latitude, coaching them as needed to carry out the directions.

Guided by robust feedback loops, I returned to three questions: What do I know? Who needs to know? Have I told them? Shared data displays kept all planning elements aligned.

Everyone on my staff, in Marine parlance, filled sandbags. No one was exempt from the simplest tasks. We answered our own phones, brewed our own...

The Taliban had left their back door open. Memo to young officers: I can appear brilliant if I fight enemy leaders dumber than a bucket of rocks.

But having a plan counts for nothing unless those above you are made confident that you can execute. As the leader, you maintain communications connectivity up, not just down.

Videoconferences may speed decision-making, but they have a downside. You can see only the participants selected by the camera. You can’t read the body language of the others. In addition to the two generals, there were others listening in that conference room in Tampa, plus more than a dozen other stations, from Bahrain to Washington to Hawaii. I knew I had only a few minutes to win CENTCOM’s approval. A negative consensus can lock in without a word being spoken.

General Franks was opaque. “We may well use assets from [Rhino] to interdict the roads….It is not an invasion. As soon as our work is finished, it [Rhino] certainly will be removed. And yes, we may well use it to bring humanitarian assistance to the people in Afghanistan.” Not an invasion? Well, here we were—hundreds of Marines and Special Operations troops, caked in dust, cleaning their weapons four times a day.

In his memoir, General Franks explained why he chose not to employ my Marines. “We don’t want to repeat the Soviets’ mistakes,” he wrote. “There’s nothing to be gained by blundering around those mountains and gorges with armor battalions chasing a lightly armed enemy.” I didn’t have armor; I had fast-moving light infantry and Bob Harward’s Special Forces, all heliborne, reinforced by agile wheeled light armored vehicles. By closing off the mountain passes with overwatch teams and then attacking with well-supported infantry, we were ready to squeeze Al Qaeda in a vise. Here is how the White House correspondent for The New York Times described what happened: “Hank Crumpton, who was leading the CIA’s operations in Afghanistan, brought his concerns to the White House, imploring Bush to send the marines to block escape routes….Bush deferred to Franks….In his desire to let the military call the shots, Bush had missed the best opportunity of his entire presidency to catch America’s top enemy.”

My view is a bit different. We in the military missed the opportunity, not the President, who properly deferred to his senior military commander on how to carry out the mission. Looking at myself, perhaps I hadn’t invested the time to build understanding up the chain of command.

I needed to adapt to a new Army commander with a different staff style. I should have paid more attention and gotten on the same wavelength as my higher headquarters if I wanted them to be my advocates. Deploying teams with massive firepower to seal off the passes seemed patently compelling on the merits. I waited for the call to come. But I was in Afghanistan, and the decision-makers were continents away.

When you are engaged at the tactical level, you grasp your own reality so clearly it’s tempting to assume that everyone above you sees it in the same light. Wrong. When you’re the senior commander in a deployed force, time spent sharing your appreciation of the situation on the ground with your seniors is like time spent on reconnaissance: it’s seldom wasted. If I had it to do over again, I would have called both the ARCENT commander and Admiral Moore and said, “Sir, I have a plan to accomplish the mission, kill Osama bin Laden, and hand you a victory. All I need is your permission.”

I wanted all hands to pitch in, with the value of good ideas outweighing rank. In the infantry, I had learned early to listen to the young guys on point.

Our intelligence officers would commence the update on enemy activities, often referencing overhead photos of enemy positions.

While I insisted on a sharp demarcation line between data-driven facts and speculative judgments, I wanted both, aware that you have to avoid the danger of accepting informed speculation as if it were fact.

I don’t care how operationally brilliant you are; if you can’t create harmony—vicious harmony—on the battlefield, based on trust across different military services, foreign allied militaries, and diplomatic lines, you need to go home, because your leadership is obsolete.

Note to all executives over the age of thirty: always keep close to you youngsters who are smarter than you.

War is all about reach and tempo. Logistics could easily prove to be my biggest constraint. Supply isn’t the logistician’s problem; it’s the commander’s problem. Only a commander has the authority to reduce extraneous demands on the logistics system.

Our campaign’s success was based on not giving the enemy time to react. We would turn inside the enemy’s “OODA” loop, an acronym coined by the legendary maverick Air Force Colonel John Boyd. To win a dogfight, Boyd wrote, you have to observe what is going on, orient yourself, decide what to do, and act before your opponent has completed his version of that same process, repeating and repeating this loop faster than your foe.

When things go wrong, a leader must stand by those who made the decision under extreme pressure and with incomplete information. Initiative and audacity must be supported, whether or not successful.

Field Marshal Slim wrote in World War II: “As officers,” he wrote, “you will neither eat, nor drink, nor sleep, nor smoke, nor even sit down until you have personally seen that your men have done those things. If you will do this for them, they will follow you to the end of the world. And, if you do not, I will break you.”

my policy of embedding outside liaison officers in my staff. I didn’t want them listening in and reporting back to their units. Rather, by being inside our staffs and our processes, they would necessarily have a better look at our intentions and tempo, and thus be able to keep the units they represented better informed than they would if they were simply sitting, odd man out, in the back of the briefing room, removed from the give-and-take of sorting out how we were assessing and reacting to situations.

digital technologies can falsely encourage remote staffs to believe they possess a God’s-eye view of combat. Digital technologies do not dissipate confusion; the fog of war can actually thicken when misinformation is instantly amplified.

Never think that you’re impotent. Choose how you respond.

A squad of Marines, half walking and half trotting, brushed by us. Just another normal day for our young grunts. When the squad leader paused to survey the surroundings, I offered him water from a jerry can on my Humvee’s gypsy rack. He guzzled down a few swallows without taking his eyes off the enemy positions ahead. He wiped his mouth, patted me on the shoulder, and continued on. Absorbed in the fight, he had no idea that I was the division commander. Or if he did, it made no impression. He had a job to do.

As the commanding general, you concentrate on outsmarting and outmaneuvering the enemy. But you cannot outmaneuver the odds. No matter how ferociously you study, plot, and attack, some of your brave young troops will die. You try your best to make that number as small as possible. But you can never drive it to zero.

“It is not the young man who misses the days he does not know,” Marcus Aurelius wrote. “It is the living who bear the pain of those missed days.”

Without consulting our military commanders in the field, Bremer disbanded the Iraqi Army and banned most members of the Baath Party from government positions. Under Saddam, technocrats had kept their jobs by belonging to the party. We could have weeded out the oppressors and die-hard Baathists without slicing off the sinews of governance, public services, and security. Demobilizing the Iraqi Army instead of depoliticizing it set the most capable group of men in the country on an adversarial course against us.

Two months later, in November, as I was dressing for the Marine Corps Birthday Ball, a televised Pentagon briefing announced that the Marines were going back to Iraq. Shortly after, we received an official warning order: prepare to relieve the 82nd Airborne Division in Anbar Province, the heart of what was called the “Sunni Triangle.” I immediately called John Kelly and said, “Get over there and find out what we’re getting into.” I had to read the newspapers to understand the end state desired by President Bush. It was called the “Freedom Agenda.” “America will take the side of brave men and women who advocate these values around the world,” the President said, “including the Islamic world, because we have a greater objective than eliminating threats and containing resentment. We seek a just and peaceful world beyond the war on terror.”

Great nations don’t get angry; military action should be undertaken only to achieve specific strategic effects. In this case, we were in an extremely violent political campaign over ideas, and we were trying to treat the problem of Fallujah like a conventional war. I believed we had a more effective, sustainable approach for the situation we faced. But that was the order: Attack.

I had made my objections clear. While some might urge a senior officer to resign his post in this circumstance, your troops cannot resign and go home. They will carry out that specific order regardless of whether you are still with them. Loyalty to your troops, to your superiors, and to your oath to obey orders from civilian authority matters most, even when there are a hundred reasons to disagree.

The President’s envoy had argued first for an assault I believed was reckless, and now, with my troops in house-to-house fighting and close to victory, he had succeeded in halting the assault. I didn’t see the order to halt coming.

“First we’re ordered to attack, and now we’re ordered to halt,” I said. “If you’re going to take Vienna, take fucking Vienna.”

The impact of such incoherence at the theater and national command levels cannot be overstated. Dizzying is the appropriate word. My division was given orders about what not to do—Do not attack—but we weren’t given any orders about what to do. It was Groundhog Day. In continued urban fighting, over the next few days, my division lost eighteen killed and wounded.

In the last week of May, President Bush gave a speech at the Army War College, announcing a change in policy. Going forward, security would be a “shared responsibility in Fallujah….Coalition commanders have worked with local leaders to create an all-Iraqi security force….I sent American troops to Iraq to make its people free, not to make them American. Iraqis will write their own history, and find their own way.” I believed the President’s goal was idealistic and tragically misplaced, based on misguided assessments that appeared impervious to my reporting. Of all places in Iraq, Fallujah was certainly the wrong example for the President to cite. I had no idea who told him that responsibility for security was being “shared.” Not one American was left inside the city.

Bremer departed after turning over control to Iraqi officials. He wrote to President Bush, “As a result of the President’s courage and the Coalition’s efforts, Iraq has before it a path to a better future.” In reality, nascent Iraqi leaders jockeyed for power amid ever-shifting alliances, with the Shiite factions maneuvering to consolidate power, some with Iranian financial and weaponry support. Anbar received no help from the Shiite-controlled government in Baghdad. The province was remote, restive, and impoverished—and all hell was breaking loose.

The press rightly plays a devil’s advocate role and doesn’t have to be right or accurate in that capacity. But whether you’re a general or a CEO, win or lose, you have to fight a false narrative or it will assuredly be accepted as fact.

If there’s something you don’t want people to see, you ought to reconsider what you’re doing. The most compelling story for us should be the naked truth about the reality of our operations.