Call Sign Chaos

by Jim Mattis

  From the classrooms of Quantico to the training fields to the battlefields, I winnowed information to what proved most beneficial in coming to grips with war’s realities. From a leader’s perspective, intent is the starting point. “Commander’s intent” has a special meaning in the military that requires time and thought. A commander must state his relevant aim. Intent is a formal statement in which the commander puts himself or herself on the line. Intent must accomplish the mission, it has to be achievable, it must be clearly understood, and at the end of the day, it has to deliver what the unit was tasked with achieving. Your moral authority as a commander is heavily dependent on the quality of this guidance and your troops’ sense of confidence in it: the expectation that they will use their initiative, aligning subordinate actions. You must unleash initiative rather than suffocate it.

  If I were to sum up the leadership techniques I constructed on the basis of the Marine Corps’s bias for action, it would be simple: once I set the tempo, the speed I prized was always built on subordinate initiative. This governing principle drove home the underlying efforts that would make speed a reality. Speed is essential, whether in sports, business, or combat, because time is the least forgiving, least recoverable factor in any competitive situation. I learned to prize smooth execution by cohesive teams (those that could adapt swiftly to battlefield shocks) over deliberate, methodical, and synchronized efforts that I saw squelching subordinate initiative. In fact it was always subordinate initiative that got my lads out of the jams I got them into, my mistakes being my own.

  Such initiative must be specifically rewarded throughout any organization. In my chosen field, the military, this starts by mastering the art and science of war so well that we know when to part with doctrine, which serves only as a start point for decision-making. Like a jazzman with the ability to improvise, you need to know doctrine so that you can shift from a known point.

  Mastering the art and science of war also means understanding strategy and planning. Strategy is hard, unless you’re a dilettante. You must think until your head hurts. I always stress how to enlarge the competitive space to solve problems. Planning, which is simply another word for anticipatory decision-making, is equally rigorous and, in war, is a constant, never-ending process.

  Eventually reaching high rank, I made extra efforts to maintain my connection to those who made the difference in the formations that would close with and destroy our adversaries. The spiritual connection was built on my memory of what it was like for those who would step into enemy minefields or patrol the contested ground where lives were on the line. That connection was essential as I worked to balance risk and avoid gambling with their lives on the tactical and operational levels. I was less successful at persuasively arguing against strategic gambles.

  Boiled down to its essence, only battlefield harmony could summon the speed I was looking for in order to shatter the enemy. This harmony demanded clearly articulated intentions from senior levels, reinterpreted at each echelon to make it relevant to their part of the effort. With a commander’s aim clearly understood down through the ranks, synergy of effort can be constantly maintained, from the senior ranks—where it is no less needed—down to the youngest troops on the front lines and deck plates. In the framework of this book, that means from the direct or tactical level all the way to the strategic.

  I used “touchstones” such as “No better friend, no worse enemy” and “First, do no harm,” among others, leavened with history’s enduring lessons, to guide subordinates who would face situations requiring them to make instantaneous decisions on their feet. I often chose phrases from antiquity, purposely using broad themes and objectives, leaving maximum opportunity for subordinates to use their initiative and aggressiveness. Clearly stating the operation’s purpose and sparsely outlining the methods we’d used, I closed my intent by explaining our desired end state.

  But I was not just addressing their tactical thinking: I was also appealing to their spiritual side: Intangibles like will, cohesion, morale, and affection are more important than tangibles. I strove to be the opposite of the château general. By conveying my intent in writing and in person, I was out to win their coequal “ownership” of the mission: it wasn’t my mission; rather from private through general, it was our mission. I stressed to my staff that we had to win only one battle: for the hearts and minds of our subordinates. They will win all the rest—at the risk and cost of their lives. Once the intent was clearly conveyed, the mission was left in the hands of our junior officers and NCOs, and their animating spirits coached our troops to achieving my aim.

  Trust is the coin of the realm for creating the harmony, speed, and teamwork to achieve success at the lowest cost. Trusted personal relationships are the foundation for effective fighting teams, whether on the playing field, the boardroom, or the battlefield. When the spirit of your team is on the line and the stakes are high, confidence in the integrity and commitment of those around you will enable boldness and resolution; a lack of trust will see brittle, often tentative execution of even the best-laid plans. Nothing compensates for a lack of trust. Lacking trust, your unit will pay a steep price in combat.

  Yet it’s not enough to trust your people; you must be able to convey that trust in a manner that subordinates can sense. Only then can you fully garner the benefits. From mission-type orders that left subordinates with freedom of action to declining to take detailed briefs if I thought it would remove subordinate commanders’ sense of ownership over their own operations, my coaching style exhibited confidence in juniors I knew were ready to take charge. I had also found, in Tora Bora’s missed opportunity to prevent Osama bin Laden’s escape, that I had to build awareness and trust above me. This takes significant personal effort, and the information age has not made this easier or removed the need for face-to-face interaction.

  I found staff visits and daily or weekly visits—reducing reports and getting out more to see units on their turf—essential to building trust. And “hand-con,” maintaining relationships, takes time to build, and can be lost in a second—and you may not get a chance to get it back. High morale is reflected by the absence of self-pity. Resourceful leaders do not lose touch with their troops. A leader’s job is to inculcate high-spirited, amiable self-discipline. Leaders must always generate options by surrounding themselves with bright subordinates and being catalysts for new ideas.

  Command and feedback is a fundamentally different approach than imposing command and control for coordinating teams to work optimally. Critical to the command and feedback approach is the speed of information sharing and decentralizing decision-making. While having commanders physically forward with the troops is important, commanders cannot be everywhere, even while their influence must permeate the entire organization. This meant that imaging the troops in advance through potential upsets and decision points allowed them to anticipate what they must take in stride. Using “eyes” officers to supplement reporting from field commanders locked in combat, we turned out decisions faster than our adversary, permitting us to turn inside the enemy’s decision loop. When I fight an enemy, my frontline troops quickly sense enemy strengths and weaknesses. Taking immediate advantage of an enemy’s misstep is essential, and the resulting feedback allows an organization’s decisions and actions to outpace those of the enemy. But for all this, decentralized decision-making ultimately gave us the edge.

  We can decentralize decision-making and gain relative speed over the enemy, however, only if conditions are set to enable subordinate success. Where decisions are decentralized, subordinate-unit-leader discipline must be of a higher level than when decisions are made solely at senior levels. This is due to the need for aligning independent decisions in a concert of actions. The glue aligning these decisions is the commander’s clearly articulated intent, firmly setting the operation’s aim.

  The other necessary condition is the education and training of the subord
inate leaders to ensure they have the skills necessary to take intelligent initiative. Various techniques for mental imaging proved enormously useful to ensuring that my intent was widely comprehended. After all, subordinate leaders are as likely as senior officers to make bad calls if they are not properly prepared for the increased responsibility. Training to enable “brilliance in the basics” and educating junior leaders to make sense out of the unexpected (as friction, uncertainty, and ambiguity are war’s elementals and nothing ever goes according to plan) are the down payment for subordinate initiative. Only with sufficient investment can an organization expect, even demand, subordinate initiative as the price for attaining a leadership position.

  As we rise in rank, our teams are more broadly composed. Multi-service and multinational teams are the norm in our current reality. As organizational complexity grows, I’ve found that the same leadership principles endure for creating the best teams. Clarity of intent actually becomes more critical when the formative experiences of those on your team are dissimilar. When national caveats reduce (or even remove) command authority over allied nations’ militaries sharing the battlefield, persuasive commander’s intent and a willingness to adapt one’s plans are critical to the success of the mission, taking full advantage of what other nations can do instead of focusing on what they cannot.

  We sometimes find that we’ve grown organizations with echelons that have outlived their value. Allowing bad processes to stump good people is intolerable. When the utility of certain staff or command echelons is lacking, they slow down decisions and can paralyze execution, allowing the adversary to dance around the methodical, process-driven approach. Skip-echelon will generally work to restore the speed of decisions and agility; if not, removing entire organizations can clear the pipes. By employing skip-echelon when a staff function did not add value and displaying only critical data, we can achieve alignment and transparency with less internal friction. While I could never reduce internal friction to zero, I enjoyed the challenge of reducing it to the greatest degree possible.

  While processes are boring to examine, leaders must know their own well enough that they can master them and not be mastered, even derailed, by them. In competitive situations, a faster operating tempo than your adversary’s is a distinct asset. A smoothly operating team can more swiftly move through the observe/orient/decide/act loop, multiplying the effectiveness of its numbers. Left untouched, processes imposed by unneeded echelons will marginalize subordinate audacity.

  Robust feedback loops enabled our operations, but we could continue operating even if feedback was interrupted: our momentum was directed onward by the commander’s intent in place of “synchronization” matrixes, which I found slowed operations once we met the enemy and the usual emergencies cropped up. All hands had to be thinking all the time: What do I know? Who needs to know? Have I told them? Additionally, by reducing the size of headquarters staffs, we reduced demands for information flow from subordinate units, which could then principally focus on the enemy rather than answering higher headquarters’ queries.

  In the same spirit, any competitive organization must nurture its maverick thinkers. You can’t wash them out of your outfit if you want to avoid being surprised by your competition. Without mavericks, we are more likely to find ourselves at the same time dominant and irrelevant, as the enemy steals a march on us. Further, calculated risk taking is elemental to staying at the top of our competitive game. Risk aversion will damage the long-term health, even survival, of the organization, because it will undercut disciplined but unregimented thinking. Because maverick thinkers are so important to an organization’s adaptability, high-ranking leaders need to be assigned the job of guiding and even protecting them, much as one would do for any endangered species.

  Leaders at all ranks, but especially at high ranks, must keep in their inner circle people who will unhesitatingly point out when a leader’s personal behavior or decisions are not appropriate. In its own way, this too is part of command and feedback, for none of us are infallible. Further, the significant authority granted to military officers requires officers to practice command over themselves, and that is enhanced by maintaining a counterbalance to the obedience required to conduct military operations in high-stress environments. As a full general commanding NATO’s transformation efforts, I had a Hellenic Navy commander who kept me on the straight and narrow. At U.S. Central Command with hundreds of thousands of troops assigned to me, I had in my command group a U.S. Army Ranger sergeant major and a U.S. Navy admiral who didn’t give a damn what I thought of them: if they thought that I had made a bad call, with door closed they would quickly make their point loud and clear. I trusted them to do this, and they never let me down. Knowing that my own approach to decisions was not foolproof, they saved me on more instances than I can recall from walking into minefields of my own making.

  THE NEED FOR ALLIES

  I’ve had the privilege to fight for our country in many places. Not once did I fight in a solely American formation. I fought repeatedly alongside allies and partners. It should be a source of pride for all Americans that if we have an “empire,” it has been an empire of ideas and ideals sufficient to draw many like-minded nations to our side. The World War II generation is referred to as our Greatest Generation because they defeated fascism, and had it seared into them that while we may not like everything that happens beyond our borders, our freedom is inextricably tied to the global situation. They then acted to secure a better peace.

  History is determined by choices made. America’s record is exceptional, despite some notable lapses. After World War II, instead of turning isolationist as we had following World War I, we facilitated the reintegration of Germany and Japan into the community of nations. In a remarkable display of bipartisanship, Democrats and Republicans pulled together for America to invest, via the Marshall Plan, in the economic resurgence of an impoverished Western Europe. We stabilized the international financial system. We entered the North Atlantic Treaty, pledging to defend our European allies against the Soviet threat, even at the risk of a hundred million dead Americans in a nuclear war. The growth in global wealth and the freedoms enjoyed by so many since 1945 were the direct results of America’s willingness to lead. You have to go a long way to find a country more willing to admit its mistakes, listen to its friends, and correct its ways.

  History is compelling. Nations with allies thrive, and those without wither. Alone, America cannot provide protection for our people and our economy. At this time, we can see storm clouds gathering. By drawing like-minded nations into trusted networks and promoting a climate of victory that bolsters allied morale, we can best promote the values we hold dear and protect our nation at the lowest cost. A polemicist’s role is not sufficient for a leader; strategic acumen must incorporate a fundamental respect for other nations that have stood with us when trouble loomed. In our past, America has offered the example of coming together to prevent or win wars. Returning to a strategic stance that includes the interests of as many nations as we can make common cause with, we can better deal with this imperfect world we occupy together. Absent this, we will occupy an increasingly lonely position, one that puts us at increasing risk in a world that as George Shultz said, is “awash in change.”

  It never dawned on me that I would serve again in a government post after retiring from active duty. But the phone call came; I went to Bedminster and then in front of the Senate. On a Saturday morning in late January 2017, I walked into the Secretary of Defense’s office, which I had first entered as a colonel on staff twenty years earlier. Using every skill I had learned during my decades as a Marine, I did as well as I could for as long as I could. Over the 712 days I served as Secretary, we drafted the first defense strategy in a decade, gained bipartisan support for a budget to implement that strategy, adopted unpredictable deployment schedules to confuse our adversaries, accelerated the destruction of ISIS’s geographic caliphate, and w
orked to reassure allies of our steadfast support.

  The other occupant of that office who’d required a waiver, as I did, for insufficient time out of uniform was General George C. Marshall. “Problems which bear directly on the future of our civilization cannot be disposed of by general talk or vague formulae—by what Lincoln called ‘pernicious abstractions,’ ” he stated. “They require concrete solutions for definite and extremely complicated questions.” When my concrete solutions and strategic advice, especially keeping faith with allies, no longer resonated, it was time to resign, despite the limitless joy I felt serving alongside our troops in defense of our Constitution.

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  UNLIKE IN THE PAST, where we were unified and drew in allies, currently our own commons seems to be breaking apart. What concerns me most as a military man, coming out of a diverse yet unified culture, is not our external adversaries; instead, it is our internal divisiveness. We are dividing into hostile tribes cheering against each other, fueled by emotion and a mutual disdain that jeopardizes our future, instead of rediscovering our common ground and finding solutions. At Gettysburg, Lincoln spoke of our nation having a new birth of freedom. Today’s disruptive civic climate would confound and sadden the Great Emancipator.