Call Sign Chaos

by Jim Mattis

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

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.

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 essential to battlefield victory.

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.

recruit for attitude and train for skills.

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.

we learn how to convey our intent so that it passed intact through the layers of intermediate leadership to our youngest Marines. For instance, you may say, “We will attack that bridge in order to cut off the enemy’s escape.” The critical information is your intent, summed up in the phrase “in order to.” If a platoon seizes the bridge and cuts off the enemy, the mission is a success. But if the bridge is seized while the enemy continues to escape, the platoon commander will not sit idly on the bridge. Without asking for further orders, he will move to cut off the enemy’s escape. Such aligned independence is based upon a shared understanding of the “why” for the mission. This is key to unleashing audacity.

you need only transparent sharing of information (What do I know? Who needs to know? Have I told them?) to orchestrate, as opposed to “control” or “synchronize,” a coordinated team.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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

“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.”

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.

“A lie gets halfway around the world before truth gets its pants on.”

“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.”

When asked how he would order his thoughts if he had one hour to save the world, Einstein sagely responded that he would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem and save the world in five minutes.

The first was housekeeping, which allowed me to be anticipatory—for example, munitions stockage levels and ship locations. The second was decision-making, to maintain the rhythm of operations designed to ensure that our OODA loops were functioning at the speed of relevance. The third were alarms, called “night orders.” These addressed critical events—for instance, a U.S. embassy in distress or a new outbreak of hostilities. “Alarm” information had to be immediately brought to my attention, day or night.

Marshall. “Problems which bear directly on the future of our civilization cannot be disposed of by general talk or vague formulae—by what Lincoln called ‘pernicious abstractions,’ ” he stated. “They require concrete solutions for definite and extremely complicated questions.” When my concrete solutions and strategic advice, especially keeping faith with allies, no longer resonated, it was time to resign, despite the limitless joy I felt serving alongside our troops in defense of our Constitution.