Jim Mattis seems to have come to the conclusion that for most of his storied career as a Marine commander, he pretty much knew just how to play it.
Whether it was managing and motivating his Marines or routing his foes on the battlefield, the former defense secretary’s new memoir, Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead, reveals above all his unwavering belief that he had a better grasp than others of when to hit hard and when, quoting Napoleon, to employ “an iron fist in a velvet glove.”
Speed is the key to vanquishing your enemies, Mattis argues convincingly, except when it’s not. It’s as though Mattis, the maven of maxims, is guided by dueling adages: “He who hesitates is lost” and “Look before you leap.”
Armed with the wisdom of the ages from his extensive study of military strategy, Mattis oozes confident, self-deprecating charm, all while dispensing homespun aphorisms on nearly every page.
It makes for a highly readable humblebrag in which Mattis is the hero of his own story and his modest putdowns of himself only serve to make him look better, along the lines of “I should have done a better job convincing everyone else I was right.”
The call sign in the title comes from the mid-1990s, when Mattis, fresh from commanding a Marine battalion in the first Iraq War, was a cocksure colonel. An irreverent subordinate welcomed him to a briefing by writing the capital letters C-H-A-O-S on a chalkboard, for “Does the Colonel Have Another Outstanding Solution?”
The name Chaos stuck, and Mattis recounts time after time when he had an “outstanding solution,” only to be ignored or rebuffed by more cautious, and perhaps clueless, higher-ups in his chain of command.
For example, in December 2001, two months into the Afghanistan War, Mattis, by then a one-star general, believed fervently that his Marine infantry brigade could have captured Osama bin Laden in the mountains of Tora Bora if only his four-star commander, Army Gen. Tommy Franks, had given the green light.
Mattis had a plan modeled on the Army’s 1886 Geronimo campaign that would have had Marine Special Operations teams and rifle platoons covering all escape routes in the snow-covered mountains.
Franks blew him off, later writing in his memoir that he didn’t want “armored battalions chasing a lightly armed enemy.” That frosted Mattis, who didn’t have any tanks or heavy armor, just highly mobile “shock troops.”
“If I had it to do over again,” he writes, he would have called headquarters and said, “I have a plan to accomplish the mission, kill Osama bin Laden, and hand you a victory.”
Such is Mattis’s brio that he still harbors no doubt his plan would have worked.
In March 2004, Mattis was in Iraq and again found himself at odds with his civilian masters.
Four civilian contractors were murdered, and their burned corpses hung from a bridge in Fallujah. This time, Mattis urged restraint, not wanting to inflame the local population, but President George W. Bush and his advisers wanted to attack, to send a message.
Again the lessons of history informed his judgment, this time the 1968 Marine siege of the city of Hue, one of the longest and bloodiest battles of the Vietnam War. Mattis didn’t want to “go down that road,” believing the assault was reckless.
But he was overruled and ordered to attack in force. “While some might urge a senior officer to resign his post in this circumstance,” Mattis writes, “your troops cannot resign and go home.”
Mattis believes history has largely vindicated his judgments, especially his opposition to the decision by Paul Bremer, the diplomat who led the Coalition Provisional Authority after the 2003 Iraq invasion, to disband the Iraqi Army and ban most members of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party from government service.
“We could have weeded out the oppressors and the die-hard Ba’athists without slicing off the sinews of governance,” Mattis writes. “Demobilizing the Iraqi Army instead of depoliticizing it set the most capable group of men in the country on an adversarial course against us.”
In making the now widely accepted argument, Mattis falls victim to “outcome bias,” namely judging the quality of a decision by its outcome, something he himself warns against in second-guessing front-line commanders.
In his memoir, Bremer argued that keeping the army together was unrealistic given their destroyed barracks and the distrust of Sunni officers by the majority Shiite population. It was absolutely essential, Bremer contended, to convince the Iraqis that the United States was not going to permit the return of Saddam’s instruments of repression.
Mattis believes, and history shows, the decision led to the Sunni insurgency that plagued the Iraqi people for years. But what is unknowable is if choosing to keep Saddam’s officers and Ba’athist members in positions of authority might not have given rise to an equally problematic Shiite insurgency.
Just because one policy decision produces undesirable results does not mean the opposite decision will produce positive results. Sometimes there really are no good options, and you have to roll the dice.
It’s a lesson in leadership, outlined in a book by another military thinker, the late Sen. John McCain.
In his book Hard Call: The Art of Great Decisions, McCain tells the story of Bud Day, an Air Force pilot who ejected over North Vietnam in 1967.
Day, in trying to evade capture, had to make a fateful decision. Approaching a U.S. base by night, he might be killed by friendly fire, but if he waited until daylight, the North Vietnamese might get him before he could reach safety.
Day chose day, was shot in the leg by the enemy, and spent six years in captivity. “He had made a sound decision, in a crucible few people ever encounter,” wrote McCain. “It had probably been the right one. But it had not worked out as he had hoped.”
McCain cited the story as an example of how the quality of a decision doesn’t depend on its outcome. He wrote, “We can never know for certain whether, had he chosen the other course, he would be alive to tell the tale.”
In 2012, when Mattis found himself out of step with the Obama administration, his strong convictions would lead to his relief as the four-star commander of U.S. Central Command.
During his tenure, Mattis urged retaliation against Iran for plotting to blow up a Washington, D.C., restaurant. Barack Obama, who saw Mattis as increasingly reckless, fired him.
“While I fully endorse civilian control of the military, I would not surrender my independent judgment,” he writes of his firing by Obama.
We can never know for certain what would have happened if Obama followed his advice and carried out a strike on Iran.
We do know that given the same advice, President Trump decided against the use of force in response to an Iranian provocation.
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter, “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.
