The list went on.
The Marine Corps’ greatest asset is its relatively small size. As Mattis used to say, “When the captain says hard to starboard, small ships turn faster than big ones.” So, very quickly, our ideas began to shape Marine training and tactics. After his stint in MCCDC Mattis took command of the First Marine Expeditionary Force in Iraq and had the opportunity there to put theory into practice. The results were extraordinary. He saved many lives.
Upon return to the States Mattis again was promoted, this time to head a newly created four-star headquarters, the Joint Forces Command (JFCOM). Mattis’ energy and “take no prisoners” attitude shook up colonels and generals. Things started to get done. One of his efforts was to elevate the study of the tactical fight, just as he had done at MCCDC. Unfortunately, most generals and admirals considered tactics beneath them. It was sergeants’, not generals’, business. At JFCOM I worked for Mattis as a contractor, with the vision to create a National Center for the Study of Small Unit Excellence. During this time I wrote a think piece on tactical warfare, a piece that came out of a private conversation with Mattis.
He loved the book The Defence of Duffer’s Drift, published in 1904 by Ernest Dunlop Swinton and reissued in recent years, because that fictional account of the Boer War captured all of the timeless tenets we hoped to impart to the ground services. He asked me to update Duffer’s Drift to a modern setting. Instead, I convinced him the book we needed to mimic was Ender’s Game, a very popular science fiction work by Orson Scott Card. Written in the 1980s and later made into a popular movie, Ender’s Game told the story of a young teenager who is selected among many millions for his exceptional decision-making skill. Ender spends years undergoing a series of ever more demanding simulations to make him the absolute master of tactical warfare. My version, Jerry Smith’s War, incorporated most of our ideas about the theoretical future of small units and has become something of a cult piece on the Internet.
The climactic event of our effort was our Small Unit Excellence Conference, held at the Monaco Hotel, in the Old Town district of Alexandria, Virginia, in April 2009. Mattis’ JFCOM was the sponsor. I was a director of the event, along with Army general Jason Kamaya. It was without doubt the culminating point in our effort to make the Department of Defense and the other ground services start to pay attention to small tactical units, those who were doing virtually all the fighting and dying in 2009. We invited representatives of all the ground services, from generals to sergeants. We included police SWAT teams, CIA direct-action teams, and Special Forces and Tier I U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) leaders, to include Delta personnel, Rangers, and SEALs. We included civilian industry partners and academics, such as Dr. Martin Seligman from the Center of Positive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, and also Coach Peter Carroll, then at the University of Southern California. We were on a roll. We had plans to open a national center for small-unit excellence. We had begun to design a huge, virtual “shoot house” at Camp Pendleton, California, that would represent the highest achievement in the simulation of warfare at the small-unit level.
Sadly, the next year it all died. Some liberal national newspapers did a series of articles harshly criticizing JFCOM’s association with defense contractors. In a needless overreaction, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates implemented draconian requirements for contractual advisers that literally forced me to leave JFCOM. The next year JFCOM itself was dead, and our once-hopeful effort to reform the military at the tactical level died as well. As a result, the ideal of small-unit reform, an effort that had held so much promise for so many years, died too, and with it died many Soldiers and Marines. They are dying still.
I blame myself for much of this. The idea that the nation doesn’t really care about those who do the dirty day-to-day business of killing the enemy haunts me to this very day. This will be my last book. I had to write it to atone for my sins and to try to awaken our national leaders to the need to keep those who perform the act of intimate killing alive in combat.
I’m not optimistic. Jim Mattis has retired. The nation is tired of watching war on television. What the Defense Department really wants is to buy big, expensive stuff that floats and flies, and ISIS is on the march, undoing the brave work done by hundreds of thousands of Soldiers and Marines in Iraq.
But here goes anyway.
And by the way, Jim, thanks for trying . . .
Portions of this book have been repurposed from various articles and op-eds that I have written over the years. Parts were originally published as articles in Armed Forces Journal International (AFJI) between 2006 and 2010. Much of chapter 7 was taken from two AFJI articles: “American Infantry and National Priorities” published in June 2007, and “Small Unit Dominance,” published in March 2010. The first third of chapter 10 is taken from “Clausewitz and World War IV,” published in July 2006. The portion subtitled “Meeting the Mother Ship” in chapter 15 is taken from “A Vehicle for Modern Times,” published in 2009.
All of chapter 20, “The Draft,” is taken from Ripon Forum (May 2008). All of chapter 13, “Ripley’s Ghost,” is taken from Atlantic Magazine’s article “Gun Trouble,” January 2014. The first two-thirds of chapter 9, “Feeding the Narrative,” is taken from a monograph I first published through the Center for New American Security in 2010. Joint Force Quarterly first published chapter 4, “Adaptive Enemies,” while I was still on active duty in 1999. Various portions from chapter 16, “Firepower,” were taken from my 1989 book Firepower in Limited War, published by the Presidio Press.
I adapted several chapter segments from op-eds I wrote over the years. Most of chapter 21, “Earning the Right,” was taken from two Washington Post op-eds written in 2013. I selectively lifted much of chapter 8, “War in Two Epochs,” from a Washington Post op-ed “The Only Way to Defeat the Islamic State” published September 6, 2014.
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Now, I’m going to go off-script here for a second and just say I really like this guy. . . . [W]hen you meet Sal and you meet his family, you are just absolutely convinced that this is what America is all about.
—President Barack Obama
I was brought to tears when I watched with enormous pride and humility a November 2010 White House ceremony in which SSgt. Salvatore “Sal” Giunta became the first living Soldier awarded the Medal of Honor since Vietnam. For many of us who served in that long-ago war, the circumstances under which Giunta was awarded his medal felt frighteningly familiar: an inhospitable and forbidding mountainous battlefield that looks very much like Vietnam’s Central Highlands; a diabolical, fanatic enemy skilled in the tactical art of war; a lone squad patrol, armed with the same class of weapons we used more than four decades ago, engaged in a desperate firefight against an enemy who remained undetected until the patrol entered the kill zone. The results were both heroic and tragic: two of Giunta’s buddies died in what appeared to have been, sadly, too fair a fight.
Similarly, almost exactly two years later I watched with the same emotion during the Medal of Honor ceremony celebrating the heroism of Capt. William Swenson and his team in Afghanistan. Swenson’s men had walked into a three-sided ambush. All five members of Swenson’s lead element, four Marines and a medical corpsman, had been killed in the opening exchange of fire.
This book is about these two men and hundreds of thousands of other close-combat fighters like them who have done most of the killing and dying in wars fought since the beginning of recorded time.
