Читать книгу Scales on War - Bob Scales - Страница 6

PREFACE

I first “met” Jim Mattis virtually (though not yet in person) when my coauthor, Professor Williamson Murray, and I wrote our book The Iraq War: A Military History. The publisher, Harvard University Press, wanted to be first with a book about the March on Baghdad in 2003, so they gave us only a few months to produce it. We worked like dogs, and by the next fall it was on the shelves.

Two characters stood out in the book: Maj. Gen. David Petraeus, commanding the Army’s 101st Airborne Division, and Maj. Gen. James Mattis, his Marine counterpart, commanding the 1st Marine Division. By the end of the campaign both had achieved near-legendary status—Petraeus for understanding the need for a shift to counterinsurgency and Mattis for his remarkable skill as a fighting and intellectually gifted infantryman.

Two years later, Mattis was commanding all Marine forces in Central Command, leading the headquarters responsible for the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. As he watched the battle from his perch in Tampa, Florida, he became concerned with the tough battle being fought to retake the Iraqi city of Fallujah. When it was over the city was ours but at a cost of more than ninety Marine lives. Early on a November evening just after Thanksgiving, Mattis called me at home.

“General, it’s me, Mattis. I just read your book.” Of course I thought he was referring to The Iraq War. “No, I mean Yellow Smoke.” I had published Yellow Smoke before the invasion of Iraq. I had written it to offer a future vision of ground warfare. “I keep your book by my bedside,” Mattis said. “You say some things in it about tactics and the human dimension in small units. Many of those things I saw play out in Fallujah. We need to talk.” Here was a fighter, the archetype American warrior, wanting me to talk to him about tactical warfare. Of course I agreed.

The phone call started a relationship between us that continues to this day. His next assignment after returning from the second battle of Fallujah was as commander of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command (MCCDC), and it came with promotion to three stars. MCCDC is essentially the Marine Corps’ in-house think tank. It develops fighting doctrine and runs schooling, training, and the requirements for new weapons. It was here that I became reacquainted with “Rip” van Riper, a retired Marine lieutenant general, who like me was a military writer and intellectual. We became something of a brain trust for Mattis.

Mattis knew something was not right about how the Marine Corps fought at the tactical level of war. He thought at the time that some of my ideas might prove useful in making changes after Fallujah. In January he put me in front of all Marine brigadier generals in the auditorium at Henderson Hall, the Marine Corps Headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. The next month I gave the same briefing to the Marine Corps’ “Executive Offsite.” Present were all the senior Marine generals and the Commandant of the Marine Corps, Mike Hagee. It was a tense moment for me: a retired Army artilleryman lecturing to a body of men who considered themselves to be leaders of the most competent tactical body on Earth. Of course it was a risk for Mattis to invite me, as well.

I talked for an hour and a half and then answered questions. I kept the notes of that talk, and those notes generally form the outline for this book. General Hagee was extremely kind to me, and he told Mattis to get on with some of our suggested reforms. They seem so simple today: to construct a system of “combat profiling” that would allow Marines to observe an enemy’s body language to determine his intent; to create a virtual “shoot house” to teach Marines how to react to various unpredictable circumstances when fighting in towns and cities; to reinvigorate the long-range shooting course, by which (to use my words) every infantryman would be a sniper. 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 . . .