No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy

by Jim Proser

  * * *

  In Twentynine Palms, California, forty-one-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Jim Mattis squares away the men and equipment of the 1/7 who have just returned from war. Readiness exercises are routinely scheduled and conducted by the combat veterans of Desert Storm to set the lessons of Kuwait in muscle memory for new Marines coming into the unit. Maneuver warfare—shoot and scoot—is now the operating principle in training that the vets drill into the new men recruited into the 1/7. The pace is relaxed and steady, and motivation remains high. No one believes they are going to avoid another fight for very long. Many feel they should have gone all the way to Baghdad and taken out Saddam while they had the chance. Few doubt that when they are called upon again, they will be headed back to the Middle East.

  At his headquarters desk, Mattis chips away at the mountain of post-deployment paperwork. His focus on “brilliance in the basics” in the field is now applied to his office work. He devours post-operation literature on lessons learned in Desert Storm in articles like “The Corps’ Potable Water Capability—Assessing the Corps’ Manufacture and Provision of Potable Water in Middle Eastern Deserts” in the Marine Corps Gazette and “Options in the Middle East—A Presentation of Policy Options Available to the US and Allied Countries, and to Iraq, in the Middle East Crisis” from the US Naval Institute’s Proceedings.

  It is well above his current pay grade to be considering policy options, but completely within his grasp. He has just helped create history, firsthand, on the ground. From his devoted study of the subject, he knows that nothing about the Kuwait campaign, other than the new weapons, would surprise previous campaigners, from Alexander to T. E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia. With time now to reflect on what just happened and what it predicts, he likely knows he has something to say about it, something important to contribute.

  He maintains a daily ritual of interacting face-to-face with the men of the 1/7, infusing them with his quiet energy and keeping their motivation high. But at the end of each day, the empty, endless Sonora desert of California is there to remind him that he is stuck in a remote outpost, far away from where decisions are being made.

  At forty-one, he has put in his twenty years with the Corps. He has proven himself in combat as a fierce and effective commander. He is the warrior he sought to become. He could walk away now and enjoy the hell out of a life safely beyond the Rocky Mountains, fishing on the Yakima River, working in the food bank in his hometown, and entertaining the local ladies. But it’s not to be. America’s new enemies in the Middle East are well known for maintaining blood vendettas over centuries. They are working even now, patiently and diligently, to avenge their recent defeats. Mattis seems to understand this and decides that his next years will not be spent entertaining women or fishing on the Yakima. Instead he will stand watch as America’s gathering enemies prepare for battle. When the order comes, America’s enemies will again become his enemies. And again they will not succeed, not on his watch. He applies for a position at Marine headquarters in Virginia, in the Enlisted Assignments Branch.

  May 1991—Marine Headquarters—Quantico, Virginia

  Mattis reports for duty as assistant head of the Marine Corps Enlisted Assignments Branch. He has his foot in the door of the nerve center of the Marine Corps, where the big decisions are made. His experience as an effective recruitment officer in Portland makes him the ideal candidate for the job. In reviewing his application for the position, heads of the enlistment branch no doubt have pulled his concept of command paper about the Portland recruiting post from his service file. In his concept of command, the then thirty-three-year-old Mattis wrote:

  My philosophy of command has several basic assumptions. First, all Marines want to do the job. Second, mission accomplishment in the Marine Corps requires the combined efforts of all hands. Last, I assume that all Marines can be trusted. While there may be individuals in my command who do not live up to my assumptions, the tone of my command group will be in step with my assumptions. Marines who fail to live up to my expectations will be dealt with directly, and on an individual basis, but the character of my command will not be affected by those who fail.

  My responsibilities as commanding officer will be to set the tone for the station, imparting the necessary sense of urgency while remaining positive at all times. This will best be accomplished by ensuring my personal example is above reproach, my performance is competent, and exceeds the standards I set for subordinates. It is also my responsibility to define the mission in such a manner that each Marine knows what part of the mission is his individual responsibility.

  After two pages of precise goal-setting and anticipated challenges, Mattis concludes:

  Recruiting is a vibrant, people-oriented assignment. The ultimate goal I have is to know that all Marines assigned to me in stations from Pocatello, Idaho to Coos Bay, Oregon to Vancouver, Washington are working in the best interests of our Corps, and, while giving 100 per cent effort in accomplishing their mission, do nothing to bring discredit on the Corps.2

  Within a year, Mattis will be head of the Marine Corps Enlisted Assignments Branch at headquarters, with a secure career track far from the torments of the battlefield.

  1218 Hours—23 February 1993

  Perhaps just as Lieutenant Colonel Mattis is thinking about what to have for lunch, his secure career track gets derailed. The battlefield has followed him home. A high explosive truck bomb has ripped through the underground parking garage of the World Trade Center in New York City. Six are dead, thousands injured, and $1 billion in damage done. Osama hoped it would be worse. With his knowledge of construction, he thought the Twin Towers would topple, or at least be made unstable and uninhabitable, a crippling blow to the US economy. The Americans would retreat within their borders and leave his Saudi king and the Jewish stone in his shoe, Israel, unprotected and vulnerable.

  Osama stays hidden, issuing a statement through proxies proclaiming a new Islamic army and promising more attacks if the United States does not leave the Middle East and abandon Israel. Mattis is suddenly in a beehive of speculation. Immediately thoughts at headquarters turn to Saddam, but within days the Blind Sheik, Omar Abdel-Rahman, is caught, and a different picture emerges. The sheik is a genuine Muslim leader, not a calculating poseur like Saddam. There is a genuine Islamic army out there somewhere. Suddenly Mattis’s job, like that of every person in uniform, is to figure out who, exactly, has declared war on the United States, and where they are.

  While Mattis is working overtime to understand the levers of power at headquarters, his 1/7 Marines ship out for Operation Restore Hope to Mogadishu, Somalia. They live in the Mogadishu Stadium Complex and conduct peacekeeping operations in the city and surrounding cities, patrolling the same areas where Army, Air Force, and Navy special operators will soon fight and lose the First Battle of Mogadishu to Muslim militiamen, a battle that will be dramatized in the movie Black Hawk Down.

  23 April 1993

  The 1/7 returns to Twentynine Palms from Somalia. Perhaps spurred on by the stories his friends bring back and the recent World Trade Center attack, Mattis makes his move to engage in military foreign policy conversations at the highest levels. He leaves the Enlisted Assignments Branch and enrolls in the National War College to pursue his second master’s degree, this one in international security affairs.

  As Mattis pursues his studies in quiet, bucolic Virginia, Somalia continues to slide deeper into murderous chaos under militant Muslim control. At the same moment in Europe, Yugoslavia suddenly explodes into a genocidal frenzy, much of it against Muslims. In news reporting it is known as the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina, or the Bosnian War. In military detail, it is actually ten small wars, each deadlier and more barbaric than the last. Eventually they escalate into the ethnic cleansing campaign of the Serbian Christians against the Bosnian Muslims. Before American air power and diplomacy bring the campaign to an end, 140,000 people will be killed. Current international policy becomes the urgent topic at the
National War College, and Mattis is in the middle of the discussion.

  In his paper The Macedonian Conundrum, published by the National War College that year, Army General Lawrence Adair writes, “The outbreak of war in the former Yugoslavia has presented the United States with a glaring denunciation of its ineffectual efforts to espouse a comprehensive policy towards this complex region. Foreign policy leaders have been increasingly reactive to shocking developments in the Balkans and seem especially impotent to promote even the most modest calls for stability.”3 Clearly Adair feels there is a pressing need for new American military strategy and strategists. He continues, “It is essential that the present hostilities not migrate south, endangering not only Greece and Turkey, but perhaps inviting the threat of Islamic extremists of the Middle East as well.”4

  But it is already too late to avoid the threat of Islamic extremists. To Osama and Saddam, the Muslim blood spilled in Bosnia is an invigorating tonic. The Crusades have returned, but the crusaders aren’t coming for the Holy Grail: they are coming for the Holy Land itself, and the oil underneath it. Across the economically depressed and culturally isolated Middle East, religious jihadis and economic soldiers of fortune are recruited by the thousands.

  Mattis’s moves from battalion commander to headquarters staff to student of international defense policy have put him squarely in fortune’s favor. While in his studies at the National War College, he is promoted from lieutenant colonel to colonel. The number of unforeseen regional conflicts in Europe and the Middle East make finding experienced new leaders like Mattis urgent. He is an engaging young man, full of incisive ideas grounded in an encyclopedic understanding of history. He has an easygoing, confident manner. His classwork is well regarded, garnering attention from his influential instructors and guest lecturers. Good fortune ushers his writings and reputation into the halls of power in nearby Washington, DC.

  Graduating with his master’s degree in international security affairs, Mattis enjoys a reunion with his old outfit, but now as its regimental commander. He now commands the three battalions of the Seventh Marine Regiment, including its first battalion, the 1/7. The regiment’s mission is to be ready on forty-eight hours’ notice to go anywhere in the world and hit the ground fighting. Mattis steps up an already rigorous training schedule, alternating between desert and amphibious exercises on the sand dunes of Twentynine Palms and the beaches of Camp Pendleton in Oceanside, California.

  But at the end of each training day, the endless, parched Sonora desert or dusty hills of Camp Pendleton offer Mattis only solitude. He is mostly out of the loop of policy discussions back east. As regimental commander he is now desk-bound, limited to talking on the phone with headquarters about his regiment’s day-to-day operations. The nearby desert town of Joshua Tree, population 7,414, offers cold beer and little else. He reads, he trains, he waits for orders. After two years of waiting by the phone, it finally rings with orders for Mattis himself to report to the Pentagon. The secretary of defense, William Perry, wants to speak with him.

  Just as Mattis was graduating from the National War College, Perry, along with coauthors Ashton Carter and John Steinbruner, published A New Concept for Cooperative Security, laying out America’s unique position in the post–Desert Storm world. In this highest of high-level policy papers, Perry calls for new thinking about America’s defenses, just as Adair did in The Macedonian Conundrum during Mattis’s previous time at the college. “For US security policy in particular, the conceptual crisis is acute,” Perry suggests. “The USSR is gone; Iraq’s military machine is defeated. The absence of immediate threat is welcome, but also disorienting. Countering threats and deterring through readiness are the traditional bases for defense planning. Yet in both conventional and nuclear realms, today’s defense policy problems are not anchored in immediate threat.”5 He goes on to indicate how Mattis’s on-the-ground experience and grasp of military history may have attracted Perry to the “lucky” Marine colonel:

  In the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War, the United States is generally conceded to possess a power projection capability, based on the reconnaissance strike complex [the ability to see and fire on targets hidden and beyond conventional ranges] that no other military establishment can match, not without also matching the lengthy and intense investment that created it.

  For more than a decade to come, therefore, no other military establishment will be able to contemplate any major offensive without acknowledging that the United States is capable of decisive countermeasures. That inevitability makes the United States, in the estimation of most countries, the ultimate answer to acts of aggression; for some it also makes the United States a potential problem.6

  Obviously, Perry is thinking of the vanished Russian threat, similar to Mattis’s concern years before in his first student paper at the Command and Staff College. Perhaps this was another point of agreement that brought Mattis to Perry’s attention.

  Unfortunately for America, Perry had little concern about the danger rising in the Middle East that had just hit the United States at the World Trade Center. Asymmetrical warfare from private Islamic militias was not a concern for top-level planners in the Pentagon yet. In Saudi Arabia, Osama bin Laden’s repeated threats against the kingdom and its American allies were downplayed. Defense minister Prince Sultan bin Abd al-Aziz al-Saud called the small attacks carried out by Osama’s jihadis the previous year as “boyish,” and stated that “the Saudi Kingdom is not influenced by threats.”7

  For the next two years, Mattis learns the job of secretary of defense at Perry’s elbow. As Perry’s executive secretary, he helps him prepare for policy battles with Bill Clinton’s White House, funding battles with the 104th Congress, political intrigues in Washington, and the inertia of a bloated defense bureaucracy that is the nation’s largest employer. Every week the department meets a payroll of 1.7 million active duty service members and 1.1 million civilian employees. Toward the end of Perry’s tenure, while America is looking the other way, Osama’s dismissed jihadis strike.

  2220 Hours—25 June 1996—al-Khobar, Saudi Arabia

  An enormous bomb concealed in a diesel-fuel truck explodes at the perimeter of the King Abdel Aziz airbase near Dhahran. The blast is so powerful it is felt twenty miles away in the country of Bahrain. It kills nineteen US Air Force pilots and mechanics whose mission it was to enforce Operation Southern Watch, the no-fly zone in southern Iraq, as they sleep in their beds. It injures another four hundred people in and around the airbase’s tower.

  Again, Osama stays hidden, letting the Saudis blame Iran and Hezbollah for his handiwork. Journalist Abdel Bari Atwan writes in The Secret History of Al Qaeda:

  In May 1996 Bin Laden and his entourage moved from Sudan to Afghanistan. As if to make the point that they might have been chased out of Sudan by Saudi Arabia and the US [but] they were not leaving with their tails between their legs, al Qaeda struck again: The June bombing of Khobar Towers. The Saudi authorities were at pains to implicate Shi’a militants backed by Iran in this attack, since the embarrassing truth that they had their very own homegrown militancy problem was inadmissible; they did not want to give the impression that there was domestic opposition to the deployment of US troops on Saudi soil.8

  The pursuit of the Khobar bombers strains the battle-tested friendship of the United States and Saudis. Suspicion that the Saudis have a rat in their house grows in the United States.

  * * *

  William Perry leaves shortly after the reelection of Bill Clinton for a second term, and in the midst of the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal. He is replaced by Maine senator William Cohen. Mattis stays on through the transition period at Defense, and then flees Washington for Marine headquarters in Quantico, Virginia. Fast-tracked now as an up-and-coming policy wonk and operations whiz who is an adept player in the political big leagues, he is assigned as director of Manpower Plans and Policy division and, on October 1, 1997, promoted to Brigadier General.9

  For the first time, Mattis control
s a significant lever of power. He reports on and recommends the number of Marines recruited, trained, and deployed and has a seat at the table for many major policy decisions. He cuts staff in his division and instills a high-energy, high-efficiency work tempo that creates order by its momentum. To the amusement and admiration of his colleagues, Mattis rejects the privileges of power. He makes his own coffee, carries his own bags—if traveling overnight, a standard-issue green canvas sea bag—and largely handles his own filing and office work. His style is what Pentagon reporters call “unaffected.”

  Down the road at the White House, Bill Clinton is succeeded by President George W. Bush. Cohen is out at Defense, and Donald Rumsfeld and Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz are in.

  Temperamentally, Secretary Rumsfeld is like Mattis. They both work fast and like things lean and efficient. Bloated staffs, gone. Extra paperwork, gone. Long meetings, gone. Rumsfeld gets into the office early and works at a stand-up desk, handwriting notes at a furious pace, often late into the night. He attacks the Pentagon bloat, cutting over a hundred thousand civilian staff jobs and saving the department hundreds of millions of dollars a year. He is aggressive, combative, and unapologetic. Suddenly, the tone in the secretary of defense’s office and in the George W. Bush White House is once again on Mattis’s wavelength.