Extracted from an Inside the Pentagon interview with Marine Corps
General Mattis by Elaine Grossman
In keeping with Marine Corps doctrine, Mattis said he prefers leading through â Å“command and feedbackâ ? rather than traditional â Å“command and control.â ? â Å“And you get your best feedback by . . . going out and sensing what's going on. That's when you really know what's happening,â ? Mattis told ITP. He said he could not effectively command â Å“as the generals did in World War I, sitting back at a chateau in France and getting a telegraph key clicking to them.â ? He said he would often fly by helicopter or travel in a small convoy to wherever an important battle was taking place.
â Å“I get up there and I sense what's going on from the commander face-toface,â ? Mattis said. â Å“If he's dead tired, that helps me to understand what they're facing. But those human aspects are much more important to combat then all of the mechanical [questions like], 'What level of supplies does this unit have?'â ? Mattis offered two other principal reasons, one philosophical and the other tactical, for leading from the battlefield rather than from a command center in the rear.
First, â Å“basically war is something that requires courage and it's in the province of fear,â ? he said. â Å“And if you don't move forward yourself, you lose your moral authority to order others to go.â ? Mattis says â Å“the No. 1 authority you have [as a commander] is moral authority. The No. 1 power you have is expectation. If they expect to see you and they see you, and you expect to see them moving forward, then that moral imperative is what really takes us forward.â ?
Second, from a purely practical standpoint, Mattis doesn't trust that the sensor and communications systems will always function as needed in the heat of battle.
â Å“Why shouldn't we sit back [behind the battlefield]?â ? Mattis asked. â Å“All that fancy gear will break down.â ?
He pointed to last month's Hurricane Isabel, which roared up the East Coast and caused extended power outages throughout the Washington area. â Å“We sit here in the most technologically advanced country, in one of the most technologically advanced parts of that country,â ? Mattis said. â Å“And a silly hurricane comes through [and] we have computer] servers in every building here, and we have people right now who don't have the power to send a message across the street or to the next floor up.
â Å“And do you think [there won't be similar failures] under the stresses of combat, where an enemy is trying to interrupt those communications, where lowcost alternatives exist [like using] jammers that you can't even find because they're so small and they're hidden inside a box of trash next to a road you're driving down?â ? he continued. â Å“There's an illusion things that can go wrong.â ?
Rather than assume he can track and make sense of virtually every movement on the battlefield -- as some advocates of â Å“network-centricâ ? warfare imply -- Mattis says he provides his troops clear â Å“commander's intentâ ? about the battle's underlying objectives, leaving the rest largely to them. â Å“It's all about commander's intent, to me,â ? he said. â Å“Commander's intent does not mean that I have to be monitoring every minute. Do I like to have good situational awareness? Yes, I want the best technology and the best capability I can get. But there is no way that I think that you can take the place of that
timeless commander's intent.â ?
