Call Sign Chaos: Lessons in Leadership from Jim Mattis
“If you haven’t read hundreds of books, learning from others who went before you, you are functionally illiterate.”
Few men have been so passionately loved and feared as General Jim Mattis.
In his book, Call Sign Chaos, Mattis walks his eager audience through his extensive career as a Marine Officer and then into his two-year stint as the Secretary of Defense to President Donald Trump.
In true command fashion, Mattis says, “I don’t write about sitting Presidents.” Mattis was exceptionally intentional with the release of his co-authored memoir after the results of the Presidential election. Within its 300-pages are lessons learned from sweat, blood, failure, success, and a resolve to innovate.
A common phrase throughout his book is “push decisions to the lowest level possible.” In each chapter on specific leadership contexts, Mattis echos the importance of delegating decision-making down the chain of command.
Mattis organizes his memoir into three parts: Direct Leadership, Executive Leadership, and Strategic Leadership. In each section, Mattis’ demonstrates himself to be a transformational leader.
Direct Leadership
“We don’t get to choose when we die… But we do choose how we meet death.”
A Vietnam platoon commander said those words to his men before having them storm a hill under intense enemy fire. Mattis was forged in the crucible of such battle-hardened and experienced men.
From that quote, Mattis took the mantra, “You don’t always control your circumstances, but you can always control your response.”
Mattis learned early as a young lieutenant that men follow competence, caring, and conviction. If a man leads his men with these elements, he doesn’t have to win the fight, they will do it for him.
“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.”
Within this role of living and breathing every day amongst the men, Mattis learned how to transform his units by decentralizing leadership and being aggressively competitive, caring, and convicting.
Executive Leadership
“Civilization progresses, Homer taught us, only when the strongest nations and armies respect the dignity of the weakest.”
Mattis is an avid reader. He carries books with him wherever he goes. To quote Al Mohler, “Leaders are Readers.”
Mattis does not waste time or words. “If you haven’t read hundreds of books, learning from others who went before you, you are functionally illiterate.”
As Mattis began to move up the ranks from Brigadier General to Major General, he found himself fighting in the same hot sand of Iraq and Afghanistan that he did when he was a young Captain. All the while, Mattis became a student of his enemies and a master of war.
In this role, Mattis had exceptional difficulties in navigating the burden of leadership. To provide direction and motivation for his men, enforce ethical standards in an unethically sound fight while obeying orders from his superiors and policymakers.
“Conviction doesn’t mean you should not change your mind when circumstances or new information warrant it.”
This humble perspective prepared him for taking on General of the Marines and Secretary of Defense's roles.
Strategic Leadership
“Unless you want to lose, you don’t tell an enemy when you are done fighting.”
Mattis wrestled with the complexity of becoming a master of war and yet, being told how to fight by policymakers with no experience nor understanding of warfare. However, he navigated his role with honesty, integrity, and clarity to affect the strategic battlefront with precision and accuracy.
Over the years in battle and pouring time into studying past warfare masterminds, Mattis became convinced that command and control did not belong together. Instead, he calls it command and feedback. Decentralized command and decision-making allowed for swift, immediate action that continually defied the enemies’ abilities to react and adjust.
When it became clear that Mattis’ desires and the Presidents separated, he saw no other course of action than resigning. In his resignation letter, he wrote the following:
“I pledge my full effort to a smooth transition that ensures the needs and interests of the 2.15 million Service Members and 732,079 DoD civilians receive undistracted attention of the Department at all times so that they can fulfill their critical, round-the-clock mission to protect the American people.”
Few have been so loved and feared as Mattis. His book is an engaging episodic experience that traces the history of America’s current fight against terrorism and illustrates timeless arts in leadership along the way.
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John Owen came from Welsh descent, was educated at Queens College, and became a renowned Puritan theologian, Oxford professor, and passionate pastor who lived from 1616 to 1683. In 1647, he wrote the exhaustive treatise The Death of Death defending Limited or Definite Atonement against the Arminian view of Universal Atonement or Unlimited Atonement.