Kruse's Keys: Read "Call Sign Chaos" for a Leadership Primer

Yes, Call Sign Chaos is a biography of one of the Marine Corps’ more storied and legendary generals, but it’s also a primer on leadership, and a first person account of the wars America fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. In it we see the rise and development of a man who became both a student of history and of those who followed him. A voracious reader with legendary (and prized) reading lists, he acknowledges that only an aide earlier in his career had read more than him (then 1st Lieutenant Warren Cook--now LtCol Cook). He notes that the importance of reading history is that it gives a leader some margin: “Living in history builds your own shock absorber, because you’ll learn that there are lots of old solutions to new problems.” With this shock absorber a leader realizes they don’t need to come up with every solution on their own. Mattis is more direct in some of his closing reflections: “If you haven’t read hundreds of books, learning from others who went before you, you are functionally illiterate--you can’t coach and you can’t lead.” And for Mattis, everything boils down to developing leaders because that is how one accomplishes the mission of defeating the enemy and doing everything you can to keep your Marines alive. So here I'll offer you (spoiler alert) Mattis’ leadership philosophy distilled to its essence.

Have a bias for action. Set the tempo for that action and reward those who meet that tempo or exceed it. Speed is king because time can’t be recovered once it’s lost. Reward the initiative of those under you--even when they fail.

I’d encourage you to read through my key quotes and takeaways below for many more lessons. But I’ll close here by discussion one of the great Mattis quotes:

“Powerpoint is the scourge of critical thinking.” 

He notes that powerpoint is only good for displaying data and I'd argue most military service members would agree. The very first admiral I ever worked for was also one of the best leaders that I worked for (as a reservist airline pilot, he also had the best hair and mustache in the Pentagon--can one have a "grooming mentor") and he demonstrated the truth of Mattis' assertion whenever he would speak to audiences. His powerpoint’s rarely ever had more than a few words. Instead, his powerpoints would contain pictures or a few maps. He’d use those illustrations to tell a story and lay out his argument or point. This method would force the listeners to stay engaged, take some notes, and not just mentally check out (knowing that they could just refer to the powerpoint slides later). We need leaders to embrace this truth and use their presentations to create narratives that tell a story that cogently lays out the problem at hand so that solutions can be discovered and developed. 

See our 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015 and 2014 Reading Lists. 

Key Quotes

88 “Note to all executives over the age of thirty: always keep close to you youngsters who are smarter than you.

92 “Any general who isn’t spiritually connected to his troops is not a combat leader.”

96 “To expect success every time is wishful thinking, but we should default to supporting commanders who move boldly against the enemy...initiative and audacity must be supported, whether or not successful.”

102 “Never think you’re impotent. Choose how you respond.” Mattis when faced with adversity or impossible situations.

124 “Great nations don’t get angry; military action should be undertaken only to achieve strategic effects.” Mattis’ considerations prior to orders to attack into Fallujah.

132 “I come in peace. I didn’t bring artillery. But I’m pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you fuck with me, I’ll kill you all.” Mattis during continuations with sheikhs.

141 “If there’s something you don’t want people to see, you ought to reconsider what you’re doing. The most compelling story for us should be the naked truth about the reality of our operations.” Mattis on openness with media.

144 “Be polite, be professional--but have a plan to kill everyone you meet.” Mattis’ direction to his grunts as he charges them to thread the line and act ethically while being prepared to act lethally when shot at.

150 “Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.” Mattis picked this up from chess matches and then wanted to teach his squad leaders how to pick up subtle cues in the same way in combat situations. So he started to use tactical simulators and a dedicated training program to go along with it. Despite aviation using simulators to great effect, this had never been done for infantry which shoulders the buk of the fatalities.

156 “Without credible military force, our diplomacy is toothless.”

156 “Operations occur at the speed of trust.” “Make your intent clear, and then encourage your subordinates to employ a bias for action.”

159 “Attitudes are caught, not taught.” An important tenet of successful leadership is maintaining morale amidst adversity.

177 “There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that is fighting without them.” attributed to Winston Churchill but Mattis uses it in discussing the value of NATO.

182 “Powerpoint is the scourge of critical thinking.” It’s only good use is for displaying data.

212 “If a democracy does not trust its troops, then it shouldn’t go to war.” Mattis in pushing for better rules of engagement which would be “reflexive, not reflective, so that troops can react swiftly and legitimately when time is of the essence.”

237 “Living in history builds your own shock absorber, because you’ll learn that there are lots of old solutions to new problems.”

237 “If you haven’t read hundreds of books, learning from others who went before you, you are functionally illiterate--you can’t coach and you can’t lead.”

Key Takeaways

46 Origin of Mattis’ call sign came from then LtCol John Toolan, who wrote CHAOS on the chalkboard and asked Mattis when he came in the room: “Does the Colonel Have Another Outstanding Solution.”

84 He acknowledges that he comes up with very few new ideas but that he takes the opportunity to integrate and learn from the lessons of others.

87-8 Without the creation and stoking of “vicious harmony” on the battlefield, one’s leadership is outdated and incomplete. This type of harmony requires coordination and most importantly TRUST across all sectors (military, diplomacy, service etc.)

88 Aide 1st LT Warren Cook comes up with the idea for the “mother of all sand tables” to rehearse the invasion of Iraq with the different combat leaders wearing colored and unit-labeled jersey to walk through the invasion of Iraq. Important here is that Mattis created an environment where his aide felt comfortable interrupting to offer a solution and that Mattis didn’t just blow him off. https://www.hoover.org/news/nsaf-profile-us-marine-corps-lt-colonel-warren-cook

90 his success in initial Iraq invasion was getting “inside the enemy’s OODA loop”--that is “not giving the enemy time to react and repeating the loop faster than they could.

101 Digital technology and instant communication don’t necessarily clear the fog of war--if the information is incorrect or incomplete to start with, then its instantaneous communication can make matters infinitely worse.

132 When faced with subpar guidance from headquarters or higher, you must suppress your frustration and deal with the situation at hand.

133 Mattis division lost 18 marines because the theater and national command’s couldn’t get their act together and tell them what to do...only what not to do.

143 Crazy story about this meeting he had with Junabi, head of the “moderate” Mujahideen Council. This was a man who had tried to kill him months earlier. If it had gone the wrong way, he was ready to kill Junabi.

146 Mattis takes issue with the notion of the mission being to “bring all my men home safely.” Instead he said it must be to “defeat the enemy” and do everything to keep your marines alive.

156 Military’s Achilles’ heel is overconfidence in uninterrupted communications. We need to consider and learn how to continue the fight when our networks fail. This hearkened back to the idea of commander’s intent which Admiral Nelson encapsulated perfectly before the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805: “In case signals can neither be seen nor perfectly understood, no captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of the enemy.”

173 NATO transformation was stymied by a process-driven culture that lacked energy and which didn’t value initiative.

182 Powerpoint can only display data--it does nothing to enhance critical thinking. Instead we need our leaders to create a narrative that tells a story that cogently lays out the problem at hand so that solutions can be discovered and developed.

202 Sought to emulate George Washington’s brand of leadership which prompted him to

235 I’ll caveat my observations here by noting that the below wasn’t the point of Mattis’ section on “Lethality as the Metric”...it was only a glancing comment he made--but it still bothered me. The only fault that I found came in his reflections chapter where he asserts that our military is all about teamwork. That assertion would actually make a good question to pose to service members periodically: Is the military all about teamwork? I guess the first step would be to come up with the military’s accepted definition of teamwork. I hung up on this assertion because I believe it’s one of those broad statements that is too often unchallenged and simply accepted--as in, the military is a hierarchical organization with strong leaders therefore it’s a teamwork-based organization. There may be communities or units that are teamwork-centric, or teamwork-obsessed but certainly not the entire military. The second fault that I find comes in his next sentence: “Everyone enters the military at junior rank and rises according to merit.” Certainly, the first phrase is accurate as that is the current baseline--we all start at the bottom (although there are, of course, varying degrees of bottom) but does everyone rise according to merit? I mean, that is the general idea with our promotion system and that is generally how it happens but I think it’s worthwhile to return to the basic definitions. Word matter. So what does “merit” mean within the military promotion system? Because in reality, servicemembers rise according to a multitude of factors: merit, timing, time-in-rank, class rank, lineal number, personality conflicts with commanding officers, good commanding officers, horrible commanding officers. Purely anecdotally, given how quickly veterans rise within civilian organizations after their military service, it would seem that those organizations are more merit-based than the U.S. military.

238 Mattis’ leadership philosophy distilled to its essence is this: Have a bias for action. Set the tempo for that action and reward those who meet that tempo or exceed it. Speed is king because time can’t be recovered once it’s lost. Reward the initiative of those under you--even when they fail.

242 You want those under your leadership to think the following at all times: “What do I know? Who needs to know? Have I told them?”

Notes on Mearsheimer and Walt's "An Unnecessary War"

BONUS LINK:  My entire (so far) grad school notes collection can be found here. 

Mearsheimer and Walt, An Unnecessary War, 2003

- Here the authors take apart the notion of intervention/war in Iraq as a preventive measure against an undeterrable lunatic Saddam Hussein. 

-  Written from a realist perspective where they show Saddam as a leader trying to survive; he initiated the wars for realist reason

- Iran-Iraq war we were on his side and fed him intel that allowed him to use his biological weapons against Iran.

- in the Gulf War, State Dept earlier told Saddam we had no part in any border disputes with Kuwait—was this true, or was the truth more nuanced?

-  Finally, it didn’t matter whether Saddam had WMDs or nukes, because we could use deterrence against him—we had bigger weapons and nuclear arsenal.  Saddam was a survivor and would have caved. 

LINKS:

http://mearsheimer.uchicago.edu/pdfs/A0032.pdf

Iran's "America Can't Do a Damn Thing" Billboard

We are studying Iran's 1979 Revolution this week in my Islamic Fundamentalism class.  It reminded me of a picture a friend took back in 2005.  This billboard sits along the Iran/Iraq border, close to the mouth of the river (Khor Abdullah).

We always got a kick out of Khomeini's giant middle finger to the United States!

Is the UN Charter Relevant in the Twitterific Age of Intervention?

BONUS LINK:  My entire (so far) grad school notes collection can be found here. 

Is the UN Charter Relevant in the Twitterific Age of Intervention?

            Both liberals and realists would agree that there are scenarios that call for or require intervention in the internal affairs of other sovereign states.  Speaking on the idea of collective global security Kofi Annan said, “In our globalized world, the threats we face are interconnected . . . whatever threatens one threatens all.” (Lauren, Craig, George, 272).  Annan overreaches in his statement and it is in the application of the limitations and requirements for intervention that realists and liberals disagree today.  It is only in the reconciliation of realist and liberal approaches that a system balancing restraint and freedom can not only be developed, but most importantly applied.  Most notably the international community set out to do just this after World War II with the United Nations (UN) Charter.  While well intentioned, this system has not changed in concert with advances in technology or with the shift in the international balance of relative power. 

            A key feature of the Westphalian Order, still largely in place today, is the mutual respect for sovereignty among nation states.  Although this respect is lessening, most states feel obliged to provide a modicum of international legal justification before interfering in another state’s domestic affairs and even name interventions with this in mind.  The U.S. dubbed their invasion of Panama, “Operation JUST CAUSE.”  Realists focus on the autonomy, power, and security of sovereign state actors and are invested in the modern state system and thus have a higher bar.  Nevertheless, one could see realist support for the U.S. intervention in Pakistan in defense of Afghan sovereignty and the aforementioned invasion of Panama based on the threat to the U.S. of Noriega’s facilitating drug running into the United States.  The liberal viewpoint, with its focus on the interdependence of not only state actors, but also organizations and institutions, and the promotion of human rights, provides to a large measure the basis for the recent series of “humanitarian interventions” such as the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia and its most recent involvement in the Libyan Civil War.  

            Thus a realist might also favor intervention when it contributes to the international balance of power and order.  Although there was an obvious ideological component to the U.S. policy of containment during the Cold War, each side viewed challenges to its sphere of influence as a zero-sum game exemplified by the 1983 U.S.-led invasion of Grenada in response to what was viewed as the Soviet-backed, Cuban militarization of the island.  A liberal might demand intervention in the same situation but for very different reasons—namely because the intervention would enable the independence of the people and the government (Nye, 169). 

            Although imperfect in design and often execution, the UN Charter represents a pragmatic reconciliation of the realist and liberal approaches and more importantly, addresses both the limitations and obligations of states in intervention.  The UN Charter sought to provide a structure to address, evaluate and ratify (when applicable) calls for intervention.  Specifically, Chapter VII (Action with Respect to Threats to the Peace, Breaches of the Peace, and Acts of Aggression) does provide a single standard.  Article 39 states: “The Security Council shall determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression and shall make recommendations, or decide what measures shall be taken . . . to maintain or restore international peace and security.” The Security Council has a vested interest in maintaining international balance of power, and the UN provides the framework for nations to make decisions together.  This framework and Chapter VII mandate does not encompass intervening actions like public appeals by government leaders or officials.  Nye describes this wide range of possible actions that build from words to steel (Nye, 166-7).  When “steel” is needed, Article 43 obligates all UN members to contribute as required, but sets a limit on this contribution by including those members in UNSC’s decisions and by allowing them to bring any economic problems to the UNSC as well.  Although the charter has no real enforcement mechanism for states that refuse to participate, the Charter is an improvement over the legal framework of the League of Nations—as it better balances national sovereignty with international legal obligations (and includes the U.S. as a member).  Finally the charter is clear that nothing “shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence” (UN Charter, Article 51).  This charter has been criticized, however, for taking too soft an approach to human rights in favor of sovereign ones (Lauren, Craig and George, 76).

            Although the Charter limits U.N.-approved or sponsored intervention with fairly clear criteria, these criteria have been more broadly applied during the late two decades.  Of late, the UN’s loose interpretation of threats to “international peace and security” raises the question of inconsistency. Why did it condone interventions in Iraq and Libya, but does not intervene in China’s violent suppression of public dissent?  This, of course, stems from China’s veto power on the UN Security Council.  One contributing factor may be the 24-hour news cycle for which a closed society like China’s is less vulnerable.  Today it is public opinion, forged by the continual bombardment of images and information, which creates the impetus for action more so than any rigorous evaluative series.

            Without a standard interpretation of Article 39, the UN must create a framework of evaluation for intervention.  First and foremost, the tripwire to intervene must be when the internal threatens the external—when the abuses occurring within a country affect the peace and security of the international community.  It is at this juncture that the obligation must be separated from the limitation.  The international community must agree to intervene but must embrace Huntington and ensure that the intervention itself is regionally led.  The application of sub-state theory is applicable here; those countries in  their region can better understand their culture (strategic and otherwise), and are in the best position to use soft power to affect change.  That soft power traditionally has not been systematically applied in this manner is perhaps why its effectiveness has been limited (Nye, 63-4).  This regional intervention combines the liberals’ focus on interdependence with the realists’ need for power and security. 

            Although flawed and in need of an update to reflect the modern international system, the provisions on intervention in the UN Charter provide satisfactory resolution to the tension between obligations and standards, or limits, on intervention.  The Charter uses a liberal lens to promote international peace and security while providing a realist mechanism to implement said peace and security throughout the globe.  Once must question, though, whether the current trend toward humanitarian intervention can be sustained.  As an increasing number of nations such as Mexico show signs of devolving into failed states, the international community will continue to be challenged to set boundaries on and provide justification for intervening in what were considered until recently, purely domestic issues within sovereign states.  The challenge is for the standards and means of intervention to fully evolve with technology and the role of transparency.  While certain factors like human nature remain timeless, the 24-hour news cycle is already quickly morphing into the 1,440 minutes (and one day the 86,400 seconds) news cycle with a real-time global flow of news and reporting.  The world must not pay mere lip service to former Secretary General Daj Hammarskjöld’s comment that the “United Nations reflects both aspiration and a falling short of aspiration.  But the constant struggle to close the gap . . . makes the difference between civilization and chaos.” (Lauren, Craig, and George, 129).  The struggle in this case must be to keep pace with an increasingly interdependent world and to intervene consistently and only when required. 

 Bibliography

The Crux of FAO-dom

      I want to comment early on in this blog on RADM Lemmon's statement from the 4th Annual FAO Conference: "Trust and cooperation cannot be surged."
     This statement directly addresses the dichotomy between the role of the warfighters (the guys with guns on the ground-GWGOG) and the FAOs.  Using Iraq as an example, we had the capability to surge our GWGOGs to much success.  However, the roles of FAOs, specifically the successful role of FAOs as advisers to  the GWGOGs requires that each FAO has put in the requisite time within that country/region, that each FAO has forged the relationships needed to be effective. 
      And it is in this respect that RADM Lemmons statement must truly become the mantra for FAOs worldwide.  In whatever position each FAO finds themselves in (whether stateside or overseas) they must seek ways to build that trust and cooperation within their ROI (region of influence) throughout their career.

 (In future postings I will discuss the nature of trust and cooperation and what is required to create them)

Questions for discussion:

1.  Had a robust FAO program been established 20 years earlier, how might the conflict in Iraq have played out differently?  What should their role be (ideally) in Iraq today?

2.  Are there currently the correct number of FAO billets on each regional staff world-wide to advise/influence in future conflicts?  Are these billets correctly placed and distributed amongst the branches of the armed forces? 

3.  What are ways that FAOs can build that trust and cooperation within their region while they are stateside?