Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead

Mattis is sent back into the Iraq War, although this time with even more responsibility. He has charge of the I Marine Expeditionary Force (40,000 strong), which is stationed on the West Coast, while also having direct command of 25,000 Marines in the Middle East who are largely in Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition to these duties, he is commander of Marine Corps Forces Central Command (MARCENT). All these roles demand mobility from Mattis, who travels frequently between California, Florida, and the Middle East.

Iraq has not changed significantly in the two years Mattis has been absent. The Sunni warlords are still at odds with the Shia majority. The insurgents are still powerful, and Al Qaeda’s presence is growing as well. As Mattis explains, “basically it was a free-for-all, with the Iraqi people paying the price” (159).

A younger sheik, Abdul Sattar, has his life saved by an American Army commander and then begins to pull together a coalition of Sunni tribes to fight against Al Qaeda alongside the Americans. An agreement between the Iraqi government and the sheikhs, called the Anbar Awakening, begins to emerge. Mattis tells the press that progress is being made amidst the violence, telling them that it will probably be around give years before American forces can fully withdraw.

Anbar Province continues to progress. Mattis is able to walk down the streets of Ramadi without helmet or armor. In the fighting, however, Sheik Sattar is killed. More ominously, the mood within the United States and among its representatives is turning against the war. A full-page New York Times ad refers to Petraeus as “General Betray Us” (163), and while Mattis preaches optimism, it is difficult in the face of casualties and the years of warfare with little to show for them.

The remaining pages of this chapter are given over to an incident that most Americans were made aware of at the time, the slaughter of civilians in Haditha on November 19, 2005, after a Marine unit had been attacked by an IED. Mattis makes two points about these events. One, he finds the press to be inconsistent in its reporting of atrocities. He notes that when insurgents kill people, the reporting uses the passive voice, whereas when Marines kill the active voice is used, with the Marines as the subject. He feels this distinction prejudices the public against the Americans. The second point Mattis presses is that he takes charges against his Marines seriously. Mattis reads, by his estimate, over 9,000 pages of evidence relating to this single event. He goes to the scene of the altercation and takes note of the area personally.

In the end, Mattis makes a distinction between “a mistake and a lack of discipline” (166). The former can be excused in the heat of the battle, but the latter is a dereliction of duty and requires consequences. Some court martials are issued, and some are excused on the basis of Mattis’s deliberations. Mattis produces in full a letter dismissing the charges against one of his Marines in Appendix E.

In 2007 Robert Gates taps Mattis to lead NATO’s military arm as the Supreme Allied Commander for Transformation (SACT) as well as taking over the US Joint Forces Command (JFCOM). These positions, according to Mattis, are usually held by the same individual. These positions come with another promotion, making Mattis a four-star general. Mattis is reluctant to leave his current position but feels obligated to accept since the public has “paid my tuition going on thirty-five years” (169).

Mattis devotes some time to describing the mission of NATO. In its simplest form, NATO formalizes the bond and military interdependence between Europe and the United States. It has existed historically due to perceived Russian aggression. Mattis sets out to shape the military force of NATO, and he finds that one of the greatest challenges is getting 26 countries to work harmoniously. Mattis looks for advice where he can find it, speaking with such notables as Colin Powell and Henry Kissinger. He finds it odd that only retirees have the expertise he is looking for to speak to his concerns. He opines that the United States has ceased to teach military history and that true strategic thinkers are in short supply as a result.

Mattis experiences some novel issues as head of NATO forces. One of them is that even though he has staff who are subordinate to him, they are not, by and large, Americans, and there are diplomatic repercussions to firing personnel from other nations. Nevertheless, Mattis does send one admiral packing. He is, by Mattis’s estimation, “brilliant,” but he treats his staff mockingly and with little respect. Mattis warns him once, but when the behavior continues, he releases him from service with NATO.

Mattis finds at NATO a listlessness that precludes planning for future wars. Mattis perceives that the ongoing war in Afghanistan has sapped energy for thinking of the future, but his fear is that they will be ill prepared for the next war if they only focus on the current one. He assembles strategic thinkers from all participating countries to verbalize military concerns on the horizon. After some time, a consensus is reached in a document called “Multiple Futures,” completed in 2009. Mattis uses this document to move forward and analyze the readiness of NATO’s strength.

However, as Mattis endeavors to shape the nature of NATO, he is continually struck by the incongruity of an American being the Supreme Commander of NATO when the majority of countries it comprises are European. Mattis implies, too, that some European countries are not sharing the burden of NATO equitably. He states, “I saw advantages to instead having a European commander in Norfolk [Virginia] making the argument for the forces required […]” (175).

Mattis brings up this concern with the Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who readily agrees that this would make more sense. In 2009 Mattis gives his command of NATO forces to a French officer, the first time in NATO history that this position was held by a European.

While Mattis is working with NATO, he leaves his JFCOM duties in the hands of Navy SEAL Bob Harward. Mattis hopes that Harward’s combat history will give him the ability to aggressively shape JFCOM into what Mattis envisages it should be. The difficulty for Mattis lies in discerning JFCOM’s mission. It was designed to be a networking organization that would give the branches of the Armed Forces a combined vision when fighting a war or anticipating one. Mattis observes that JFCOM has thousands of staff and hundreds of millions in its budget. Mattis’s primary question is, “how did this add value in making U.S. forces more lethal?” (179).

Mattis finds little to recommend in JFCOM’s mission or implementation of its mission. He relates a story of visiting a JFCOM brigade headquarters and sees on the wall numerous slogans encouraging initiative. Mattis learns soon after that the commander micromanages excessively, even dictating the color of the safety belt that must be worn while working out.

Adding to his disdain, Mattis finds that JFCOM has “bastardized” a system developed by the Air Force called effects-based operations (EBO). This system is used by the Air Force to determine the impact of targeting certain installations used by the enemy. However, Mattis finds it less than useful when employed in a battlefield against moving targets with goals of their own as opposed to static land targets. Mattis sees the detrimental impact of EBO in Israel’s first military defeat in Lebanon, soon after adopting EBO principles. Israel’s inability to accurately predict the enemy’s movements reveals, to Mattis’s mind, the overly rigid nature of EBO in the face of the fluidity of a battlefield. Mattis abolishes EBO (he provides the document he submitted in Appendix G) and refocuses JFCOM on identifying the problems of the future, e.g., space-based dominance, continued nuclear deterrence, and counterinsurgency principles.

Having done away with EBO, Mattis then focuses on speaking to soldiers working at the various levels of JFCOM, asking them what their tasks are and what value they are adding to the organization as a whole. Some soldiers report frustration from bureaucratic obstacles. The chapter ends with Mattis recommending in 2010 that JFCOM be fully disbanded, especially as the Department of Defense is looking for ways to cut the budget. JFCOM is dissolved, and Mattis has again, as he points out, fired himself.