by Jim Mattis
* * *
—
Conviction doesn’t mean you should not change your mind when circumstance or new information warrant it. A leader must be willing to change and make change. Senior staffs sometimes need pruning. It’s easy to get into a bureaucratic rut where things are done a certain way because they’re done a certain way. That seems absurd when you read it in print—but it’s the norm in large organizations. Every few months, a leader has to step back and question what he and his organization are doing.
As I made the rounds of European capitals, I recognized that I would forever be the outsider, the non-European always urging for change. I stood back and asked, “Why is an American in charge of the transformation of NATO transatlantic forces?” I saw advantages to instead having a European commander in Norfolk making the argument for the forces required to meet the threats identified in the NATO document.
Until this point, both of NATO’s two supreme commander positions had always been filled by Americans, in deference to our extraordinary commitment. But America ultimately could not care more about the freedom of Europe’s children than the Europeans themselves.
I broached the subject with Admiral Mike Mullen, then the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Mike was a quick thinker with an attentive demeanor. Years earlier, when I was at Quantico, he had been Chief of Naval Operations. An admiral had been complaining that we Marines were adding too many heavier weapons, like tanks and artillery, to what we expected the Navy to carry. This extra bulk and weight required more amphibious shipping that the Navy couldn’t afford. The message was clear: The Marines were forgetting they were a naval force and pricing themselves out of sealift. We discussed it over lunch.
“You have it backwards,” I replied. “Appearances may be masking the reality. Our afloat units are actually becoming lighter, largely because naval air support is providing more precise firepower. Matter of fact, since Desert Storm, we Marines have cut nearly in half the amount of our artillery. We are not putting more on ships.” Mike listened intently and then agreed. He dropped the issue.
Now I was pointing out that I was spending nearly all my time mastering the details of dozens of European militaries. The effort was diverting me from sustaining any attention to my U.S. Joint Forces Command functions. There was no reason, I concluded, for an American to continue as el supremo. Mike laughed and agreed that a European officer might well be a better fit for persuading Europeans to carry more of the burden. I recommended that France take over the post, because of my confidence in the strategic thinking of that nation’s officers and its demonstrated political willingness to intervene militarily to protect its own interests. And since the French at the political level had frequently been the most difficult to persuade to make necessary changes to the NATO command structure, I thought it best if their generals dealt with the transformation issue.
When Secretary Gates and I were together on the sidelines of the next NATO meeting, in Brussels, I laid out my case. The issue clearly had the secretary’s attention, and he had obviously discussed it with Admiral Mullen.
“If we turn NATO transformation over to a European,” I said, “that brings European pressure on the nations to address their own shortfalls.”
Secretary Gates usually gave no visible feedback. He’s a born poker player. In this case, he brightened and nodded right away. In the fall of 2009, I turned over my NATO duties to a superb French Air Force officer. No Frenchman since Lafayette has been more warmly embraced than General Stéphane Abrial was when he lifted the NATO duties off me.
* * *
—
I believed then and believe today that NATO is absolutely necessary for geopolitical and cultural solidarity among Western democracies. Friends who share enduring historical values are needed as much today as when we stood united against fascism and communism. Those values are foundational to our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution. If we didn’t have NATO today, we would have to create it in order to hold on to our Founding Fathers’ vision of freedom and rights for all. We must remember we are engaged in an experiment called democracy, and experiments can fail in a world still largely hostile to freedom. The idea of American democracy, as inspiring as it is, cannot stand without the support of like-minded nations.
At the same time, I strongly believe that Europe must contribute more.
In my judgment, NATO cannot hold together if the burden-sharing continues to be so unequal. Europeans cannot expect Americans to care more about their future than they do. Without adequate resources, even the most brilliant European plan for transformation to meet very real threats will remain a mirage. And if Europe’s moral voice is not backed up by a capable military, their geopolitical and moral leadership will become nothing more than empty words on a piece of paper.
For those who question the post–Soviet Union value of NATO, it was telling that an alliance designed originally for the defense of Western Europe fought its first combat campaign in response to the 9/11 attacks on America. It must not be forgotten, in our too often transactional view of allies, that these nations offered up the blood of their sons and daughters in our common defense. As Churchill said, “There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that is fighting without them!”
BECAUSE I WAS DOUBLE-HATTED, while I was spending most of my time at NATO, my American command was left largely in the hands of my deputy. He had to be a flag officer who shared my views about allies, warfighting, and leadership. In essence, he would be my co-commander. I turned to my comrade in arms Navy SEAL Bob Harward, who was now a one-star admiral. With Admiral Mullen’s support, Bob jumped to a three-star vice admiral, the established rank for the deputy position. I believed we had to import the agility of Special Operations Forces (SOF) thinking into the very top of the U.S. military. I was convinced that Bob, the quintessential fighter, had the combination of SOF experience, persuasiveness, and force of personality to drive my agenda home.
As soon as I figured out what that was. At our headquarters in Norfolk, and spread across other bases, JFCOM had a staff of several thousand and an annual budget of hundreds of millions of dollars. I focused on grasping the essence of JFCOM’s mission. The four service chiefs are responsible for recruiting, training, and equipping their forces, taking a longer-term view of what the nation will need in the future. At the direction of the Secretary of Defense, JFCOM allocates their forces to the combatant commanders who conduct current and near-term operations around the world—the Pacific, Atlantic, and other commands.
The Joint Forces Command had been established in 1999 to harness service doctrines into a joint approach. The intent was to nurture service interoperability in concepts, training, and ultimately war. I understood that JFCOM was supposed to add the glue called “jointness,” but what did that mean in practice? What was our core output? What was JFCOM teaching, and how did this add value in making U.S. forces more lethal?
Understanding what made this organization tick meant dissecting its culture, not just what was written down in its charter. Culture is a way of life shared by a group of people—how they act, what they believe, how they treat one another, and what they value. Peter Drucker, the business guru, criticized business executives for devoting too much time to planning, rather than understanding the nature of the corporation itself. As he put it, “Culture eats strategy for lunch.” The output of any organization, driven by its culture, must reflect the leadership’s values in order to be effective.
Early in my tenure, I visited a brigade headquarters. On the bulletin board were slogans exhorting initiative, like DECIDE THEN ACT! SEIZE THE DAY! and JUST DO IT! These sounded inspiring, reflecting an ethos that valued initiative, until a battalion commander directed my attention to his commanding general’s division-wide order. It prescribed the exact attire required for physical training that every soldier had to wear while working out—including the color of their safety be
lt. By prescribing such minutiae from the top down, the actual culture of the organization contradicted its own declarations and stifled any kind of real initiative. Initiative has to be practiced daily, not stifled, if it’s to become a reality inside a culture. Every institution gets the behavior it rewards. We had to reward battlefield behavior, not what in an earlier time we called garrison Mickey Mouse, or worse.
After I encountered numerous such instances of command from the top, I stood back to reflect. When asked how he would order his thoughts if he had one hour to save the world, Einstein sagely responded that he would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem and save the world in five minutes. Well, how did JFCOM define the joint problem? What guiding vision had formed its culture over the past decade? I knew the service chiefs knew best how to guide the Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, and Marine Corps in preparing for warfighting. But was JFCOM providing the same guidance for the joint team? The answer was no.
Unlike service doctrines, JFCOM’s joint doctrine did not tell me how to fight. I was mostly reading the equivalent of bumper stickers embellished with useless, even confusing, adverbs and adjectives. I talked to hundreds of officers of all ranks and listened to assorted briefings. The concept I heard constantly was “effects-based operations.” In its original design, EBO was, and remains, a sound Air Force targeting concept. By employing a “system of systems” approach to attacking certain target sets and by forecasting the degradation in enemy capabilities, some air operations could be precisely calculated to work based on predicted effects. Effects-based targeting had worked well when targeting physically defined, closed systems such as power grids and road networks. For instance, by destroying certain railroad bridges, we could force the enemy to, predictably, move by motor vehicles along certain highways. By bombing road choke points, we could curtail enemy movement.
But JFCOM had bastardized this Air Force doctrine, generalizing it to open systems like warfighting, where adaptation and unpredictability are the norm. In my view, JFCOM’s transformation effort was wrongheaded and not anchored in any valid theory of war, in all its messy, violent unpredictability. The only thing predictable about EBO was that it would fail, and so it did, even in jury-rigged exercises and, tragically, in combat.
Five years after JFCOM’s adoption of EBO, Israel practiced it in Lebanon and suffered its first defeat in war. The Israelis believed that the enemy could be immobilized by air attacks alone and that, as historian Matt Matthews wrote, “little or no land forces would be required since it would not be necessary to destroy the enemy,” and the results were disastrous. The enemy used small-unit initiative, electronic warfare, and irregular tactics to attack Israeli units from the front, sides, and rear. Without “precise” intelligence, “precise” targeting was impossible. An Israeli general complained that the EBO “terminology used was too complicated, vain, and could not be understood by the thousands of officers that needed to carry it out.”
The Israelis had learned a bitter lesson. Coming out of a meeting with the IDF in Norfolk, an Israeli colonel remarked to me with regret, “We thought you Americans had done your homework.”
After reflection, I concluded that EBO had two fatal flaws. First, any planning construct that strives to provide mechanistic certainty is at odds with reality, and will lead you into a quagmire of paralysis and indecision. As economist Friedrich Hayek cautioned, “Adaptation is smarter than you are.” The enemy is certain to adapt to our first move. That’s why in every battle I set out to create chaos in the enemy’s thinking, using deception and turning faster inside his decision loop, always assuming that he would adapt. War refuses any doctrine that denies its fundamentally unpredictable nature. EBO could not take into consideration enemy cunning and courage, a grievous omission. “Every attempt to make war easy and safe,” General Sherman wrote, “will result in humiliation and disaster.” Short of a nuclear exchange, war will not abide a mathematical equation of cause and effect. The EBO approach, misapplied, was a mechanistic, even deterministic view that ignored the simple fact that conflict is ultimately a test of wills and other largely nonquantifiable factors.
Second, EBO required centralized command and control to amass the precise intelligence and assess in real time the precise effects of strikes. So the top-level staffs needed a continuous flow of exact battlefield data. Besides requiring uninterrupted communications, our battlefield commanders had to become reporters rather than focus on breaking the enemy’s will. This was the surest means of surrendering initiative and creating a critical vulnerability. Having been joined by Bob Harward, with his SOF approach to war, we took the bull by the horns, cutting every shred of EBO wrongheadedness out of our joint doctrine.
* * *
—
Interestingly, everything I was briefed on regarding EBO came to me on PowerPoint, reinforcing a long-standing concern. EBO played well on PowerPoint slides, but I have always urged the avoidance of “death by PowerPoint.” In that, I was guided by what General George C. Marshall had written: “The leader must learn to cut to the heart of a situation, recognize its decisive elements and base his course of action on these. The ability to do this is not God-given, nor can it be acquired overnight; it is a process of years. He must realize that training in solving problems of all types—long practices in making clear unequivocal decisions, the habit of concentrating on the question at hand, and an elasticity of mind—are indispensable requisites for the successful practice of the art of war….It is essential that all leaders—from subaltern to commanding general—familiarize themselves with the art of clear, logical thinking.”
PowerPoint is the scourge of critical thinking. It encourages fragmented logic by the briefer and passivity in the listener. Only a verbal narrative that logically connects a succinct problem statement using rational thinking can develop sound solutions. PowerPoint is excellent when displaying data; but it makes us stupid when applied to critical thinking.
I abolished EBO as downright dangerous to American warfighting. (See Appendix G.) In a letter to all hands, I wrote, “JFCOM will no longer use, sponsor or export the terms and concepts related to EBO. We must define the problems we are trying to solve and propose value-added solutions. We will return clarity to our operational concepts. My aim is to ensure leaders convey their intent in clearly understood terms that empower their subordinates to act decisively.” Whenever militaries build a physical or intellectual Maginot Line, they set themselves up for failure. We must make sure EBO does not return in a new guise, disconnected from war’s reality.
* * *
—
If JFCOM had the wrong cultural mindset, and EBO was the wrong approach, what should replace it? What would guide our approach to fighting future wars? I determined to bring back historically informed principles rather than algebraic formulae. We would adhere to those principles. The approach had to be balanced and dexterous, adapting to unforeseen challenges and using history, experiments, and war games to gain insight into the enduring nature of war in its possible future forms.
“The trinity of chance, uncertainty, and friction [will] continue to characterize war,” Clausewitz wrote, “and will make anticipation of even the first-order consequences of military action highly conjectural.”
My goal was for our joint forces to move against the enemy with a spirit of collaboration among the services, displaying what I had learned to call a jazzman’s ability to improvise. I wanted a joint service culture based upon a philosophy of independent alignment and operational decentralization, guided by the commander’s intent. The character of the war—its tactics, political reality, technology, weapons—constantly changes. But war’s fundamental nature remains, even as its changing character demands that we urgently adapt.
Again employing Einstein’s fifty-five-minute rule, I pointed out to my staff that no military had successfully transformed without first defining the problem. That problem was three-tiered: maintain
a safe and credible nuclear deterrent so that those weapons are never used; sustain a compelling conventional force capable of deterring or winning a state-on-state war; and make irregular warfare a core competency of the U.S. forces. Concurrently, we had to incorporate two new domains, cyber and space, for in the future those domains will be contested. The course of this effort was not easy, but any leader, whether a commander or a CEO, must guide his or her organization around the rocks and shoals. I took JFCOM off the shoals of EBO and steered in what I determined was the right course. If you don’t do that as a leader, you’re along for the ride; you’re not steering the ship.
* * *
—
In the ten years since JFCOM was established, the idea of “jointness” had expanded into an ever larger circle of tasks. By the time I arrived, the Secretary of Defense had charged JFCOM with carrying out twenty-three formal tasks, with nearly a dozen generals and admirals on board. You name it and JFCOM seemed to have a hand in it. In some cases we were doing well. For example, our joint training was top-notch and highly sought after by the services. I decided to help teach the classes for newly selected admirals and generals. Most generals were promoted because they performed well in operations. They now had to shift their perspective to the strategic level and embrace skills that had played little or no role in their promotion to flag rank. I wanted to convey, in personal, concrete terms, the complexity of dealing with civilian policymakers and how their current skill set was incomplete for what lay ahead.