by Jim Mattis
Buff’s 3ID, on my left, and General Robin Brims’s 1UK armored division, on my right, had excellent reputations. We three enjoyed a mutual confidence in one another’s fighting spirit.
I don’t care how operationally brilliant you are; if you can’t create harmony—vicious harmony—on the battlefield, based on trust across different military services, foreign allied militaries, and diplomatic lines, you need to go home, because your leadership is obsolete.
Again, I emphasized brilliance in the basics. In my meetings with the troops, I had three Flat-Ass Rules, or “FARs”: (1) Guardian Angel, where a hidden sentry is positioned to ambush the enemy; (2) Geometry of Fires, designed to reduce friendly fire casualties; and (3) Unity of Command, meaning that someone was in charge in any group. These rules were meant to emphasize the unrelenting level of attention that had to be paid to key operating principles. That level had to permeate every element of my forces.
I knew I needed an organizing principle, and to the commanders I made it clear that the success of the mission depended on speed: speed of operations and movement would be prefaced by speed of information-passing and decision-making. Armed with this intent, my troops would keep punching through before the enemy could react. Further, we believed that the Iraqis would use poison gas, and a moving target is harder to hit.
As the jumping-off day approached, I was confident in our division’s fighting spirit and training, but I had to avoid complacency. I wasn’t yet confident that all my commanders and the critical supporting elements fully appreciated our plan’s complexity and its friction points. While I was discussing this problem with my chief of staff, my twenty-five-year-old aide, First Lieutenant Warren Cook, interrupted with a solution. He recommended that our combat leaders put on various-colored jerseys with their unit designations on the back and walk through the movement plan with everyone watching. I seized on his concept, and my chief of staff put the “mother of all sand tables” in motion.
Among the sand dunes, we found a natural amphitheater larger than a football field. Using rocks, tape, and cans of spray paint, our NCOs laid out a map of Iraq with enemy units highlighted. We invited all supporting and adjacent commanders and key staffs—Army, Air Force, Marine and Navy air, CIA, Marine logistics, Seabees, British, and other allies—to observe. We all watched as my commanders walked through the movements of their units, starting from Kuwait on D-Day and advancing deep into Iraq. Thanks to the Legos and the Mojave exercises, the units knew the order of attack and which had priority. Pilots and ground commanders had extensive discussions that continued following the formal sand table demonstration. Well-briefed aviators knew our scheme of maneuver and watched knowingly from the air as they aggressively supported what was coming next and the deception plan. Logistics officers were now alert to when we would be expending a lot of ammo or where we would need fuel, enabling them to anticipate how to keep us on the move. As far as I was concerned, young Warren Cook had come up with the most ingenious idea I’d heard in thirty years of war-gaming.
When the division attacked on D-Day (March 20, 2003), every unit leader knew his role and could visualize how the entire division intended to proceed according to my intent. When confronted with the inevitable combat challenges, junior leaders armed with my intent reacted swiftly. I could delegate decision authority to much lower levels, because now I knew that the junior leaders were set up for success. The Lego and colored-jersey drills had enabled us all to “image” what might occur. Note to all executives over the age of thirty: always keep close to you youngsters who are smarter than you.
War is all about reach and tempo. Logistics could easily prove to be my biggest constraint. Supply isn’t the logistician’s problem; it’s the commander’s problem. Only a commander has the authority to reduce extraneous demands on the logistics system. On his march to Vicksburg in 1863, General Grant specified that “one tent will be allowed each company for the protection of rations from rain; one wall tent for each regimental headquarters, one wall tent for each brigade headquarters, and one wall tent for each division headquarters.” I admired Grant’s parsimony, recognizing the freedom of maneuver it gained his army and the speed that resulted.
After I’d calculated the fuel requirements, my biggest problem was the amount and weight of artillery ammunition. To save weight and reduce the frequency of ammunition resupply once we were deep inside Iraq, I cut back on our artillery fire expectations. On my long airplane ride home from Afghanistan, I had recognized the revolutionary impact of precision in air-delivered bombs. In 1991, we had calculated how many aircraft sorties it took to destroy a target. In Afghanistan, we instead calculated how many targets one aircraft could take out. Going deep into Iraq on constantly lengthening supply lines, air support allowed us to husband our artillery ammunition, ensuring that our “cannon cockers” were fully loaded when we were deeper in enemy territory. Whenever possible, we would rely on Marine air to deliver the bulk of our fire support.
Taking a page from U. S. Grant, I told my assault elements to strip away all creature comforts. We carried only a few cots; these were for the sick or wounded. Everyone else slept on the ground, regardless of rank. I had Gypsy racks hung on each vehicle to carry cans of extra fuel. We had fuel-testing kits to take advantage of captured enemy stocks. Every Marine—from general to private—carried his home in his rucksack. No extras for anyone; all hands lived with the same level of discomfort as the lowest-ranking infantryman. We would eat two, not three, meals per day. We did, however, store a case of humanitarian meals in every vehicle, to be passed out to the Iraqi people. We would demonstrate the American tradition of liberating the people, not dominating them.
Logistics troops would be fighting their way past enemy remnants to keep us going. I wasn’t going to risk their lives or our mission with poor supply discipline. I told my Marines, “If you bounce a check at the post exchange, your first sergeant’s gonna kick your ass. But if you waste gas by running a vehicle when you’re not on the move or throw away half your MRE, I will court-martial you.”
THE ENEMY’S DECISION LOOP
Just north of our jumping-off point in Kuwait, the Iraqis had one division defending the Rumaila oil fields and Basra. Four more divisions were posted along the northern and eastern banks of the Tigris, the historical invasion route to Baghdad, facing Iran. After seizing the southern oil fields, our plan was to advance north, staying between the Euphrates and the Tigris, thus isolating and rendering irrelevant the four Iraqi divisions.
However, to bypass them I had to move across the Fertile Crescent—millions of acres of marshy farm fields interlaced by thousands of irrigation ditches. We would fight bad terrain while bypassing most of the enemy forces.
One night in the operations tent in Kuwait, dealing with the problems of putting my entire division on a single roadway, I had noticed a moving target indicator on an unfinished road not on our map. I asked the Army private monitoring the video screen, “How fast is that dude going?”
“Sixty-five kilometers an hour, sir,” he said.
Sensing the opportunity, all eyes in the tent swung to me. I immediately made up my mind. I turned to Colonel Toolan: “Shift the Fifth and Seventh RCTs to that route.” This became the main axis of our attack, and now we could proceed along two axes. A commander, given his own route, will be aggressive, however difficult the terrain. But tie him behind another unit and he has no option but to follow at the pace of the lead unit, stunting the initiative of troops who should be in the fight and rendering them idle. If we were temporarily blocked on one route, the other would continue to advance, turning the enemy’s flank.
My mission was to guard Buff Blount’s right flank. Now, with two routes—even though one was only two lanes wide and the other an unpaved, unfinished roadway—I was confident I could keep up with him, and, with the British pressing the Iraqis on my right flank, the Iraqis were on the horns of multiple dilemmas about
where to mass their forces.
Our campaign’s success was based on not giving the enemy time to react. We would turn inside the enemy’s “OODA” loop, an acronym coined by the legendary maverick Air Force Colonel John Boyd. To win a dogfight, Boyd wrote, you have to observe what is going on, orient yourself, decide what to do, and act before your opponent has completed his version of that same process, repeating and repeating this loop faster than your foe. According to Boyd, a fighter pilot didn’t win because he had faster reflexes; he won because his reflexes were connected to a brain that thought faster than his opponent’s. Success in war requires seizing and maintaining the initiative—and the Marines had adopted Boyd’s OODA loop as the intellectual framework for maneuver warfare. Used with decentralized decision-making, accelerating our OODA loops results in a cascading series of disasters confronting the enemy.
My intent to my regimental and battalion commanders was as follows.
COMMANDER’S INTENT: We will swiftly secure key oil nodes allowing the least possible opportunity for their destruction. We will shatter enemy forces south of the Euphrates, west of the Shatt al Basra and east of An Nasiriya, opening the MSR and gaining positions north of the river to facilitate operations in the vicinity of Kut via Routes 1, 7 or 6 as the situation dictates. In order to achieve tactical surprise we will first blind enemy reconnaissance, then close on the border. We will be prepared to accept enemy capitulation, but destroy the 51st Mech Division and its adjacent/supporting units if they fight. To the greatest extent possible, we will limit enemy or friendly damage to the oil infrastructure.
We must neutralize enemy artillery through shaping, preparatory, or responsive counter fires. I expect maximum use of air fires; assault support will be used if rapid linkup is achievable. Speed is the measure: speed coupled with harmony of information flow; rapidity in decision making; orders promulgation; counter fire; response to changing conditions; resupply; CASEVAC; identification of multiple routes; obstacle reduction; maneuver; relief in place; and hand off of EPWs. We will avoid all possible forward passages of lines and any other mingling of forces, and whenever possible create conditions of chaos for our enemies. Aggressive tempo and initiative are vital. Once we have seized the nodes, we will rapidly hand over the zone and EPWs to 1st UK Div and reposition north of Jalibah. Crossing the Euphrates and moving against Kut, 1st MarDiv supports 3ID’s attack along our western flank denying the enemy the opportunity to mass against CFLCC’s [the Coalition Forces Land Component Command’s] main effort.
The end state will place the oil infrastructure safely in 1st UK Division’s hands; 51st Mech and associated elements eliminated as a threat to Coalition Ops; our Division oriented against Kut; and the enemy’s units facing absolute destruction if they choose to fight.
“No better friend, no worse enemy.”
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Supervision of the planning took me only an hour or two each day. The rest of my waking hours were spent coaching fighters—officers and enlisted. I spoke to the troops in groups, from thirteen-man squads to eight-hundred-man battalions. We went over our overall strategy and their unit’s scheme of maneuver. My goal was to put a human face on the mission, answer every question, and build their confidence. I followed British Field Marshal Slim’s advice that, in fairness to my troops, they had to know what their objective was and what my expectations of them were. Additionally, I needed to look the lads in the eye to get a sense of their levels of confidence and for them to directly feel the respect I had for those who would face our enemies. As Slim made clear, any general who isn’t connected spiritually to his troops is not a combat leader.
To close the gap between me and my youngest Marines, I studied what others had said. Before leading his Marine Raiders ashore on Guadalcanal in 1942, Colonel Evans Carlson told his men that the mission was to “annihilate all enemy personnel and destroy as many military installations as they could.” In the summer of 1944, General Eisenhower exhorted each of his soldiers “to go forward to his assigned objective with the determination that the enemy can survive only through surrender.”
Now it was time for me to write a letter to my lads. It had to convey the nature and purpose of their mission. I needed every Marine to understand my two core principles:
First, don’t stop. Don’t slow down, don’t create a traffic jam. Jab, feint, hit, and move, move, move.
Second, keep your honor clean. Thousands of homes, stores, stalls, and mud and concrete houses lined the roads. Terrified civilians would be in the line of fire. I made it clear that our division would do more than any unit in history to avoid civilian casualties.
While my commanders understood my operational design, I wanted to connect with every member of the Blue Diamond. I limited myself to one page they could carry with them, a message reconciling ferocity toward the foe with abiding concern for the innocents caught on the battlefield. Directly following is my letter.
Click here to view a transcript of this text.
My letter was distributed to all hands on the day before the attack. Over the years since, many have taken that letter out of their wallets and shown it to me. In an age when cynicism too often passes for critical thinking, it’s worthwhile to remember that young men and women who sign up for the military still fight for ideals.
My meetings with the troops weren’t quite so highbrow. They enjoyed prodding me, and I enjoyed giving it right back. After 9/11, everyone who signed on knew he’d go into battle, and the vast majority actually looked forward to the test. I did my best to keep the young lads primed and cocky. On one occasion, a lance corporal referred to a World War I painting of Marines attacking in gas masks: “That looked like rough stuff.”
“The press will shove cameras in your faces,” I said. “If you suck your thumb and say you’re worried about poison gas, then you’re emboldening the enemy. If you are not tough enough and need to talk about your midlife crisis, stand aside and let a tougher Marine represent us.”
My grunts burst out laughing, and “thumb-suckers” became a running joke.
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Operation Iraqi Freedom was set to begin with a massive air and ground assault on March 21, 2003. Due to late-breaking intelligence, however, my division was sent across the line of departure in the early evening of March 20. My regimental combat teams adapted smoothly to this change. Just north of the Kuwaiti border, Iraqi soldiers manned an observation post atop a steep rise called Safwan Hill, the sole high ground in all southern Iraq, overlooking Kuwait.
“When we kick off,” I had told my staff, “I want that hill a foot shorter.”
The CIA was sending a message to the enemy commanders: Don’t fight us and we won’t kill you. By bombing the hill, I would be sending my own message to all the Iraqi soldiers who could see Safwan from a great distance: Go home while you still can walk.
By the afternoon of March 21, we had advanced thirty miles into Iraq, ahead of our pre-attack estimates. As we had rehearsed, the units communicated with one another, shifted accordingly, and kept driving forward, knocking aside the flimsy resistance encountered. British units embedded with us and on our right flank smoothly orchestrated our combined operations. As the commander, I didn’t have to urge on any unit or adjust any movement. Initiative and decentralized decision authority were paying off. Let me give an example.
A critical goal was to prevent Saddam from torching the southern oil fields, as he had done in Kuwait a decade earlier, causing an environmental disaster. A key objective was the pumping station called Zubayr, which facilitated the flow of two million barrels of oil each day. If the station was sabotaged, all that thick black liquid would gush out, creating a widespread oily swamp and oozing into the Gulf. In our planning, we nicknamed this critical objective the Crown Jewel.
Getting to the station and preventing that disaster was the job
assigned to “Suicide Charlie” Company of the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines. Having led that battalion in Operation Desert Storm, I kept a fond eye on its movement. When company commander Captain Tom Lacroix got to the wall surrounding the station, he halted to check his “go/no-go” list. Months before in California, Lacroix’s lieutenants and NCOs had visited an Exxon refinery. Engineers had walked them through the maze of high-pressure pipes and control valves, stressing where not to shoot, lest sparks set off a massive explosion. On Lacroix’s list were the conditions that would make the station unsafe to enter. One key tipoff was to look for the pyramids of flame spurting harmlessly in the air from the tops of the vertical pipes. If there were no flames, that meant the natural gas pressure was building up. Lacroix saw no flames, and no workers moving anywhere inside the station.
Was he now facing a bomb waiting to be touched off once a hundred or more Marines were inside? Acting on instinct, he ordered all his drivers to turn off their engines. Then the Marines listened. They heard a few random shouts and some half-hearted bursts of fire from a few AKs, but nothing more. It was the lack of sound that tipped Lacroix off. Three massive 1,500-horsepower engines generated the power to pump those millions of barrels. Obviously, they made quite a racket. But now there was silence. Lacroix decided that meant the station had been shut down, and any buildup of natural gas had dissipated. He ordered his Marines to break through the wall and take control of the station.
That was a good, on-the-spot call far down the chain of command.
That small incident illustrates a larger principle. Lacroix consulted with no one. When a key indicator flashed a danger signal, he didn’t pull back to call headquarters for guidance. That was decentralized execution. Based on understanding his commander’s intent, Lacroix decided on his own course of action, and the Crown Jewel was firmly in our hands.