Call Sign Chaos Read online

  The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy and position of the Department of Defense or the U.S. government. The public release clearance of this publication by the Department of Defense does not imply Department of Defense endorsement or factual accuracy of the material.

  Copyright © 2019 by James N. Mattis and Francis J. West

  Maps copyright © 2019 by David Lindroth Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Hardback ISBN 9780812996838

  Ebook ISBN 9780812996845

  randomhousebooks.com

  Cover design: Greg Mollica

  Cover photograph: AP Images / John Moore

  v5.4

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Part I: Direct Leadership

  Chapter 1: A Carefree Youth Joins the Disciplined Marines

  Chapter 2: Recruit for Attitude, Train for Skill

  Chapter 3: Battle

  Chapter 4: Broadening

  Chapter 5: Rhino

  Part II: Executive Leadership

  Chapter 6: The March Up

  Chapter 7: A Division in Its Prime

  Chapter 8: Incoherence

  Chapter 9: Cascading Consequences

  Chapter 10: Fighting While Transforming

  Chapter 11: Hold the Line

  Chapter 12: Essential Nato

  Chapter 13: Disbanding Bureaucracy

  Part III: Strategic Leadership

  Chapter 14: Central Command: The Trigonometry Level of Warfare

  Chapter 15: Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

  Chapter 16: Friend or Foe

  Chapter 17: Reflections

  Epilogue: America as Its Own Ally

  Appendix A

  Appendix B

  Appendix C

  Appendix D

  Appendix E

  Appendix F

  Appendix G

  Photo Insert

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  About the Authors

  In late November 2016, I was enjoying Thanksgiving break in my hometown on the Columbia River in Washington State when I received an unexpected call from Vice President–elect Pence. Would I meet with President-elect Trump to discuss the job of Secretary of Defense of the United States? I had taken no part in the election campaign and had never met or spoken to Mr. Trump, so to say that I was surprised is an understatement. Further, I knew that, absent a congressional waiver, federal law prohibited a former military officer from serving as Secretary of Defense within seven years of departing military service. Given that no waiver had been authorized since General George Marshall was made secretary in 1950, and I’d been out for only three and a half years, I doubted I was a viable candidate. Nonetheless, I flew to Bedminster, New Jersey, for the interview.

  I had time on the cross-country flight to ponder how to encapsulate my view of America’s role in the world. On my flight out of Denver, the flight attendant’s standard safety briefing caught my attention: If cabin pressure is lost, masks will drop….Put your own mask on first, then help others around you….We’ve all heard it many times, but in that moment, these familiar words seemed like a metaphor: to preserve our leadership role, we needed to get our own country’s act together first, especially if we were to help others.

  The next day I was driven to the Trump National Golf Club and, entering a side door, waited about twenty minutes before I was ushered into a modest conference room. I was introduced to the President-elect, the Vice President–elect, the chief of staff, and a handful of others. We talked about the state of our military, where our views aligned and where they differed. In our forty-minute conversation, Mr. Trump led the wide-ranging discussion, and the tone was amiable. Afterward, the President-elect escorted me out to the front steps of the colonnaded clubhouse, where the press was gathered. I assumed that I would be on my way back to Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, where I’d spent the past few years doing research and guest lecturing around the country, and was greatly enjoying my time. I figured that my strong support of NATO and my dismissal of the use of torture on prisoners would have the President-elect looking for another candidate. Standing beside him on the steps as photographers snapped away and shouted questions, I was surprised for the second time that week when he characterized me to the reporters as “the real deal.” Days later, I was formally nominated. That was when I realized that, subject to a congressional waiver and Senate consent, I would not be returning to Stanford’s beautiful, vibrant campus.

  During the interview, Mr. Trump had asked me if I could do the job of Secretary of Defense. I said I could. I’d never aspired to the job, and took the opportunity to suggest several other candidates I thought highly capable of leading our defense. Still, having been raised by the Greatest Generation, by two parents who had served in World War II, and subsequently shaped by more than four decades in the Marine Corps, I considered government service to be both honor and duty. In my view, when the President asks you to do something, you don’t play Hamlet on the wall, wringing your hands. To quote a great American athletic company’s slogan, you “just do it.” So long as you are prepared, you say yes.

  When it comes to the defense of our experiment in democracy and our way of life, ideology should have nothing to do with it. Whether asked to serve by a Democrat or a Republican, you serve. “Politics ends at the water’s edge.” This ethos has shaped and defined me, and I wasn’t going to betray it no matter how much I was enjoying my life west of the Rockies and spending time with a family I had neglected during my forty-plus years in the Marines.

  When I said I could do the job, I meant I felt prepared. By happenstance, I knew the job intimately. In the late 1990s, I had served as the executive secretary to two Secretaries of Defense, William Perry and William Cohen. I had also served as the senior military assistant to Deputy Secretary of Defense Rudy de Leon. In close quarters, I had gained a personal grasp of the immensity and gravity of a “SecDef’s” responsibilities. The job is tough: our first Secretary of Defense committed suicide, and few have emerged from the job unscathed, either legally or politically.

  We were at war, amid the longest continuous stretch of armed conflict in our nation’s history. I’d signed enough letters to next of kin about the death of a loved one to understand the consequential aspects of leading a department on a war footing when the rest of the country was not. Its millions of devoted troops and civilians spread around the world carried out their mission with a budget larger than the gross domestic products of all but two dozen nations. On a personal level, I had no great desire to return to Washington, D.C. I drew no energy from the turmoil and politics that animate our capital. Yet I didn’t feel inundated by the job’s immensities. I also felt confident that I could gain bipartisan support for Defense despite the political fratricide practiced in Washington.

  In late December, I flew into Washington, D.C., to begin the Senate confirmation process.

  * * *

  —

  This book is about how my career in the Mar
ines brought me to this moment and prepared me to say yes to a job of this magnitude. The Marines teach you, above all, how to adapt, improvise, and overcome. But they expect you to have done your homework, to have mastered your profession. Amateur performance is anathema, and the Marines are bluntly critical of falling short, satisfied only with 100 percent effort and commitment. Yet over the course of my career, every time I made a mistake—and I made many—the Marines promoted me. They recognized that those mistakes were part of my tuition and a necessary bridge to learning how to do things right. Year in and year out, the Marines had trained me in skills they knew I needed, while educating me to deal with the unexpected.

  Beneath its Prussian exterior of short haircuts, crisp uniforms, and exacting standards, the Corps nurtured some of the strangest mavericks and most original thinkers I would encounter in my journey through multiple commands, dozens of countries, and many college campuses. The Marines’ military excellence does not suffocate intellectual freedom or substitute regimented thinking for imaginative solutions. They know their doctrine, often derived from lessons learned in combat and written in blood, but refuse to let that turn into dogma. Woe to the unimaginative one who, in after-action reviews, takes refuge in doctrine. The critiques in the field, in the classroom, or at happy hour are blunt for good reason. Personal sensitivities are irrelevant. No effort is made to ease you through your midlife crisis when peers, seniors, or subordinates offer more cunning or historically proven options, even when out of step with doctrine.

  In any organization, it’s all about selecting the right team. The two qualities I was taught to value most in selecting others for promotion or critical roles were initiative and aggressiveness. I looked for those hallmarks in those I served alongside. Institutions get the behaviors they reward. Marines have no institutional confusion about their mission: they are a ready naval force designed to fight well in any clime or place, then return to their own society as better citizens. That ethos has created a force feared by foes and embraced by allies the world over, because the Marines reward initiative aggressively implemented.

  During my monthlong preparation for the Senate confirmation hearings, I read many excellent intelligence briefings. I was struck by the degree to which our competitive military edge was eroding, including our technological advantage. We would have to focus on regaining the edge. I had been fighting terrorism in the Middle East during my last decade of military service. During that time and in the three years since I had left active duty, haphazard funding had significantly worsened the situation, doing more damage to our current and future military readiness than any enemy in the field.

  I could see that the background drummed into me as a Marine would need to be adapted to fit my role as a civilian secretary. The formulation of policy—from defining the main threats to our country to adapting the military’s education, budget, and selection of leaders to address the swiftly changing character of war—would place new demands on me. It now became even more clear to me why the Marines assign an expanded reading list to everyone promoted to a new rank: that reading gives historical depth that lights the path ahead. Slowly but surely, we learned there was nothing new under the sun: properly informed, we weren’t victims—we could always create options.

  Habits ingrained in me over decades of immersion in tactics, operations, and strategy, in successes and setbacks, in allied and political circles, and in dealing with human factors, guided by the Marine Corps’s insistence that we study (vice just read) history, paid off. When I left active duty, I was reminded that I’d been fortunate in being allowed to serve so long, and fortunate in being in the right place at the right time on what had been an adventurous career path. When I told the President-elect I could do the job, I knew that those decades of study and watching the competent and incompetent deal with issues similar to what I’d face would greatly inform my work.

  Looking back, some things are clear: the required reading that expanded with every rank, the coaches and mentors imposing their demanding standards, the Marine Corps emphasis on adaptation, team building, and critical thinking, and my years at sea and on foreign shores had all been preparation for this job, even if I’d never sought it. Fate, Providence, or the chance assignments of a military career had me as ready as I could be when tapped on the shoulder. Without arrogance or ignorance, I could answer yes when asked to serve one more time. While I intended to serve the full four years, I resigned at the halfway point. That is how my public service ended; now I will tell you how it began.

  * * *

  —

  My purpose in writing this book is to convey the lessons I learned for those who might benefit, whether in the military or in civilian life. I have been fortunate that the American people funded my forty years of education, and some of the lessons I learned might prove helpful to others. I’m old-fashioned: I don’t write about sitting Presidents. In the chapters that follow, I will pass on what prepared me for challenges I could not anticipate, not take up the hot political rhetoric of our day. I remain a steward of the public trust.

  The book is structured in three parts: Direct Leadership, Executive Leadership, and Strategic Leadership. In the first part, I will describe my formative years growing up and then in the Corps, where the Vietnam generation of Marines “raised” me and where I first led Marines into battle. This was a time of direct, face-to-face leadership, when, alongside those I led, I had a personal, often intense bond with troops I frequently knew better than my own brothers.

  In the second part, I will describe the broadening tours in executive leadership, when I was commanding a force of 7,000 to 42,000 troops and it was no longer possible to know the name of every one of my charges. I had to adapt my leadership style to best ensure that my intent and concern, filtered through layers of command below, were felt and understood by the youngest sailors on the deck plates and the most junior soldiers in the field, where I would seldom see them.

  Finally, in the third section, I will delve into the challenges and techniques at the strategic level. I will address civilian-military interaction from a senior military officer’s perspective, where military leaders must try to reconcile war’s grim realities with political leaders’ human aspirations, and where complexity reigns and the consequences of imprudence are severe, even catastrophic.

  The habit of continuing to learn and adapt came with me when I joined the administration as a member of the cabinet, where my portfolio exceeded my former military role. Yet at the end of the day, driving me to do my best were the veterans of past wars I felt watching me, and the humbling honor of serving my nation by leading those staunch and faithful patriots who looked past Washington’s political vicissitudes and volunteered to put their lives on the line to defend the Constitution and the American people.

  Much of what I carried with me was summed up in a handwritten card that lay on my Pentagon desk these past few years, the desk where I signed deployment orders sending troops overseas. It read, “Will this commitment contribute sufficiently to the well-being of the American people to justify putting our troops in a position to die?” I would like to think that, thanks to the lessons I was taught, the answer to the Gold Star families of those we lost is “yes,” despite the everlasting pain those families carry with them.

  LIKE MOST TWENTY-YEAR-OLDS, I thought I was invulnerable. Then, on a steep ridge in eastern Washington, in the winter of 1971, I fell toward my death. I was looking at the tiny figures of workers on a dam far below when my foot slipped and I plunged down an icy sheet toward the Columbia River. I threw my body back to avoid pitching headlong into space, sliding on my back down the steep slope. I tried to dig in my heels, but my boots slid off the rocks. My pack tore loose as I accelerated down the slope. I had a Ka-Bar in my belt, a fighting knife given to me by a Marine veteran. I pulled it and stabbed at the sheet ice, only to find it torn from my hands. I kept sliding, picking up speed. I twisted over and frantically clawed and
scratched. But I wasn’t slowing down.

  I bounced off a big rock and tumbled sideways, slamming into a boulder that broke my fall. When I came to, I was bleeding from my nose, but not from my ears, and I wasn’t vomiting, so I knew my skull wasn’t fractured. I lay there, testing various body parts. My ribs ached when I breathed, but I could flex my arms and legs. I hadn’t impaled myself.

  I was lucky, and it certainly wasn’t my alpine skills that had saved me. It took me a few hours of slipping and sliding to make it to a rocky ravine and down the slope. A worker saw me hobbling along and gave me a lift across the Priest Rapids Dam. He offered to drive me the forty miles back to my home.

  “I appreciate it,” I said, “but I’d like to heal up a bit first.”

  He gave me an understanding look. A working man, he was outdoors every day. He knew the type. If I chose to take my time before returning home, that was my business.

  I camped for two days, waiting for the bruising to go down. During the day I was flat on my back with nothing to do but admire the sleet on the sagebrush. At night I dozed more than slept. With bruised, probably cracked ribs, each time I rolled over I was jolted wide awake.

  The summer before, I had gone through the rigors of Marine Officer Candidates School. I remembered what one tough sergeant told us. Years earlier, his platoon had to take a hill under fire. Everyone was nervous; the North Vietnamese knew how to shoot. He told us how his platoon commander had settled them down.

  “We don’t get to choose when we die,” he said. “But we do choose how we meet death.”

  My fall on the ice had driven home to me that I wanted to spend my career among men like that: men who dealt with life as it came at them, who were more interested in living life fully than in their own longevity. I didn’t care about making money. I wanted to be outdoors—and in the company of adventurous people. For me, the Marines had the right spirit and the right way of looking at life. My fall would serve as a metaphor for my subsequent career in the Marines: You make mistakes, or life knocks you down; either way, you get up and get on with it. You deal with life. You don’t whine about it.