Call Sign Chaos

by Jim Mattis

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

It was our mission, never my mission.

“command and feedback.” You don’t control your subordinate commanders’ every move; you clearly state your intent and unleash their initiative.

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.”

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.

We had a shared spirit of collaboration that enabled swift decisions. We shook hands and committed to one another’s success, confident that each of us would do his part. Trust remains the coin of the realm.

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.

By killing those who had violated our common humanity while maintaining our moral compass, I intended to demonstrate that there is no better friend and no worse enemy than a United States Marine.

Great nations don’t get angry; military action should be undertaken only to achieve specific strategic effects.

“First we’re ordered to attack, and now we’re ordered to halt,” I said. “If you’re going to take Vienna, take fucking Vienna.”

“Be polite, be professional—but have a plan to kill everyone you meet.”

In my judgment, Admiral Nelson’s instruction before the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar remains the standard for all senior commanders. “In case signals can neither be seen nor perfectly understood,” he said, “no captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of the enemy.”

I seized every opportunity to repeat my touchstones. No better friend: To the one million Sunnis in Anbar, we offered friendship and protection. No worse enemy: To the terrorists, we offered a grave.

“Only the dead have seen the last of war.”

As economist Friedrich Hayek cautioned, “Adaptation is smarter than you are.”

“Every attempt to make war easy and safe,” General Sherman wrote, “will result in humiliation and disaster.” Short of a nuclear exchange, war will not abide a mathematical equation of cause and effect. The EBO approach, misapplied, was a mechanistic, even deterministic view that ignored the simple fact that conflict is ultimately a test of wills and other largely nonquantifiable factors.

“The trinity of chance, uncertainty, and friction [will] continue to characterize war,” Clausewitz wrote, “and will make anticipation of even the first-order consequences of military action highly conjectural.”

“What do you do? What impact does your team make?”

General Colin Powell. I explained what I was hearing, and he cut to the heart of the matter: “Jim, the central question is: Will all your successes just be transient, because you don’t have the forces or the time to solidify them?” The question rode in the back of my mind in every briefing and in every visit to Afghanistan.

Trust is the coin of the realm for creating the harmony, speed, and teamwork to achieve success at the lowest cost.

By employing skip-echelon when a staff function did not add value and displaying only critical data, we can achieve alignment and transparency with less internal friction. While I could never reduce internal friction to zero, I enjoyed the challenge of reducing it to the greatest degree possible.

History is compelling. Nations with allies thrive, and those without wither. Alone, America cannot provide protection for our people and our economy. At this time, we can see storm clouds gathering. By drawing like-minded nations into trusted networks and promoting a climate of victory that bolsters allied morale, we can best promote the values we hold dear and protect our nation at the lowest cost.