Politicians should not arbitrarily change how the services are organized to fight. No one is exempt from studying warfighting and lethality as the dominant metric, and nothing decreases the lethality of our forces should be forced on a military that will go into harm’s way.
I have seen no case where weakness promotes the chance for peace. A Kipling passage comes to mind about a peace-seeking man (the lama) and an old soldier.
“It is not a good fancy,” said the lama. “What profit to kill men?”
“Very little - as I know,” the old solider replied, “but if evil men were not now and then slain it would not be a good world for weaponless dreamers.”
At the same time, there’s no substitute for constant study to master one’s craft. Living in history builds your own shock absorber, because you’ll learn that there are lots of old solutions to new problems. 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. History lights the often dark path ahead; even if it’s a dim light, it’s better than none.
Policies can change based on political goals established by our elected leaders. Yet those goals must remain realistic and coherent if they are to enable an achievable strategy. Any war, even a war of limited political ends, must be fully resourced for its mission. Acting strategically requires that political leaders make clear what they will stand for and what they will not stand for. We must mean what we say, to both allies and foes: no more false threats or failing to live up to our word. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow, the decision of going to war is too great a matter to stumble into or to half-step once the decision is taken.
So long as we live in an imperfect world, one containing enemies of democracy, we will need a military strictly committed to combat-effectiveness. Our liberal democracy must be protected by a bodyguard of lethal warriors, organized, trained, and equipped to dominate in battle.
A short time later, Assad did employ chemical weapon, killing hundreds of civilians. Obviously, the President’s warning had not impressed the murderous dictator. At CENTCOM, I had assumed we would be the ones to provide the President’s “enormous consequence.” We prepare options to hold Assad harshly accountable, with NATO and Arab allies in support, from single strikes to more extensive operations, depending on the President’s judgment. We were ready, and I awaited the orders.
Instead, the President decided not to strike. We never responded militarily. This was a shot not heard around the world. Old friends in NATO and in the Pacific registered dismay and incredulity that America’s reputation had been seriously weakened as a credible security partner. Within thirty-six hours, I received a phone call from a friendly Pacific-nation diplomat. “Well, Jim,” he said, “I guess we’re on our own with China.”
“Dynamite in the hands of a child,” Winston Churchill wrote, “is not more dangerous than a strong policy weakly carried out.” Over the next several years, Syria totally disintegrated into hell on earth. The consequences included an accelerated refugee flow that changed the political culture of Europe, punctuated by repeated terrorist attacks. And America today lives with the consequences of emboldened adversaries and shaken allies.
My job was to provide options for the President, and we conducted frequent war games, testing moves versus countermoves. Nobody other than God can consistently predict the onset, scope, tenor, intensity, course, and consequences of any war. Requirements therefore exist for a rucksack full of plans… because planning for certitude is the most grievous of all mistakes. My rucksack had plans that would give the President options to ensure the fewest major regrets if a crisis struck.
Public humiliation does not change our friends’ behavior or attitudes in a positive way. In international affairs, we have often had to choose between the lesser of two evils, a balance between idealism and pragmatism. It is better to have a friend with deep flaws than an adversary with enduring hostility.
President Obama, however reluctantly, agreed to send in more troops in 2010. “It is in our vital national interest to send an additional thirty thousand US troops to Afghanistan,” he said. “After eighteen months, our troops will begin to come home.” In his first sentence, the President raised the hopes of the anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan; in the second sentence, he raised the hopes of the Taliban by giving them our departure date. After President Obama’s speech, I asked my Pakistani military liaison officer what he understood to be the message. He was quick to say, “You’re pulling out.” As Dr. Kissinger had taught me years before, we should never tell our adversary what we will not do.
Much talk has been given to having an “exit strategy.” My thought was that “exiting” a war was a by-product of winning that war. Unless you want to lose, you don’t tell an enemy when you are done fighting, and you don’t set an exit unrelated to the situation on the ground. Dave Petraeus now faced a very short window in which to turn around a deteriorating war effort. It would take months to even get the additional troops on the ground, and more months to make an impact.
Wherever I went during my tenure at CENTCOM, I heard blunt questions about our reliability as a security partner. The impression of many Arab leaders was that we might abandon them. America was emphasizing “rebuilding at home.” The lack of constancy in American foreign policy left them unsettled. Many were now openly doubting our word. I understood their concerns but explained that we had enduring interests in the region.
In these countries, we could not insist on the same level of democratic achievements as the UK had, six hundred years after the Magna Carta was signed. In the meantime, our enemies were not taking a holiday as they moved against our imperfect partners and against us. So, while I unhesitatingly reinforced our State Department’s efforts supporting inclusive government, I was also determined to work with our friends on critical, time-sensitive security matters.
In late 2010, WikiLeaks began to release classified State Department cables exposing to the world our diplomats’ assessments of foreign leaders. A new kind of adversary had inflicted deep harm to our interests, and of course many friends whose secrets had been compromised were livid. I encountered several who said they would no longer be candid with me, because they didn’t trust that Americans could keep secrets anymore. I assured them that I had not written “cables,” emails, or after-action reports containing sensitive information. Instead, if I considered an issue sufficiently important to report, I would either pick up a secure phone or meet personally with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs or the Secretary of Defense. Initially, I encountered silences and superficially brittle discussions. In some cases, the damage was so severe that only with the appointment of new ambassadors could we start rebuilding trust. Instituting on the strategic level what I had learned at the tactical level, “hand-con” became the order of the day, with handshake cementing trust.
After a few months, the broader complaints about America stopped, and specific disagreements were discussed more productively. But I wasn’t naive about relationships and hand-con. Partners were beginning to hedge their bets, now engaging with countries that were competing with us. I had returned to the region even as the dynamics of the Middle East were changing. As Heraclitus put it, you never step into the same river twice. My former commander and predecessor at CENTCOM, General John Abizaid, cautioned me, “This is not the same CENTCOM you and I served in four years ago. Ever since CENTCOM was created, America was seen as an ascending power. Today some see us as a descending power.”
America’s lack of strategy in setting priorities that would earn their trust resulted in a growing sense that we were proving unreliable. This would cause a series of challenges for me in the Middle East and would later concern me on a global scale.
The only thing that allows government to work at the top levels is trusted personal relations. You can’t achieve this leading by email.
His advice aligned with my strongest conviction: I had to gain the trust of foreign leaders, civilian and military. If regional leaders didn’t know me and didn’t feel comfortable with my understanding of what they faced, I’d be nothing more than a place card at the dinner table. The intimate conversations and the sharing of confidences will flow around me as if I didn’t exist. I’d be irrelevant, treated with indifferent courtesy as a tourist instead of a player. To avoid that, I was determined to be a good listener and to be direct in laying out my thoughts, explaining the courses of action I was considering and asking for their views. I represented the world’s most powerful military. But they lived in the Middle East, and I wanted them to know that, where our interests overlapped, their problems were my problems.
In our military, lack of time to reflect is the single biggest deficiency in senior decision-makers. If there was one area where I consistently fell short, that was it. Try as I would, I failed to put aside hours for sequestering myself outside the daily routine to think more broadly: What weren’t we doing that needed to be done? Where was our strategy lacking? What lay over the horizon? I had find officers working hundreds of issues, but a leader must try to see the overarching pattern, fitting details into the larger situation. Anticipating the second- and third-order consequences of policy decisions demanded more time than I was putting aside.
For a commander, fighting in a coalition is the trigonometry level of warfare. This is because coalition warfighting denies what is considered axiomatic in military circles: that when you assign anyone a mission or duty, you must also provide them with sufficient authority over everyone assigned to execute that mission. Coalitions, however, combine many nations’ forces, and those forces still belong to their home nations. Most nations, our own included, place “caveats” on the forces they assign, in effect restrictions that lessen the command authority of a coalition commander has over some of his assigned troops, even to the point of denying the use in certain missions. In this environment, the persuasive power of a high-level commander is tested, as is his staff’s imagination as they work to identify missions that can be assigned. My direction to my American officers was to concentrate on what allied forces could do, rather than moan about what the allies’ home governments or low levels of training prevented them from doing.
An oft-spoken admonition in the Marines is this: when you’re going to a gun-fight, bring all your friends with guns. Having fought many times in coalitions, I believe that we need every ally we can bring to the fight. From imaginative military solution to their country’s vote in the UN, the more allies the better. I have never been on a crowded battlefield, and there is always room for those who want to be there alongside us. Speaking with young generals and admirals, I would explain that in coalitions, I could not give them sufficient military authority to override an ally’s decision. “Nonetheless,” I explained, “your nation expects success from you.” Nothing new under the sun: this was the same challenge Marlborough and Eisenhower had to deal with.
The discipline of writing always drove me to be more exact, even at times driving me to different conclusions than I had originally held. A concern began to gnaw at me: I found myself grasping to define the policy end states and the strategies that connected our military activities to those end states. In the back of my mind rang the adage “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” What does it look like when we’re done?
Again I sought advice from both inside and outside government. Dr. Kissinger, in particular, was most insistent that I concentrate upon the foreign policy horizon before diving into military details or deciding on the correct application of our military power. I also understood that many disputes defied resolution in crisp form or on an expected timetable. Some crises could be solved; others could only be managed; and our military approach had to accommodate both.
Most generals were promoted because they performed well in operations. They now had to shift their perspective to the strategic level and embrace skills that had played little or no role in their promotion to flag rank. I wanted to convey, in personal, concrete terms, the complexity of dealing with civilian policymakers and how their current skill set was incomplete for what lay ahead.
Above all, I cautioned them that their natural inclination to be team players could not compromise their independence of character. They had to be capable of articulating necessary options or consequences, even when unpopular. They must give their military advice straight up, not moderating it. Avoid what George Kennan called “the treacherous curtain of deference.” Don’t be political. They had to understand that heir advice might not be accepted. Then they must carry out a policy, to the best of their ability, even when they might disagree. Recognize, too, that ultimately any President gets the advice he desires and deserves, but in the dawn’s early light you need to be able to look in the shaving mirror without looking away. As Secretary Shultz had said before Congress, to do our jobs well, we should not want our job too much.
If you’re uncomfortable dealing with intellectual ambushes from your own ranks, it’ll be a heck of a lot worse when the enemy does it to you.
The leader must learn to cut to the heart of a situation, recognize its decisive elements and base his course of action on these. The ability to do this is not God-given, nor can it be acquired overnight; it is a process of years. He must realize that training in solving problems of all types - long practices in making clear unequivocal decisions, the habit of concentrating on the question at hand, and an elasticity of mind - are indispensable requisites for the successful practice of the art of war… It is essential that all leaders - from subaltern to commanding general - familiarize themselves with the art of clear, logical thinking.
PowerPoint is the scourge of critical thinking. It encourages fragmented logic by the briefer and passivity in the listener. Only a verbal narrative that logically connects a succinct problem statement using rational thinking can develop sound solutions. PowerPoint is excellent when displaying data; but it makes us stupid when applied to critical thinking.
Again employing Einstein’s fifty-five-minute rule, I pointed out to my staff that no military had successfully transformed without first defining the problem. That problem was three-tiered: maintain a safe and credible nuclear deterrent so that those weapons are never used; sustain a compelling conventional force capable of deterring or winning a state-on-state war; and make irregular warfare a core competency of the US forces. Concurrently, we had to incorporate two new domains, cyber and space.
Reviewing my self-assigned reading, one fact stood out repeatedly about militaries that successfully transformed to stay at the top of their game: they had all identified and defined to a Jesuit’s level of satisfaction a specific problem they had to solve. The effort to define the military problems we had to solve in our time would consume a lot of my attention.
History shows that wars don’t wait until you’re ready, so it was unsettling, coming from a culture that considers every week of peace your last opportunity to prepare for war, to experience the exasperatingly slow decision cycles required to get 26 independent democracies aligned.
Any coalition has two parts: political and military. Political agreement on the purpose must be the first priority. Trust permits coalition militaries to work harmoniously together. On the battlefield, strength comes with unity of effort and a strong spirit of collaboration. I often reminded my American officers, with their hard-won pride in combat leadership and tremendous capabilities, that not all good ideas come from the nation with the most aircraft carriers. Additionally, the various NATO headquarters, my own included, had to maintain an atmosphere of respect that nurtured team readiness. That wasn’t always easy.
I took as a model the example of a chess master at a tournament who, after taking a single glance at the board, predicts the winner three moves hence. How could he do that? The economist Herbert Simon explained, “The situation [on the chessboard] provided a cue; this cue has given the chess master access to information stored in his memory; and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.”
Anticipation was critical, so my goal became to teach our young squad leaders how to pick up on the slightest cue like a chess master and sense what it meant. I searched for tools that could help develop this skill, settling on two approaches: tactical simulators and a training program to sharpen the cunning of our small-unit leaders.
Anyone who has studied history knows what an enemy always moves against your perceived weakness, and this enemy had chosen irregular warfare.
You can’t fool the troops. Our young men had to harden their hearts to kill proficiently, without allowing indifference to noncombatant suffering to corm a callus on their souls. I had to understand the light and the dark competing in their hearts, because we needed lads who could do grim, violent work without becoming evil in the process, lads who could do harsh things yet not lose their humanity.
My command challenge was to convey to my troops a seemingly contradictory message: “Be polite, be professional - but have a plan to kill everyone you meet.”
Building trust and affection in units is not the same as chasing popularity, which relies on favoritism, nor does it replace the priority of accomplishing the mission. For this reason I came down hard on anyone who said, “Sir, my mission is to bring all my men home safely.” That’s a laudable and necessary goal, but the primary mission was to defeat the enemy, even as we did everything possible to keep our young men and women alive.
Homer, in describing how Achilles had dragged Hector’s body behind his chariot during the Trojan War, condemned Achilles, regardless of his warrior fame. Civilization progresses, Homer taught us, only when the strongest nations and armies respect the dignity of the weakest.
Great nations don’t get angry; military action should be undertaken only to achieve specific strategic effects.
Every Marine lived and fought alongside others in his small team. For months, showers would be a distant memory. From general to private, we had no privacy, swapped for our favorite MREs and slept in holes next to our vehicles. Job, not rank, determined every Marine’s family. I was reminded of a pithy sentiment Field Marshal Slim wrote in WW2:
“As officers,” he wrote, “you will neither eat, nor drink, nor sleep, nor smoke, nor even sit down until you have personally seen that your men have done those things. If you do this for them, they will follow you to the end fo the world. And, if you do not, I will break you.”
“When we kick off,” I had told my staff, “I want that hill a foot shorter.”
The CIA was sending a message to the enemy commanders: Don’t fight us and we won’t kill you. By bombing the hill, I would be sending my own message to all the Iraqi soldiers who could see Safwan from a great distance: Go home while you still can walk.
War is all about reach and tempo. Logistic could easily prove to be my biggest constraint. Supply isn’t the logistician’s problem; it’s the commander’s problem. Only a commander has the authority to reduce extraneous demands on the logistics system.
Looking at myself, perhaps I hadn’t invested the time to build understanding up the chain of command.
When I no longer worked for Admiral Moore for my ashore elements, I needed to adapt to a new Army commander with a different staff style. I should have paid more attention and gotten on the same wavelength as my higher headquarters if I wanted them to be my advocates.
When you are engaged at the tactical level, you grasp your own reality so clearly it’s tempting to assume that everyone above you sees it in the same light. Wrong. When your’e the senior commander in a deployed force, time spent sharing your appreciation of the situation on the ground with your seniors is like time spent on reconnaissance: it’s seldom wasted.
When you are in command, there is always the next decision waiting to be made. You don’t have time to pace back and forth like Hamlet, zigzagging one way or the other. You do your best and live with the consequences. A commander has to compartmentalize his emotions and remain focused on the mission. You must decide, act, and move on.
Business management books often stress “centralized planning and decentralized execution.” That is too top-down for my taste. I believe in a centralized vision, coupled with decentralized planning and execution. In general, there are two kinds of executives: those who simply respond to their staffs and those who direct their staffs and give them latitude, coaching them as needed to carry out the directions. I needed to focus on the big issues and leave the staff to flesh out how to get there. Guided by robust feedback loops, I returned to three questions: What do I know? Who needs to know? Have I told them? Shared data displays kept all planning elements aligned.
“The amphibious landing,” MacArthur explained, “is the most powerful tool we have to employ. We must strike hard and deep into enemy territory. The deep envelopment, based upon surprise, which severs the enemy supply lines, is and always has been the most decisive maneuver of war.”
So here I was - offered an opportunity. Biographies of executives usually stress achievement through hard work, brilliance, or dogged persistence. By contrast, many who achieve less point to hard luck and bad breaks. I believe both views are equally true. Following the attacks on 9/11, when Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan became the target, I was the next up to deploy. As Churchill noted, “To each there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour.” Thanks to the Vietnam veterans, at this “special moment” I was prepared and qualified “to do a very special thing.” While six months earlier, it would have been someone else leading our Marines into Afghanistan, mastering your chosen vocation means you are ready when opportunity knocks.
“There is a gift,” Napoleon wrote in his memoirs, “of being able to see at a glance the possibilities offered by the terrain… One can call it coup d’oeil [to see in the blink of an eye] and it is inborn in great generals.”
“It really is the commander’s coup d’oeil,” Clausewitz agreed, “his ability to see things simply, to identify the whole business of war completely with himself, that is the essence of good generalship. Only if the mind works in this comprehensive fashion can it achieve the freedom it needs to dominate events and not be dominated by them.”
To instill that trust, the Marine Corps demanded that, as young officers, we learn how to convey our intent so that it passed intact through the layers of intermediate leadership to our youngest Marines. For instance, you may say, “We will attack that bridge in order to cut off the enemy’s escape.” The critical information is your intent, summed up in the phrase “in order to.” If a platoon seizes the bridge and cuts off the enemy, the mission is a success. But if the bridge is seized while the enemy continues to escape, the platoon commander will not sit idly on the bridge. Without asking for further orders, he will move to cut off the enemy’s escape. Such aligned independence is based upon a shared understanding of the “why” for the mission. This is key to unleashing audacity.
Developing a culture of operating from commander’s intent demanded a higher level of unit discipline and self-discipline than issuing voluminous, detailed instructions. In drafting my intent, I learned to provide only what is necessary to achieve a clearly defined end state: tell your team the purpose of the operation, giving no more than the essential details of how you intend to achieve the mission, and then clearly state your goal or end state, one that enables what you intend to do next. Leave the “how to your subordinates, who must be trained and rewarded for exercising initiative, taking advantage of opportunities and problems as they arise.
The details you don’t give in your orders are as important as the ones you do. With all hands aligned to your goals, their cunning and initiative unleashed, you need only transparent sharing of information (What do I know? Who needs to know? Have I told them?) to orchestrate, as opposed to “control” or “synchronize,” a coordinated team.
Acting without orders… yet always within the overall intention.
“You are a very persuasive young man,” he said, handing me a book about a Roman centurion, “but it would be best if you did your homework first.”
Before going into battle, you can learn by asking veterans about their experiences and by reading relentlessly. Lieutenants come to grasp the elements of battle, while senior officers learn how to outwit their opponents. By studying how others have dealt with similar circumstances, I became exposed to leadership examples that accelerated my expanding understanding of combat.
The Marines are known for their emphasis on physical toughness. But I well recall an Israeli exchange officer, on a sweltering run in the Virginia woods, bellowing at me that the physically vigorous life is not inconsistent with being intellectually on top of your game. “Read the ancient Greeks and how they turned out their warriors,” he said.
Reading is an honor and a gift from a warrior or historian who - a decade or a thousand decades ago - set aside time to write. He distilled a lifetime of campaigning in order to have a “conversation” with you. We have been fighting on this planet for ten thousand years; it would be idiotic and unethical to not take advantage of such accumulated experiences. If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you. Any commander who claims he is “too busy to read” is going to fill body bags with his troops as he learns the hard way. The consequences of incompetence in battle are final.
In war, even the greatest victory is salted with tragedy. It’s not like business - or losing money in the market or missing a sales quota. The human and moral dimension is paramount. In combat, Napoleon once said, the moral is to the physical as three is to one. The combination of intangible qualities - confidence, trust, harmony, and affection for one another that build on each man’s physical strength, mental agility, and spiritual resilience - produces cohesive units capable of dominating the battlefield. But death is ever present.
To risk death willingly, to venture forth knowing that in so doing you may cease to exist, is an unnatural act. To take the life of a fellow human being or to watch your closest comrades die exacts a profound emotional toll. In Michael Shaara’s novel the Killer Angels, Robert E. Lee says, “To be a good soldier you must love the army. But to be a good officer you must be willing to order the death of the thing you love. This is… a very hard thing to do. No other profession requires it. That is one reason why there are so very few good officers. Although there are many good men.”
To maintain my emotional equilibrium, I knew I couldn’t be informed about casualties, let alone their names, while fighting. I instructed my staff not to report the names or the number of casualties to me unless their mission was jeopardized. The doctors and corpsmen, with the cooks as stretcher-bearers, would care for the wounded and swiftly evacuate them. I would remain focused on accomplishing the mission. On some level, I knew every one of my men, and I didn’t want to think of his face if he was hit.
As the leader, anticipating heavy casualties, I had to compartmentalize my emotions. Otherwise I would distract myself from what had to be done. The mission comes first. Personal solace must wait for another day. I knew my limitations. Sort it all out later on the banks of the Columbia.
Homer described the Trojan War as wild and confused, a storm of dust and smoke, hoarse screaming and bloody swords, cacophony and irrationality. Ever since then, in their imaginations commanders have searched in vain for the orderly battlefield that unfolds according to plan. It doesn’t exist.
My battalion was trained infantry. But, other than a dozen Vietnam vets, they hadn’t experienced actual battle. Combat involves a level of intensity that is difficult to prepare for even with the most grueling training. How do you prepare your men for the shock of battle? For one thing, you need to make sure that your training is so hard and varied that it removes complacency and creates muscle memory - instinctive reflexes - within a mind disciplined to identify and react to the unexpected. And once your men have been trained, you need to ensure that they are in the same unit long enough to know their brothers and develop trust and confidence in one another. Once this building block is accomplished, the next training step is rehearsal as they focus intently on the skills that will constitute their repertoire in battle. Mentally, this is a step beyond combat skills training, one that must continue during any pause in combat, whether before a patrol or before a deliberate attack. We would use any opportunity to rehearse.
I was conscious of what George Washington wrote to the Congress early in our war for independence: “Men who are familiarized to danger meet it without shrinking; whereas troops unused to service often apprehend danger where no danger is.”
The key to preparation for those who hadn’t yet been in battle was imagining. The goal was to ensure that every grunt had fought a dozen times, mentally and physically, before he ever fired his first bullet in battle, tasted the gunpowder grit in his teeth, or saw blood seeping into the dirt.
I wanted my troops to imagine what would happen, to develop mental images, to think ahead to the explosions, yelled orders, and, above all, the deafening cacophony. Battle is so loud that it is hard to hear - let alone make sense of - what someone is trying to direct you to do in the midst of chaos. At that instant, the muscle memory of training and rehearsals must kick in; swift decisions have to be made with inadequate information. Every warrior must know his weapon, his job, and his comrade’s reactions so well that he functions without hesitation. A hitter has a quarter of a second to gauge the arc of a curveball and swing his bat. He doesn’t have time to think. He has practiced so many times that calculating whether to swing is automatic, grooved into his muscle memory. The same is true of the grunt engaged in close combat.
Verbal clarity requires the same intense practice. We have all heard recordings of 911 calls by frantic people who are talking incomprehensibly. Imagine, then, trying to give clear, terse, accurate descriptions and orders over the radio when you are under fire. So, day after day, I had my platoon sergeants and platoon commanders on the radio, responding to sudden scenarios designed to inject stress.
I adapted a technique used by Roman legions, which built rectangular camps. I organized our camp (or laager) in a triangular shape so that every man knew where he fit. The triangle always pointed north toward the enemy. Day or night, regardless of where we made camp, everyone knew the exact locations of the mortar pits, the communications tent, the fuel compound, and his command element. We were oriented toward the enemy, so all hands could roll out in battle formation at a moment’s notice.
On Christmas Day, I called in my fire support team. Proud of their plan, they were dismayed and dumbstruck when I ripped it in half. I wanted to disprove those test results about heavy casualties in the minefields.
“Start over,” I said. “Inside that U, I want everything dead, including the earthworms.”
The word battalion originated in the 16th century, derived from the Italian word for “battle,” battaglia. The battalion is the last command where the leader has a face-to-face, direct relationship with the troops. It is large enough to fight for sustained period on its own, and small enough to ensure a close relationship between the commander then the troops.
If you want an elite force, selection is critical.
My aims were modest. I thought, Maybe I’ll make captain. It freed me up to not worry about my next command and focus instead on doing the best job I could in the one I had. Each week in the Fleet Marine Force was considered the last week of peace. As a gunnery sergeant put it, “Be ready. Next week we’ll be in a fight.”
Competence. Caring. Conviction.
Leadership means reaching the souls of your troops, instilling a sense of commitment and purpose in the face of challenges so severe that they cannot be put into words.
The first is competence. Be brilliant in the basics. Don’t dabble in your job; you must master it. That applies at every level as you advance. Analyze yourself. Identify weaknesses and improve yourself. If you’re not running three miles in 18 minutes, work out more; if you’re not a good listener, discipline yourself; if you’re not swift at calling in artillery fire, rehearse. Your troops are counting on you. Of course you’ll screw up sometimes; don’t dwell on that. The last perfect man on earth died on a cross long ago - just be honest and move on, smarter for what your mistake taught you.
“What do you see, Jimmy?” he said, lying back on his bunk.
“A muddy parking lot.”
“From down here, I see stars in the night sky,” he said. “It’s your choice. You can look at stars or mud.”
He was in jail, but his spirit wasn’t. From that wayward philosopher I learned that no matter what happened, I wasn’t a victim; I made my own choices how to respond. You don’t always control your circumstances, but you can always control your response.
We were evaluated and molded by corporals and sergeants fresh from Vietnam battlefields, determined that we aspiring lieutenants would make good officers - or be sent home. Those sergeants never accepted that we were giving our best effort; rather, they always pushed us to do more. Either you kept up with them on the steep, muddy hill trails, completed the obstacle course in the allotted time, and qualified on the rifle range or you went home. They dangled airline tickets home to entice us to quit, to take the easy way out. In Vietnam, Marines were dying while we were training. Trying didn’t count; you had to deliver. Well over half the class got screened out over the course of two sweltering summers.
At the same time, each of us was establishing an individual professional reputation. Whether you stayed in the Corps for four years or forty, that reputation would follow you: Were you physically fit? Were you tactically sound? Could you call in the artillery fire? Could you adapt quickly to change? Did your platoon respond to you? Could you lead by example? You had to be as tough as your troops, who weren’t concerned with how many books you’d read. I tried to work out with the most physically fit and learn from the most tactically cunning.
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.”
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.
The Marines teach your, above all, how to adapt, improvise, and overcome. But they expect you do 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.
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 a 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.
Without arrogance or ignorance, I could answer yes when asked to serve one more time.