Call Sign Chaos

by Jim Mattis

As far as I was concerned, young Warren Cook had come up with the most ingenious idea I’d heard in thirty years of war-gaming.

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.

Supervision of the planning took me only an hour or two each day. The rest of my waking hours were spent coaching fighters—officers and enlisted. I spoke to the troops in groups, from thirteen-man squads to eight-hundred-man battalions.

In the summer of 1944, General Eisenhower exhorted each of his soldiers “to go forward to his assigned objective with the determination that the enemy can survive only through surrender.”

First, don’t stop. Don’t slow down, don’t create a traffic jam. Jab, feint, hit, and move, move, move. Second, keep your honor clean. Thousands of homes, stores, stalls, and mud and concrete houses lined the roads. Terrified civilians would be in the line of fire. I made it clear that our division would do more than any unit in history to avoid civilian casualties.

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.

“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.”

Conway’s arguments were of no avail. Somehow at higher headquarters the fedayeen had been elevated to an operational threat. To this day, I do not know how such an exaggerated perception gained enough traction to stop us.

On the spot, I relieved the RCT commander, a noble and capable officer who in past posts had performed superbly. But when the zeal of a commander flags, you must make a change. Sometimes you order them into their sleeping bag, and rest restores them. In this case I believed that rest alone would not work. In good conscience, he was reluctant to follow my intent, which involved speed as the top priority. 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. This was the first relief in combat of a regimental commander in this fight, and it was front-page news the next day. You can imagine what it felt like to be that colonel, his family, or his admirers. While I was criticized by some whom I respect, their disapproval didn’t make me question my decision. To take command of RCT 1, I gave up my operations officer, Colonel John Toolan. In the midst of this campaign, he had the leadership savvy to swiftly earn the respect of five thousand troops who didn’t know him, bringing their power fully into the fight. Lieutenant Colonel Clarke Lethin stepped up as operations officer and my division staff didn’t miss a beat.

The British strategist B. H. Liddell Hart wrote that the object of war is to produce a “better state of peace.” I left having no confidence that we had done that.

Sitting alone in my Camp Pendleton office and reflecting on two decades of deployments to a region with no democratic traditions, I knew the transition to a Shiite-dominated “democracy” would not be peaceful. I had to make clear to my Marines the dilemma we faced: We had to dial down the overall cycle of violence while dominating it at the point of enemy contact. We had to be both restrained and deadly.

I could sense that the window of opportunity to avoid a full-blown fight was closing rapidly. The highways and ratlines from Syria were wide open for foreign fighters. We had very few reliable local Iraqi forces, and we were still developing informant networks. The terrorists were coming together for attacks and then falling back into safe houses in the city. Very few civilians would dare inform against them, and even if someone wanted to inform, they didn’t know which Iraqi officials could be trusted not to betray them, and we Americans hadn’t proved that we would stick around.

First, we would avoid sparking further outbursts. Working

Second, we had to hold to a steady course. Across

Third, we would deliver justice by the discrimina...

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. “Right, let’s get on with it,” I said to my network of commanders.

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. At the top level, there was loose, uninformed speculation that the attack might take weeks. My judgment, that we were close to crushing an enemy now in disarray, was not solicited.

I knew that the underlying motivations of the policymakers were not malicious. Indeed, they wanted to do the best thing. But they had no grasp of the tactical opportunity or peril that their decision to assault the city now presented. They were spinning in a circle, without a strategic compass to keep them pointed in a consistent direction.

Reflecting back on the weeks of brutal urban fighting, I thought of a Kipling line: “For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.” For all the dysfunction of the on-again, off-again attack, I was proud beyond words that our Marines kept the faith when they’d had every reason to give it up.

believed I had let my men down, having failed to prevent the attack in the first place and subsequently failing to prevent a stop order once we were deep inside the city. It was a tough time for me, because higher-level decisions had cost us lives, but now was not the time to go inward. You must always keep fighting for those who are still with you.

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.

Having studied the British occupation of Iraq after World War I, I saw that much of what was happening to us could have been predicted. I also studied the 1956–57 French battle for Algiers.

As Churchill noted, “A lie gets halfway around the world before truth gets its pants on.” In our

Building trust and affection in units is not the same as chasing popularity, which relies on favoritism, nor does it replace the priority of accomplishing the mission. For this reason I came down hard on anyone who said, “Sir, my mission is to bring all my men home safely.” That’s a laudable and necessary goal, but the primary mission was to defeat the enemy, even as we did everything possible to keep our young men and women alive.

had been raised by Vietnam-era Marines who drummed into me the importance of making sure the policymakers grasped the nature of the war they were responsible for. Don’t get trapped into using halfway measures or leaving safe havens for the enemy. I believed I had spoken clearly. But I hadn’t gotten through.

Anyone who has studied history knows that an enemy always moves against your perceived weakness, and this enemy had chosen irregular warfare. Now we had to adapt faster than they could, getting inside their OODA loop.

I took as a model the example of a chess master at a tournament who, after taking a single glance at the board, predicts the winner three moves hence. How could he do that? The economist Herbert Simon explained, “The situation [on the chessboard] provided a cue; this cue has given the chess master access to information stored in his memory; and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.”

I knew that if we kept a Marine alive through his first three firefights, his chances of survival improved. We

Regardless of rank or occupation, I believe that all leaders should be coaches at heart. For me, “player-coach” aptly describes the role of a combat leader, or any real leader.

What is war doctrine? Basically, it’s a written guide, based on historical precedents, of the best fighting practices for commanders and troops to follow. Doctrine lays out principles that have worked in the past and establishes guidelines for how an organization fights, based on lessons learned in experiments or at great cost in bloody battles. Every corporation and government agency follows a doctrine, whether written or unwritten.

I concluded that the answer was yes. While we are reducing our forces overseas, we must retain the ability to reassure our friends that we can quickly get to them when trouble looms. We also need this capability to temper our adversaries’ designs.

also knew that our Achilles’ heel was overconfidence in uninterrupted communications. In a future war, these communications are certain to be broken. Therefore, we had to know how to continue fighting when (not if) our networks fail. Because opportunities and catastrophes on the battlefield appear and disappear rapidly, only a decentralized command system can unleash a unit’s full potential. We couldn’t become reliant on communication networks that will not be there when most needed.

In future battles, outcomes will depend on the aligned independence of subordinate units.

This is a very important thought.

Make your intent clear, and then encourage your subordinates to employ a bias for action. The result will be faster decisions, stronger unity of effort, and unleashed audacity throughout the force, enabling us to out-turn and outfight the enemy.

But a leader’s role is problem solving. If you don’t like problems, stay out of leadership. Smooth sailing teaches nothing, and there was nothing smooth about the Middle East. Plus, I’d be back with the troops.

What did you do to keep from burning out and getting too weary to keep solving the problems?

My boss, Army General John Abizaid, was now in his third year as commander of CENTCOM. He was a wise mentor, and we shared a common outlook. He had long impressed me with his grasp of history and his penetrating way of getting to the essence of any issue. He rightly considered service doctrine to be only a starting point. As with any war or complex situation, there was no cookie-cutter model that would lead to success in Iraq. The

Throughout the fall of 2006, I delivered the same message. Keep training and encouraging local forces. Stay professional and polite. Whenever you show anger or disgust toward civilians, it’s a victory for the insurgents. Victory is not an abstraction. We will train Iraqi forces and patrol until the last terrorist is dead.

“When you see the amount of violence and criminal activity,” I said, “it is easy to say this just isn’t working or at best we are just going sideways, when in fact a lot of progress has been made….I don’t want to put lipstick on a pig, but the one point I would make very strongly is this: Violence and progress can and do coexist….

Our strategy, first identified by John Kelly three years before, of working with—not against—the tribes was finally paying off.

poorly articulated policy goals, a wavering and initially under-resourced plan that lacked a coherent strategic approach, and our inability to define progress meant that the timing for testimony was unfortunate.

was to take command of the U.S. Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) and concurrently serve as NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander for Transformation (SACT), two jobs traditionally linked together. Of course, it was an honor to be selected for four stars, but I was already in the best three-star job I could have imagined. I was not eager to leave. But the American people had paid my tuition going on thirty-five years, and if this was where my seniors wanted me, I would go. (See Appendix F.)

For those who had forecast that I’d never receive the Senate’s consent for another promotion in light of some well-publicized remarks: my past statements never came up, and I was confirmed by a non-contentious voice vote.

I had to consider how to prepare for a job that required a new skill set. As the saying goes, the military does not accept “difficult” as an excuse for failing at anything. I recalled also how hard Secretaries Perry and Cohen had worked to keep the alliance effective. I had reached a break point in my military frame of reference. I was no longer a military operator; instead I was now at a place where policy and military factors intersected. I had to understand the politics and motivations shaping member nations’ militaries and defining the unwritten rules by which they operated. These rules were as much cultural as martial, stemming from each individual nation’s history. I

I had a brilliant admiral from a European nation. He looked and acted every inch the leader, always crisp, intellectually fit, and forceful. Too forceful. He yelled, dressing officers down in front of others, and publicly mocked reports that he considered shallow instead of clarifying what he wanted. He was harsh and inconsiderate toward officers from half a dozen countries. My NATO sergeant major was Czech; my deputies were British and Italian. My personal staff was largely German. All were disturbed by his conduct, and his subordinates were fearful. I called in the admiral and carefully explained why I disapproved of his leadership. “Your staff resents you,” I said. “You’re disappointed in their input. Okay. But your criticism makes that input worse, not better. You’re going the wrong way. You cannot allow your passion for excellence to destroy your compassion for them as human beings.” This was a point I had always driven home to my subordinates. “Change your leadership style.” I continued. “Coach and encourage, don’t berate, least of all in public.” He was one of my finest operational thinkers and I didn’t want to lose him. After our talk, there was no doubt he understood my message, and things were all right for a time. But he soon reverted to demeaning his subordinates. I shouldn’t have been surprised. When for decades you have been rewarded and promoted within your own nation’s service, it’s difficult to break the habits you’ve acquired, regardless of how they may h...

Key Question. Walk us through that. What criteria did you use? What lessons did it reinforce to you? What principles would you share with us about how that intersects with the value of being a SL?

The underlying problem with NATO transformation was not individual personalities, though; it was, rather, a lack of energy and initiative, resulting from a process-driven culture.

process had replaced output. They

Early in my tenure, I visited a brigade headquarters. On the bulletin board were slogans exhorting initiative, like DECIDE THEN ACT! SEIZE THE DAY! and JUST DO IT! These sounded inspiring, reflecting an ethos that valued initiative, until a battalion commander directed my attention to his commanding general’s division-wide order. It prescribed the exact attire required for physical training that every soldier had to wear while working out—including the color of their safety belt. By prescribing such minutiae from the top down, the actual culture of the organization contradicted its own declarations and stifled any kind of real initiative. Initiative has to be practiced daily, not stifled, if it’s to become a reality inside a culture. Every institution gets the behavior it rewards. We had to reward battlefield behavior, not what in an earlier time we called garrison Mickey Mouse, or worse.

Why do so many organizations say they value initiative but seem oblivious to the the fact that the culture they have built actually handcuffs it?

In that, I was guided by what General George C. Marshall had written: “The leader must learn to cut to the heart of a situation, recognize its decisive elements and base his course of action on these. The ability to do this is not God-given, nor can it be acquired overnight; it is a process of years. He must realize that training in solving problems of all types—long practices in making clear unequivocal decisions, the habit of concentrating on the question at hand, and an elasticity of mind—are indispensable requisites for the successful practice of the art of war….It is essential that all leaders—from subaltern to commanding general—familiarize themselves with the art of clear, logical thinking.”

That problem was three-tiered: maintain a safe and credible nuclear deterrent so that those weapons are never used; sustain a compelling conventional force capable of deterring or winning a state-on-state war; and make irregular warfare a core competency of the U.S. forces.

took JFCOM off the shoals of EBO and steered in what I determined was the right course. If you don’t do that as a leader, you’re along for the ride; you’re not steering the ship.