by Jim Proser
The meeting is tense. President Bush is demanding a quick, unequivocal answer from Musharraf. After an hour, there is little progress. Musharraf wavers in his commitment to the United States, so Chamberlin resorts to a dramatic bit of negotiation technique called “the takeaway.” Sitting familiarly close to him like the friend she has become, she half turns away and looks down, seemingly troubled. Musharraf asks, “What’s wrong, Wendy?”
She answers with a heavy heart, “Frankly, General Musharraf, you are not giving me the answer I need to give my president.” Musharraf quickly weighs his options and makes his decision. He states firmly, “We’ll support you unstintingly.”
A few days later, on September 15, President Bush assembles his war cabinet at Camp David in Maryland. CIA director George Tenet presents a multidimensional plan, including soliciting support from a dozen tribal leaders in southern Afghanistan who oppose the Taliban, al-Qaeda’s hosts in the region. He also proposes attacking their financial resources, tracking down their sympathizers in the United States, and conducting covert operations to detain al-Qaeda operatives.
But when the Joint Chiefs present options developed by Franks and the Central Command planners, Bush finds their suggestions insufficient. Secretary Rumsfeld agrees, even calling the options outdated. He argues for unconventional special operations forces. He scolds the Chiefs and Franks, “Get a group functioning fast. Lift out of the conventional mind-set. This is chess, not checkers. We must be thinking beyond the first move.”
Bush, Rumsfeld, and Mattis all see the problem of this new asymmetrical warfare the same way. The old ways of fighting a war are not going to work in Afghanistan. Brute force, as the Soviets and all those who came before them learned, will not work in the Graveyard of Empires. This is going to be a thinking man’s war. This “new” type of war at the crossroads of history plays to Mattis’s particular strength, as a lifelong scholar of warfare. He already knows from his studies that there is nothing truly new about fighting in Afghanistan that hasn’t already been learned by past invaders like Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, various Persian empires, the British Empire, the Sikh Empire, and recently the Soviet Union. The challenge is getting the twentieth-century Marine Corps up to speed for this ancient challenge.
* * *
On 9/11 the Marine Corps has only a tan double-wide trailer up on cinder blocks in the parking lot in back of General Tommy Franks’s imposing Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Florida. Colonel John A. Tempone is the Marine commander in charge. He corresponds frequently with a similar skeletal Marine presence in Bahrain. These two men and a handful of junior officers are the total Marine Southern Command, covering twenty-five countries, including Afghanistan. The rationale behind this minimal force is the Marine Corps’ reputation for improvising and getting the job done no matter what, whenever called upon. Since 1775 at Tun’s Tavern in Philadelphia, when General Washington was in a hurry to recruit fighting sailors to attack the British at Fort Nassau in the Bahamas, the Marines have always been first in line when there was trouble but last in line at budget time. Apparently nothing much has changed since then.
The luck or the fate that has shone on Mattis during his career still seems to be lighting his way. He happens to be in Bahrain commanding the First Marine Expeditionary Brigade (I MEB) in a cooperative exercise with the Egyptians called Operation Bright Star when Osama attacks the Twin Towers for the second time, and the Pentagon and White House. Mattis is the most forward deployed (closest) Marine force to Afghanistan.
After General Franks’s traditional land invasion strategy is shot down by Rumsfeld and Tenet and the new CIA, Special Forces and Marine strategy starts to be developed. Mattis is called into the office of US Navy vice admiral Charles W. Moore, commander of US Naval Forces Central Command in Bahrain. Moore offers Mattis the job of commander of a new naval expeditionary force to go after Osama. Normally this command would fall to a naval officer, but Moore favors the Marine Mattis as the best choice to lead the combination of ground combat operations, CIA, Army and Navy Special Forces, and the Northern Alliance that has been picked to get the job done.
Mattis is ready. He begins by taking his existing I MEB command staff, including Lethin, Broadmeadow, and Carl, and folding in Tempone and his junior officers as his liaison at Central Command. With this tiny group, he staffs a reaction force that changes Marine doctrine by achieving the deepest insertion of Marine seagoing forces in history. Officially they are called Naval Expeditionary Task Force 58. Their mission; find Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organization and kill them all.
To ensure that his small staff is strong enough to manage such a complex mission, Mattis draws from the book Good to Great by Jim Collins. This is a key book in the Mattis library that he recommends pointedly for staff members. Essentially, Collins accelerates the process of natural selection. He advises that, once recognized, a weak staff member be immediately marginalized. His duties and responsibilities are then gradually fed to the wolves, the stronger members of the staff. If the weak staffer gets stronger because of this, he survives; if not, his entire job gets eaten by the pack. He is immediately sent back to his parent command. No explanation, no excuses, no second chances. Within weeks Mattis’s small staff is honed into a powerful, cooperative wolf pack of leaders.
Beyond his immediate command staff, Mattis cuts out entire echelons of administrative staff, supporting them using a technique called “skip echelon” outlined by British field marshal Sir William Joseph Slim in his book Defeat into Victory.8 He also learned of skip echelon from an Iraqi Army major captured in Desert Storm. Since Iraq was once a British colony, it is likely the Iraqi major also learned the technique from Field Marshal Slim’s book. Staff reduction is necessary because of the limited space and resources allotted to Marine command in Bahrain. Mattis eventually settles on a general staff of approximately thirty-two by eliminating, among others, the brigade’s surgeon, staff judge advocate, chaplain, and sergeant major.
America is in a big hurry to taste revenge while it is still hot. They want Osama’s head on a stick and don’t much care who or what the obstacles are. It comes down to Mattis’s team to sort out the logistics of coordinating and moving a task force from eleven countries, including eight thousand US Marines and sailors, over four hundred miles inland, and capturing a forward operating base (FOB) they call Camp Rhino. Mattis’s operations officer, Lieutenant Colonel Lethin describes some of that process:
There were a couple of desert landing strips; Bastogne, Anzio, one other that they were using. So the idea was, maybe we go in there and we seize that for a 72-hour period and run a FOB, or an ISB [intermediate staging base], or a FARP [forward arming and refueling point] to go and do a limited raid and come back.
. . . We’d already been looking at how we were going to do it, developing the plans to do that, so when we did get the orders, it didn’t take much to speed up. In fact, we were ready to move before they were ready to unleash us.9
With US ambassador Wendy Chamberlin successfully paving the way across Pakistan by securing access to staging areas and supply routes, Mattis begins his assault. Marine Corps commandant James Jones sums up Mattis’s approach and its effect on al-Qaeda’s host, the Taliban: “[Task Force 58’s] arrival hundreds of miles from their Navy base ships in the North Arabian Sea took the Taliban by surprise; they had not expected to face the traditional ‘assault from the sea’ Marines in the land-locked nation of deserts and mountains they had ruled for more than a decade.”10
Mattis dives into the job of what many military analysts consider to be “the most difficult amphibious landing in 20 years.”11 He continues to draw heavily from his reading of military history in order to “practice informed boldness.”12 He credits the lessons of history, including British major general Orde Charles Wingate’s operations in Burma, the firebase concept used during Vietnam, and Grierson’s Raid during the Civil War. As Mattis says, these “broaden your operational reach, giving you mental models that y
ou can apply imaginatively.”13
Major Wingate fought in Burma under Field Marshal Slim. Between these two, Mattis has the models for his “skip echelon” command structure and innovative field tactics for mountainous terrain that he will update for Afghanistan. In 1944, Wingate developed the tactic of flying his forces behind Japanese lines to “operate in comparatively small, lightly equipped columns to harry communications and rear establishments.”14 Mattis affirms Wingate’s tactic, saying, “Give me 1,000 men ashore for 30 days and we could make the enemy’s life hell on earth for raids.” At the supreme commander level, Field Marshall Slim’s objectives for Wingate included inflicting “the greatest possible damage and confusion on the enemy in North Burma.”15
This echoes the intent of Mattis’s supreme commander, President George W. Bush. Mattis also seizes on Slim’s directive of confusing his enemies. It is the polar opposite of the clarity and efficiency of Mattis’s own operations. Feints and slashing, lightning-speed advances to throw the enemy off balance become the hallmarks of Mattis’s way of war. Perhaps as a constant reminder, he adopts the radio call sign Chaos, which will stay with him for the rest of his career. With typical humor, he claims the call sign is an abbreviation for “commander has an outstanding suggestion.”16
0800 Hours—13 September 2001—The White House
CIA director George Tenet, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and counterterrorism chief Cofer Black brief President Bush on the agency’s fully developed plan to merge CIA paramilitary teams, US Special Operations Forces, and airpower to kill Osama and destroy al-Qaeda and the Taliban. But even with overwhelming US advantages, there will be a price. Black has been told that al-Qaeda does not surrender or negotiate. The great martyred Northern Alliance leader Massoud once told him, “We’ve been fighting these guys for years and I’ve never captured one of these bastards.” The reason is that any time al-Qaeda is overrun, they bunch together and detonate a hand grenade, killing themselves.
Black explains to Bush, “Mr. President, we can do this. No doubt in my mind. We do this the way that we’ve outlined it, we’ll set this thing up so it’s an unfair fight for the US military. But you’ve got to understand people are going to die.”17
Bush is tired of talking. He wants Osama and all of his friends dead. Black says, “When we’re through with them they will have flies walking across their eyeballs.”18 Bush looks around at the faces of his advisers for any last objections. Finally he nods and agrees with Black. America’s Global War on Terrorism begins. Moments later in Bahrain, Mattis receives orders from Central Command, including an operation with the CIA code name Operation Jawbreaker.19
2045 Hours—7 October 2001—Kandahar, Afghanistan
American and British Special Operations teams “paint the targets” with laser indicators on the ground as fifteen US bombers and twenty-five strike aircraft attack. US and British ships and submarines offshore of the Pakistani coastal city of Karachi, 470 miles south, fired about fifty Tomahawk missiles an hour earlier. Fireballs erupt from Taliban air defense installations, the defense ministry, airport-based command centers, airfields, electrical grids, and fuel depots. America is clearing its throat, preparing to deliver its answer to Osama for his attacks.
Mattis starts the ground campaign against the Taliban in the north, because opposition from neighboring Tajik and Uzbek tribes against the Pashtun Taliban is strongest there. Three hundred and forty miles north of Kandahar, in the Dar-ye Suf and Balkh River Valleys, CIA teams fight their way up the valleys with Northern Alliance allies toward the city of Mazar-e-Sharif. The smallest four-wheel vehicles are too big and too heavy for the narrow and fragile mountain trails, so men and equipment travel on horseback along the precarious paths, with thousand-foot drops on one side.
Several of the CIA’s Jawbreaker team have never been on a horse before. They are told to ride with their downhill foot out of the stirrup in case the horse stumbles. They then have a chance to fall back onto the trail while the horse plummets a thousand feet down the cliff. The Jawbreakers take their weapons off safety and rest the muzzles aimed at the back of their horse’s head, prepared to shoot the animal if it stumbles.
After a day or two of riding, the Jawbreakers are terribly saddle-sore, close to becoming combat ineffective. A hundred jars of Vaseline are delivered by airdrop. Unfortunately, the dirt in Afghanistan is a fine rock dust that lingers in the air and covers everything. This fine dust collects on the Vaseline, which, instead of helping, is turned into sandpaper. Two hundred pairs of pantyhose arrive by airdrop. In Mattis’s operations shop, a thinking man has reasoned that if pantyhose worked to relieve skin irritation for quarterback Joe Namath in Super Bowl III in 1969, it would work for the CIA cowboys in Afghanistan. It does. Pantyhose saves Operation Jawbreaker.
The Jawbreakers with their Northern Alliance allies sweep up the Dar-ye Suf Valley, taking the villages of Bishqab, Cobaki, Chapchal, and Oimetan. On November 5, they overrun the Taliban manning the Soviet-built defensive posts at Bai Beche. Fifty-eight miles to the east, in the narrow Balkh River Valley, Jawbreakers capture the key blocking city of Ac’capruk. A rapid advance to the objective, Mazar-e-Sharif, is now possible.
On November 10 Mazar-e-Sharif falls, collapsing the Taliban position in northern Afghanistan. Taliban defenders near Bamiyan in central Afghanistan offer only light resistance before surrendering on November 11. Before the battle for Bamiyan, Taliban commander Mullah Mohammed Omar uses scarce ordnance to blow up the 150-foot-tall fourth-century Buddha statues carved into the side of a limestone cliff outside the city. Buddhist religious art is apparently a greater threat than the US Special Forces bearing down on him. Kabul surrenders without a fight on November 13. Also, apparently, the native Afghan Taliban fighters don’t share their Arab al-Qaeda allies’ preference for death before surrender and are captured en masse.
On November 20, Mattis flies with nineteen of his command staff from Bahrain to the USS Peleliu off the coast of Karachi. They cram into their floating forward command post, about the size of a Manhattan studio apartment. Within minutes, one bulkhead wall is covered with computer screens. A paper map of Pakistan and Afghanistan covers the other. Radio, telephone, and face-to-face chatter floods the room, bouncing off the metal floor and walls. The noise level inside rapidly escalates to uncomfortable.
Minutes later, Mattis and his staff assemble in a briefing room to hear their weeks of planning repeated back to them in detail in a three-and-a-half-hour confirmation briefing. D-Day is set for 1700 Zulu (Greenwich Mean Time), six hours behind local time, on November 23. Combining the humanitarian relief elements, the CIA, US Army and Navy Special Forces, and eleven allies, it is easily the most complex landing plan in anyone’s memory.
Because Mattis trusts his staff’s capabilities, he is able to focus on issues facing his front-line grunts. For example, Central Command (CENTCOM) has sent rules of engagement for taking FOB Rhino that require a hostile act or intent to be committed or demonstrated prior to the engagement of potential targets. It sounded like a load of diplomatic fertilizer to Mattis. He shoots back an official request that all personnel in the landing zone be declared hostile. Ground force commanders have to be able to engage targets at will. After some time wrestling with CENTCOM and engaging Admiral Moore in the fight, Mattis wins, and his rules of engagement are approved.
The initial three-and-a-half-hour confirmation briefing on the Peleliu also isn’t enough time to cover the flow of Marines from the landing areas like FOB Rhino to the intermediate staging bases in Pakistan and coordination with Marine liaison elements already on the ground. It also isn’t enough time to review much detail of Mattis’s overall concept of command, which integrates the Fifteenth and Twenty-Sixth Marine Expeditionary Units (MEUs) with his Headquarters unit.
The thrown-together Task Force 58 contains three separate command structures—Mattis’s headquarters and the two subordinated commands of the Fifteenth and Twenty-Sixth MEUs, totaling seven ships containing dozens
of ground and aviation elements, and over eight thousand individuals who have never before trained together as one unit. Mattis decides that keeping the MEUs separate and using “supporting / supported” relationships, depending on the mission, is the most logical choice under the time constraints. They will soon find out if Mattis’s call sign, Chaos, better describes Task Force 58 or the enemy.
2300 Hours—25 November 2001—Operation Swift Freedom
Mattis’s first objective inside Afghanistan is a former hunting camp with a 6,400-foot dirt runway and a few buildings surrounded by a white cinder-block wall. Sometime in the distant past it was the retreat of an Afghan prince, used for hunting with falcons. Now it is a cement and dirt compound in the middle of a frigid, barren landscape 3,285 feet above sea level and ninety miles south of Kandahar.
Guard towers stand at the four corners of the block wall, protecting a warehouse, a water tower, half a dozen smaller buildings, and a mosque. Each of the towers has a single hole from a cannon round in its roof. Many of the buildings were shot up during Operation Sword, which kicked out the Taliban on its way north a few weeks earlier. Now the place looks lifeless and empty under the freezing night sky.
Battalion Landing Team 1/1, that includes Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, and a weapons company, steps out of transport helicopters just outside the walls, weapons ready. The mission tonight is to secure the compound. It will be the command post for the coming attack against Kandahar. A reconnaissance team moves inside the walls as the others set a watch. In minutes, recon reports buried enemy dead inside, possibly booby-trapped, and ordnance left behind from the Operation Sword raid. Otherwise, it’s clear.