Call Sign Chaos

by Jim Mattis

The critiques in the field, in the classroom, or at happy hour are blunt for good reason. Personal sensitivities are irrelevant.

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.

“We don’t get to choose when we die,” he said. “But we do choose how we meet death.”

You make mistakes, or life knocks you down; either way, you get up and get on with it. You deal with life. You don’t whine about it.

“A life is not important except in its impact on other lives.”

You don’t always control your circumstances, but you can always control your response.

You don’t send a grunt with a rifle when a five-hundred-pound bomb will do the job. Firepower brings to bear America’s awesome technologies, giving our grunts a decided edge.

The first is competence. Be brilliant in the basics. Don’t dabble in your job; you must master it.

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.”

Value initiative and aggressiveness above all. It’s easier to pull the reins back than to push a timid soul forward.

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. Your troops catch on fast. State your flat-ass rules and stick to them. They shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. At the same time, leaven your professional passion with personal humility and compassion for your troops. 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.

Competence, caring, and conviction combine to form a fundamental element—shaping the fighting spirit of your troops. Leadership means reaching the souls of your troops, instilling a sense of commitment and purpose in the face of challenges so severe that they cannot be put into words.

If you as the commander define the mission as your responsibility, you have already failed. It was our mission, never my mission.

“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. Then, when the inevitable obstacles or challenges arise, with good feedback loops and relevant data displays, you hear about it and move to deal with the obstacle. Based on feedback, you fix the problem. 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.

Every warrior must know his weapon, his job, and his comrades’ reactions so well that he functions without hesitation.

Everyone has a plan, Mike Tyson said, until he gets punched in the mouth. The prepared fighter knows he’s going to be rocked back on his heels. He’s anticipated that before the brawl begins.

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. The consequences of incompetence in battle are final.

tell your team the purpose of the operation, giving no more than the essential details of how you intend to achieve the mission, and then clearly state your goal or end state, one that enables what you intend to do next. Leave the “how” to your subordinates, who must be trained and rewarded for exercising initiative, taking advantage of opportunities and problems as they arise.

(What do I know? Who needs to know? Have I told them?)

Examine your coaching and how well you articulate your intent. Remember the bottom line: imbue in them a strong bias for action.

“To each there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour.”

Attitudes are caught, not taught.

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.

In my meetings with the troops, I had three Flat-Ass Rules, or “FARs”: (1) Guardian Angel, where a hidden sentry is positioned to ambush the enemy; (2) Geometry of Fires, designed to reduce friendly fire casualties; and (3) Unity of Command, meaning that someone was in charge in any group.

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

In 1991, we had calculated how many aircraft sorties it took to destroy a target. In Afghanistan, we instead calculated how many targets one aircraft could take out.

We would demonstrate the American tradition of liberating the people, not dominating them.

I followed British Field Marshal Slim’s advice that, in fairness to my troops, they had to know what their objective was and what my expectations of them were.

That small incident illustrates a larger principle. Lacroix consulted with no one. When a key indicator flashed a danger signal, he didn’t pull back to call headquarters for guidance. That was decentralized execution. Based on understanding his commander’s intent, Lacroix decided on his own course of action, and the Crown Jewel was firmly in our hands. Suppose gas pressure had built up, resulting in a severe explosion? In that tragic case, I still would have fully supported Captain Lacroix. Why? Because he had reviewed the situation smartly, weighed the risk factors against what he knew—and acted swiftly in accord with my intent.

“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.”

Uncertainty runs riot if you don’t keep cool.

Digital technologies do not dissipate confusion; the fog of war can actually thicken when misinformation is instantly amplified.

The more trust there is inside a unit, the more strain that unit can withstand without a lot of discussion.

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

You cannot order someone to abandon a spiritual burden they’re wrestling with. Fear of losing his Marines, coupled with his tremendous fatigue, cost the division an officer I admire greatly to this day.

A few hours later, energetic First Sergeant Edward Smith was killed. Two days earlier, while I was talking with Dunford, Sergeant Smith had been standing a few feet away, smiling at us as he puffed on a cigar. I had joked that he wasn’t supposed to deploy with us. He had put in his retirement papers and was about to start a second career on the Anaheim police force. But he put off his retirement to stay with his rifle company, where he knew his experience was needed. Such were the men I served alongside.

I had to understand the light and the dark competing in their hearts, because we needed lads who could do grim, violent work without becoming evil in the process, lads who could do harsh things yet not lose their humanity.

I wasn’t asking that immoral action on our part be excused; rather, I was arguing for journalists to practice their profession with the same integrity they expected of us.

“Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the face of an uplifted knife.”

History is compelling; nations with allies thrive; those without them die.

For those who question the post–Soviet Union value of NATO, it was telling that an alliance designed originally for the defense of Western Europe fought its first combat campaign in response to the 9/11 attacks on America. It must not be forgotten, in our too often transactional view of allies, that these nations offered up the blood of their sons and daughters in our common defense. As Churchill said, “There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that is fighting without them!”

I have never been on a crowded battlefield, and there is always room for those who want to be there alongside us.

In keeping with George Washington’s approach to leadership, I would listen, learn, and help, then lead.

“You know I say what I mean and I mean what I say,” Obama said in the fall of 2012. “I said I’d end the war in Iraq. I ended it.” Rhetoric doesn’t end conflicts. With America’s influence effectively gone, Prime Minister Maliki imprisoned numerous Sunnis, drove their representatives from government, and refused to send funds to Sunni districts, virtually disenfranchising a third of his country. Iraq slipped back into escalating violence. It was like watching a car wreck in slow motion. Soon the Sunnis were in full revolt and the Iraqi Army was a hollow, powerless shell, allowing the terrorists to return like a barbarian horde, exactly as the CIA had predicted. In the summer of 2014, the medieval scourge called ISIS rose like a phoenix and swept across western Iraq and eastern Syria, routing the Iraqi Army and establishing its murderous caliphate. It would take many years and tens of thousands of casualties, plus untold misery for millions of innocents, to break ISIS’s geographic hold. All of this was predicted—and preventable.

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.

Engage your mind before your trigger finger. First, do no harm to the innocent. Identify your target before you shoot.

Much talk has been given to having an “exit strategy.” My thought was that “exiting” a war was a by-product of winning that war. Unless you want to lose, you don’t tell an enemy when you are done fighting, and you don’t set an exit unrelated to the situation on the ground.

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. Always build in shock absorbers.

Of all the countries I’ve dealt with, I consider Pakistan to be the most dangerous, because of the radicalization of its society and the availability of nuclear weapons. We can’t have the fastest-growing nuclear arsenal in the world falling into the hands of the terrorists breeding in their midst. The result would be disastrous. The tragedy for the Pakistani people is that they don’t have leaders who care about their future.