Call Sign Chaos

by Jim Mattis

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.

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.

Once subordinate commanders sense that, they hesitate. The very brittleness of detailed orders that cannot possibly anticipate unknowns sucks the initiative out of them, suffocating their aggressiveness and slowing operational tempo, a problem doubled if hobbled by risk aversion.

Subordinate commanders cannot seize fleeting opportunities if they do not understand the purpose behind an order.

at the executive level, your job is to reward initiative in your junior officers and NCOs and facilitate their success.

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

But a leader’s role is problem solving. If you don’t like problems, stay out of leadership.

But the Naval Service is the varsity, and a lack of discipline is not a mistake. In the Naval Service, consistent with the enormous authority granted to a commander, and the wide latitude and deference they’re given to exercise their judgment, if a ship strikes a shoal, the captain is relieved, even if he was asleep at the time and his subordinates were at the helm. Similarly, if lance corporals are not trained properly, their superiors must be held to account for their lack of leadership competence and professional supervision.

“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.”

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. Entropy prevailed; process had replaced output.

We must remember we are engaged in an experiment called democracy, and experiments can fail in a world still largely hostile to freedom. The idea of American democracy, as inspiring as it is, cannot stand without the support of like-minded nations.

Peter Drucker, the business guru, criticized business executives for devoting too much time to planning, rather than understanding the nature of the corporation itself. As he put it, “Culture eats strategy for lunch.” The output of any organization, driven by its culture, must reflect the leadership’s values in order to be effective.

PowerPoint is the scourge of critical thinking. It encourages fragmented logic by the briefer and passivity in the listener. Only a verbal narrative that logically connects a succinct problem statement using rational thinking can develop sound solutions.

Recognize, too, that ultimately any President gets the advice he desires and deserves, but in the dawn’s early light you need to be able to look in the shaving mirror without looking away. As Secretary Shultz had said before Congress, to do our jobs well, we should not want our job too much.

While our intelligence community’s and military’s successes had prevented additional terrorist attacks on our soil emanating from overseas following 9/11, I did not patronize this enemy. I had dealt with them long enough to know they had not arrived rationally at their hateful, intolerant worldview, and they would not be rationally talked out of it. We had to fight, or there would be worse to come.

“What do I know? Who needs to know? Have I told them?” I repeated it so often that it appeared on index cards next to the phones in some offices.

In keeping with George Washington’s approach to leadership, I would listen, learn, and help, then lead.

He exuded the confidence of a man whose mind was made up, perhaps even indifferent to considering the consequences were he judging the situation incorrectly.

This wasn’t a military-versus-civilian flaw, or a Democrat-versus-Republican error. It went deeper. At the top, then as now, there was an aura of omniscience. The assessments of the intelligence community, our diplomats, and our military had been excluded from the decision-making circle.

believed that, lacking coherent policy objectives, and in the face of growing criticism over a long and inconclusive war, in the field we had tightened our rules of engagement to fight “the right way.” These tightened rules were imposed in a vain effort to compensate for the lack of a sound strategy that could show progress. Instead of straightening out the strategy, we tried to remove any criticism of the manner in which we were fighting. In doing so, we were hobbling ourselves militarily, losing the confidence of our troops in the process. Dave Petraeus was aligning military necessity with the absolute need to protect the innocent.

When the brass lose influence over their troops because their rules are out of touch, the discipline that binds all ranks together is undercut.

Unless you want to lose, you don’t tell an enemy when you are done fighting,

The commander, Colonel Aref al-Zaben, was a resourceful leader who brought fresh ideas to bear. He deployed his men on frequent patrols, and his interpreters kept him updated on the Taliban’s hateful messages going out over the airways to isolated communities in the mountain valleys. Using his own Muslim clerics, he began a daily radio barrage contradicting the fundamentalists’ misinterpretation of the Koran. The program was titled “Voices of Moderate Islam.” His troops distributed small radios to the families, and his clerics took to the air, challenging the Taliban’s ideology in a manner only fellow Muslims could.

The history of counterinsurgency teaches us that an enemy who can roll in and out like waves on a beach is devilishly hard to beat.

Pakistan views all geopolitics through the prism of its hostility toward India. Afghanistan lies to the rear of Pakistan, so the Pakistan military wanted a friendly government in Kabul that was resistant to Indian influence. This is why, after Russia left Afghanistan in 1988, Pakistan nurtured and supplied the Afghan Taliban movement.

It demonstrated the importance of never having only one course of action to achieve your aims. If in a crisis you find yourself without options, you will be pushed into a corner. Always build in shock absorbers.

Of all the countries I’ve dealt with, I consider Pakistan to be the most dangerous, because of the radicalization of its society and the availability of nuclear weapons. We can’t have the fastest-growing nuclear arsenal in the world falling into the hands of the terrorists breeding in their midst. The result would be disastrous. The tragedy for the Pakistani people is that they don’t have leaders who care about their future.

In international affairs, we have often had to choose between the lesser of two evils, a balance between idealism and pragmatism. It is better to have a friend with deep flaws than an adversary with enduring hostility.

Training to enable “brilliance in the basics” and educating junior leaders to make sense out of the unexpected (as friction, uncertainty, and ambiguity are war’s elementals and nothing ever goes according to plan) are the down payment for subordinate initiative. Only with sufficient investment can an organization expect, even demand, subordinate initiative as the price for attaining a leadership position.