Call Sign Chaos

by Jim Mattis

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.” In 2005, a New York Times correspondent wrote, “An American intelligence official told me that the Bush administration later concluded that the refusal of Centcom to dispatch the Marines…was the gravest error of the war.”