Call Sign Chaos

by Jim Mattis

Woe to the unimaginative one who, in after-action reviews, takes refuge in doctrine.

The two qualities I was taught to value most in selecting others for promotion or

critical roles were initiative and aggressiveness.

It now became even more clear to me why the Marines assign an expanded reading list to everyone promoted to a new rank: that reading gives historical depth that lights the path ahead. Slowly but surely, we learned there was nothing new under the sun: properly informed, we weren’t victims—we could always create options.

“We don’t get to choose when we die,” he said. “But we do choose how we meet death.”

Lee’s Lieutenants, by Douglas Freeman, and Liddell Hart’s Strategy.

I got the message: Have faith in your subordinates after you have trained them.

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

Physical strength, endurance, calling in fire, map reading, verbal clarity, tactical cunning, use of micro-terrain—all are necessary. You must master and integrate them to gain the confidence of your troops. A good map-reading lieutenant is worthless if he can’t do pull-ups.

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.

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.

Competence, caring, and conviction combine to form a fundamental element—shaping the fighting spirit of your troops.

The Marine philosophy is to recruit for attitude and train for skills. Marines believe that attitude is a weapon system.

“You and I,” I said to each recruiter, “have a clear goal: four recruits a month who can graduate from boot camp. Anything you need from me, I’ll get you. We will succeed as a team, with all hands pulling their weight.”

Establishing teamship while offering support

I had learned in the fleet that in harmonious, effective units, everyone owns the unit mission. If you as the commander define the mission as your responsibility, you have already failed. It was our mission, never my mission.

“Command and control,” the phrase so commonly used to describe leadership inside and outside the military, is inaccurate. In the Corps, I was taught to ...

You don’t control your subordinate commanders’ every move; you clearly state your intent an...

Then, when the inevitable obstacles or challenges arise, with good feedback loops and relevant data displays, you hear about it and move to deal with the obstacle. Based on feedback, you fix the problem. George Washington, leading a revolutionar...

There’s a huge difference between making a mistake and letting that mistake define you, carrying a bad attitude through life.

“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.”

Because a unit adopts the personality of its commander, just as a sports team adopts the personality of its coach,

Had Custer been one of my subordinate commanders, I wouldn’t put him on point; I’d put him in trace—behind a more calculating commander—so I could unleash Custer’s hell-for-leather style into a developed situation.

I matched personalities to anticipated tasks,

You cannot allow your unit to be caught flat-footed.

When you have to give up personnel, the tendency is to hang on to your best. Nick’s example stuck with me: When tasked with supporting other units, select those you most hate to give up.

Never advantage yourself at the expense of your comrades.

Fulford left me confident that once the battle began, I wasn’t expected to call back for instructions. Use your aggressive initiative according to his intent.

was conscious of what George Washington wrote to the Congress early in our war for independence: “Men who are familiarized to danger meet it without shrinking; whereas troops unused to service often apprehend danger where no danger is.”

Everyone has a plan, Mike Tyson said, until he gets punched in the mouth.

“What if radio communications are lost at night during a chemical attack?” “Corporal, your fire team is advancing behind the cover of a tank, bullets bouncing off the armor. To your left, you see a bulldozer throw a track. What do you do? Who do you notify?” By having all hands share a mental model, each man learned the bigger picture and could adapt to changing circumstances.

Keeping me informed would be a lower priority. By listening over their tactical radio nets, I could gather information without interfering. But I needed more than that. Using a technique I had found in my reading, I intended to gather information that bypassed normal reporting channels by means of “focused telescopes.” I copied this technique from Frederick the Great, Wellington, and Rommel, among others.

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.”

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.

violent harmony.

Maneuver warfare had taught us to shatter the enemy’s capacity to make coherent decisions.

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.

Attitudes are caught, not taught.

Hagee had taught me a lesson in generalship. Now I realized why he was reprising what our former Commandant, General Charles Krulak, looking to the future, had called the “three-block war.” On one block you’d be fighting; on the next, bringing humanitarian aid to beleaguered civilians; and on the third, separating warring factions—all on the same day.

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.

I emphasized brilliance in the basics. In my meetings with the troops, 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. These rules were meant to emphasize the unrelenting level of attention that had to be paid to key operating principles. That level had to permeate every element of my forces.

As the jumping-off day approached, I was confident in our division’s fighting spirit and training, but I had to avoid complacency. I wasn’t yet confident that all my commanders and the critical supporting elements fully appreciated our plan’s complexity and its friction points. While I was discussing this problem with my chief of staff, my twenty-five-year-old aide, First Lieutenant Warren Cook, interrupted with a solution. He recommended that our combat leaders put on various-colored jerseys with their unit designations on the back and walk through the movement plan with everyone watching. I seized on his concept, and my chief of staff put the “mother of all sand tables” in motion. Among the sand dunes, we found a natural amphitheater larger than a football field. Using rocks, tape, and cans of spray paint, our NCOs laid out a map of Iraq with enemy units highlighted. We invited all supporting and adjacent commanders and key staffs—Army, Air Force, Marine and Navy air, CIA, Marine logistics, Seabees, British, and other allies—to observe. 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. Well-briefed aviators knew our scheme of maneuver and watched knowingly from the ai...

Note to all executives over the age of thirty: always keep close to you youngsters who are smarter than you.

Our campaign’s success was based on not giving the enemy time to react. 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. 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. Success in war requires seizing and maintaining the initiative—and the Marines had adopted Boyd’s OODA loop as the intellectual framework for maneuver warfare. Used with decentralized decision-making, accelerating our OODA loops results in a cascading series of disasters confronting the enemy.

I spoke to the troops in groups, from thirteen-man squads to eight-hundred-man battalions. We went over our overall strategy and their unit’s scheme of maneuver. My goal was to put a human face on the mission, answer every question, and build their confidence. 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. Additionally, I needed to look the lads in the eye to get a sense of their levels of confidence and for them to directly feel the respect I had for those who would face our enemies. As Slim made clear, any general who isn’t connected spiritually to his troops is not a combat leader.

That was a good, on-the-spot call far down the chain of command. That small incident illustrates a larger principle. Lacroix consulted with no one. When a key indicator flashed a danger signal, he didn’t pull back to call headquarters for guidance. That was decentralized execution. Based on understanding his commander’s intent, Lacroix decided on his own course of action, and the Crown Jewel was firmly in our hands.

but we should default to supporting commanders who move boldly against the enemy.

commander must accustom his staff to a high tempo from the outset, and continually keep them up to it.”

I was reminded of a 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.”

Having learned a lesson during Operation Desert Storm, where, because I was dead tired, I allowed my own battalion to drive into an ambush in the open desert, I would not allow a unit duty officer to awaken a commander who was catching some rest.