Call Sign Chaos

by Jim Mattis

you need to ensure that they are in the same unit long enough to know their brothers and develop trust and confidence in one another. Once this building block is accomplished, the next training step is rehearsal as they focus intently on the skills that will constitute their repertoire in battle.

It seems your philosophy was (1) Hard Training (2) Trust and Confidence with each other (3) practice and rehearsal of the plan

The key to preparation for those who hadn’t yet been in battle was imaging. The goal was to ensure that every grunt had fought a dozen times, mentally and physically, before he ever fired his first bullet in battle, tasted the gunpowder grit in his teeth, or saw blood seeping into the dirt. I wanted my troops to imagine what would happen, to develop mental images, to think ahead to the explosions, yelled orders, and, above all, the deafening cacophony. Battle is so loud that it is hard to hear—let alone make sense of—what someone is trying to direct you to do in the midst of the chaos. At that instant, the muscle memory of training and rehearsals must kick in; swift decisions have to be made with inadequate information. Every warrior must know his weapon, his job, and his comrades’ reactions so well that he functions without hesitation.

So, day after day, I had my platoon sergeants and platoon commanders on the radio, responding to sudden scenarios designed to inject stress.

By having all hands share a mental model, each man learned the bigger picture and could adapt to changing circumstances. By walking through sand tables and imaging through setbacks, casualties, and chemical attacks, we built grim confidence in our ability to adapt. I’ve found this imaging technique—walking through what lies ahead, acclimating hearts and minds to the unexpected—an essential leadership tool.

The combination of intangible qualities—confidence, trust, harmony, and affection for one another that build on each man’s physical strength, mental agility, and spiritual resilience—produces cohesive units capable of dominating the battlefield. But death is ever present.

In Michael Shaara’s novel The Killer Angels, Robert E. Lee says, “To be a good soldier you must love the army. But to be a good officer you must be willing to order the death of the thing you love. This is…a very hard thing to do. No other profession requires it. That is one reason why there are so very few good officers. Although there are many good men.”

INTO THE ATTACK Homer described the Trojan War as wild and confused, a storm of dust and smoke, hoarse screaming and bloody swords, cacophony and irrationality. Ever since then, in their imaginations commanders have searched in vain for the orderly battlefield that unfolds according to plan. It doesn’t exist.

General Ulysses S. Grant, who knew a thing or two about war, had criteria for leaders, which boiled down to humility; toughness of character, so one is able to take shocks in stride; and the single-mindedness to remain unyielding when all is flying apart but enough mental agility to adapt when their approach is not working.

capabilities, morale, and confidence of the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, provided me with a measuring stick to apply when training units in future wars. I knew what confident men looked like when they went into the assault.

Before going into battle, you can learn by asking veterans about their experiences and by reading relentlessly. Lieutenants come to grasp the elements of battle, while senior officers learn how to outwit their opponents. By studying how others have dealt with similar circumstances, I became exposed to leadership examples that accelerated my expanding understanding of combat. The Marines are known for their

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. We have been fighting on this

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. The consequences of incompetence in battle are final. History

The Commandant of the Marine Corps maintains a list of required reading for every rank. All Marines read a common set; in addition, sergeants read some books, and colonels read others. Even generals are assigned a new set of books that they must consume. At no rank is a Marine excused from studying. When I talked to any group of Marines, I knew from their ranks what books they had read.

Reading sheds light on the dark path ahead. By traveling into the past, I enhance my grasp of the present. I’m partial to studying Roman leaders and historians, from Marcus Aurelius and Scipio Africanus to Tacitus, whose grace under pressure and reflections on life can guide leaders

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.

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.

Instillation of personal initiative, aggressiveness, and risk-taking doesn’t spring forward spontaneously on the battlefield. It must be cultivated for years and inculcated, even rewarded, in an organization’s culture. If a commander expects subordinates to seize fleeting opportunities under stress, his organization must reward this behavior in all facets of training, promoting, and commending. More important, he must be tolerant of mistakes. If the risk takers are punished, then you will retain in your ranks only the risk averse.

Yet he rarely called me, and his staff stood ready to help my battalion, not badgering me for information. From Slim to Fulford—both promoted to four-star general—came the same message: at the executive level, your job is to reward initiative in your junior officers and NCOs and facilitate their success. When they make mistakes while doing their best to carry out your intent, stand by them.

He often made wry comments, accompanied by a disarming Irish smile. On the board, in capital letters, he had written: 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?”

Because Afghanistan was four hundred miles from the ocean, some at Central Command headquarters assumed that Marines could not be employed. As a CENTCOM planner explained, “We don’t have access from the sea anyway, and it’s going to have to be introduced by air, then let’s just introduce the Army….So, quickly we went away from—at least initially—consideration of the Marines.” This was a classic example of being trapped by an outdated way of thinking. The Marines don’t need to be anywhere near a beach to land from ships. We had long-range, air-refuelable helicopters and transport aircraft. We were expeditionary, able to fight at a moment’s notice in forward-deployed, self-contained combat packages.

The exercise was thoroughly scripted, crafted as much to display political unity as military training. So once my staff and I had memorized our parts, I had ample time to study the Afghanistan situation.

liked prodding the young guys. You always learned something. Besides, I enjoyed the pained expressions at staff meetings when I brought up a lance corporal’s latest recommendation. If you can’t talk freely with the most junior members of your organization, then you’ve lost touch.

Level with me. Give me something I can fix.”

For the rest of the deployment, they would not carry loaded weapons—a singular disgrace. That was the end of

But 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.

You can never allow your enthusiasm to exceed your unit’s capabilities, but my assessment was governed by the principle of calculated risk.

Once General Farooq was finished, I said, “General, I’m not a diplomat. I’m going to Afghanistan. I want to know if you will help me.” Farooq understood, and the discussion shifted. He agreed to air corridors over Pakistan. While the initial assault troops would seize Rhino, going in by air-refuelable helicopters, the reinforcements would fly into Rhino later.

Compared with that giant endeavor, our effort in 2001 was small in scale. It nonetheless demanded the same speed of decision; we had to move against Kandahar before the enemy had time to reinforce its defenses.

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.

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.

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.

Talk about what goes wrong with feedback loops and why do you think organizations have so much trouble with them.

At the end of each day, we’d all discuss how we had done so far. I’d sum up the meeting by saying, “Okay, I like this. Now let’s do that.” The

Absent those years of integrating Navy and Marine exercises and complex operations, I could not have executed this operation.

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. This can be hard when you introduce the phrase “amphibious operation” to people whose mental image has not progressed beyond World War II landings at Normandy and in the Pacific.

For several nights before the assault, we had quietly staged Marines and vehicles. The assault wave launched from the ships, and by dawn, four hundred more Marines, plus gun trucks, had landed. Our team had just achieved the deepest amphibious assault from the sea in history.

From start to finish, it had taken our team—Navy, Marine, Army Special Operations, State Department—just twenty-eight days to conceive, plan, persuade, and execute the invasion of Afghanistan. Operations occur at the speed of trust.

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 September, the President had described CENTCOM’s war plan as requiring ground troops to “hunt down remaining Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters.” We had come to Rhino to destroy the terrorists who had murdered three thousand civilians. Admiral Moore had told me to land and shatter the Taliban’s last hope of defending themselves. His clear-eyed vision, coupled with his force of personality, gave me at least one steady anchor point on which to plan and conduct the operation. His example would be a model to me in the years ahead.

One of the injured Afghan fighters died at Rhino, despite the efforts of our Navy surgeons. Had my delayed decision cost him—and his family—his life? Should I have sent the helos in earlier, as the Special Forces soldiers were urging? Or had I avoided more aircraft accidents and fatalities by not rushing to an unconfirmed location? When you are in command, there is always the next decision waiting to be made. You don’t have time to pace back and forth like Hamlet, zigzagging one way and the other. You do your best and live with the consequences. A commander has to compartmentalize his emotions and remain focused on the mission. You must decide, act, and move on. Due to the gritty

Instead, General Franks sent in Afghan tribal fighters loyal to warlords from the north. The thinking was that this would show Afghans fighting their own war. But they were out of their tribal element in Tora Bora—poorly equipped and strangers among the locals. They proved incapable of closing with the tough, desperate Al Qaeda fighters. Many of the enemy leaders fled unscathed to Pakistan. By Christmas, the intel officers were informing me that they thought bin Laden had escaped. “That’s a hell of a Christmas present,” I commented.

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.

When I no longer worked for Admiral Moore for my ashore elements, 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.” In 2005, a New...

It was already my habit, at the close of staff meetings and even chance encounters, to push my Marines by insisting they put me on the spot with one hard question before we finished our conversation. I wanted to know what bothered them at night. 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. Lieutenant Colonel Clarke Lethin provided a classic example.

When I no longer worked for Admiral Moore for my ashore elements, 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. What was the impact of that practice on your staff? On the dynamics? On you?

Instead of landing from the sea, my fully mechanized division would be moving along a few roads in seven thousand vehicles, in the deepest major land assault in Marine Corps history. I needed a method to display this challenge without disrupting their urgent training. Having studied the initial American battle in World War I, where traffic jams delayed and undermined our own attack, I needed a method to prevent that from happening. The Legoland theme park was near our California base. On his own, Clarke purchased seven thousand Lego blocks. The NCOs glued them to sheets of cardboard in numbers reflecting the varied composition of each unit and laid them out on our parade deck. Each commander then dragged his sheet of Legos across a map of Iraq marked out on the parade deck, in accord with our assault plan. We watched as dozens of sheets became entangled. Presto—we had identified the choke points from our Kuwait jumping-off positions to bridges deep inside Iraq, stacking up and resulting in massive traffic jams even without fighting an enemy. As a result of Clarke’s display of the problem, commanders had a graphic understanding of what they had to fix, which we rehearsed in the Mojave Desert.

On another front I was taken by surprise. In June 2002, General Hagee war-gamed the invasion. He identified the critical problem, one that had escaped me: it wasn’t breaking through the Iraqi Army or seizing Baghdad and throwing Saddam out of power. Rather, it was what we would do after.

“No,” he said. “What comes next after we depose Saddam will be the war. I’m getting no guidance about that. We have to do our own planning for post-hostilities.”

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. We then refined our fire and maneuver schemes. The logistics officer briefed next. The distances involved could tether us to slow progress, and his job was to push off the “culminating point” when we ran out of fuel, water, or ammo. To the enjoyment

Chaos—Colonel Has Another Outstanding Suggestion.

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.

We all watched as my commanders walked through the movements of their units, starting from Kuwait on D-Day and advancing deep into Iraq. Thanks to the Legos and the Mojave exercises, the units knew the order of attack and which had priority. Pilots and ground commanders had extensive discussions that continued following the formal sand table demonstration.