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Book Review

Missing in Action: The Mattis Behind the Mask

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Jim Mattis and Bing West, Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead, Random House, 300 pages, $28.00/hardcover.

By Walker Mills

Jim Mattis’s new book, written with Bing West, Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead, is in many ways exactly what one would expect from the former Secretary of Defense and four-star Marine general. It is as if Mattis is writing with his uniform on, chock-full of the Mattis-isms that as a young Marine officer I grew up hearing and reading about. But Mattis doesn’t offer a deeper or more introspective side of himself. For those that have already been introduced to ‘Saint Mattis of Quantico’ and his persona, the book is not much more than a compendium of his “touchstones” and anecdotes combined with a single narrative arc. There are anecdotes that have been made famous by others – like Mattis walking the lines at night in Afghanistan as recounted by Nate Fick in his book One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer, and there is his own recounting of the swift, combat relief of one of his own regimental commanders during the march to Baghdad in 2003 – elaborated on by Thomas E. Ricks in The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today. But Call Sign Chaos fails to reveal anything deeper. It is not a tell all, and it takes pains to avoid painting people who served with Mattis in a negative light. It contrasts sharply with the recent book Holding the Line by Guy Snodgrass which touts an inside view. However, for readers who are unfamiliar with Mattis and his time in the Marines, Call Sign Chaos is an excellent introduction to Mattis and his philosophy, and an introduction to Marine Corps leadership writ large. The authors fulfill their intent “…to convey the lessons I learned for those who might benefit whether in the military or in civilian life.”

The one surprise in Call Sign Chaos is Mattis’s preoccupation with Iran. His narrative is bookended by Iran experiences. First, as a young officer he was part of a planned, but unexecuted, diversion in support of an operation to rescue the 52 American embassy hostages. And then later, as the Commander of United States Central Command (CENTCOM) he was relieved because the Obama Administration regarded him as “…too eager for a military confrontation with Iran” according to Leon Panetta’s memoir Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace. Mattis’s bellicose stance on Iran is also seeded throughout the book. Mattis almost never passed an opportunity to rhetorically bash Iranian leaders as “zealots who needed a lesson in humility,” “cunning and hostile – a malign force,” and “radicals” who chant “death to America.” In contrast, North Korea barely featured, the Chinese not as much as one would expect, and the Russians or Soviets didn’t receive any nasty labels like the Iranians. It is perhaps ironic then that since his departure as Secretary, the United States has repeatedly moved closer to war with Iran and teaching those “zealots” a “lesson in humility.” As Secretary of Defense a large part of his legacy will be the 2018 National Defense Strategy, which purported to reorient or pivot the United States military away from the Greater Middle East toward “Great Power Competition.” But his own career and writing point to a near obsession with the Middle East and Iran in particular. Commissioned in the 1970s, Mattis does not write about the Soviet Union with a sour taste, even though by any measure the threats presented by the Soviet Union would have dominated his early career. Instead, he focuses on Iran, leaving the reader to wonder how Mattis would have shaped or handled recent Iranian provocations differently than his successors and making his work particularly relevant because Iran still features prominently in the headlines. It highlights one of the primary tensions in contemporary American foreign policy – the stated desire of multiple administrations to leave the Middle East tugging against the region’s strong geopolitical gravity.

Call Sign Chaos is generally organized into three parts that correspond to Mattis’s ascent through the ranks and corresponding leadership method – direct, executive, and strategic. It focuses on his time on active duty, predating his time as Secretary. Throughout the book, our narrator is General Mattis – he is never quite able to take off his uniform and step into the role of political appointee. Absent are the perspectives of Secretary or Professor Mattis. The book is peppered with history and with quotes from great leaders and the famous captains of history, but usually only as brief anecdotes. Mattis employs men from Xenophon to Churchill and Kipling to serve as background or signposts in his narrative. (Sadly, there are no women featured.) This is enlightening for the reader who is unfamiliar with the history of the Peloponnesian Wars or the Zimmerman Telegram – but the lessons are also disappointingly shallow, or as the Washington Post noted in their review – occasionally off the mark. They might remind the reader more of an overactive student in class hoping to impress a professor, rather than the musings of the professor himself. They also at time ring with a touch of hubris – Mattis is certainly aware of his cult-like following in the Marine Corps and feeds it with his juxtaposition of himself with men like Alexander the Great in Afghanistan.

The book will leave many readers disappointed. Mattis paints his own portrait somewhat stiffly, it doesn’t pierce his carefully curated persona or show the man ‘behind the mask.’ The mask is, if anything, enhanced by the addition of new material, like anecdotes about his youth in Washington state. He only teases the reader with the barest of information about his time as Secretary of Defense in the Trump Administration asserting “I’m old fashioned: I don’t write about sitting presidents.” There is no large reveal about his time working for President Trump. The most dramatic words to this effect are in his resignation letter, which has long been released. Call Sign Chaos is entirely about his time in uniform.

Ultimately, Call Sign Chaos is a primer on leadership from one of the most influential military leaders of the 21st Century. Readers will find Mattis’s story and his advice for young leaders written in a continuation of his persona. While never revolutionary or even radical, his advice is sound and well-grounded in study and experience. For a reader who wants to look behind the curtain or be taken in on a secret, Mattis and West will disappoint. However, they deliver clear and valuable leadership advice, in context – which as they write, was their intent.

Walker D. Mills is a Marine Corps infantry officer serving on exchange in Cartagena, Colombia. He has previously published book reviews in the Marine Corps Gazette, U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, Small Wars Journal, the Journal of Slavic Military Studies, and Strategy Bridge.

Featured Image: AL ASAD, Iraq – Lt. Gen. James Mattis, the commander of U.S. Marine Corps Forces Central Command, speaks to the Marines of the maintenance section from Marine All-Weather Fighter Attack Squadron 121 on the Al Asad flightline, May 6, 2007. 

Fiction Week

No Decision

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Fiction Week

By Walker D. Mills

February 8, 2040.
Senate Chamber, United States Capitol Building.

Chairman: Madam Commandant, we have asked for you to come here today to testify about the role the Marine Corps played in the Pacific War. As you are well aware, the future of the Marine Corps is now in question and we wanted you to justify for us the Corps’ continued existence as a separate entity in the Department of Defense. We will start with five minutes of questions from the junior Senator from Wisconsin.

Senator: General, do you feel that the service was prepared to meet the challenges of conflict?

CMC: First, thank you for the question and for inviting me here today. The attacks on Taiwan and Okinawa caught us in the middle of a transformation – a shift from decades of counter-insurgency warfare to great power competition. When the war broke out we were making changes to facilitate the operationalization of our concept Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations and acquiring new systems to better address the emerging threats of China and Russia. We had also begun to realign our education programs more closely with the Navy, adding a maritime focus.

Senator: General – how long have you been, as you put it “in transformation”? Secretary of Defense Mattis declared that the military was transitioning to great power competition in the 2018 National Defense Strategy. That was two decades ago.

CMC: Yes – well, the thing is, after the release of the 2018 NDS it took us a further five years to write new concepts. And then another five years to realign our acquisition priorities. After we realigned our priorities it took five more years to design and prototype our news systems, and we’d only just begun to field them operationally when the war broke out. Likewise – between a comprehensive curriculum review and redesign it took over a decade to shift our professional education and training away from a counter-insurgency focus and back to peer-competition.

Senator: So, you’re telling me, after twenty years you are still transitioning?

CMC: Yes – but it hasn’t been in a vacuum. We’ve had Marines engaged all over the world advising foreign forces, and conducting counter-narcotics and humanitarian missions. In fact we’re very proud of that. We have significantly expanded our humanitarian and disaster relief capability in the last several years and have been deploying our Marine Special Operators and Marine Advising Regiment almost non-stop. We have teams still operating in Africa and in the Middle East.

Senator: General, do you remember what the mission of the Marine Corps is?

CMC: The mission of the Marine Corps?

Senator: Yes, according to Title 10, United States Code.

I’ll read it for you, in case you have forgotten.

“The Marine Corps shall be organized, trained, and equipped to provide fleet marine forces of combined arms, together with supporting air components, for service with the fleet in the seizure or defense of advanced naval bases and for the conduct of such land operations as may be essential to the prosecution of a naval campaign.”

General, would you say that the seizure or defense of advanced naval bases in support of a naval campaign was the primary focus of the Marine Corps before the China Sea Conflict? How do foreign internal defense missions in central Africa and the Middle East, or counter-narcotics missions in South America support the prosecution of naval campaigns?

CMC: Yes sir, but I would add that Title 10 also says that we are responsible for “whatever other duties the president may direct.” We are staying relevant to the nation – we call ourselves the “First to Fight,” meaning we execute what operations come our way instead of waiting on the sidelines for operations specific to our mission.  

Senator: Let me continue. I’ll read the sentence after that.

“However, these additional duties may not detract from or interfere with the operations for which the Marine Corps is primarily organized.”

With that mission in mind, General, was the Marine Corps ready for the Pacific War?

CMC: Ready – I was actually hoping you would ask about readiness. Our readiness prior to the outbreak of the war was actually higher than it has ever been in our history. And that is readiness across all categories, Senator – maintenance, medical, dental, annual training– it was all green across the board. We were almost 100 percent deployable across the board. As an example, in I MEF, we didn’t have a single Class 4 dental Marine or Sailor. For III MEF, we were deployable across the board – no issues whatsoever and –

Senator: General, I mean what specifically had the Corps done to get ready for a great power conflict in the Pacific – with training, acquisitions, concept development or anything else related to warfighting?

CMC: We invested heavily in training before the war and sent Marines through multiple iterations of combined arms training at our Marine Air Ground Combat Center in 29 Palms, California. As for acquisition we were watching a lot of Army and Navy programs closely – we don’t have as much money as the other services and so we can’t afford to go off and do things on our own as much. So, we were following the Army’s Long-Range Precision Fires, Future Vertical Lift, and their Future Attack Reconnaissance Helicopter programs, as well as the Navy’s mine-countermeasures and unmanned surface vehicle programs. But we didn’t have the money to fund these things ourselves.

Senator: General, in that same time period, the Marine Corps acquired over a hundred new CH-53Ks. You bought hundreds of amphibious combat vehicles and thousands of joint-light tactical vehicles. In the mid-2000s, you developed, fielded, and then scrapped your Expeditionary Fire Support System in only a few years, along with ammo and vehicles instead of purchasing existing Army systems. The Corps clearly had money to invest in unique capabilities but lacked the prescience to invest in the right capabilities.

Furthermore, why is it that your service’s most comprehensive training was conducted in the Mojave Desert – amongst terrain completely different from anywhere in the Pacific and hundreds of miles from the ocean?

CMC: To be honest sir, those programs are really holdovers from my predecessors, as was our training – I can’t bear full responsibility for that. When you start these programs you have to see them through. Back when we were fighting Afghanistan, we needed heavy lift helicopters to operate at high altitudes in desert climates. That’s also why we bought the joint-light tactical vehicle. And the amphibious combat vehicle was a much-needed replacement for our legacy vehicles. We needed something that can carry Marines from ship-to-shore and move them to the objective. We trained in the desert because it was easier than training on the coast.  It was also cheaper.

Senator: So, if I understand correctly, the Marine Corps acquired over 200 of the most expensive helicopters ever built to meet operational requirements from a war that ended in 2020 and to address terrain limitations that simply do not exist in the Pacific? And furthermore, despite the directive to increase lethality across the force, they are essentially unarmed?

Next, at the same time as we were trying to lighten the force and improve our capability to host air-mobile, forward-refueling points you replaced the mainstay tactical vehicle with one that is both significantly larger, heavier, and has less room inside. All to protect those Marines against a threat that we have not seen in the Pacific theater?

And finally, we invested in a new vehicle for ship-to-shore movement under fire after multiple Secretaries of Defense have questioned the relevance of forcible entry operations?

CMC: We made the best decisions we could with the information we had at the time.

Senator: General, you made no decisions. Under your tenure and the tenure of your predecessors, the utility of the Marine Corps withered. The Corps repeatedly invested in capabilities that were no longer relevant and legacy projects. Simultaneously, hard questions about the fundamental role of the force were ignored and unanswered. The Marine Corps shoehorned their own idea of what they should be and what they could provide into the Joint Force.

You went to war with lethal squads that were stuck in their barracks. You went to war with amphibious vehicles but without the amphibious shipping to put them on – the new L-Class ships don’t even have well decks for them to launch from. Your only contribution to the Pacific War was a few squadrons of F-35s, but limited by their short takeoff capability, they had to carry less fuel and ammunition than their Air Force and Navy cousins. You did not have the weapons, training, or concepts to defend our allies, or even yourselves. Marines were forced to fire cannon artillery at Chinese ships and landing craft because they had nothing else.

Despite the high levels of readiness you briefed, the Marine Corps was not ready for war. You were not even able to fulfill the basic mission of defending and seizing advanced bases. Therefore, I see no reason for there to be a Marine Corps.

I yield my time.

Walker D. Mills is a Marine Corps infantry officer currently serving as an exchange officer with the Colombian Marine Corps. This short story is inspired by his experiences being deployed to the Western Pacific. He has previously written fiction for the Center for International Maritime Security and as part of the Krulak Center’s Destination Unknown Project and Marine Corps Post Mortem.

Featured Image: “Landing” by Charles E.J. Downing via Artstation

History

The Fleet Problem Exercises: An Investment in the Future

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By Walker Mills

Introduction

“Foe’s Force Superior.”1

“All ships except those laid up will take part in exercises.”2

“Forty-thousand men of the United States Navy and land forces of the United States Army here began a ‘battle’ at midnight tonight…”3

In the 1920s and 1930s the United States Navy had a problem. The fleet was almost completely comprised of ships that the Navy had never used in combat – the fleet’s last major combat actions were in the Spanish-American War. New classes of platforms that operated under the sea and in the sky threatened to even more drastically change naval warfare than the updates to battleships and cruisers since the last war.4 So the Navy ran a series of large-scale exercises with the goals of preparing the fleet for potential conflict, experimenting with new weapons and tactics, and refining operational plans.

These major exercises, some 21 in all, are unique in Navy history for several reasons. At first glance it is their scale that impresses, they often utilized every carrier and well over half of the battleships, cruisers and destroyers in the fleet for the duration of a single exercise measured in weeks, and that was conducted over thousands of miles of ocean and coastline.5 But upon closer inspection the appetite for innovation and tolerance for risk is even more impressive. Scenarios were truly free-play and designed so that the ‘blue force’ was often likely to lose and fight significantly shorthanded from the beginning.

The Navy conducted Fleet Problems across the Caribbean and the Pacific from Mexico to Alaska and Hawaii to Puerto Rico, with the last Fleet Problem held in 1939. By WWII virtually every senior leader in the Navy had participated in one problem or another either as a direct participant or as a planner. But these Fleet Problem exercises have not often received as much attention as other naval developments during the interwar period like arms limitation treaties and technological changes but the exercises were similarly if not more important in preparing the U.S. naval service for the Second World War.

Martin T4M-1 torpedo bombers of torpedo squadron one fly over USS LEXINGTON (CV-2) on 26 February 1929, shortly after that year’s fleet problem. Note aircraft laid smoke screen in distance. (Naval History and Heritage Command photo)

In 1923, the U.S. fleet conducted Fleet Problem I off the coast of Panama. At the time, the fleet was organized in a way where all of the vessels in the Navy fell under the operational command of the Commander-in-Chief United States Fleet, Admiral Hilary P. Jones. Jones was able to pull ships based in the Atlantic, Caribbean, and Pacific for the exercise or simply “maneuvers” as they were known. The exercise force divided into two parts referred to by color. Each iteration was blue against another color. Blue represented the United States, orange for Japan, red for Britain, and black for Germany. But in the 1920s political developments quickly made clear that the primary naval threat was orange. The Navy even went so far as to transpose Pacific geography on the Caribbean for some of the exercises with Japanese ports in the Windward Islands and the Panama Canal standing in for Manila and Corregidor. The first Fleet Problem focused on defending the Panama Canal from attack and it was scored as a resounding defeat for the defenders – the blue force. But the exercise was considered a major developmental success in that it led to critical assessments like the need to improve fleet communications, especially with aircraft and submarines to coordinate complex maneuvers.6

The exercises were designed to challenge and expand the thinking of the participants – they were not simply Mahanian duels of the battle line. They included, by modern definitions, both hybrid warfare and irregular warfare. The first Fleet Problem started without a formal declaration of war by the aggressor – foreshadowing the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor nineteen years later.7 In the third Problem one of the fleets sent an intelligence officer undercover as a journalist to place notional bombs at fuel depots and key canal control installations and obtained a schedule for the opposing fleet’s transit of the canal.8 In the fifth Problem the blue fleet received an “intelligence bonanza” after cracking the codes used by ‘black.’9 The exercises were also coupled with diplomatic initiatives and often ended with grand reviews of the fleet – huge public relations boons for the Navy.10

The Fleet Problems were often joint – combining land and sea-based forces (the Air Force did not yet exist as a separate service) and challenging commanders to decide which of their forces were the best to achieve their objectives. For example, during Fleet Problem III in 1924, 1,700 Marines landed under cover of night and seized Fort Randolph – a Army Coastal Defense fortification on the Atlantic side of the Panama Canal. Quickly overrunning the defenders, they moved on to seize a nearby submarine base and naval air station. The umpire for that part of the exercise proclaimed “The problem has conclusively shown that a Marine Expeditionary Force is a powerful weapon for a Commander-in-Chief engaged in any such operation…”11 In the next Problem the Marines employed an amphibious tank for the first time in their assault on the island of Culebra.12 The maneuvers also included significant notional, or as they were called at the time ‘constructive’ land forces to generate developments on land that would influence the play of the problems at sea. One Fleet Problem included a constructive expeditionary force of 150,000 soldiers.13 This jointness forced naval leaders to expand their thinking to include expeditionary operations and to try and adapt their tactics to leverage the advantages of land-based aviation and forces. This made for essential training for what would later be the island-hopping campaigns in the Pacific.

The Fleet Problems helped drive innovation in the Navy and gave naval leaders and Congress the information they needed to design a modern battle fleet. Some of the early lessons were the inability of legacy submarines to keep up with the battle line – leading to the development of faster and larger ‘fleet’ submarines. The Fleet Problems also led to the requirement for supply ships capable of cruising at twelve knots or faster. It was during maneuvers in 1924 that the Navy first employed the “riding abeam” or  the broadside method for underway replenishment.14 In the 1930s that the Navy developed the concept of “carrier task forces” and proved that carriers can operate most effectively and magnify their offensive combat power when separate from the fleet.15 Conservative thinking argued that aircraft were better employed defensively or as spotters for battleship guns but this was ultimately rejected based on experiences from the Fleet Problems. Repeated experiments and exercises eventually created a naval air arm that “became the principal means of naval strike by the end of the war…”16 The experiments were field by live-fire against target ships and the use of dummy bombs against specially modified ships covered in wooden planking. It is worth noting that in the Fleet Problems alone the U.S. conducted more mock air attacks on ships than were actually conducted by all combatants in the First World War – and sunk in training about half as many large warships as were sunk in the war.17 It was this experimentation that laid the groundwork for the Navy to develop an unmatched naval air arm during the Second World War.

The U.S. Navy aircraft carriers USS Ranger (CV-4), foreground, USS Lexington (CV-2), middle distance, and USS Saratoga (CV-3) lie at anchor off Honolulu, Territory of Hawaii, on 8 April 1938 during exercise Fleet Problem XIX. (Wikimedia Commons)

The maneuvers were a significant undertaking – requiring months or a year to plan. For support in designing and in assessing the Fleet Problems, leaders relied on the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. During the months between problems the Naval War College also ran many sophisticated wargames that continued the practice of innovation and experimentation at a much lower cost. The games also contributed directly to the refinement of the operational plans for war in the Pacific. The wargaming was so intensive and exhaustive that Admiral Chester Nimitz would later glibly state that the Newport war games had predicted almost every event during the Pacific campaigns of the Second World War.18 The Fleet Problems were also effective because they were mostly public, and naval leaders presented the conclusions directly to Congress. They were also covered in the press, helping exercise conclusions influence budgetary decisions in the most direct manner.

Conclusion

Today, like during the interwar period, the Navy is trying to reimagine itself and operationalize new technology and new concepts. The integration of several classes of unmanned surface vessels and aerial systems again will mandate changes in the tactics and operations of naval forces. The U.S. Pacific Fleet Commander, Admiral Scott Swift, wrote last year that the Pacific Fleet is trying to use the Fleet Problem model for exercises, albeit on a much smaller scale, yet still they have been a resounding success.19 Other commentary in the pages of Proceedings and the Center for International Maritime Security (CIMSEC) have also called for the Navy to revisit the large-scale free play exercise of the 1920s and 1930s.20, 21 The Navy should look back on the high-priority it placed on innovation and experimentation during the Fleet Problems. Certainly, the Navy did not have the readiness problems or operational commitments then that it does now, and today’s fleet shoulders a significant humanitarian and constabulary commitment. But the value of doing large-scale exercises to prepare for war must be appropriately weighed against the myriad variety of demand signals.

The Fleet Problems were not easy to facilitate in their own time. The Interwar Navy was much smaller and more fiscally constrained with only about 90,000 men and dealt with especially severe Great Depression-era budget cuts.22 Stringent naval arms limits after the First World War meant that some of the Navy’s newest and most technologically advanced ships were scrapped or sunk as targets to keep the service within treaty limits.

Innovation and experimentation are never free and rarely cheap, but the Fleet Problems of the Interwar Navy offer a successful case study of how to go to sea to prepare for war even with limited resources.

Walker D. Mills is an active duty Marine Corps infantry officer. He is currently assigned to the Defense Language Institute in preparation for an exchange tour in Colombia. These views are presented in a personal capacity.

References

1. “40,000 Men Guard Canal from ‘Enemy’,” The New York Times ( 23 January, 1929).

2. “Navy to Maneuver in Pacific in 3 Months,” The New York Times (27 December, 1931).

3. “40,000 Men Guard Canal from ‘Enemy’,” The New York Times ( 23 January, 1929).

4. Norman Friedman, Winning A Future War: War Gaming and Victory in the Pacific War, Naval History and Heritage Command (Washington D.C.: 2017) 7.

5. Albert A. Nofi, To Train the Fleet for War: The U.S. Navy Fleet Problems, 1923-1940, Naval War College (Newport, RI: 2010) 327.

6. Ibid, 55.

7. Ibid, 52.

8. Ibid, 63.

9. Ibid, 75.

10. Ibid, 23.

11. Craig C. Felker, editor, Testing American Seapower: The U.S. Navy Strategic Exercises, 1923-1940, Texas A&M University Press (College Station, TX: 2007) 95.

12. Nofi, To Train the Fleet for War, 67.

13. Ibid, 60.

14. Ibid, 61.

15. Geoffery Till, “Adopting the aircraft carrier: The British, American and Japanese case studies,” chapter in Military Innovation in the Interwar Period, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, U.K.: 1996) 221.

16. Geoffery Till, “Adopting the aircraft carrier,” 225.

17. Nofi, To Train the Fleet for War, 30-31.

18. Norman Friedman, Winning A Future War: War Gaming and Victory in the Pacific War, Naval History and Heritage Command (Washington D.C.: 2017) 6.

19. Scott H. Swift, “Fleet Problems Offer Opportunities,” Proceedings, Vol. 144, No. 3 (March 2018).

20. Dale Rielage, “Bring Back Fleet Problems,” Proceedings, Vol. 143, No. 6 (June 2017).

21. Ryan Hilger, “Fight the Next Fleet Problem in the Solomons,” Center for International Maritime Security (28 January, 2019) https://cimsec.org/fight-the-next-fleet-problem-in-the-solomons/39529.

22. Nofi, To Train the Fleet for War, 13.

Featured Image: Martine T4M-1 torpedo bombers landing on USS LEXINGTON (CV-2) on 26 January 1929, during that year’s Fleet Problem. (Naval History and Heritage Command photo)