by Jim Mattis
General George Marshall, the Chief of Staff of the Army during World War II, was faced with a similar challenge. In World War I, Marshall had seen too many soldiers die due to a lack of training in fundamental tactics. When he served in the 1930s at the Army Infantry School, he instituted an iron rule: Establish a base of fire before maneuvering against the enemy. “Fire and Flank” became the elemental tactic for thousands of novice platoon leaders rapidly trained in World War II.
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I placed renewed emphasis on elementary tactics. I recalled “brilliance in the basics.” Watch a basketball team passing the ball back and forth, each player knowing who is being set up to take the shot. They’ve rehearsed their plays so often that they don’t have to think about it or wait for instructions. Similarly, every squad, platoon, and company needed a repertoire of plays, with everyone fully capable of executing a mix of well-drilled tactics, and few commands needed when engaging the enemy.
Close-quarters combat demands hard practice. But honing the skills to shoot and move was only the first step. Equally important was improving cognitive skills. A corporal from Des Moines would be patrolling in a totally foreign environment. How would he sense what was going on? In Iraq, for example, insurgents would often shoot first, hidden among the people. As the situation developed, the squad leader had to read the cues, so that we could be the ones to initiate contact, not the enemy. This had to be accomplished without hurting the innocents.
I took as a model the example of a chess master at a tournament who, after taking a single glance at the board, predicts the winner three moves hence. How could he do that? The economist Herbert Simon explained, “The situation [on the chessboard] provided a cue; this cue has given the chess master access to information stored in his memory; and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.”
Anticipation was critical, so my goal became to teach our young squad leaders how to pick up on the slightest cue like a chess master and sense what it meant. I searched for tools that could help develop this skill, settling on two approaches: tactical simulators and a training program to sharpen the cunning of our small-unit leaders.
Computerized flight simulators had long provided a valuable cognitive training tool for aviators. Behind the controls in a simulator, the novice pilot crashes into a mountain or is taken out by a missile. He dies, comes back to life, reviews his technique, takes off again, and avoids the mountain or the missile. As a result, our pilots don’t repeat in actual flight the deadly mistakes drilled out of them in the simulators. So valuable is simulator training that we will not buy a new airplane without buying a simulator that mimics its flight. Yet, despite our country’s having suffered 85 percent of its post–World War II casualties in infantry units, we had no simulators for those at the tip of the spear.
I knew that if we kept a Marine alive through his first three firefights, his chances of survival improved. We needed a simulator to train and sharpen cognitive skills until a young leader could swiftly appraise a situation and not hesitate before taking action. He had to develop the cognitive equivalent of muscle memory in order to instinctively seize the initiative. Let him get killed a few times in simulated ambushes to learn the consequences of his mistakes.
Situational recognition isn’t unique to battle. Notice how often a college quarterback calls out the wrong signal, resulting in a broken play. To cut down on those mental mistakes, former Ohio State coach Urban Meyer devoted team meetings to hands-on simulation exercises, demanding that his players respond to confused situations. The goal was the assimilation of knowledge to take with them into the next game so that they would recognize the same situation when it occurred.
Regardless of rank or occupation, I believe that all leaders should be coaches at heart. For me, “player-coach” aptly describes the role of a combat leader, or any real leader.
I employed dozens of techniques. For instance, I recalled from Desert Storm how my NCOs threw rocks at our vehicles to simulate shrapnel from explosives. Talk about a rudimentary simulator! We built simulators complete with smoke, flash-bang detonations, sewage smells, foreign background actors playing the roles of villagers and insurgents, fluids that looked like blood—any setting, any scenario, any artifact that immersed the troops in as realistic a semblance as possible of the chaos of combat they would encounter.
At Camp Pendleton, we constructed a simulator by converting an abandoned tomato-packing plant into a Middle Eastern town. We set up an indoor simulation where the noise, smells, temperature, screams, detonations, casualties, scenery, and situations allowed a squad leader to confront tactical and ethical decisions, screw up and see his men die, or kill an innocent. Thus would they image their way through combat situations, envisioning what was going to happen before it happened, better imprinting immediate action drills and calculated decision-making into their squad’s DNA. We detonated small explosives and flash-bang grenades, piped in smoke and putrid smells and casualties with horrible wounds gushing fake blood, and hired Arab Americans who screamed invective in Arabic. We threw in anything and everything—even holograms of enemies mysteriously appearing and disappearing—to rattle and disorient the squads. Repeated bouts in the simulator began to build swifter-acting squads, their confidence growing as their skills sharpened.
Both veteran NCOs and fresh recruits lauded their time in the simulator. It also became the best tool we had to build communications—through mutual understanding—among all the members of a squad. We called it the Infantry Immersion Simulator, because everyone was thrown into the combat scenario together—immersed in it. After someone “drowned” a few times, he learned how to swim.
Related to the simulator, but distinct from it, was another program aimed at enhancing tactical cunning. We called it Combat Hunter. The inputs came from an eclectic group. A Los Angeles police detective explained counter-IED and counter-sniper techniques in urban settings. An African big-game hunter demonstrated how to pick out telltale signs of an ambush. A football coach stressed how to build a book of plays, so that one word from a point man would cause each squad member to take up a set position. A former officer of the Rhodesian Selous Scouts showed how to detect even the smallest depressions in an open field where an enemy sniper might lurk and how to track an enemy’s path. Instructors from the Marine Sniper School added the “Keep-in-Mind” (KIM) game, giving each Marine thirty seconds to look around a farmyard or alleyway and then turn around and describe how many objects he had seen and what was out of place. Or how to watch a marketplace for an hour in order to pick out the newcomer in the crowd.
By 2003 our military was fully at war, and our military families had fallen into the fraught routine of repeat deployments, fearful their loved ones might not return. The brutality and intensity of combat are impossible to grasp for those without skin in the game. The result has been a growing divide in understanding between the 1 percent in the fight and the 99 percent who are not. The families abreast that divide live in America yet have their hearts and minds half a world away.
One event in particular drove that disconnect home to me. I was speaking at a San Diego conference, to a mixed audience of sailors and civilian contractors, including dozens of Marines. I knew they had seen hard fighting and were deploying again shortly. When asked about fighting the enemy, I spoke candidly.
“You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn’t wear a veil,” I said. “You know, guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway. So it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them. Actually it’s quite fun to fight them, you know. It’s a hell of a hoot. It’s fun to shoot some people. I’ll be right up there with you. I like brawling.”
As I spoke, I was looking right at those young grunts. As S. L. A. Marshall, the noted Army historian, wrote, “It is by virtue of the spoken word rather than by the sight or any ot
her medium that men in combat gather courage from the knowledge that they are being supported by others….Speech galvanizes the desire to work together. It is the beginning of the urge to get something done.” By my words, I wanted them to know I was with them in spirit and expected them to act as warriors. They deserved to know that I respected and supported them.
My remarks made national news and I was soundly criticized, many pundits and some members of Congress outraged by my apparent lack of sensitivity. Frankly, I was surprised and found their comments bizarre. Our Commandant, Mike Hagee, publicly stood up for me, saying, “Lt. Gen. Mattis often speaks with a great deal of candor….While I understand that some people may take issue with the comments made by him, I also know he intended to reflect the unfortunate and harsh realities of war.” Further, I never moderated my words or apologized. Knowing our enemies also read my words, I wanted them to know that America had troops who were not tormented about fighting people who murder in the name of religion or deny human rights to others. In an age when so many think they must guard their every word for fear of career-ending repercussions, the Marine Corps stood with me.
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Three months after I left Iraq, the Marines and the Army fought a second battle to seize Fallujah. The terrorists had taken full advantage of the delay to stockpile ammunition, and we lost hundreds killed and wounded while the top terrorists escaped. The centrifugal forces tearing Iraq apart were accelerating. Concurrently, inside the U.S. military, a debate was raging: Should we pull back to bases to avoid increasingly angering the Iraqis, or should we redouble our efforts to be on patrol among the people?
At Quantico, I received a call from Army Lieutenant General David Petraeus, who had taken over at the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. We had met as colonels in the Pentagon, and both of us had commanded divisions in Iraq. Essentially, we now had the same jobs in our respective services. Our views about the wars were aligned: we had to adapt, and quickly. Dave proposed that we jointly produce an Army/Marine counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine. We needed our two services on the same sheet of music. If we did it right, the allies would follow.
“Dave, you and I can do this,” I said. “But let’s keep it between our two commands. If we take this to the Pentagon, it’ll take forever. We need to move fast.”
Dave was already in that mindset. We split up the work and moved out smartly.
What is war doctrine? Basically, it’s a written guide, based on historical precedents, of the best fighting practices for commanders and troops to follow. Doctrine lays out principles that have worked in the past and establishes guidelines for how an organization fights, based on lessons learned in experiments or at great cost in bloody battles. Every corporation and government agency follows a doctrine, whether written or unwritten.
We assembled first-rate teams of writers, who produced a document based on enduring lessons from past insurgencies as well as what we were learning in Iraq and Afghanistan. I met with wounded Marines at Bethesda Naval Hospital and asked them what we could do better, and I made numerous changes as a result. We had no birthright to victory; we had to outthink this enemy.
One of the eight chapters was of special interest to me, and the Marines took the lead in writing it. Never again did I want to invade a country, pull down a statue, and then ask, What do I do now? We called this chapter “Campaign Design,” meaning we would define the military problem to be solved inside its political context. This would ensure that the military solution we subsequently planned to execute would be fit for its political purpose.
Also in the manual were touchstones to help young officers come to grips with the esoteric nature of irregular warfare among the people: Always try to partner on patrol with the local forces you are training. Conduct a census and issue identification cards. Get to know the local leaders, sheiks, and imams in your area of operations. Conduct yourself as a guest. In today’s insurgent wars, the vital ground is not a mountaintop or a key road—it’s the people.
I also published a guide for small-unit leaders, stressing that doctrine was not prescriptive.
“There is no magic bullet,” I wrote, “nor technological breakthrough that will win this fight for us….Empathy may be as important a weapon as an assault rifle.” The guide’s tactics “provide methods for reference and are not prescriptive….This type of warfare defies ‘templates’ or rigid adherence to techniques. Rather it is a test of our imagination and ability to improvise.”
To provide the background needed to permeate our thinking and training, I established a center for “operational” cultural learning. Staffed with specialists who understood the warfighting requirement for cultural awareness, it contributed immediately, institutionalizing cultural training across our schools and training centers. I was delighted to see Staff Sergeant Qwas, my interpreter in my Fallujah meetings with Janabi, joining the faculty. With his immigrant background, he was the right fit.
As critical as it was to institutionalize the lessons of the current war, I had to look to the future as well. Eventually the anti-jihadist wars would end. They were not yet existential threats to America. But other nations were rising that could soon pose such a threat. There will come another big war, as there will come another big hurricane, and if we want to deter it, we can do so only from strength.
I had to ask: Was the Marine Corps on the right track to fight future wars? Was a complete transformation necessary? The essential nature of the Marine Corps was to launch forces from the sea. We use the water as an avenue of approach, unlike some armies that see water as an obstacle.
Every decade since the end of World War II, critics had come forward to declare that landing from the sea was now impossible. As far back as 1949, Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson had said, “We’ll never have any more amphibious operations. That does away with the Marine Corps.” That prophecy proved wrong the very next year. As American forces were on the brink of being driven from South Korea by the invasion of the North Korean army, General MacArthur ordered an amphibious landing deep behind enemy lines. This reversed the Korean War virtually overnight. Perennially, the refrain of amphibious assault obsolescence has been repeated. A half century later, my Marines launched from ships in the North Arabian Sea, flew over the mountains of Pakistan, and seized a lodgment in landlocked Afghanistan, four hundred miles from the sea. As the only nation with the capability of forcible entry from the sea, the question was: Does America’s survival still require this capability?
I concluded that the answer was yes. While we are reducing our forces overseas, we must retain the ability to reassure our friends that we can quickly get to them when trouble looms. We also need this capability to temper our adversaries’ designs. Without credible military force, our diplomacy is toothless. So, as I viewed it, the Marines could not abandon their core business even while adapting how we fought as new technology changed the character of the fight. It’s a national capability and cannot be re-created overnight. The sea is an unforgiving environment, and dabblers die.
I also knew that our Achilles’ heel was overconfidence in uninterrupted communications. In a future war, these communications are certain to be broken. Therefore, we had to know how to continue fighting when (not if) our networks fail. Because opportunities and catastrophes on the battlefield appear and disappear rapidly, only a decentralized command system can unleash a unit’s full potential. We couldn’t become reliant on communication networks that will not be there when most needed.
In my judgment, Admiral Nelson’s instruction before the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar remains the standard for all senior commanders. “In case signals can neither be seen nor perfectly understood,” he said, “no captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of the enemy.” In countless coaching sessions and fleet exercises, Nelson had trained the captains of his ships. Once the battle was joined, he trusted them to execute aggressively. In
future battles, outcomes will depend on the aligned independence of subordinate units.
Operations occur at the speed of trust. If, unlike Nelson, senior commanders don’t sufficiently train their subordinates so they can trust their initiative, then those commanders have failed before combat begins. Commanders don’t drive from the back seat. Credit those below you with the same level of commitment and ability with which you credit yourself. Make your intent clear, and then encourage your subordinates to employ a bias for action. The result will be faster decisions, stronger unity of effort, and unleashed audacity throughout the force, enabling us to out-turn and outfight the enemy.
As always, I did not rely on the chain of command to bring all important issues to my attention. I let it be known that every Friday afternoon I would be at the club for happy hour. As one man explained, when asked why Robert Burns wrote his poetry in taverns, it was in those places that one could hear “the elemental passions, the open heart and the bold tongue, and no masks.”
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For two years, I’d played my part in a military sea change. Side by side with the Army, we had modified our doctrine to fit the fight. We had stressed the critical role of the squad leader who was actually engaging the elusive enemy. I concluded that transforming the Marine Corps away from its amphibious roots and away from attacking from the sea would be a grave error. America needed its Navy/Marine expeditionary force precisely in order not to build more bases overseas. I had done my best to advocate decentralization of decision-making, emphasizing a return to command and feedback rather than embracing the illusion of command and control down to the lowest capable level.