Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead

“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.”

Mattis frequently exhibits compassion for his troops and also for his civilian leaders, even when he disagrees with them or has to have a hard conversation. His commitment to dominating a battlefield or creating a killer Marine soldier does not come at the cost of his humanity as he strives not to publicly humiliate anyone or berate them for things beyond their control. This humanity helps Mattis in his continued promotions to the highest levels in the Marine Corps.

“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.”

Mattis says this while learning how to lead a team of recruiters, which is a mission with a distinctly measurable success rate. As such it would be easy to put the sense of failure or success squarely on his own shoulders, but he insists to his team that they act as one and own the success or failure equally. It is this philosophy that encourages his subordinates to put their all into the mission, to honestly own their own mistakes, and to be willing to reach out to Mattis when they need assistance.

“Because a unit adopts the personality of its commander, just as a sports team adopts the personality of its coach, I made my expectation clear: I wanted a bias for action, and to bring out the initiative in all hands. I would make do with what I had, and not waste time whining about what I didn’t have.”

Mattis brings his aggressive policy into his first significant placement of leadership—command of a battalion. In battle Mattis is noted for his speed of movement and his encouragement of independent unit action when an opportunity presents itself. He wants his Marines to be opportunistic in the fight, and he wants them to know that they are empowered by their commander to take any initiatives they deem necessary as long as they are acting in service to the larger objective of the mission.

“In my military judgment, President George H. W. Bush knew how to end a war on our terms. When he said America would take action, we did. He approved of deploying overwhelming forces to compel the enemy’s withdrawal or swiftly end the war. He avoided sophomoric decisions like imposing a ceiling on the number of troops or setting a date when we would have to stop fighting and leave.”

Mattis’s first deployment into battle is under Bush Sr., and through the remainder of his fighting years, he favors Bush Sr. to the following three administrations. There are a number of reasons for this preference, but Bush’s record in the Gulf War of stating a goal, accomplishing it, and then finishing strong once the goal is realized appeals to Mattis’s military sensibilities and his preference for clear strategic aims in the Middle East.

“We have been fighting on this planet for ten thousand years; it would be idiotic and unethical to not take advantage of such accumulated experiences. 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.”

Mattis has the informal nickname among the troops of “Warrior Monk,” and part of the reason is his level of education and his ability to apply that education to real-life tactical and strategic planning. For Mattis this approach is not about appearing smart or impressing others, but rather about having the ability to outsmart an enemy and foresee potential problems before they arise. He believes that a well-read officer has an inherent advantage against one only working from his own experience or reason, and therefore each officer has an ethical obligation to read extensively in his field.

“As I walked out of the admiral’s office, I could already see the shape of the operation in my mind. Granted, we had to penetrate four hundred miles, and what Willy Moore had in mind took poetic license with doctrine. But doctrine is the last refuge of the unimaginative. The Marines taught me that it is a guide, not an intellectual straitjacket. Improvise, adapt, and overcome; I was going to do whatever it took to carry out the admiral’s intent.”

Mattis’s philosophies of initiative and creativity come into play when America goes to war in Afghanistan after 9/11. The Marines are disinvited from the battle since Afghanistan is landlocked, but Mattis finds an admiral who has clearance to conduct raids at his discretion. The admiral sends Mattis on a “raid” with the entire Marine Expeditionary Force into Southern Afghanistan. This event exhibits Mattis’s dismissive attitude toward hidebound thinking as well as something of his willingness to bend the rules a bit without breaking them in service to the greater mission of taking out Al Qaeda.

“We in the military missed the opportunity, not the President, who properly deferred to his senior military commander on how to carry out the mission. 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.”

In this passage Mattis is referring to the escape of bin Laden into Pakistan, despite Mattis’s pleas to let his Marines and Special Forces seal off the retreat routes into Pakistan. It was General Tommy Franks who advised George Bush to not allow the Marines to take up those positions. Mattis blames himself for not focusing more on his relationship with Franks and the central staff in charge of the war. This experience is indicative of Mattis’s willingness to take ownership of his own mistakes even while noting poor choices on the part of his commanding officers.

“‘The decision is made; you’re going. I’ll disown you if you don’t go through the Iraqi Army in six weeks.’ Next he said, wagging his finger at us, ‘Then the hard work begins. Ripping out an authoritarian regime leaves you responsible for security, water, power, and everything else. Removing Saddam will unleash the majority Shiites, defanging the minority Sunnis, who won’t take lightly their loss of domination.’”

This is advice a retired Marine Corps general gives to Mattis and his senior officers shortly before the Iraq War. In a few brief sentences, this general lays out prophetically what will transpire in Iraq after the Iraqi army is destroyed. The Marines were only slated to take part in the invasion—they were not to stay after the initial fighting—so Mattis was not a part of planning for post-war Iraq, but by including quotes such as these he underlines the criticism that the Bush administration should have foreseen the troubles they were going to have after Hussein was deposed.

“Uncertainty runs riot if you don’t keep cool. […] I’d seen this before, the disconnect between frontline thinking and higher staffs’ more remote assessments. I’d always found first reports to be half wrong and half incorrect. That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but digital technologies can falsely encourage remote staffs to believe they possess a God’s-eye view of combat. Digital technologies do not dissipate confusion; the fog of war can actually thicken when misinformation is instantly amplified.”

This quote comes when Mattis is forced to halt his attack on Baghdad at a crucial moment. Mattis has something of an anti-technology streak. He reportedly has never owned a television, he hates PowerPoint, and his preferred form of communication is face-to-face—a preference that is also one of the reasons he is always traveling. He inherently distrusts emails and other forms of digital communication, as this quote shows. When Mattis says he has “seen this before,” it is notable that it is General Franks who, once again, has stopped Mattis at a crucial point in an engagement, jeopardizing, in Mattis’s eyes, the whole objective based on bad intel.

“I was torn by his answer. I want officers to nurture a deep affection for their men, as I do—in my view, it’s fundamental to building the trust that glues an organization together. Your troops must be confident about how much you care about them before they can commit fully to a mission that could cost them their lives. I also understood how difficult it is to order men you’ve come to love into a fight that some won’t survive. But the mission must come first.”

The demotion of a regimental commander in the middle of a battle is nearly unheard of in United States military history. Mattis has taken a good deal of criticism for this decision over the years. In his eyes the officer in question is neither incompetent nor unmotivated. His only sin is in allowing his compassion for his men to trump the requirements of the mission at hand, particularly by not following Mattis’s orders with alacrity.

“Sitting alone in my Camp Pendleton office and reflecting on two decades of deployments to a region with no democratic traditions, I knew the transition to a Shiite-dominated ‘democracy’ would not be peaceful. I had to make clear to my Marines the dilemma we faced: We had to dial down the overall cycle of violence while dominating it at the point of enemy contact. We had to be both restrained and deadly.”

Here Mattis struggles with a conundrum that has centuries of history behind it: How to win a battle against local insurgents while winning the hearts and minds of the local populace? Mattis believes that his Marines are up to the task, but there are many factors at play in Iraq, and Mattis can only control so many of them. Still, Mattis is relentless in repeating one of his favorite mantras to his troops—“No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy”—as a model of how he wants his Marines to comport themselves in Iraq.

“Language is a weapon. In formal circumstances, I’m calculating but I speak pointedly. There’s nothing to be gained by speaking obliquely about important matters. Brought up in the American West, I don’t hide behind euphemisms. 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.’”

Mattis quotes himself speaking to some sheikhs in Iraq during the initial assault on Fallujah targeting insurgents. This quote gained some notoriety among the Marine Corps and was cited frequently in the press as well, earning Mattis both praise and criticism. It encapsulates Mattis’s desire to see peace take hold in Iraq and his desire to avoid war whenever possible, and it also exhibits his no-nonsense attitude when it comes to waging war and destroying enemy combatants.

“I had been raised by Vietnam-era Marines who drummed into me the importance of making sure the policymakers grasped the nature of the war they were responsible for. Don’t get trapped into using halfway measures or leaving safe havens for the enemy. I believed I had spoken clearly. But I hadn’t gotten through.”

Mattis raises the specter of Vietnam on a couple of different occasions in the text. He joined the Marines right after the end of that war, and he clearly wants to avoid a similar disaster as a Marine commander. Mattis never discusses the Vietnam War in any detail, but he hints that he considers the blame for its failure to lie less with the military than with the policies coming from Washington. Two factors he mentions here, the “safe havens” and “halfway measures,” are frequently cited reasons for American defeat in Vietnam. Mattis believes the same mistakes are being repeated in Iraq, as evidenced by the conflicting orders given and the free pass given to Iran when it comes to funding the insurgents.

“‘You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn’t wear a veil,’ I said. ‘You know, guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway. So it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them. Actually it’s quite fun to fight them, you know. It’s a hell of a hoot. It’s fun to shoot some people. I’ll be right up there with you. I like brawling.’”

This is another example of Mattis quoting himself in a situation that got him in hot water with the general public and some politicians. Mattis claims to be surprised by the backlash since his comments were addressed to Marines who would soon be fighting in Afghanistan, and he feels it is important to express to fellow soldiers that they are supported not just as human beings but as warriors who will be at times asked to kill.

“There was no moral equivalency between jihadist terrorists and our troops. In the morally bruising environment of war, we still hold our Marines to the highest moral standards. Discipline is our protective fabric. I took career-ending actions, including some up the chain of command above the tactical unit. We will maintain America’s ethical high ground.”

The Iraq War had many of the same stressors and debates that surrounded the Vietnam War. The war in many ways was being fought against the very people America was there, in theory, to assist. Mattis came under the same criticism that was leveled against America in Vietnam, and sometimes American troops acting badly under fire meant that the Marine Corps had an obligation to investigate its own. Mattis explains one such investigation in detail, recounting why some were declared innocent and others guilty. However, Mattis takes care to emphasize that he sees no parallels between the actions of American troops and the actions of the insurgents.

“As I made the rounds of European capitals, I recognized that I would forever be the outsider, the non-European always urging for change. I stood back and asked, ‘Why is an American in charge of the transformation of NATO transatlantic forces?’ I saw advantages to instead having a European commander in Norfolk making the argument for the forces required to meet the threats identified in the NATO document.”

In every position Mattis is appointed to, he looks for ways to think outside the box, sometimes making decisions that are controversial, occasionally getting fired, but always trying to shake things up and avoid conventional answers. His rather brief tenure at NATO involves a number of changes, with the decision to make a European the head of NATO surely being the most radical one, with no precedence.

“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. PowerPoint is excellent when displaying data; but it makes us stupid when applied to critical thinking.”

Mattis’s Luddite tendencies are on full display here. Mattis often feels like strategic planning and creative initiative can be smothered by data and the analysis of it. However, it should be noted that Mattis expresses no such reservations about advanced technologies when it comes to weapons in the field.

“To date, only the Shiite terrorists have a state sponsor, namely Iran. While we have shredded Al Qaeda’s core leadership in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier and Al Qaeda’s Middle East offshoot ISIS in Iraq and Syria, Shiite militias have a steady stream of financial, military, and diplomatic backing from the revolutionary regime in Iran and as a result have been left virtually unscathed by our counterterror campaign.”

Mattis has a profound confidence in the United States Armed Forces, particularly his own Marines. The impression he gives is that any enemy of the United States can be fairly beaten in battle, but it is strategic indecisiveness and poor foreign policy from above that hamstring the war on terror. In this instance, the decision not to harry Iran is seen as a strategic failure.

“Wherever I went during my tenure at CENTCOM, I heard blunt questions about our reliability as a security partner. The impression of many Arab leaders was that we might abandon them. America was emphasizing ‘rebuilding at home.’ The lack of constancy in American foreign policy left them unsettled. Many were now openly doubting our word. I understood their concerns but explained that we had enduring interests in the region.”

This is a typical kind of criticism found in Call Sign Chaos from Mattis; it does not mention Obama or his administration by name, nor is it particularly specific about the issues at hand, but it nevertheless indicates that Mattis finds Obama’s foreign policies to be scattershot and unhelpful in terms of building alliances.

“I had no issue about obeying orders from the Commander in Chief elected by the American people (no one had elected me), but agreeing that this precipitous withdrawal was a wise course of action was a wholly different matter.”

Mattis’s reputation for speaking plainly to his commanding officers or civilian leaders is not about disrespect or rebelliousness. Mattis sees it as an integral part of his mission as a military leader to give unvarnished assessments, even if doing so means openly disagreeing with the course of action that is being planned.

“The example of South Korea is instructive. Since the cease-fire in 1953, we have kept tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers there. Our large troop presence and steady diplomacy safeguarded the transformation of that war-torn country from a dictatorship into a vibrant democracy. But it took forty years. In Afghanistan, we were unwilling to devote the resources and time needed to transform the country, decade by decade, into a thriving democracy.”

Mattis believes that regime change in countries without a history of democratic institutions is necessarily a long game—not something that can be accomplished in single battle or even war, but rather something that takes generations to implant.

“‘Dynamite in the hands of a child,’ Winston Churchill wrote, ‘is not more dangerous than a strong policy weakly carried out.’ Over the next several years, Syria totally disintegrated into hell on earth. The consequences included an accelerated refugee flow that changed the political culture of Europe, punctuated by repeated terrorist attacks. And America today lives with the consequences of emboldened adversaries and shaken allies.”

Mattis quotes Churchill in the context of Obama’s decision not to strike at Assad when he used chemical weapons on his own people. Mattis frequently quotes leaders from the past in his memoir, reflecting his erudition and his ability to apply the lessons of the past to the present. For Mattis, this was Obama’s most egregious error in the Middle East.

“While I had the right to be heard on military matters, my judgment was only advice, to be accepted or ignored. I obeyed without mental reservation our elected Commander in Chief and carried out every order to the best of my ability.”

On more than one occasion, Mattis reaffirms the Constitutional arrangement of civilian oversight of the American military. He is cognizant that when a four-star general writes a memoir that includes criticism of the civilian government, it may be used by some to make political arguments regarding the structure of command, and so he attempts to preclude such debate.