by Jim Mattis
My deputy at CENTCOM, Vice Admiral Bob Harward, had grown up in Iran and was fluent in Farsi. We both considered the Iranian theocracy to be cunning and hostile—a malign force that exported mayhem and took advantage of any turmoil. Assad, with his Baathist regime in Syria, was Iran’s sole ally in the Middle East. Iranian cargo aircraft routinely flew across Iraqi airspace to land at Damascus. From there, supplies were shipped overland into Lebanon, where the Iran-backed Hezbollah militia maintained a state of war against Israel. For decades, Iran was the principal state sponsor of terrorism in the Middle East, and between 2004 and 2009 the regime’s Republican Guards sent assassination teams into Iraq and provided the explosive devices that killed or wounded more than six hundred American troops. The regime shipped weapons and explosives to all corners of the region—Bahrain, Yemen, Gaza, Saudi Arabia, and beyond. They renamed a Tehran street in honor of the man who assassinated Egyptian President Sadat.
* * *
—
On the evening of October 11, 2011, the duty officer at my headquarters in Tampa informed me that the Attorney General and the Director of the FBI had just held a press conference. They announced the arrest of two Iranians who were plotting to bomb the Cafe Milano, an upscale restaurant in Washington, D.C. They intended to assassinate the ambassador from Saudi Arabia, who would be dining there among the hundreds of American and foreign citizens who crowd Georgetown every night.
Attorney General Eric Holder said the bombing plot was “directed and approved by elements of the Iranian government and, specifically, senior members of the Qods Force.” The Qods were the Special Operations Force of the Revolutionary Guards, reporting to the top of the Iranian government. I saw the intelligence: we had recorded Tehran’s approval of the operation. I was puzzled why CENTCOM hadn’t been informed beforehand. For America, this wasn’t solely a local law enforcement matter; Iran had intended to commit an act of war. Had the bomb gone off, those in the restaurant and on the street would have been ripped apart, blood rushing down sewer drains. It would have been the worst attack on us since 9/11. I sensed that only Iran’s impression of America’s impotence could have led them to risk such an act within a couple of miles of the White House. Ambassadors are men and women of peace, and even nations at war have traditionally protected them. Absent one fundamental mistake—the terrorists had engaged an undercover DEA agent in an attempt to smuggle the bomb—the Iranians would have pulled off this devastating attack. Had that bomb exploded, it would have changed history.
I believed we had to respond forcefully. My military options would raise the cost for this attack beyond anything the mullahs and the Qods generals could pay. First, though, the President had to go before the American people and forcefully lay out the enormous savagery of the intended attack. The American public—and the global public—had to understand the gravity of the plot.
In March 1917, President Wilson received, via British intelligence, a copy of a telegram sent by German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmermann to the president of Mexico. It proposed a wartime alliance between their two countries against the United States, dangling to Mexico the offer of seizing parts of Texas and California. Outraged, Wilson publicized the telegram to alert and mobilize the public. Congress responded by arming U.S. merchant ships against German submarines. Public sentiment turned decisively against Germany. In my judgment, the Zimmermann Telegram provided a clear precedent.
I proposed to the Pentagon that we reprise the Zimmermann moment. As President Wilson had done, so too should President Obama go before the American public, lay out the evidence, denounce the Iranian regime, and hold it to account.
America had done this before. In 1988, a U.S. Navy frigate struck a mine in the Persian Gulf. The evidence pointed to Iran. There were no fatalities, but Admiral William Crowe, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, argued for retaliating by sinking an Iranian warship. They had gone too far. He wrote, “We have to let Tehran know that we are willing to exact a serious price.” A week later, we bombed and destroyed three Iranian oil platforms after alerting the crews to evacuate. Iran, cowed, halted its misbehavior for a time.
But Washington was not interested in my Zimmermann analogy. We treated an act of war as a law enforcement violation, jailing the low-level courier. Several months later, I was in Tampa conducting CENTCOM’s annual war game. This was the only time each year that staff members from the Pentagon, State, and the White House participated. A few days later, The Washington Post reported about the war game. The story was picked up, and additional particulars about the game were published in several newspapers. I was chastised, on the assumption that CENTCOM had leaked the war game. Call me crazy, but if the only time our planning leaked was when we included Washington, I’d bet my paycheck the leak came from the banks of the Potomac River. At CENTCOM, we stayed loyal and kept our mouths shut.
This accusation of a leak came on top of my urging that we expose Iran with a Zimmermann moment and did not raise my popularity inside the White House. But at CENTCOM, I had to deal with an Iran that continued to provoke. In June 2012, Iranian gunboats captured a British Royal Navy small craft. Iranian leaders struck a bellicose tone. Rear Admiral Ali Fadavi of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps boasted, “We determine the rules of military conflict in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz.” That was nonsense. The strait is globally recognized as international waters. Forty percent of the globally traded oil is shipped through those straits. If that oil was taken off the market, our economy would suffer dramatically and immediately.
The aggressive actions and cavalier remarks of the Iranian military had my full attention. You’re not the sentinel for your unit if you don’t react to warning signals as clear as that one. I notified the Pentagon that I intended to hold an international naval mine-clearing exercise in the Gulf.
My Fifth Fleet commander invited other like-minded nations to join in the exercise. I anticipated that a half dozen navies might participate. Instead, twenty-nine nations came on board. Every continent except Antarctica was represented. Iran stayed well clear of the exercise. For years afterward there was no more talk out of Tehran about mining international sea lanes. This was a good example of a military action supporting our foreign policy and the economic interests of our allies. Only one navy in the world, the U.S. Fifth Fleet, forward deployed in the region, had both the capability and the trust of so many nations to draw together such an international response.
A few months later, the Iranian regime tested us in a different space. An Iranian fighter aircraft attacked an American drone in international airspace over the Gulf. The pilot was a terrible shot, missing on repeated tries captured on the drone’s video. I proposed to Washington that we launch another drone on the same track, position a few F-18 aircraft out of sight, and shoot down the Iranian aircraft if it attacked the drone. The White House refused to grant permission.
“I could sense Mattis did not want to back down,” Secretary Panetta later wrote in his memoir, “and that the White House was wary of his resolve. As I knew already, the White House didn’t fully trust Mattis, regarding him as too eager for a military confrontation with Iran.”
I wanted calculated actions, to restrain the regime so it couldn’t thrust us into a war. If you allow yourself to be goaded and trifled with, one of two things will happen: eventually a harder, larger fight will explode, or you will get moved out of the neighborhood.
Secretary Panetta understood this point, but it took all his persuasive power to eventually convince the White House to respond. I sent another drone into international airspace—escorted by two of our fighters. The Iranian aircraft stayed on the ground. Yet once again the Iranians had not been held to account, and I anticipated that they would feel emboldened to challenge us more in the future.
The radical Iranian regime’s leaders meant it when they led chants of “death to America” and proclaimed that Israel must be wiped out. Iran’s t
errorist and belligerent activities were ongoing every day. In my view, we had to hold Iran to account and strike back when attacked. But there was a reason for the administration’s restraint. The administration was secretly negotiating with Iran, although I was not privy to the details at the time. What emerged was that if Iran agreed to time-phased restrictions on its nuclear program, Europe and America would lift their sanctions. Eventually that deal was publicly ratified, but without the advice and consent of the Senate. In my military judgment, America had undertaken a poorly calculated, long-shot gamble. At the same time, the administration was lecturing our Arab friends that they had to accommodate Iran as if it were a moderate neighbor in the region and not an enemy committed to their destruction. As long as its leaders consider Iran less a nation-state than a revolutionary cause, Iran will remain a terrorist threat potentially more dangerous than Al Qaeda or ISIS.
My traction inside the White House was eroding. It was no secret in Washington that the White House was wary of my command at CENTCOM and increasingly distrusted me. While I fully endorse civilian control of the military, I would not surrender my independent judgment. In 2010, I argued strongly against pulling all our troops out of Iraq. In 2011, I urged retaliation against Iran for plotting to blow up a restaurant in our nation’s capital. In 2012, I argued for retaining a small but capable contingent of troops in Afghanistan. Each step along the way, I argued for political clarity and offered options that gave the Commander in Chief a rheostat he could dial up or down to protect our nation. While I had the right to be heard on military matters, my judgment was only advice, to be accepted or ignored. I obeyed without mental reservation our elected Commander in Chief and carried out every order to the best of my ability.
In December 2012, I received an unauthorized phone call telling me that in an hour, the Pentagon would be announcing my relief. I was leaving a region aflame and in disarray. The lack of an integrated regional strategy had left us adrift, and our friends confused. We were offering no leadership or direction. I left my post deeply disturbed that we had shaken our friends’ confidence and created vacuums that our adversaries would exploit.
* * *
—
I was disappointed and frustrated that policymakers all too often failed to deliver clear direction. And lacking a defined mission statement, I frequently didn’t know what I was expected to accomplish. As American naval strategist Alfred Mahan wrote, “If the strategy be wrong, the skill of the general on the battlefield, the valor of the soldier, the brilliancy of victory, however otherwise decisive, fail of their effect.”
Under our form of government, the President is our Commander in Chief and must be the sentinel for our nation’s future generations. This calls for a strategy both embraced by the American people and inclusive of our allies. History is not some great, inanimate river determining its own unchangeable course down the centuries. As President Truman, the great builder of the post–World War II order, put it, “Men make history; history doesn’t make the man.”
We’ve fought wars that we should have avoided, and half-heartedly engaged in wars that needed to be won. But we can recover our strategic footing, if we don’t squander opportunities to strengthen the international order that is in the best interest of all nations seeking peace and stability on the world stage. America has more tools than its military and CIA to draw upon. In league with our allies, our economic strengths and our use of traditional diplomatic practices can reduce the militarization of our foreign policy. Unilateralism will not work, and we must craft an integrated, multidimensional strategy that incorporates America’s deepest wells of power.
Policies can change based on political goals established by our elected leaders. Yet those goals must remain realistic and coherent if they are to enable an achievable strategy. Any war, even a war of limited political ends, must be fully resourced for its mission. Acting strategically requires that political leaders make clear what they will stand for and what they will not stand for. We must mean what we say, to both allies and foes: no more false threats or failing to live up to our word. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow, the decision of going to war is too great a matter to stumble into or to half-step toward once the decision is taken.
LETHALITY AS THE METRIC
History presents many examples of militaries that forgot that their purpose was to fight and win. So long as we live in an imperfect world, one containing enemies of democracy, we will need a military strictly committed to combat-effectiveness. Our liberal democracy must be protected by a bodyguard of lethal warriors, organized, trained, and equipped to dominate in battle.
The military is all about teamwork. Everyone enters the military at junior rank and rises according to merit. Our legacy of teamwork is rich in precedents. In 1804, black and white men and a Native American woman all voted as equals on the Army’s long-range reconnaissance patrol known as the Lewis and Clark expedition. They had reached the headwaters of the Columbia River, north of my hometown in Washington, and had to decide whether to risk crossing against a strong current. They were all literally in the same boats together, so they worked as a team for their common survival.
For me, direct leadership was all about preparing my troops to win in close-quarters combat. When you go into battle, you enter a different world. I set out to engrain in every grunt an aggressive spirit and confidence in winning. “Whatever we learn to do, we learn by actually doing it,” Aristotle wrote. “People come to be builders, for instance, by building, and harp players, by playing the harp. In the same way, by doing just acts we come to be just. By doing self-controlled acts, we come to be self-controlled, and by doing brave acts, we become brave.” Courage as an act of self-discipline can be infused by coaching a team until every member acquires the skills to have and to share confidence. Group spirit binds warriors together in a necessary way that keeps them distinct from the civilian society they are sworn to protect.
* * *
—
The need for lethality must be the measuring stick against which we evaluate the efficacy of our military. By aligning the entire military enterprise—recruiting, training, educating, equipping, and promoting—to the goal of compounding lethality, we best deter adversaries or, if conflict occurs, win at lowest cost to our troops’ lives. The next bullet doesn’t care who it strikes, yet troops charge onto battlefields. When I meet with Gold Star families, I feel that all the fallen were my sons and daughters. They deserve more than “Thank you for your service.”
Politicians should not arbitrarily change how the services are organized to fight. We no longer use conscription, so our volunteers who sign a blank check payable with their lives must be given every opportunity to return home. Those who choose to not serve, and especially those in civilian oversight roles, must show reserve in directing social changes inside our military. They need to listen to those senior officers and NCOs who know how to compose warfighting organizations. Our military exists to deter wars and to win when we fight. We are not a petri dish for social experiments. No one is exempt from studying warfighting and lethality as the dominant metric, and nothing that decreases the lethality of our forces should be forced on a military that will go into harm’s way.
I have seen no case where weakness promotes the chance for peace. A Kipling passage comes to mind about a peace-seeking man (the lama) and an old soldier.
“It is not a good fancy,” said the lama. “What profit to kill men?”
“Very little—as I know,” [the old soldier replied,] “but if evil men were not now and then slain it would not be a good world for weaponless dreamers.”
THE ART OF LEADING
My warfighting style simply represents the Marine Corps way of war. It stems from a Corps that cannot stomach defeat, even when landed on hostile shores with the enemy to the front and the ocean at its back. It’s a naval force limited in its fighting philosophy to what the ships can carry, so it cannot r
ely on overwhelming numbers or heavy equipment. It’s a force that integrates skill, courage, cunning, and initiative into its own form of maneuver warfare, maneuver that takes form in the intellectual, physical, and spiritual realms.
It’s well known among Marines that our greatest honor is fighting alongside our fellow sailors and Marines. I know that our soldiers, airmen, and Coast Guardsmen feel the same. No Marine is ever alone—he carries with him the spirit passed down from generations before him. Group spirit—that electric force field of emotion—infuses and binds warriors together. If we’re not on the front line, then we’re supporting the nineteen-year-old infantryman who is. The Corps recognizes that its success comes ultimately from those on the leading edge. This was the reason I felt misgivings upon each promotion. While I could take some satisfaction that I’d met the standard of promotion, I believed I could not do my job well if I lost touch with those on the front lines who carried out orders at the point of danger.
To turn this broader Marine philosophy of fighting into my own authentic leadership style, I drew upon historical influences and the Vietnam veterans whose experiences imparted a healthy dose of reality. I had been shaped and sharpened by the rough whetstone of those veterans, mentored by sergeants and captains who had slogged through rice paddies and jungles, fighting a tough enemy every foot of the way. I learned then and I believe now that everyone needs a mentor or to be a mentor—and that no one needs a tyrant. At the same time, there’s no substitute for constant study to master one’s craft. Living in history builds your own shock absorber, because you’ll learn that there are lots of old solutions to new problems. If you haven’t read hundreds of books, learning from others who went before you, you are functionally illiterate—you can’t coach and you can’t lead. History lights the often dark path ahead; even if it’s a dim light, it’s better than none. If you can’t be additive as a leader, you’re just like a potted plant in the corner of a hotel lobby: you look pretty, but you’re not adding substance to the organization’s mission.