Isegoria

Adam Elkus pities the fool who paraphrases General Mattis, so here’s the general’s full response to a colleague who asked him, back in 2003, about professional reading for officers who are generally too busy to read:

The problem with being too busy to read is that you learn by experience (or by your men’s experience), i.e. the hard way. By reading, you learn through others’ experiences, generally a better way to do business, especially in our line of work where the consequences of incompetence are so final for young men. Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat-footed by any situation, never at a loss for how any problem has been addressed (successfully or unsuccessfully) before. It doesn’t give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead.

With TF 58, I had w/ me Slim’s book, books about the Russian and British experiences in AFG, and a couple others. Going into Iraq, “The Siege” (about the Brits’ defeat at Al Kut in WW I) was req’d reading for field grade officers. I also had Slim’s book; reviewed T.E. Lawrence’s “Seven Pillars of Wisdom”; a good book about the life of Gertrude Bell (the Brit archaeologist who virtually founded the modern Iraq state in the aftermath of WW I and the fall of the Ottoman empire); and “From Beirut to Jerusalem”. I also went deeply into Liddell Hart’s book on Sherman, and Fuller’s book on Alexander the Great got a lot of my attention (although I never imagined that my HQ would end up only 500 meters from where he lay in state in Babylon).

Ultimately, a real understanding of history means that we face NOTHING new under the sun. For all the “4th Generation of War” intellectuals running around today saying that the nature of war has fundamentally changed, the tactics are wholly new, etc, I must respectfully say… “Not really”: Alex the Great would not be in the least bit perplexed by the enemy that we face right now in Iraq, and our leaders going into this fight do their troops a disservice by not studying (studying, vice just reading) the men who have gone before us. We have been fighting on this planet for 5000 years and we should take advantage of their experience. “Winging it” and filling body bags as we sort out what works reminds us of the moral dictates and the cost of incompetence in our profession. As commanders and staff officers, we are coaches and sentries for our units: how can we coach anything if we don’t know a hell of a lot more than just the TTPs? What happens when you’re on a dynamic battlefield and things are changing faster than higher HQ can stay abreast? Do you not adapt because you cannot conceptualize faster than the enemy’s adaptation? (Darwin has a pretty good theory about the outcome for those who cannot adapt to changing circumstance — in the information age things can change rather abruptly and at warp speed, especially the moral high ground which our regimented thinkers cede far too quickly in our recent fights.) And how can you be a sentinel and not have your unit caught flat-footed if you don’t know what the warning signs are — that your unit’s preps are not sufficient for the specifics of a tasking that you have not anticipated?

Perhaps if you are in support functions waiting on the warfighters to spell out the specifics of what you are to do, you can avoid the consequences of not reading. Those who must adapt to overcoming an independent enemy’s will are not allowed that luxury.

This is not new to the USMC approach to warfighting — Going into Kuwait 12 years ago, I read (and reread) Rommel’s Papers (remember “Kampstaffel”?), Montgomery’s book (“Eyes Officers”…), “Grant Takes Command” (need for commanders to get along, “commanders’ relationships” being more important than “command relationships”), and some others. As a
result, the enemy has paid when I had the opportunity to go against them, and I believe that many of my young guys lived because I didn’t waste their lives because I didn’t have the vision in my mind of how to destroy the enemy at least cost to our guys and to the innocents on the battlefields.

Hope this answers your question…. I will cc my ADC in the event he can add to this. He is the only officer I know who has read more than I.

Semper Fi, Mattis

The Dirty Dozen were fictional, but the Filthy Thirteen were real:

The “Thirteen” was an unofficial unit (in fact consisting of up to 18 men) within the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division. It was parachuted into France hours before the D-Day landings to take and hold a bridge over the Douve river, in a bid to prevent German reinforcements from moving into Normandy.

The group derived its nickname from the fact that they showered just once a week and never washed their uniforms — as well as from their insubordinate attitude to authority. “We were absolutely undisciplined,” McNiece recalled. “We did not greet the officers and we did not speak to them by saying the traditional ‘Sir’. We used to call them by their nicknames.” Following the example of McNiece, whose mother was a Choctaw Indian, the men prepared for their mission by shaving their heads into Mohican haircuts and smearing their faces with war paint.

Shortly after midnight on June 6 1944, McNiece and his men parachuted behind enemy lines. By the time dawn broke, they had destroyed two bridges and had taken up positions on the bridge over the Douve. They held it against German counter-attack for three days until the structure was bombed, apparently in error, by the US Air Force. “I was submerged by anger,” McNiece recalled. “We had kept this bridge despite all opposition! And it’s our aircraft which bombed it!”

McNiece and his men subsequently joined the main invasion, and on one occasion were on the winning side of a firefight that saw 700 German soldiers killed in just 20 minutes. Paratroopers did not take prisoners, as he later explained.

McNiece believed that the group had been selected because their task was regarded as a “suicide mission” and, as notorious troublemakers, the men were seen as expendable. “The average lifetime of a paratrooper was one and a half jumps,” he recalled. “They gave you one day’s food supply when you left the plane, and they figured you wouldn’t eat all of that.”

By the time McNiece returned to Britain after 36 days of fighting, all but three members of his unit had lost their lives. Yet there were some compensations: the survivors “got two months’ wages plus everything we stole in France”.