by Jim Mattis
Show no favoritism. Value initiative and aggressiveness above all. It’s easier to pull the reins back than to push a timid soul forward. 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.
You get to know them as individuals—what makes them tick and what their specific goals are. One is striving to make corporal, another needs a letter of recommendation for college, another is determined to break eighteen minutes for three miles. A Marine knows when you are invested in his character, his dreams, and his development. Men like that won’t quit on you.
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.
Competence, caring, and conviction combine to form a fundamental element—shaping the fighting spirit of your troops. Leadership means reaching the souls of your troops, instilling a sense of commitment and purpose in the face of challenges so severe that they cannot be put into words.
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After several years of commanding small units, I had a good sense of what the Marine Corps expected of me. Whether in a command billet or a staff job, I was operating inside an organization of mission-oriented sailors and Marines who were straightforward in describing the tasks that would be done. How the mission was to be accomplished was left up to me, but it was clear that I was to deliver results.
I spent many months in the seventies and early eighties on amphibious ships in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. When crises arose, American naval task forces were placed on alert and sailed to the region of unrest. That was what first propelled me into Middle Eastern waters in 1979. With the intelligence officers providing in-depth briefings, I had a ringside seat from which to observe how quickly flashpoints spread across this increasingly violent arena.
Much of the security challenge we deal with today grew out of 1979. That year, a radical Sunni splinter group seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, Islam’s holiest site. In a battle that unnerved the Muslim world, hundreds were killed before the group was eradicated. Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolutionary regime took hold in Iran by ousting the Shah and swearing hostility against the United States. That same year, the Soviet Union was pouring troops into Afghanistan to prop up a pro-Russian government that was opposed by Sunni Islamist fundamentalists and tribal factions. The United States was supporting Saudi Arabia’s involvement in forming a counterweight to Soviet influence. The reverberations of these cataclysmic events were swiftly felt: within a year, Iraq’s President, Saddam Hussein, had launched an inconclusive eight-year war against Iran that would claim nearly a million lives.
The reverberations of that tumultuous year continue to be felt today. As a young infantry officer sailing back to Pearl Harbor from the North Arabian Sea, I didn’t know then that these tectonic shifts would define my next forty years.
IF YOU WANT AN ELITE FORCE, selection is critical. Like any organization, the Marine Corps has to recruit to get the talent it needs. In the mid-1970s, I served the first of two tours on recruiting duty.
In the post-Vietnam environment, after the draft went away, it wasn’t easy convincing a young man to devote years to the Marine Corps. In those fractious times, the Corps had taken in too many dropouts and criminals exempted from jail by judges who thought a stint in the Marines would straighten them out. By my second tour of recruiting, recognizing that we could be only as good as the raw material we brought in, we began sending only our most competitive NCOs as our recruiters—infantrymen, artillery, aviation technicians, tank crewmen, etc. Our best were charged with bringing in the best they could find.
The Marine philosophy is to recruit for attitude and train for skills. Marines believe that attitude is a weapon system. We searched for intangible character traits: a quest for adventure, a desire to serve with the elite, and the intention to be in top physical condition. The strenuous task of the recruiter was to find young men and women with the right stuff to send to boot camp. There, the drill instructors worked their magic to turn recruits into Marines.
I found that each recruiter had moved his family to a faraway town, where he usually worked alone or with several others in small teams spread across the country. Every day, he had to reassure some mother that the Marine Corps was the right organization for her son, or persuade a counselor with grave reservations about the Marines to let him talk to his or her students. Every night, he brought his work home, answering phone calls from anxious parents. He worked long hours and experienced frequent frustrations, not the least being hostile faculty. Alongside my recruiters, I learned the art of persuasion, creating common ground where none seemed to exist and gaining the confidence of a young person terrified of the legendary Marine drill instructor.
In the mid-1980s, when I was brought back to command a recruiting station that covered Oregon, Idaho, and part of Washington, plus eventually Hawaii and Guam, my station was near the bottom among the eight recruiting stations on the West Coast. In a brief meeting with my commanding officer, he made it clear that I was expected to turn things around—to “get things going,” as he said. I welcomed the challenge. From my hitchhiking days, I knew they were out there: the young, high-spirited, cocky, and often rebellious ones whom the Marine spirit would appeal to.
As I was walking out of that meeting, I met the operations officer.
“Lieutenant,” I said, “give me the address of each recruiter’s office.”
I was taking command of a platoon of overachievers—NCOs with six to twenty-eight years of service. They had done well in their previous jobs, and now they were literally out on their own. In the next two weeks, I drove and flew more than two thousand miles, meeting individually with each of the thirty-eight NCOs, who worked in various towns. My message was simple.
“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.”
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. The thirty-eight recruiters were my subordinate commanders. “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 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. 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 revolutionary army, followed a “listen, learn, and help, then lead,” sequence. I found that what worked for George Washington worked for me.
It’s all about clear goals and effective coaching. At the Portland headquarters, I was blessed with two first-rate young officers. My twenty-four-year-old operations officer was action-oriented and sharp enough to do my job. With the small headquarters staff implementing my intent and orchestrating the team according to my vision, I spent most of every month out coaching my recruiters. I traveled so much that hotel desk clerks from Pocatello, Idaho, to Honolulu called me by m
y first name.
Headquarters Marine Corps had issued a strict set of selection standards that usually worked. It allowed for case-by-case waivers for a few who, like me, had had a run-in with the law or some other infraction. In one case soon after I arrived, my staff turned down the request for a young man who had been arrested for a single use of cocaine. The recruiting sergeant was convinced it was a one-time mistake in judgment.
The judge who sent me to jail as a nineteen-year-old taught me a lesson, but he didn’t ruin my future. There’s a huge difference between making a mistake and letting that mistake define you, carrying a bad attitude through life. When I was informed about the rejection for a waiver, I called in my staff.
“Look,” I said, “the sergeant on-scene endorsed that young man. He sees character in that guy. Unless you know something the recruiter is missing, your duty is to advocate so that headquarters grants the waiver.” That recruiter was on the line to see that recruit graduate from boot camp. The recruit was accepted and proudly became a Marine.
In return for eighty-hour workweeks, the recruiter had to believe that his success in recruiting people who graduated would advance his career. A written fitness report on each sergeant—an assessment of his or her performance and potential for promotion—was then required twice a year. Computers and word-processing apps were in their infancy in 1985. To submit seventy-six “fitreps,” it was tempting to fall back on a standard template to fill in the blanks. “Shows initiative,” “consistently works hard,” “does an excellent job,” etc. With specially selected recruiters working extraordinary hours, I wanted to write fitness reports that would break them out from the pack.
With the help of my officers, a thesaurus, and caffeine, we chipped and hammered sentence after sentence until each fitrep reflected the individual personality and his accomplishments. Keeping in mind that the evaluator at the other end had never met this particular sergeant, I strove to describe each Marine accurately as an individual, the same way any of us would want to be evaluated. If we wanted ethical recruiting of top-notch applicants, I had to make sure that those who gave 100 percent to the mission received the promotions their commitment earned.
It wasn’t all smooth sailing. Early on, one recruiter walked into my office and said, “Sir, I’m not going to do this. I’m not going to work these hours.”
His words and attitude had made the rounds. One of my seasoned gunnery sergeants had told me, “The whole station is watching how you handle this, Major.”
I told the man, “You can be a quitter or you can be a Marine. But you can’t be both.” I busted him and ended his career.
Partial commitment changes everything—it reduces the sense that the mission comes first. From my first days, I had been taught that the Marines were satisfied only with 100 percent commitment from us and were completely dissatisfied with 99 percent. You can’t have an elite organization if you look the other way when someone craps out on you.
The bottom line was that I learned to hold everyone to the same standard. I told each recruiter, “If at any time you can’t meet the quota, call and I’ll send somebody to help you.” Soon the team was hitting its stride, and for thirty-nine months it was rated the top recruiting station in the western district. Most of my recruiters received meritorious promotions or commendations. They had learned the art of persuasion, according to the Marine Corps training program for recruiters. They were able to find common ground, even with those high school teachers for whom anti-Vietnam sentiment had blossomed into anti-military attitudes. For me, the education I’d received in the skills of persuasive leadership would prove critical to my effectiveness.
Beyond that, for the rest of my career, I aggressively delegated tasks to the lowest capable level. I made sure missions were clearly understood. Ethics and honesty held everyone to the same standard. I grew comfortable delegating authority to people I saw only once or twice a month. Decision-making was decentralized. Thirty-eight junior and senior sergeants spread out over thousands of miles operated as a team without seeing one another. This showed me that this approach could unleash subordinate initiative in any organization.
Recruiting duty also introduced me to a useful paradox. On the one hand, success was quantitatively measurable. You couldn’t fake it. Speaking crisply or having a tight haircut did not make a leader. Collectively, I and my thirty-eight sergeants had a monthly quota to make. It wasn’t enough to deliver warm bodies. A recruiter was evaluated on the performance of his candidates. If he had a top graduate, the recruiter attended graduation to be publicly praised along with his recruit. But if his recruits failed, the recruiter’s fitrep would reflect that. Because I was held to a rigorous quantitative standard, I learned to value clear output goals.
On the other hand, achieving those quantitative results depended upon qualitative skills that defied mere mathematical evaluation. I was the coach for those on the front lines, and I had to understand their problems, their strengths and weaknesses, and how they could improve. None of that was quantitative. 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.”
BY 1990, I WAS A “TOTUS PORCUS” (whole hog) Marine. While I hated some tasks that came with my jobs in the Corps, like crawling through minefields, I reveled in the camaraderie of men crawling through them with you, biting their lip the whole time. Before I knew it, I’d spent eighteen years deploying around the globe and reached the rank of lieutenant colonel, and, by early 1990, I was commanding the 1st Battalion of the 7th Marine Regiment, or 1/7.
This was a humbling assignment. In the military, unit legacies matter, and this battalion had a proud legacy indeed. The renowned Chesty Puller had commanded 1/7 in the epic World War II battle of Guadalcanal. In the Korean War, Ray Davis had earned the Medal of Honor leading my battalion in its critical fight at the “Frozen Chosin” Reservoir, freeing the 1st Marine Division from the Chinese Communist trap.
I was also energized because I was up to the job. I had been trained well by the Marines: between Quantico and my shipboard deployments, I had mastered fire-and-maneuver and amphibious operations—the fundamentals to a Marine officer. The Vietnam veteran whetstone had sharpened my edge and taught me how to build confidence in the men I led. In the preceding year I’d served under a uniquely capable combat leader, Colonel Carlton Fulford, so I understood the man above me. The day I took command on a windy parade deck at Twentynine Palms, California, I was eager to coach a new team, passing on the lessons I’d been taught.
The word battalion originated in the sixteenth century, derived from the Italian word for “battle,” battaglia. The battalion is the last command where the leader has a face-to-face, direct relationship with the troops. It is large enough to fight for a sustained period on its own, and small enough to ensure a close relationship between the commander and the troops. Inside a nine-hundred-man battalion, the sergeants and officers know one another. A company commander will know every one of his 180 men. A battalion is so small and tightly meshed that, like a football or soccer team, it develops a distinct personality. This is called the command climate, and it reflects the tone set by the battalion commander, the sergeant major, the company commanders, and their first sergeants. Taken together, these men know the personalities, strengths, and weaknesses of every man in their battalion.
My battalion was under strength, numbering fewer than 500 instead of the normal 860-man complement. Although this was not what I expected, it was also an opportunity. I’d been taught an approach when I was a second lieutenant in command of a half-strength platoon. The battalion sergeant major told us lieutenants to focus on training the young Marines we had, not worry about the ones we didn’t have. That way, we would have a cadre we could shape who could instruct the new recruits
when they joined us. Now I was in command of an under-strength battalion in the desolate base of Twentynine Palms, California. There, I set about shaping a cadre.
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.
In the spring of 1990, we conducted two months of amphibious training in the eastern Pacific. In June, we returned to Twentynine Palms. There, in the Mojave Desert’s blistering heat, we evaluated another battalion’s mechanized training. Then we flew four hundred miles north to the remote Mountain Warfare Training Center, located among the ten-thousand-foot high peaks of the Sierras.
For four weeks, my squads hiked, rappelled, navigated, and competed against one another night and day. Our only distraction was the soaring, stunning scenery. We slept in tents or on the open ground, patrolled constantly, and climbed sheer cliffs, with not one day off, no television or phone calls. My primary objective in the demanding, unforgiving mountain terrain was to build small-unit leaders focused on brilliance in the basics. Small units of a dozen men operating together, facing conditions that demanded every ounce of physical strength, bred trust in one another. Day by day, I saw my squads physically harden, develop tighter bonds, and grow in confidence as we built from the ground up.
The isolation provided the ideal setting for me to learn the personalities of my Marines. My job was to know which leaders should be assigned to which tasks. What do I mean? 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. After a month together, I knew the strengths and weaknesses of my company commanders. One, a former enlisted artillery observer in Vietnam, was mature and cool. I would use him as my reliable point man. Another had an active, even agitated mind. He thought of one thing even when talking about the next, the words tumbling out. I would employ his aggressiveness once the situation had sorted itself out. A third was quiet, authoritative and cunning. He would do well busting up an enemy position. I matched personalities to anticipated tasks, whether amphibious assault, mechanized war, or mountain fighting, because I had watched them in all three domains.