Call Sign Chaos

by Jim Mattis

In any organization, it’s all about selecting the right team. The two qualities I was taught to value most in selecting others for promotion or critical roles were initiative and aggressiveness.

The book is structured in three parts: Direct Leadership, Executive Leadership, and Strategic Leadership. In the first part,

I will describe my formative years growing up and then in the Corps, where the Vietnam

generation of Marines “raised” me and where I first led M...

In the second part, I will describe the broadening tours in executive leadership, when I was commanding a force of 7,000 to 42,000 troops and it was no longer possible to know the name of every one of my charges.

Finally, in the third section, I will delve into the challenges and techniques at the strategic

level. I will address civilian-military interaction from a senior military officer’s perspective, where military leaders must try to reconcile war’s grim realities with political leaders’ human aspirations, and where complexity reigns and the consequences of imprudence are severe, even catastrophic.

My early years with my Marines taught me leadership fundamentals, summed up in the three Cs. The first is competence. Be brilliant in the basics. Don’t dabble in your job; you must master

Of course you’ll screw up sometimes; don’t dwell on that. The last perfect man on earth died on a cross long ago—just be honest and move on, smarter for what your mistake taught you.

Second, caring. To quote Teddy Roosevelt, “Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.”

Third, conviction. This is harder and deeper than physical courage. Your peers are the first to know what you will stand for and, more important, what you won’t stand for.

Remember: As an officer, you need to win only one battle—for the hearts of your troops. Win their hearts and they will win the fights.

“Command and control,” the phrase so commonly used to describe leadership inside and outside the military, is inaccurate. In the Corps, I was taught to use the concept of “command and feedback.” You don’t control your subordinate commanders’ every move; you clearly state your intent and unleash their initiative.

George Washington, leading a revolutionary army, followed a “listen, learn, and help, then lead,” sequence. I found that what worked for George Washington worked for me.

I was conscious of what George Washington wrote to the Congress early in our war for independence: “Men who are familiarized to danger meet it without shrinking; whereas troops unused to service often apprehend danger where no danger

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.

He systematically gathered public support, congressional approval, and UN agreement. He set a clear, limited end state and used diplomacy to pull together a military coalition that included allies we’d never fought alongside. He listened to opposing points of view and guided the preparations, without offending or excluding any stakeholder, while also holding firm to his strategic goal.

I was forty-three when I attended the National War College.

The War College curriculum in strategy, history, and economics broadened me.

Reading is an honor and a gift from a warrior or historian who—a decade or a thousand decades ago—set aside time to write. He distilled a lifetime of campaigning in order to have a “conversation” with you.

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. Any commander who claims he is “too busy to read” is going to fill body bags with his troops as he learns the hard way.

Reading sheds light on the dark path ahead. By traveling into the past, I enhance my grasp of the present.

C H A O S. Curious, I asked him what he was thinking. He handed me the chalk. “Does,” he asked, “the Colonel Have Another Outstanding Solution?”

coup d’oeil [to see in the blink of an eye] and it is inborn in great generals.”

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.

At one point, it struck me as odd that the generals and statesmen I focused on were all retired. In a country that, outside of a few universities, no longer teaches military history, it should have come as no surprise. I was having to come to grips with a lack of strategic thinking in active diplomatic, military, and political circles—and the need for a renaissance in this domain.

Understanding what made this organization tick meant dissecting its culture, not just what was written down in its charter. Culture is a way of life shared by a group of people—how they act, what they believe, how they treat one another, and what they value.

A wise leader must deal with reality and state what he intends, and what level of commitment he is willing to invest in achieving that end. He then has to trust that his subordinates know how to carry that out. Wise leadership requires collaboration; otherwise it will lead to failure.

As Dr. Kissinger had taught me years before, we should never tell our adversary what we will not do.

To me, the episode illustrated the unpredictable twists and turns of war. It demonstrated the importance of never having only one course of action to achieve your aims. If in a crisis you find yourself without options, you will be pushed into a corner.

if you’re going to fight a limited war anywhere, it should be limited in its political end state but fully resourced militarily, to end it quickly.

If the policy changes, the

strategy and attendant resources must also change, adapte...

After a rebellion, however, power tends to flow to those most organized, not automatically to the most idealistic. Many Arabs wanted democracy.

Trust is the coin of the realm for creating the harmony, speed, and teamwork to achieve success at the lowest cost.

Yet it’s not enough to trust your people; you must be able to convey that trust in a manner that subordinates can sense.

After he lost his son Robert in Afghanistan, my friend and colleague in arms, General John Kelly, said, “I think the one thing [the parents of the fallen] would ask is that the cause for which their son or daughter fell be carried through to a successful end, whatever that means, as opposed to ‘This is getting too costly,’ or ‘Too much of a pain in the ass,’ or ‘Let’s just walk away from it.’ They were willing to go where the nation’s leaders told them to go and in many cases gave their lives for the mission. They were willing to see it through literally to their ends. Can we do less?”