Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead

In late November 2016, I was enjoying Thanksgiving break in my hometown on the Columbia River in Washington State when I received an unexpected call from Vice President–elect Pence. Would I meet with President-elect Trump to discuss the job of Secretary of Defense of the United States? I had taken no part in the election campaign and had never met or spoken to Mr. Trump, so to say that I was surprised is an understatement. Further, I knew that, absent a congressional waiver, federal law prohibited a former military officer from serving as Secretary of Defense within seven years of departing military service. Given that no waiver had been authorized since General George Marshall was made secretary in 1950, and I’d been out for only three and a half years, I doubted I was a viable candidate. Nonetheless, I flew to Bedminster, New Jersey, for the interview.

I had time on the cross-country flight to ponder how to encapsulate my view of America’s role in the world. On my flight out of Denver, the flight attendant’s standard safety briefing caught my attention: If cabin pressure is lost, masks will drop….Put your own mask on first, then help others around you….We’ve all heard it many times, but in that moment, these familiar words seemed like a metaphor: to preserve our leadership role, we needed to get our own country’s act together first, especially if we were to help others.

The next day I was driven to the Trump National Golf Club and, entering a side door, waited about twenty minutes before I was ushered into a modest conference room. I was introduced to the President-elect, the Vice President–elect, the chief of staff, and a handful of others. We talked about the state of our military, where our views aligned and where they differed. In our forty-minute conversation, Mr. Trump led the wide-ranging discussion, and the tone was amiable. Afterward, the President-elect escorted me out to the front steps of the colonnaded clubhouse, where the press was gathered. I assumed that I would be on my way back to Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, where I’d spent the past few years doing research and guest lecturing around the country, and was greatly enjoying my time. I figured that my strong support of NATO and my dismissal of the use of torture on prisoners would have the President-elect looking for another candidate. Standing beside him on the steps as photographers snapped away and shouted questions, I was surprised for the second time that week when he characterized me to the reporters as the real deal. Days later, I was formally nominated. That was when I realized that, subject to a congressional waiver and Senate consent, I would not be returning to Stanford’s beautiful, vibrant campus.

During the interview, Mr. Trump had asked me if I could do the job of Secretary of Defense. I said I could. I’d never aspired to the job, and took the opportunity to suggest several other candidates I thought highly capable of leading our defense. Still, having been raised by the Greatest Generation, by two parents who had served in World War II, and subsequently shaped by more than four decades in the Marine Corps, I considered government service to be both honor and duty. In my view, when the President asks you to do something, you don’t play Hamlet on the wall, wringing your hands. To quote a great American athletic company’s slogan, you just do it. So long as you are prepared, you say yes.

When it comes to the defense of our experiment in democracy and our way of life, ideology should have nothing to do with it. Whether asked to serve by a Democrat or a Republican, you serve. Politics ends at the water’s edge. This ethos has shaped and defined me, and I wasn’t going to betray it no matter how much I was enjoying my life west of the Rockies and spending time with a family I had neglected during my forty-plus years in the Marines.

When I said I could do the job, I meant I felt prepared. By happenstance, I knew the job intimately. In the late 1990s, I had served as the executive secretary to two Secretaries of Defense, William Perry and William Cohen. I had also served as the senior military assistant to Deputy Secretary of Defense Rudy de Leon. In close quarters, I had gained a personal grasp of the immensity and gravity of a SecDef’s responsibilities. The job is tough: our first Secretary of Defense committed suicide, and few have emerged from the job unscathed, either legally or politically.

We were at war, amid the longest continuous stretch of armed conflict in our nation’s history. I’d signed enough letters to next of kin about the death of a loved one to understand the consequential aspects of leading a department on a war footing when the rest of the country was not. Its millions of devoted troops and civilians spread around the world carried out their mission with a budget larger than the gross domestic products of all but two dozen nations. On a personal level, I had no great desire to return to Washington, D.C. I drew no energy from the turmoil and politics that animate our capital. Yet I didn’t feel inundated by the job’s immensities. I also felt confident that I could gain bipartisan support for Defense despite the political fratricide practiced in Washington.

In late December, I flew into Washington, D.C., to begin the Senate confirmation process.

—

This book is about how my career in the Marines brought me to this moment and prepared me to say yes to a job of this magnitude. The Marines teach you, above all, how to adapt, improvise, and overcome. But they expect you to 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. Yet over the course of my career, every time I made a mistake—and I made many—the Marines promoted me. They recognized that those mistakes were part of my tuition and a necessary bridge to learning how to do things right. Year in and year out, the Marines had trained me in skills they knew I needed, while educating me to deal with the unexpected.

Beneath its Prussian exterior of short haircuts, crisp uniforms, and exacting standards, the Corps nurtured some of the strangest mavericks and most original thinkers I would encounter in my journey through multiple commands, dozens of countries, and many college campuses. The Marines’ military excellence does not suffocate intellectual freedom or substitute regimented thinking for imaginative solutions. 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 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.

In any organization, it’s all about selecting the right team. The two qualities I was taught to value most in selecting others for promotion or critical roles were initiative and aggressiveness. I looked for those hallmarks in those I served alongside. Institutions get the behaviors they reward. Marines have no institutional confusion about their mission: they are a ready naval force designed to fight well in any clime or place, then return to their own society as better citizens. That ethos has created a force feared by foes and embraced by allies the world over, because the Marines reward initiative aggressively implemented.

During my monthlong preparation for the Senate confirmation hearings, I read many excellent intelligence briefings. I was struck by the degree to which our competitive military edge was eroding, including our technological advantage. We would have to focus on regaining the edge. I had been fighting terrorism in the Middle East during my last decade of military service. During that time and in the three years since I had left active duty, haphazard funding had significantly worsened the situation, doing more damage to our current and future military readiness than any enemy in the field.

I could see that the background drummed into me as a Marine would need to be adapted to fit my role as a civilian secretary. The formulation of policy—from defining the main threats to our country to adapting the military’s education, budget, and selection of leaders to address the swiftly changing character of war—would place new demands on me. It now became even more clear to me why the Marines assign an expanded reading list to everyone promoted to a new rank: that reading gives historical depth that lights the path ahead. Slowly but surely, we learned there was nothing new under the sun: properly informed, we weren’t victims—we could always create options.

Habits ingrained in me over decades of immersion in tactics, operations, and strategy, in successes and setbacks, in allied and political circles, and in dealing with human factors, guided by the Marine Corps’s insistence that we study (vice just read) history, paid off. When I left active duty, I was reminded that I’d been fortunate in being allowed to serve so long, and fortunate in being in the right place at the right time on what had been an adventurous career path. When I told the President-elect I could do the job, I knew that those decades of study and watching the competent and incompetent deal with issues similar to what I’d face would greatly inform my work.

Looking back, some things are clear: the required reading that expanded with every rank, the coaches and mentors imposing their demanding standards, the Marine Corps emphasis on adaptation, team building, and critical thinking, and my years at sea and on foreign shores had all been preparation for this job, even if I’d never sought it. Fate, Providence, or the chance assignments of a military career had me as ready as I could be when tapped on the shoulder. Without arrogance or ignorance, I could answer yes when asked to serve one more time. While I intended to serve the full four years, I resigned at the halfway point. That is how my public service ended; now I will tell you how it began.

—

My purpose in writing this book is to convey the lessons I learned for those who might benefit, whether in the military or in civilian life. I have been fortunate that the American people funded my forty years of education, and some of the lessons I learned might prove helpful to others. I’m old-fashioned: I don’t write about sitting Presidents. In the chapters that follow, I will pass on what prepared me for challenges I could not anticipate, not take up the hot political rhetoric of our day. I remain a steward of the public trust.

The book is structured in three parts: Direct Leadership, Executive Leadership, and Strategic Leadership. In the first part, I will describe my formative years growing up and then in the Corps, where the Vietnam generation of Marines raised me and where I first led Marines into battle. This was a time of direct, face-to-face leadership, when, alongside those I led, I had a personal, often intense bond with troops I frequently knew better than my own brothers.

In the second part, I will describe the broadening tours in executive leadership, when I was commanding a force of 7,000 to 42,000 troops and it was no longer possible to know the name of every one of my charges. I had to adapt my leadership style to best ensure that my intent and concern, filtered through layers of command below, were felt and understood by the youngest sailors on the deck plates and the most junior soldiers in the field, where I would seldom see them.

Finally, in the third section, I will delve into the challenges and techniques at the strategic level. I will address civilian-military interaction from a senior military officer’s perspective, where military leaders must try to reconcile war’s grim realities with political leaders’ human aspirations, and where complexity reigns and the consequences of imprudence are severe, even catastrophic.

The habit of continuing to learn and adapt came with me when I joined the administration as a member of the cabinet, where my portfolio exceeded my former military role. Yet at the end of the day, driving me to do my best were the veterans of past wars I felt watching me, and the humbling honor of serving my nation by leading those staunch and faithful patriots who looked past Washington’s political vicissitudes and volunteered to put their lives on the line to defend the Constitution and the American people.

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.

LIKE MOST TWENTY-YEAR-OLDS, I thought I was invulnerable. Then, on a steep ridge in eastern Washington, in the winter of 1971, I fell toward my death. I was looking at the tiny figures of workers on a dam far below when my foot slipped and I plunged down an icy sheet toward the Columbia River. I threw my body back to avoid pitching headlong into space, sliding on my back down the steep slope. I tried to dig in my heels, but my boots slid off the rocks. My pack tore loose as I accelerated down the slope. I had a Ka-Bar in my belt, a fighting knife given to me by a Marine veteran. I pulled it and stabbed at the sheet ice, only to find it torn from my hands. I kept sliding, picking up speed. I twisted over and frantically clawed and scratched. But I wasn’t slowing down.

I bounced off a big rock and tumbled sideways, slamming into a boulder that broke my fall. When I came to, I was bleeding from my nose, but not from my ears, and I wasn’t vomiting, so I knew my skull wasn’t fractured. I lay there, testing various body parts. My ribs ached when I breathed, but I could flex my arms and legs. I hadn’t impaled myself.

I was lucky, and it certainly wasn’t my alpine skills that had saved me. It took me a few hours of slipping and sliding to make it to a rocky ravine and down the slope. A worker saw me hobbling along and gave me a lift across the Priest Rapids Dam. He offered to drive me the forty miles back to my home.

I appreciate it, I said, but I’d like to heal up a bit first.

He gave me an understanding look. A working man, he was outdoors every day. He knew the type. If I chose to take my time before returning home, that was my business.

I camped for two days, waiting for the bruising to go down. During the day I was flat on my back with nothing to do but admire the sleet on the sagebrush. At night I dozed more than slept. With bruised, probably cracked ribs, each time I rolled over I was jolted wide awake.

The summer before, I had gone through the rigors of Marine Officer Candidates School. I remembered what one tough sergeant told us. 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.

My fall on the ice had driven home to me that I wanted to spend my career among men like that: men who dealt with life as it came at them, who were more interested in living life fully than in their own longevity. I didn’t care about making money. I wanted to be outdoors—and in the company of adventurous people. For me, the Marines had the right spirit and the right way of looking at life. My fall would serve as a metaphor for my subsequent career in the Marines: You make mistakes, or life knocks you down; either way, you get up and get on with it. You deal with life. You don’t whine about it.

I grew up in Richland, Washington. Back in the 1940s, it was a dusty farming community of a couple hundred on the Columbia River. During World War II, the Army Corps of Engineers brought the emerging nuclear age, harnessing the Columbia’s hydroelectric power to build the Hanford reactors. It was part of the Manhattan Project, the race to build the atomic bomb. In the process, Richland became a solidly middle-class town, without enclaves of wealth or poverty. Our community of seventeen thousand engineers, technicians, construction workers, and merchants had been shaped by the trials of the Depression and World War II—hardworking, civic-minded, family-oriented, and patriotic. Nobody threw their weight around. Years later, I read the epitaph on Jackie Robinson’s tombstone: A life is not important except in its impact on other lives. That sentiment captured the credo of the generation that raised me.

My dad was a seafarer, a chief engineer in the Merchant Marine who had sailed to dozens of countries in the 1930s and ’40s. My mother, valedictorian of her high school class and daughter of a Canadian immigrant family, served as a civilian in U.S. Army intelligence in Washington, D.C., and Pretoria during World War II. She met my dad aboard ship on her way to Africa. They introduced their three sons to the free competition of ideas, a world not to be feared but to be explored. Their curiosity about life guides me to this day.

Growing up, I loved the freedom I had. Between family camping trips in the mountains and hunting rabbits with my .22, accompanied by my dog Nikki or friends, I had my family’s full permission to wander the great outdoors. How many parents would drive their teenager to the highway outside town so that he could hitchhike across the West?

I never enjoyed sitting in classrooms. I could read on my own at a much faster rate. Instead of a television, at home we had a well-stocked home library. I devoured books—Treasure Island, Captains Courageous, The Last of the Mohicans, The Call of the Wild, The Swiss Family Robinson….Hemingway was my favorite author, followed closely by Faulkner and Fitzgerald. Reading about the Lewis and Clark expedition, I was fascinated that they had canoed on the Columbia River and had passed through our neighborhood.

I had started hitchhiking in 1964, when I was thirteen. I had an insatiable penchant to see what was out there. The highways provided a means of exploring far beyond the backcountry of the Cascades. My parents had no problem with my forays. It was a simpler time back then, with a stronger sense of trust in one’s fellow Americans. I wandered across a wide swath of the western United States, enjoying the rough and ready life. I was in good shape, accustomed to sleeping outdoors, and equally curious about books, people, and open country.

Like anyone who has wandered far and wide, I got into a fair number of scrapes. In Montana, I tangled with three local boys. I was getting the worst of it when a tall sheriff wearing a silver star and a white cowboy hat showed up in a pickup—a figure right out of the movies. He gave me a jail cell and early the next morning drove me to the rail yard to hop an eastbound freight.

Three against one, he said. Tough to win against those odds.

At Central Washington State College in 1968, I was a mediocre student with a partying attitude. After I caroused too much one night, the local judge ordered me to spend weekends in jail—punishment for underage drinking.

One inmate, Porter Wagner (not the famous singer), had jumped bail in Maryland. One Saturday night he saw me hoisting myself up to look out the barred window, eager to see what I was missing outside.

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. The next day I volunteered to sweep the jail, wash police cars, and pick up food at the local restaurant for the other prisoners so I could change my circumstances as fast as possible, getting a day and a half of credit for each day served.

I was spending summers in officer candidate training in Quantico, Virginia, and loved the challenge of that environment. 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.

In early 1972, after a little over three years in college, I was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Marines. My first stop was seven months at Basic School in Quantico. Unique among the four services, every Marine officer is initially trained as an infantry officer. He will later attend other schools to become a pilot, a logistician, or what have you. But all officers begin their service together, learning the same set of basic skills and being shaped into one culture. Every Marine is first and foremost a rifleman and must qualify on the rifle range. Lieutenants learn that everything they will go on to do in the Corps, no matter the rank or the job, relates back to the private who is attacking the enemy. This initiation and common socialization has a strong impact on the Marine Corps, permeating every facet of its warfighting ethos.

—

Later that year I was sent to Okinawa to join my first infantry unit. I was lucky: I had joined the 2nd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, where most of the key leaders had spent years fighting in rice paddies, mountains, and jungles. They knew their stuff. Far from being standoffish because they had seen combat, they were tough and friendly, and they readily shared their combat knowledge. I didn’t have to earn their support; it was mine to lose, not to gain.

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 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.

The early seventies were a disruptive time in American history, with riots, political chicanery, and a divisive war. The military wasn’t isolated from this unrest in society. As the draft ended, our unpopular military ranks included an increasing number of dropouts and petty criminals. Racial tension, disobedience, and drug use caused disruption and division in the ranks. So we had our fair share of racists and druggies. They would try to infect others. If a junior officer didn’t lead by firmly displaying force of personality, that number would grow. Due to war casualties and a barracks environment that drove too many good men out of the Corps, my platoon initially numbered only twenty-six. My platoon sergeant was twenty-one-year-old Corporal Wayne Johnson, an immigrant from British Guyana nicknamed John Wayne. With only three years in the Corps, all overseas, he was doing the job designated for a staff sergeant who had ten years’ training and experience. He tolerated no guff or slackness from his teenage charges.

Lieutenant, Corporal Johnson told me, you have to be harder than petrified woodpecker’s lips. He reiterated that some in the platoon weren’t up to Marine standards and that if I wanted my troops to follow me, I had to be as tough as my toughest men. At one point, I was out in the jungle with my platoon. We had been pushing hard for several days, sweaty, stinking, sleep-deprived, exhausted—the usual fare for grunts. One guy, the biggest malcontent in the platoon, muttered that he’d like to kill his fucking hard-ass lieutenant. When Corporal Johnson brought him over to me, I decided he wasn’t going to ruin the trust in our tight-knit platoon. I told him to follow me back through the jungle to the company command post. At the end of the hike, I told him that he could have shot me in the back. But he didn’t have the guts.

I could have written up formal charges. Instead I took him to First Sergeant Mata, the senior NCO (noncommissioned officer) in our company. As a second lieutenant, I outranked him, but that was only a formality. The company first sergeant guided us young officers. He told me to return to my platoon—he would take care of the matter.

That shitbird, he said a few days later, is no longer in our Corps, Lieutenant.

Boom. The man was gone. Packed up and shipped out. Every lieutenant needs a First Sergeant Mata, a man with twenty-five years of experience and a hundred friends at other duty stations. Where did the malcontent go? Who cared; he was out. He was representative of the challenges junior officers faced in those days, and such summary dismissals of bad actors were necessary for dealing with the turbulent times. The Marine Corps would not lower its standards. Called expeditious discharge, it was a critical policy set for a time that, happily, is in our distant past.

Thanks to first sergeants like Mata, and a young battalion commander who would one day become Commandant of the Marine Corps, in our battalion the number of bottom-feeders rapidly decreased in number and in influence. Fence-sitters quickly got the message and straightened up. Why? Because there are few fates worse than public rejection and summary dismissal. Everyone needs a friend, a purpose, and a chance to belong to something greater than themselves. No one wants to be cast aside as worthless.

As a naval force, the Marines are organized to embark on Navy ships for landings on hostile shores. We would embark with only a forty-pound seabag and our combat gear and live out of that for months at a time. We lived a physically demanding life that created a rough good humor among us. I grew to know my 180 men as well as I knew my brothers back home. We would run countless laps on the flight deck when we weren’t practicing amphibious landings. We read everything from Starship Troopers to The Battle of Okinawa. We would blow off steam and weeks of pay during a couple of rambunctious days ashore in Hong Kong, Seoul, Singapore, Manila, and a dozen other cities, sometimes to the chagrin of our commanders. And what I learned about the complexities of amphibious operations on numerous shipboard deployments in the Pacific and Indian Oceans would pay off enormously in the future.

In my first dozen years in the Marines, I commanded two platoons and two companies, deploying to thirteen countries on a half dozen ships. Everywhere we sailed, at every landing and every exercise in foreign countries, I was introduced to the enormous value of allies. In Korea, their marines served as my advisers and proved their toughness in the freezing hills. The New Zealand force in Malaysia demonstrated their Maori warrior spirit and taught us jungle warfare, just as the Philippine troops did on their islands. The high-spirited, competent Australians and the quietly competent Japanese Self-Defense Force troops showed us different but effective fighting styles. These and more showed me the irreplaceable benefit of learning from others.

The Vietnam veterans taught me that you don’t win firefights by being kind. In the Vietnam jungles, the enemy tactic was to sneak as close as possible to Marine lines so that we couldn’t employ our indirect fires. In response, the Marines became skilled at registering fire sacks—identifying critical terrain features to be struck. With a simple code word, a series of shells would unleash hell on the enemy.

To give an example of the mentoring I received as a young officer, one of our company commanders, Andy Finlayson, tutored me in the fine art of fire support. On a live-fire range in the Philippines, he rehearsed with me how to employ a series of artillery strikes, bringing them ever closer to our position. I tried to reciprocate Andy’s faith in me by reading the books he recommended, including Lee’s Lieutenants, by Douglas Freeman, and Liddell