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.

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

Teddy Roosevelt, “Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.”

Show no favoritism. Value initiative and aggressiveness above all.

Consistently maintain a social and personal distance, remembering that there is a line you must not cross. But you should come as close to that line as possible—without surrendering one ounce of your authority.

You are not their friend. You are their coach and commander, rewarding the qualities essent...

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.

The Marine philosophy is to recruit for attitude and train for skills.

George Washington, leading a revolutionary army, followed a “listen, learn, and help, then lead,” sequence.

for the rest of my career, I aggressively delegated tasks to the lowest capable level.

Finally, I understood what President Eisenhower had passed on. “I’ll tell you what leadership is,” he said. “It’s persuasion and conciliation and education and patience. It’s long, slow, tough work. That’s the only kind of leadership I know.”

The word battalion originated in the sixteenth century, derived from the Italian word for “battle,” battaglia. The battalion is the last command where the leader has a face-to-face, direct relationship with the troops.

General Ulysses S. Grant, who knew a thing or two about war, had criteria for leaders, which boiled down to humility; toughness of character,

Across the entire southern front, the coalition attack was accelerating. The basic building blocks of planning and rehearsals, the iterative discussions, the generals’ sharing of the overall strategy, the heavy bombing, the simultaneous breaching of multiple lanes through the minefields—all had come together in violent harmony.

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.

Developing a culture of operating from commander’s intent demanded a higher level of unit discipline and self-discipline than issuing voluminous, detailed instructions.

In drafting my intent, I learned to provide only what is necessary to achieve a clearly defined end state: 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.

The details you don’t give in your orders are as important ...

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

we maneuvered faster than the enemy, getting inside his decision-making loop.

an organization gets the behavior it rewards,

“There is a gift,” Napoleon wrote in his memoirs, “of being able to see at a glance the possibilities offered by the terrain….One can call it coup d’oeil [to see in the blink of an eye] and it is inborn in great generals.”

Churchill noted, “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.” Thanks to the Vietnam veterans, at this “special moment”

Trust remains the coin of the realm.

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?

Military men have long memories about failures. In 1915, the British tried to seize the Dardanelles strait in order to force Turkey, fighting on the side of Germany, out of the war. But the amphibious landing at Gallipoli proved catastrophic. Two hundred thousand troops were pinned on the beachhead. The allies lost forty-four thousand killed and a hundred thousand wounded.

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.

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.

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.”

In my division were 22,000 troops, some stationed a hundred miles away. In terms of numbers, geography, and demands upon my time, I had now fully transitioned from personal to executive leadership. I accepted the staff and commanders that the system had put in place. I made it clear that after ninety days, those who couldn’t embrace my priorities were to move elsewhere for a fresh start.

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.

planner fatigue was real. We kept our meetings short.

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.

The Lego and colored-jersey drills had enabled us all to “image” what might occur. Note to all executives over the age of thirty: always keep close to you youngsters who are smarter than you.

“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. According to Boyd, a fighter pilot didn’t win because he had faster reflexes; he won because his reflexes were connected to a brain that thought faster than his opponent’s.

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.

As Slim made clear, any general who isn’t connected spiritually to his troops is not a combat leader.

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.”

As Rommel once wrote, “A commander must accustom his staff to a high tempo from the outset, and continually keep them up to it.”

pithy sentiment Field Marshal Slim wrote in World War II: “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.”

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

I took him aside—praise in public, criticize in private—before ripping into him.

Leaders are not potted plants, and at all levels they must be constantly out at the critical points doing whatever is required to keep their teams energized, especially when everyone is exhausted.

to quote Napoleon, “an iron fist in a velvet glove.”

I intended to demonstrate that there is no better friend and no worse enemy than a United States Marine.

As the negotiations turned into a kabuki dance, I warned my interlocutors: “I come in peace. I didn’t bring artillery. But I’m pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you fuck with me, I’ll kill you all.”

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

I placed renewed emphasis on elementary tactics. I recalled “brilliance in the basics.”