Call Sign Chaos

by Jim Mattis

  We had sent our proposed scheme of maneuver back to ARCENT’s staff in Kuwait (and to Admiral Moore, for his information). When we heard nothing back, I began making phone calls. At one point in early December, I was blunt; some described my presentation as highly obscene. I stated my concern that bin Laden could escape if we didn’t quickly seal the valley exits. But I was shouting against the wind.

  Having hit a stone wall with that option, I even offered to place myself and my troops under the operational control of Bob Harward, my junior in rank. This offer, too, fell on deaf ears. Over the next two maddening weeks, we were not called forward.

  Instead, General Franks sent in Afghan tribal fighters loyal to warlords from the north. The thinking was that this would show Afghans fighting their own war. But they were out of their tribal element in Tora Bora—poorly equipped and strangers among the locals. They proved incapable of closing with the tough, desperate Al Qaeda fighters. Many of the enemy leaders fled unscathed to Pakistan. By Christmas, the intel officers were informing me that they thought bin Laden had escaped. “That’s a hell of a Christmas present,” I commented.

  In his memoir, General Franks explained why he chose not to employ my Marines. “We don’t want to repeat the Soviets’ mistakes,” he wrote. “There’s nothing to be gained by blundering around those mountains and gorges with armor battalions chasing a lightly armed enemy.”

  I didn’t have armor; I had fast-moving light infantry and Bob Harward’s Special Forces, all heliborne, reinforced by agile wheeled light armored vehicles. By closing off the mountain passes with overwatch teams and then attacking with well-supported infantry, we were ready to squeeze Al Qaeda in a vise. Here is how the White House correspondent for The New York Times described what happened: “Hank Crumpton, who was leading the CIA’s operations in Afghanistan, brought his concerns to the White House, imploring Bush to send the marines to block escape routes….Bush deferred to Franks….In his desire to let the military call the shots, Bush had missed the best opportunity of his entire presidency to catch America’s top enemy.”

  My view is a bit different. 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.

  Deploying teams with massive firepower to seal off the passes seemed patently compelling on the merits. I waited for the call to come. But I was in Afghanistan, and the decision-makers were continents away.

  When you are engaged at the tactical level, you grasp your own reality so clearly it’s tempting to assume that everyone above you sees it in the same light. Wrong. When you’re the senior commander in a deployed force, time spent sharing your appreciation of the situation on the ground with your seniors is like time spent on reconnaissance: it’s seldom wasted. If I had it to do over again, I would have called both the ARCENT commander and Admiral Moore and said, “Sir, I have a plan to accomplish the mission, kill Osama bin Laden, and hand you a victory. All I need is your permission.”

  In 2005, a New York Times correspondent wrote, “An American intelligence official told me that the Bush administration later concluded that the refusal of Centcom to dispatch the Marines…was the gravest error of the war.”

  FOLLOWING TORA BORA, the Army’s 101st Airborne flew a brigade into Kandahar, relieving my Marines and sailors. They went back aboard ship. I was ordered back to fleet headquarters in Bahrain, then flew to Camp Pendleton.

  Returning to the States in late spring 2002, I reported in to the commander of I Marine Expeditionary Force, Lieutenant General Michael Hagee. “You’re being promoted to two stars,” he told me. “You will take command of the 1st Marine Division this summer and prepare them to go to war in Iraq.”

  The news both pleased and disoriented me. On the one hand, I was honored and humbled to take command of a division in which I’d served in peace and in combat. The 1st Marine Division had been the first American unit to seize the offensive in World War II, landing at Guadalcanal, in the Solomon Islands. The division patch, called the Blue Diamond, showed the five stars of the Southern Cross against the blue background of the evening sky. Since World War II, generations of Marines wearing that patch had answered the nation’s call, in Korea, in Vietnam, and most recently in Kuwait. Assuming command was, for me, the culmination of thirty years of serving Corps and country.

  On the other hand, invading Iraq stunned me. Why were we fighting them again? I was unaware of the discussions in Washington linking Al Qaeda to Saddam. There was broad consensus among international intelligence agencies that he possessed chemical weapons. The argument for invading and deposing him was based on preempting any future transfer of weapons of mass destruction to terrorists. Even assuming he had chemical weapons, I believed we had him boxed in with our daily combat air patrols and sanctions against his oil exports. Having served twenty years in the region, I knew that his hatred of Iran worked to our strategic advantage. When I questioned General Hagee, his response was straightforward. “The higher-level decisions are made in Washington by our civilian leaders, not us.” He rightly pointed out that my job was to get the troops ready.

  The night after my meeting with General Hagee, I dumped my gear in my quarters, pulled books off the shelves, and began studying campaigns in Mesopotamia, starting with Xenophon’s Anabasis and books on Alexander the Great—working my way forward.

  Taking command in early August, I called my senior officers and NCOs into a conference room. “Spend the weekend,” I said, “putting your domestic affairs in order and make peace with your God. Starting Monday, we focus on destroying the Iraqi Army.”

  Over the weekend, I wrote a list of instructions to guide my staff. For me, the staff would be a warfighting instrument, shoring up my weaknesses and amplifying my vision.

  In my division were 22,000 troops, some stationed a hundred miles away. In terms of numbers, geography, and demands upon my time, I had now fully transitioned from personal to executive leadership. I accepted the staff and commanders that the system had put in place. I made it clear that after ninety days, those who couldn’t embrace my priorities were to move elsewhere for a fresh start.

  The institutional excellence of the Corps ensured that I was inheriting varsity players. When Lieutenant General Jim Conway turned command of 1st Marine Division over to me, of forty-five key jobs, I personally selected only four. I placed Lieutenant Colonels Clarke Lethin in operations and John Broadmeadow in charge of logistics, because both had performed imaginatively with me in Afghanistan. Lieutenant Warren Cook remained my aide, and I chose Colonel John Toolan as my operations officer. John and I had worked well together in the past. He grasped my opportunistic style of warfighting, with its emphasis on on-the-spot adaptation to take advantage of each enemy misstep.

  At this stage of executive leadership, I delegated routine chores of management—filling personnel gaps, requesting equipment, etc.—to my chief of staff. I reserved for myself and my subordinate commanders the designing of the plan for how we would fight. I focused the division on only two priorities: getting ready to deploy and how to fight under chemical attack. I canceled all division-level inspections that did not pertain to those two tasks. Attitudes are caught, not taught. I left it to the seasoned leaders to schedule the events they considered necessary for those two objectives. I wanted all training conducted as rehearsals for the coming fight. My aim was to create a restlessness in my commanders and make the learning environment contagious. I wanted them all to be asking, every day, What have I overlooked?

  It was already my habit, at the
close of staff meetings and even chance encounters, to push my Marines by insisting they put me on the spot with one hard question before we finished our conversation. I wanted to know what bothered them at night. I wanted all hands to pitch in, with the value of good ideas outweighing rank. In the infantry, I had learned early to listen to the young guys on point. Lieutenant Colonel Clarke Lethin provided a classic example.

  Instead of landing from the sea, my fully mechanized division would be moving along a few roads in seven thousand vehicles, in the deepest major land assault in Marine Corps history. I needed a method to display this challenge without disrupting their urgent training. Having studied the initial American battle in World War I, where traffic jams delayed and undermined our own attack, I needed a method to prevent that from happening.

  The Legoland theme park was near our California base. On his own, Clarke purchased seven thousand Lego blocks. The NCOs glued them to sheets of cardboard in numbers reflecting the varied composition of each unit and laid them out on our parade deck. Each commander then dragged his sheet of Legos across a map of Iraq marked out on the parade deck, in accord with our assault plan. We watched as dozens of sheets became entangled. Presto—we had identified the choke points from our Kuwait jumping-off positions to bridges deep inside Iraq, stacking up and resulting in massive traffic jams even without fighting an enemy. As a result of Clarke’s display of the problem, commanders had a graphic understanding of what they had to fix, which we rehearsed in the Mojave Desert.

  I assigned young intelligence officers to understudy the six enemy division commanders facing us. Were they aggressive or tentative? Where had they gone to military school? What had they studied? What did their subordinates gossip about them? I wanted to know their weaknesses and, most important, whether or not they would take the initiative. I kept pictures of those generals in my desk drawer so that I would focus on them and not on the number of tanks in their divisions. In any confrontation, you need to know your enemy.

  On another front I was taken by surprise. In June 2002, General Hagee war-gamed the invasion. He identified the critical problem, one that had escaped me: it wasn’t breaking through the Iraqi Army or seizing Baghdad and throwing Saddam out of power. Rather, it was what we would do after.

  “General,” I said, “can’t we focus first on winning the war and then worry about what comes next?”

  “No,” he said. “What comes next after we depose Saddam will be the war. I’m getting no guidance about that. We have to do our own planning for post-hostilities.”

  What Hagee saw was what Xenophon faced when he marched deep into Mesopotamia 2,400 years ago. Xenophon’s ten thousand soldiers were a tiny minority among the people. He recognized that they must quickly gain control or the countryside would rise up against them.

  Hagee had taught me a lesson in generalship. Now I realized why he was reprising what our former Commandant, General Charles Krulak, looking to the future, had called the “three-block war.” On one block you’d be fighting; on the next, bringing humanitarian aid to beleaguered civilians; and on the third, separating warring factions—all on the same day.

  I heard the same refrain again in November. All the division’s officers attended the Marine Corps Birthday Ball, celebrated with pomp and ceremony in every location and ship where two or more Marine veterans or those on active duty can gather to raise a glass or two. I invited retired General Tony Zinni, who had commanded CENTCOM, to speak. Prior to the ceremony, all my senior officers gathered in my hotel room, Zinni sitting on the edge of the bed. It was like sitting around a campfire listening to the wisdom of an elder. He bluntly told us what, in his view, lay ahead.

  “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.”

  The cautions of Xenophon, Hagee, and Zinni brought home to me a concern about postwar control. However, we were told that shortly after hostilities ended, Marines would depart for other missions. So whatever CENTCOM planned for the governance of Iraq, it did not come down to us. As the division commander, I planned for only short-term postwar administrative tasks. But I did take some precautions based on Hagee’s war game. In particular, I augmented my artillery unit with a group of reserve officers who had civil affairs expertise.

  After the Birthday Ball—a hundred days after I took command—my advance staff and I deployed to Kuwait. Back in California, my three infantry regiments were task-organized into the 1st, 5th, and 7th Regimental Combat Teams (RCT). These were the forces I would deploy, and each consisted of 5,000 to 6,500 troops, supported by tanks, artillery, and air. Back in the States, the units rehearsed incessantly.

  In Kuwait, months of planning and rehearsals followed. As always, the war plan was forever in a state of change as assumptions about the enemy’s intentions became clearer. This was iterative work, and planner fatigue was real. We kept our meetings short. Our intelligence officers would commence the update on enemy activities, often referencing overhead photos of enemy positions. Next, we all opined about enemy intentions. While I insisted on a sharp demarcation line between data-driven facts and speculative judgments, I wanted both, aware that you have to avoid the danger of accepting informed speculation as if it were fact. We then refined our fire and maneuver schemes. The logistics officer briefed next. The distances involved could tether us to slow progress, and his job was to push off the “culminating point” when we ran out of fuel, water, or ammo.

  To the enjoyment of the staff, the most colorful briefing occurred when communications officer Colonel Nick Petronzio took the floor. In 2003, the Internet and chat rooms were coming into common usage. When Nick came into the Marine Corps, we thought it was a marvel to communicate ten miles over a ridgeline via radio. Now we had devices like Blue Force Tracker, a small digital screen in vehicles that displayed the location of all our elements. In our nightly roundups, Nick had to explain the reasons for the latest computer glitches to me in grunt’s language. After his fourth or fifth unsuccessful effort, he would clutch his chest and say, “Sir, please do not throw another spear!” I am certain every chief information officer in the world would sympathize with Nick.

  But Nick got off easy compared with John Toolan. We slept in small tents. Toolan had the misfortune of bunking in mine. After the evening brief, I’d eat an MRE and sack out. Toolan worked in the ops center until after midnight. As he staggered into the tent, I’d be getting up to go through a few hundred emails. I inadvertently reminded John why he had given me my call sign, Chaos—Colonel Has Another Outstanding Suggestion. Each night, I shared my latest suggestions until his mumbled replies became snores.

  When John was asleep, I’d read books. The Siege, by Russell Braddon, described a British defeat in Iraq in World War I on the same ground I’d be fighting through. Of course, T. E. Lawrence’s classic Seven Pillars of Wisdom: few Westerners in recent history had achieved his level of trust with Arabs on the battlefield. Biographies of Gertrude Bell, who helped create modern Iraq. I studied, again, Alexander the Great’s campaign through Mesopotamia and Sherman’s March to the Sea—I would adopt the latter’s effort to always keep enemies on the horns of a dilemma, left or right, front or back. Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations was my constant companion. His advice kept me dispassionate in some of the more infuriating planning conferences. I’m an opportunistic learner. I may not have come up with many new ideas, but I’ve adopted or integrated a lot from others.

  * * *

  —

  By January of 2003, most of my division had arrived in their Kuwaiti desert bivouacs. Above me there were three separate commands. General Tommy Franks, who commanded U.S. Central
Command, led the entire military war effort. Beneath him, Lieutenant General David McKiernan, U.S. Army, commanded all land forces.

  Beneath McKiernan was my immediate commander, Lieutenant General Jim Conway, leading I Marine Expeditionary Force. The I MEF was a combined Navy, Marine, and UK force consisting of air, logistics, and ground combat units. I commanded the 1st Marine Division, part of the ground force.

  Overall, our ground forces were organized around three divisions—about sixty thousand troops—that would do the bulk of the fighting: the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division (3ID), the British 1st Armoured Division (1UK), and my 1st Marine Division, divided into three regimental combat teams, one artillery regiment, and specialized battalions. These would be joined by contingents from other nations, a Marine brigade, and additional U.S. Army divisions. Special Operations Forces would infiltrate deep into western and northern Iraq.

  The ground forces received vague guidance. That meant I was planning without knowing the answers to the most basic question: Were we going to go all the way to Baghdad? Or only deep enough into Iraq to force Saddam to allow UN inspectors back into the country? These and other gaps in our understanding required us to plan largely in a vacuum. We didn’t know the ultimate political intent.

  My division would advance in support of the coalition’s main attack by the 3rd Infantry Division, commanded by Major General Buford Blount. “Buff” was a tall, tough warrior with a warm southern drawl, and he and I hit it off immediately. Higher headquarters had issued objectives that took us only into southern Iraq. That was clearly incomplete. Buff and I agreed to plan to keep going until we reached Baghdad, even though we had no orders to do so. Since we would attack side by side, we exchanged two personal liaisons—smart majors who knew our battle plans. Each served in the other’s headquarters, with the authority to call either of us directly. It worked well, and I was kept current on Buff’s plans and intent.