by Jim Mattis
I needed to cross Pakistani airspace to attack Al Qaeda and their Taliban allies in Afghanistan. On the spot, this highly regarded diplomat arranged the right introductions. I met with Major General Farooq Ahmed Khan, the planning chief for the Pakistani military. After losing several wars with India, to its east, Pakistan was determined to exert leverage over any government in Kabul in order to avoid any threat from the west. But the Taliban were sheltering Al Qaeda. Now, given the Taliban’s refusal to break with the Al Qaeda operatives they were sheltering, the Pakistanis knew that I would be attacking the Taliban, with whom they had come to an accommodation.
When we met, General Farooq launched into a litany of grievances about decades of American foreign policy. I heard him out. Pakistan’s relationship with America was marked by disappointments on both sides. Smoldering resentment was the result.
Once General Farooq was finished, I said, “General, I’m not a diplomat. I’m going to Afghanistan. I want to know if you will help me.”
Farooq understood, and the discussion shifted. He agreed to air corridors over Pakistan. While the initial assault troops would seize Rhino, going in by air-refuelable helicopters, the reinforcements would fly into Rhino later.
By seizing the initiative, a commander forces the enemy to react, throwing him off-balance. Once we landed, Rhino could be defended against any ground attack with air support. Conversely, once we had boots on the ground, we could control the roads and isolate Kandahar while preparing to seize it.
In his fast-moving campaigns during the Civil War, Union General William T. Sherman habitually sought to threaten two objectives before he attacked. This forced the Confederate generals to split their forces, giving Sherman a decisive advantage when he made his lunge. Admiral Moore was thinking in similar terms. Once my brigade had a lodgment at Rhino, the Taliban were placed on the horns of a dilemma: keep the bulk of their forces to defend in the north or shift them south to hold Kandahar against us.
To do this, we had to move quickly. History gives us ample precedents for making decisions at the speed of relevance. In 1943, General Douglas MacArthur was planning a landing in the Southwest Pacific. He wrote to Admiral William Halsey, in charge of the South Pacific, asking for a naval campaign to divert the Japanese forces. Only two days later, Halsey wrote back, pledging his support. (See Appendix C.) There was no need for extended exchanges between staffs. The shared objective was to shatter the Japanese forces. All else was secondary. Two strong-willed commanders collaborated to unleash hell upon our enemy.
Compared with that giant endeavor, our effort in 2001 was small in scale. It nonetheless demanded the same speed of decision; we had to move against Kandahar before the enemy had time to reinforce its defenses. Bureaucratic, organizational, and political frictions were cast aside. In the space of a few days, a Navy admiral, an American ambassador, a SEAL commodore, an Army Special Forces general, an Air Force general, and a Marine brigadier general had determined how best to invade southern Afghanistan. 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.
A LEAN STAFF
I had flown into Bahrain with a staff of three: my super-efficient aide, Lieutenant Warren Cook, my clever planner, Major Mike Mahaney, and my operational brain, Lieutenant Colonel Clarke Lethin. Admiral Moore had appointed me commander of Naval Task Force 58, and we went to work. The TF 58 designation had a hallowed lineage going back to World War II. Relying upon speed and deception, TF 58 was the hammer that struck at one Japanese-controlled island after another. At the Battle of Iwo Jima, in 1945, Task Force 58 included eighteen aircraft carriers and eight battleships—more firepower than any navy in history.
We took a quick inventory and determined that our 2001 version of TF 58 would comprise six amphibious ships, plus escorts; 3,100 sailors and 4,500 Marines; plus KC-130s, Harrier fighters, and helicopters. While tiny by comparison with World War II, an operation of this size required more than a staff of three.
By doctrine, a deployed brigade could have a staff exceeding two hundred. For what we had in mind, we drastically cut down staff size by employing “skip-echelon,” a technique I learned in discussions with a voluble English-speaking Iraqi major my battalion had captured in the 1991 Gulf War. In most military organizations, each level of command—or echelon—has staff sections with the same functions, like personnel management, intelligence gathering, operational planning, and logistics support. As the Iraqi major explained, such duplication wasted time and manpower and added no value.
I wanted my staff at the top to do only what we alone could do, delegating as much authority as possible to proven Marine and Navy commanders below me. Assuming that my boss knew how to run Fifth Fleet and that my subordinates knew how to run their ships or outfits, I did not replicate their staffs. I decided we didn’t need our own chaplain or public affairs officer or a host of other officers repeating functions that were being carried out at lower levels. Ashore at fleet HQ, when I was dealing with a legal issue, I consulted the Navy lawyer on Admiral Moore’s staff. At sea, I’d consult with a lawyer on the Marine staff. Once we were ashore in Afghanistan, I decided my senior enlisted adviser would be the senior noncom in our Coalition Special Forces. He kept me informed of any broad issues bothering the troops, regardless of nationality, through his network of NCOs across Navy, Marine, and allied elements. Throughout my career, I’ve preferred to work with whoever was in place. When a new boss brings in a large team of favorites, it invites discord and the concentration of authority at higher levels. Using skip-echelon meant trusting subordinate commanders and staffs. I chose to build on cohesive teams, support them fully, and remove those who didn’t wind up measuring up.
By eliminating redundant functions, I kept my own staff exceedingly small. Rather than two hundred, it numbered thirty-two, including Navy officers and Marines plus an Air Force Special Tactics captain and a CIA officer. When someone answered a phone, he dealt with each question tersely and generally on the spot.
Business management books often stress “centralized planning and decentralized execution.” That is too top-down for my taste. I believe in a centralized vision, coupled with decentralized planning and execution. In general, there are two kinds of executives: those who simply respond to their staffs and those who direct their staffs and give them latitude, coaching them as needed to carry out the directions. I needed to focus on the big issues and leave the staff to flesh out how to get there. Guided by robust feedback loops, I returned to three questions: What do I know? Who needs to know? Have I told them? Shared data displays kept all planning elements aligned.
Everyone on my staff, in Marine parlance, filled sandbags. No one was exempt from the simplest tasks. We answered our own phones, brewed our own coffee, and slept six hours when lucky. Meals were operational discussions. I kept my commander’s intent brief and to the point. After I communicated my intent, subordinate commanders, along with their Navy and Marine staffs, drafted plans for how they would execute their parts of the mission.
I kept my door open. If anyone needed guidance, he’d walk in and say, “Sir, here’s the issue. What’s your intent?” I had studied the British experience in Burma in World War II. To keep the numerically superior Japanese forces off-balance, in 1943 Brigadier General Orde Wingate led a long-range penetration force, called the Chindits, behind enemy lines. I was confident we could do the same and, importantly, sustain our forces four hundred miles deep in enemy territory.
At the end of each day, we’d all discuss how we had done so far. I’d sum up the meeting by saying, “Okay, I like this. Now let’s do that.” The next morning, my Navy and Marine operations officers would inform me, “Here is where we now are.” It was a constant dialogue, and hundreds of fleet exercises were now paying off in real time. Absent those years of integrating N
avy and Marine exercises and complex operations, I could not have executed this operation.
I took an eight-hour reconnaissance flight over southern Afghanistan in a Navy P-3, a long-legged, long-loitering airplane designed to find submarines. Its sophisticated technologies made my observations easy. We detected no enemy units near our intended insertion point. The Taliban had left their back door open. Memo to young officers: I can appear brilliant if I fight enemy leaders dumber than a bucket of rocks.
WHAT CAME BEFORE
Military men have long memories about failures. In 1915, the British tried to seize the Dardanelles strait in order to force Turkey, fighting on the side of Germany, out of the war. But the amphibious landing at Gallipoli proved catastrophic. Two hundred thousand troops were pinned on the beachhead. The allies lost forty-four thousand killed and a hundred thousand wounded. When World War I ended, historians emphasized the futility of assaulting from the sea.
Six years later, Major Pete Ellis, a true Marine Corps maverick, anticipating war with Japan, urged the Commandant of the Marine Corps to develop amphibious techniques to seize advanced land bases across the Pacific. In Navy/Marine experiments in the Caribbean, the amphibious forces were honed to a razor’s edge. Amphibious assaults proved key to winning World War II: Germany held Western Europe in an iron fist until the 1944 landing at Normandy, while in the Pacific, the seizure of islands isolated and doomed Japan. The frontal assaults on Japanese-held islands cost tens of thousands of Marine casualties.
When the Korean War broke out, in 1950, General Douglas MacArthur ignored Washington’s advice and ordered the Marines to land behind the North Korean army and seize Seoul, the enemy-held capital of South Korea.
“The amphibious landing,” MacArthur explained, “is the most powerful tool we have to employ. We must strike hard and deep into enemy territory. The deep envelopment, based upon surprise, which severs the enemy supply lines, is and always has been the most decisive maneuver of war.” MacArthur’s brilliance in Korea lay in moving the Marines hundreds of miles by sea to land in the rear of the unsuspecting North Korean army, and resulted in far fewer friendly casualties.
After the Korean War, the Navy constructed helicopter carriers, designed like aircraft carriers. Several years later, the Marines modified the rugged C-130 Hercules to provide aerial refueling of both fighter aircraft and helicopters. In the late sixties, Marines deployed the CH-53 helicopter, a 46,000-pound monster that, fully loaded, could haul troops and cargo hundreds of miles.
Each generation fights with the tools shaped by preceding generations. So in 2001, I had a tool kit unimaginable in prior wars. Some military and political leaders still envisioned amphibious warfare in terms of landing on Iwo Jima. The minute Admiral Moore pointed to a map showing landlocked Afghanistan, hundreds of miles from the sea, I knew I could land there with thousands of Marines. The planning would take only a few weeks, because I had the right tools at hand. Over five decades, farsighted men, both military and civilian, had contributed the pieces that I was assembling into Task Force 58.
But having a plan counts for nothing unless those above you are made confident that you can execute. As the leader, you maintain communications connectivity up, not just down. This can be hard when you introduce the phrase “amphibious operation” to people whose mental image has not progressed beyond World War II landings at Normandy and in the Pacific.
By the second week in November, small teams of CIA operatives and Special Operations Forces in northern Afghanistan were providing air support for tribal militias that were routing the Taliban. Convinced that our plan for seizing Rhino was solid, Admiral Moore decided to put the issue before Central Command to approve or disapprove, basically a “go” or “no go” decision. CENTCOM convened a video teleconference call with Moore, Dell Dailey, and me speaking, plus a host of others listening in. CENTCOM had envisioned the Marines launching small raids, as the Special Operations Forces were doing.
Actually, we were proposing an invasion. Admiral Moore suggested we not emphasize this. So in my brief, I explained that seizing Rhino provided a forward base for raids. I left out any mention of withdrawing my forces, because I did not intend to do so. Once ashore, I wanted to stay there and tear the enemy apart. To my surprise, no one asked me about withdrawing.
I had assessed this admittedly complex operation through the lens of calculated risk. But as I briefed the MEU’s plan for a nighttime heliborne assault into Rhino, followed by Marine KC-130s landing on the dirt strip with reinforcements, CENTCOM’s central concern became obvious. On the screen, I watched the expressions of two senior CENTCOM generals, both aviators who had logged thousands of hours in the cockpit. They were keenly aware of the dangers associated with nighttime refueling, and they fully understood that our proposed operation required many moving parts: ships steaming full-speed from the Mediterranean; helicopters launching at night, needing to rendezvous with KC-130 tankers hundreds of miles inland; and SEALs, hiding for days deep inside enemy territory, communicating with the ships at sea. All that said, I was confident that every piece of the plan was well within our capability.
Videoconferences may speed decision-making, but they have a downside. You can see only the participants selected by the camera. You can’t read the body language of the others. In addition to the two generals, there were others listening in that conference room in Tampa, plus more than a dozen other stations, from Bahrain to Washington to Hawaii. I knew I had only a few minutes to win CENTCOM’s approval. A negative consensus can lock in without a word being spoken. By now I had shifted my location from fleet headquarters in Bahrain to my flagship in the North Arabian Sea. I wanted to send a message to the ships at sea and the Marines on board that we were going, but as I watched, I had no idea which way CENTCOM’s decision would go.
The silence was broken by a question about potential friction between the Special Ops Task Force SWORD and TF 58. The TF SWORD commander, quietly watching from his tent, interrupted immediately.
“I am in total support of what Task Force 58 is proposing,” he said firmly. “We have deconflicted in time and space. I fully support this operation.”
He put it over the top. We were cleared hot to invade.
OPERATION ENDURING FREEDOM—NOV 2001
PURPOSE: Working in concert with TF SWORD, Amphibious Raid Forces will maintain constant pressure on Taliban/Al Qaida forces, creating chaos and destabilizing enemy control of southern Afghanistan.
I intend to exploit the enemy’s focus on active ground operations in northern Afghanistan. Coordinating, integrating, and deconflicting with TF SWORD, Amphibious Raid Forces will attack the Taliban in southern Afghanistan with repeated raids designed to destroy the enemy’s sense of security and shatter his will. Amphibious Raid Forces will exploit TF SWORD’s successes and maintain the momentum gained by SWORD attacking targets that compel the enemy to react, exposing him to our combined arms.
END STATE:
Taliban/Al Qaida Leaders in disarray, facing an operational dilemma on how to allocate their forces (northern front or southern Afghanistan).
Freedom for TF-58 to operate on the ground at the time and place of our choosing.
Destroy Taliban leadership’s confidence that they maintain any control over southern Afghanistan.
* * *
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A few days after Thanksgiving, I stood on the deck of a helicopter carrier a few dozen miles off the Pakistani coast. Clangs of gunfire were reverberating inside the hangar deck as Marines test-fired their rifles into the sea. Grunts in full armor were clambering up the catwalks with hundred-pound packs. Red lighting splayed their shadows, thick and gorilla-like, against the bulkheads. Topside on the dark flight deck, Marines were following guides with blue chemical lights up the ramps of CH-53 helicopters the size of tractor trailers. Teams of sailors and Marines in colored jerseys were carryin
g out precision tasks, fueling and arming the aircraft while moving the troops along in orderly files.
America’s war machine was stirring, each cog sliding into place. With deafening rotor blades whirling overhead, the seemingly chaotic yet choreographed deck was no place for the untrained. Every step had been rehearsed.
During the day, AV-8B Harrier aircraft had taken off from the USS Bataan to strike targets outside Kandahar. The SEALs, in hide sites overlooking Rhino, had sent the call sign “Winter,” signaling no enemy on the objective. Now, as I watched, seven gunships and six giant CH-53s had lifted off from the flight deck of the USS Peleliu for the four-hour flight. As they flew northeast over Pakistan, they were refueled in the air by four KC-130s.
At 9 P.M., the first wave hit the deck at Rhino. The first helicopters to touch down stirred up thick dust as fine as talcum powder, causing a plume that drifted hundreds of feet into the sky. This was what every aviator feared on landing—being enveloped in a total brownout. Minutes later, the Marines in the second wave felt like they were in a runaway elevator, descending and ascending like a yo-yo. Unable to see, the pilots gingerly fluttered up and down until they felt the ground. Within an hour, 170 grunts had taken up defensive positions without an accident, and Air Force Captain Mike Flatten’s Special Tactics Team had the dirt strip ready to receive the KC-130s.
After 9/11, no nation could respond as America did. Wars, like hurricanes, recur without advance warning. Some you cannot avoid. If you want the fewest big regrets when surprise strikes, you must provide, ahead of time, the doctrine and resources to respond. A few months before, I had observed this very unit rehearsing a raid from their ships off the Californian coast deep into the Mojave Desert in California. I was confident they could do it.