Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2019

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Part 1, Chapter 5

Part 2, Chapters 6-9

Part 2, Chapters 10-13

Part 3, Chapter 14-Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Themes

Initiative in Leadership

While this book is primarily a military history memoir, Mattis does share some aspects of his leadership style and advocates for them. The salient one is the encouragement of initiative taking in one’s subordinates. In every commanding role he is given, Mattis strives to minimize the need for reporting back to the higher-ups. Such data flow, for Mattis, can waste time and encourage micromanagement. This is one of Mattis’s complaints about EBO (effects-based operations) in JFCOM: that such a data-driven strategy made soldiers in the field “become reporters rather than focus on breaking the enemy’s will. This was the surest means of surrendering initiative and creating a critical vulnerability” (180).

Mattis knows that all members of a military unit must have the same objective and be working together to accomplish this goal, but once the objective has been clearly conveyed and understood, then, in the chaos of the battlefield, it is the officer on the ground who should be leading the troops and looking for creative ways to complete the mission. So it is that Mattis develops three questions that he asks himself and his officers: “What do I know? Who needs to know? Have I told them?” (44).

His inspiration for this approach is Viscount Slim, a British officer in World War II who successfully stymied the Japanese with units that were frequently out of contact with their commanding officer for extended periods of time. Slim counseled an approach to battle that entailed more trust in junior officers paired with mission clarity. If everyone in the unit is fully informed as to the mission and the purpose of the mission, then a commanding officer should allow trust to be the guiding principle from that point forward. Thus, the active unit on the ground uses its training and creativity to fulfill the mission without having to be overly concerned about checking in with superior officers every time there is an unanticipated obstacle. This is the reigning philosophy of military leadership for Mattis, and many of his subsequent choices (such as disbanding JFCOM) can be traced back to this belief.

Inept Civilian Leadership

Mattis is publicly known for his straight talk and withering invective at times. In Call Sign Chaos, however, his frustration with his civilian leaders, particularly the administrations of Bush Jr. and Obama, is palpable and even cutting at times but never devolves into rants or disrespectful language.

Mattis’s commitment to civilian leadership of the military is never a question in these pages. Even when Mattis is at his most discouraged, he reemphasizes that it is his job to obey orders, not undermine them. Mattis writes about his time as head of CENTCOM (his most senior position): “While I had the right to be heard on military matters, my judgment was only advice, to be accepted or ignored. I obeyed without mental reservation our elected Commander in Chief […]” (233).

The litany of failures Mattis identifies is a long list, but it can be distilled down to George W. Bush invading Iraq and everything that stemmed from that decision. In his retelling, Mattis disagrees that Iraq is a substantial threat, chemical weapons or no, and he intuits even before the war begins that the real challenge will be creating a stable Iraq once the invasion is done.

Ill-advised carelessness dogs Mattis during Bush’s tenure, but it is Obama’s cautiousness and slow-to-react nature that confounds the latter part of Mattis’s service years. Mattis may have been opposed to the Iraq War, but once it is done, Mattis believes that America has a responsibility to remain until stability is achieved. In his eyes, he recounts, Obama’s focus on drawing down troops in Iraq and Afghanistan will not achieve peace but rather encourage America’s enemies in the region, particularly Iran. Mattis reserves a special ire for Obama’s decision not to punish Assad when he uses chemical weapons. For Mattis this is an example of a lack of conviction and indicative of a lack of clear strategy in the Middle East.

Iran as a Threat to National Security

In terms of foreign policy and military threats, a recurring complaint of Mattis’s, and one that eventually led to his removal by Obama, is the ever-present danger that the nation of Iran presents to the Middle East, and even to America’s homeland security. This thread runs from the first chapter to the last. Mattis marks 1979 as being a formative year for international politics, largely because this was the year that the Ayatollah Khomeini took over Iran and declared the United States to be a permanent enemy of Iran. In Mattis’s words, “these tectonic shifts would define my next forty years” (14).

One of the reasons invading Iraq was a miscalculation for Mattis is because Hussein was no friend of Iran’s and therefore acted as a buffer against Iran’s ambitions in the area. With Iraq in turmoil, Iran had many opportunities to spread its influence in Iraq and to find recruits willing to commit terrorist acts against the United States and its allies.

Mattis’s acrimony is on full display every time Iran is discussed, as when he describes the country as:

a malign force that exported mayhem and took advantage of any turmoil. Assad, with his Baathist regime in Syria, was Iran’s sole ally in the Middle East. […] For decades, Iran was the principal state sponsor of terrorism in the Middle East, and between 2004 and 2009 the regime’s Republican Guards sent assassination teams into Iraq and provided the explosive devices that killed or wounded more than six hundred American troops (229).

Mattis finds Iran’s safe haven for terrorism to be galling and also personally offensive as many men under his command were killed by Iranian weapons or Iranian-trained insurgents.

The apex of this discouragement for Mattis is when the Iranian government is caught planning an assassination by bombing an American restaurant in Washington, DC. This move strikes Mattis as more than typical counterespionage; for him it is tantamount to a declaration of war. He is dismayed when the Obama administration does nothing to respond to the planned bombing. When he discovers that the Obama administration was negotiating a treaty with Iran during this event, Mattis is unimpressed, saying, “The radical Iranian regime’s leaders meant it when they led chants of ‘death to America’ […]” (233).