by Jim Mattis
In 2000, I returned to the Pentagon as the senior military assistant to the Deputy Secretary of Defense. Over the course of two separate tours, first as a colonel and now as a brigadier general, I would spend a total of three years in the executive suites of the Pentagon. I got a PhD-level course in running large organizations, witnessing how civilian control of the military actually works. The Secretary of Defense most often had to choose the least bad option. If it was an easy decision with good options, that decision had already been made. I sat in more meetings than I can count, and the whole experience brought home to me in an even more elevated context how critical it is to delegate decision-making authority or face paralyzing chaos.
I stayed in the Corps to be with the troops. At the Pentagon, I did my best to support my civilian bosses, and I learned a great deal. My faith in our form of government and the motives of the civilian leadership and the Congress was reinforced. That said, I couldn’t wait to get out of that job. I wasn’t cut out for Washington duty. I didn’t get my energy from behind a desk. I had the privilege of supporting men who cared deeply about the defense of our nation, even as the chorus for a peace dividend grew louder: Secretaries Perry, Cohen, and Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretaries John White, John Hamre, Rudy de Leon, and Paul Wolfowitz. Whether or not one agreed with their points of view, their dedication was beyond question.
In July 2001, I happily reported back at Camp Pendleton, north of San Diego, as the deputy commander of I Marine Expeditionary Force (I MEF)—forty thousand sailors and Marines in camps across southern California and Arizona. I was elated to be back with grunts. Throughout my time in service I’d always assumed each promotion would be my last. So I was pretty sure I’d conclude my career back where I started, among Marines. Then I’d go back home to the Cascade Mountains on a high note, having served one last time with the operating forces.
Looking back now, I see how mistaken that assumption was and why learning and mastering your job must never stop. I had changed in the ten years since Desert Storm. My involvement in downsizing the Marine Corps, studying at the War College, leading a large regiment, and learning how to make bureaucracy work for the warfighters would all combine to ensure I was ready for the tests ahead.
AT SIX IN THE MORNING ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, I was driving to work at Camp Pendleton and thinking about an upcoming exercise in Egypt. Over the radio, I heard that one of the Twin Towers had been hit.
They got through was my first thought.
I was certain it was Osama bin Laden. Al Qaeda had declared war on America in the mid-1990s. The group killed more than two hundred people in the 1998 attacks upon two American embassies in Africa and killed eighteen sailors on the USS Cole while she was refueling. Our intel community knew the Islamist terrorist network was thriving in Afghanistan, hosted by the radical Islamist Taliban government. I immediately thought that our military and intelligence services had let down our country. But I forced that out of my mind. Before I pulled into my parking space, I was thinking how to hunt them down to the end of the earth, in this case to Afghanistan. Having been in and out of the Middle East since 1979, I was keenly aware that it wouldn’t be a fast fight, and that the maniacs who thought that hurting us would scare us would have to be proven wrong.
On 9/11, Al Qaeda destroyed the Twin Towers, murdered three thousand innocent civilians from ninety-one countries, and injured more than six thousand in New York City, Pennsylvania, and Washington. President George W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld insisted upon swift retaliation, with CIA operatives and Army Special Forces linking up with Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance to call in air strikes against the exposed Taliban and Al Qaeda forces.
I assumed that my Marines and I would get into the fight, but that it would take some persuasion. General Tommy Franks had rejected the initial Marine offer of assistance, explaining to his staff, “No doubt about it, guys—this son of a bitch is definitely landlocked. We can’t make use of the Marines’ amphibious capabilities.” Because Afghanistan was four hundred miles from the ocean, some at Central Command headquarters assumed that Marines could not be employed. As a CENTCOM planner explained, “We don’t have access from the sea anyway, and it’s going to have to be introduced by air, then let’s just introduce the Army….So, quickly we went away from—at least initially—consideration of the Marines.”
This was a classic example of being trapped by an outdated way of thinking. The Marines don’t need to be anywhere near a beach to land from ships. We had long-range, air-refuelable helicopters and transport aircraft. We were expeditionary, able to fight at a moment’s notice in forward-deployed, self-contained combat packages.
At Camp Pendleton the month prior, I’d taken command of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Brigade, planning to deploy to Egypt for an annual multinational exercise called Bright Star. Even though we were at war, it was critical that we maintain our military-to-military contacts, conducting exercises with dozens of friendly nations. When I arrived in the Egyptian desert, I felt at home. I was accustomed to living in sweltering heat, under cramped, austere conditions. My Marines shared with soldiers from eight other nations a vast encampment of tents, plywood offices, and flies. The exercise was thoroughly scripted, crafted as much to display political unity as military training. So once my staff and I had memorized our parts, I had ample time to study the Afghanistan situation.
I liked prodding the young guys. You always learned something. Besides, I enjoyed the pained expressions at staff meetings when I brought up a lance corporal’s latest recommendation. If you can’t talk freely with the most junior members of your organization, then you’ve lost touch.
“How’s it going, lads?”
“Oorah! Fine, sir, terrific. Living the dream…”
I never accepted that stock reply.
“Nah. We both know that’s bullshit. We’re stuck in the middle of nowhere while we want to be killing Al Qaeda. Level with me. Give me something I can fix.”
On one occasion, the troops pointed to the porta-johns they shared with soldiers from other nations, some with what we considered gross hygiene habits. To fix that, I sent a sergeant eighty miles to Alexandria. To the cheers of the troops, he returned with a truckful of toilet paper, issuing every man a roll. Sometimes the basic things in life are the most important.
A commanding officer is always a sentinel for his unit, alert to danger. One senior officer was irate that I had ordered my Marines to carry live ammo at all times. He announced that I was out of step and that live ammo was not permitted. Having notified seven families that their sons had been killed in the Beirut bombing in 1983, I insisted that we Marines were always responsible for our own security. We were carrying our ammo with us. Only a month after 9/11, it amazed me that I had to make my case at all.
Of course, Murphy’s Law was always in play. That same day, two Marines negligently discharged their weapons, causing no casualties except apoplexy at senior staff levels. Again I was pressured to disarm all Marines. Again I refused, arguing that it was imprudent. The two junior offenders were busted down one rank. Their two acts of negligence had jeopardized the trust of the high command in the discipline of four thousand other Marines. For the rest of the deployment, they would not carry loaded weapons—a singular disgrace. That was the end of it.
Once the exercise was under way, my friend Major General John “Glad” Castellaw, in charge of Marines in the Middle East, and I had time to sit under a camouflage net and talk about how to fight Al Qaeda. He conjectured that we could bring two afloat Marine units and a small command staff together in the North Arabian Sea. He got me thinking. Returning to my bivouac, I told my staff to identify remote locations in Afghanistan where we could land and then went back to conducting the exercise.
When the exercise concluded, I received orders to fly to Bahrain, a tiny island nation in the Persian Gulf. Since the 1940s, Bahrain had always stood with us, a
lways punching above its weight. It provided the home port for the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, commanded in 2001 by three-star Vice Admiral Willy Moore. Upon arrival in Bahrain, I had checked in with him, and later that night he called me back to his office. He pointed to a wall map, indicating that the Taliban and Al Qaeda were under crushing attack in the north, where our CIA and Special Forces were stationed alongside Afghan tribes.
Willy Moore had done his homework. He told me the southern half of the country remained the Taliban’s home turf and that our bombing campaign in the north was forcing more Taliban toward the south. Kabul had never been successfully defended in five hundred years. Willy knew where they were going: to Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-largest city and the spiritual capital of the Taliban. We had estimates of tens of thousands of fighters scattered across several provinces, with more fleeing south. Their leader, Mullah Omar, was sheltered among the two million Pashtuns living there. With Taliban concentrating in the region as winter set in, bombing would put at risk two million innocents. Holding off, however, would mean that by spring Omar could organize a formidable defense. Willy’s envisioned second front would prevent that from happening.
Kandahar was a thousand miles northeast of Willy Moore’s office, on the far side of barren deserts and Baluchistan’s mountain ranges. To further complicate matters, Pakistan lay between the North Arabian Sea and landlocked Afghanistan. But Willy Moore was a warrior unintimidated by distance or number of enemies, and one who didn’t wait for directions; rather, he could see opportunities where others saw only obstacles.
“There is a gift,” Napoleon wrote in his memoirs, “of being able to see at a glance the possibilities offered by the terrain….One can call it coup d’oeil [to see in the blink of an eye] and it is inborn in great generals.”
“It really is the commander’s coup d’oeil,” Clausewitz agreed, “his ability to see things simply, to identify the whole business of war completely with himself, that is the essence of good generalship. Only if the mind works in this comprehensive fashion can it achieve the freedom it needs to dominate events and not be dominated by them.”
Admiral Moore had that gift, embodied in a forceful countenance. If he’d been born two hundred years earlier, I could see him attacking a ship, swinging down with a cutlass in hand and a black patch over one eye. He put the question to me.
“Can you pull together Marines,” he said, “from the Mediterranean and Pacific fleets, land in Afghanistan, and move against Kandahar?”
“Yes, I can do that,” I said. “I need a few days to plan and recon.”
“Okay, go figure out what you need, and I’ll get you a plane for your recon,” he said.
From my years at sea to a discussion under a camouflage net in Egypt to an admiral who could seize opportunity, it had all come together.
At his request, CENTCOM had authorized Moore to plan raids, and he had rather liberally stretched what that meant. If we struck fast from an unanticipated angle, the Taliban would crumble. Moore saw that in the blink of an eye.
So here I was—offered an opportunity. Biographies of executives usually stress achievement through hard work, brilliance, or dogged persistence. By contrast, many who achieve less point to hard luck and bad breaks. I believe both views are equally true. Following the attacks on 9/11, when Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan became the target, I was the next up to deploy. As Churchill noted, “To each there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour.” Thanks to the Vietnam veterans, at this “special moment” I was prepared and qualified “to do a very special thing.” While six months earlier, it would have been someone else leading our Marines into Afghanistan, mastering your chosen vocation means you are ready when opportunity knocks.
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.
The first thing we had to deal with was the tyranny of distance. Thanks to decisions made in the 1950s, the Marine Corps has its own KC-130 refuelers and its own helicopters fitted for refueling in flight. Thanks to Navy ships, we could haul thousands of troops thousands of miles without requiring access to bases in foreign nations. Admiral Moore’s authority alone was sufficient.
I could pull together two Marine expeditionary units (MEUs), each consisting of one reinforced infantry battalion, more than two dozen fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters, and fifteen days of warfighting supplies packed on board three ships. For three days, my three-man “staff” and I pushed around the numbers—distances, weather, fuel, altitudes, lift weights for helicopters, fire support, and the like. We concluded that leaping four hundred miles from the sea could be done. You can never allow your enthusiasm to exceed your unit’s capabilities, but my assessment was governed by the principle of calculated risk.
After I explained my plan, Admiral Moore said, “Good. I’m putting you in charge of Task Force 58—the ships and the landing force.”
Task Force 58 consisted of six amphibious ships and occasionally allied escorts, carrying more than four thousand Marines. It was humbling that a senior Navy officer with whom I’d never before served had vested me, a Marine, with that responsibility. This was the first time in nearly two hundred years that any Navy ship had been placed under the command of a Marine. Willy Moore took some Navy flak. But he was unperturbed. His attitude meshed with mine: Just do it.
I walked out of Admiral Moore’s office keenly conscious of the trust he had reposed in me. It never entered my mind that we might fail. Marines don’t know how to spell the word. I knew that our air could deliver and our lads were ready for the brawl, ready to bloody those who had attacked our country or supported them. My immediate job was getting my Marines from the ocean into the Taliban’s backyard.
Outside the admiral’s office, I bumped into a friend, Navy Captain Bob Harward. His SEALs, stuck in Bahrain for lack of airlift, couldn’t get into the fight. With his shaved head and muscular frame, Bob looked like the stereotype of a SEAL. As a youth he had lived in Iran, he was fluent in Farsi, and he had an encyclopedic knowledge of the Middle East. I knew him to be a cunning, competitive, and flexible leader who led by example. I stuck out my hand. “Welcome to war. I’ve got aircraft. We’ll go together.” We shook hands, striking a partnership that would endure over decades of war.
Already conducting raids across southern Afghanistan was Army Major General Dell Dailey’s Joint Special Operations Task Force. For weeks, Dell had been launching raids into the southern region, primarily flying small units from the deck of the USS Kitty Hawk in the North Arabian Sea. His operational tempo was constrained by the enormous distances they were flying under daunting conditions. One minute after Dell and I met, he heartily endorsed landing Task Force 58 in southern Afghanistan. A forward base meant more flexibility for Dell and his men. A few weeks before I arrived, his Rangers had pulled a gutsy night raid against a remote dirt strip called Rhino, ninety miles outside Kandahar. He recommended that I land my Marines there. Once we had that lodgment, both Special Operations Forces and Marines would launch raids in all directions. No one really knows an enemy until he fights them, and Dell had been fighting them. He sensed Rhino was the right target, and it became my objective, putting Admiral Moore’s vision into motion.
My next stop was an air base in Saudi Arabia, to meet with Air Force Lieutenant General Michael Moseley, the overall commander of air operations in the Mid
dle East and Afghanistan. As I explained the concept, he gauged the scale of miles on a map. He looked up and asked, “Are you really going to do this?” I said yes. Pushing the map back across the table to me, he said, “If you get in trouble, I’ll put every airplane you need over your head.”
Taking the measure of this man, I knew he could deliver. For the first time in my career, I decided not to bring artillery in my assault waves. While doctrine rightly points out that artillery ashore is key to promoting high-tempo round-the-clock operations, I judged that our helo insertion, enemy threat, and air support gave me license to adapt. In this specific case, I could increase the buildup ashore by bringing in artillery later.
But I still had to figure out how to get across Pakistan. Using Admiral Moore’s plane, I flew to Islamabad to meet with our diplomats and the Pakistani military.
“What is a Marine doing here?” Ambassador Wendy Chamberlin asked when I entered her office.
“Madam Ambassador,” I said, “I’m taking a few thousand of my best friends to Afghanistan to kill some people.” She smiled and said, “I think I can help you.” Never before had I personally experienced a diplomat’s impact so directly.