Joint Warfare in the 21st Century
Remarks given by Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis
Feb. 12, 2009
Defense Showstoppers: National Security Challenges for the Obama Administration conference, sponsored by FPRI http://www.fpri.org and the Reserve Officers Association, held in Washington, D.C.
In Joint Forces Command, we have about 1.2 million troops under us, and aircraft carriers, aircraft squadrons, Army brigades, and Marine air-ground task forces. When General Petraeus or Admiral Keating needs forces, we assign those forces out. That aspect of Joint Forces Command is very straightforward. We also train the Joint Forces Headquarters that go into Baghdad, to Bakhtaran, to Djibouti. But I spend most of my time on forward-looking concepts. That’s the intellectually demanding part. That’s where the two jobs, NATO and Joint Forces Command, come together. Think of the Roman God Janus, who looks both forward and backward. That’s because history—especially very recent history—provides us some of our best signposts for the future.
I got the phone call that I was going to be the Allied Commander Transformation and Commander of the U.S. Joint Forces Command when I was in Kabul, Afghanistan, so I called for a map of NATO. They didn’t have one there, so they got me a map of the world. At that point I was a Marine from California who answered to John Abizaid and Admiral Fallon as the Marine Force’s Central Command. There I was in Kabul, closer to Brussels than Brussels is to my current headquarters in Norfolk. And therein lies part of the problem. Right now, we are superior to our enemies in terms of nuclear warfare and conventional warfare (we’ve lost a little bit of that edge, but we’ll get it back very quickly), but we are not superior in irregular warfare, and that is what we’ve got to do.
As I studied from Kabul, trying to figure out what I had to do to help transform our military, I went back through history to determine how militaries have transformed themselves. Every one of them—starting with Alexander the Great at Persepolis, in modern-day Iran, when he took his perfect war-fighting machine which had been successful in all venues, against enemies with better technology or who outnumbered him, and reorganized it; to the Germans in World War I, to the U.S. Navy in the interwar years—that transformed, that changed, that modernized, did so on the basis of one thing: they identified a problem and solved it. They didn’t assign the Supreme Commander for Transformation and then say, “There, we’ve solved the problem.” They didn’t come up with some wrong-headed bumper sticker about a revolution in military affairs and decide that was going to change the fundamental nature of war. The fundamental nature of war will change about the same time the fundamental chemical composition of water changes.
Everything I’ve learned in 35 years of wearing this uniform could be summed up in three words when you go into a fight—improvise, improvise, improvise. The more we anticipate, and the more we try to get it right ahead of time, the less we have to improvise in combat. We will always have to improvise, but how do we get it right?
The way the U.S. military addressed this was to look at the Joint Operating Environment (JOE) and identify what we thought the problem would be. We described what the operating environment that future joint forces will operate in could look like. In doing this, we tried to take into account the big trends in demographics, climate change, etc., determine what the military implications are, and identify the problems. Then, the Chairman assigned us the task of developing the Capstone Concept for Joint Operations (CCJO). There, we identified for the first time since then-Chairman Colin Powell put his thumbprint squarely on how the joint force was going to operate, how exactly the joint force will operate in the future.
So we had a problem statement and we had a solution. Now we take that solution and we test it. We had all sorts of people help us. We had people on our advisory group from the Hill, we had then-Senator Hillary Clinton, we had former Speaker Newt Gingrich. We even had the former sound mixer for the Frank Zappa band. We tried to bring in a wide range of people to break us out of our regimented approach to problem solving and problem definition—problem setting. Because if we don’t set the problem right, we are probably going to get the solution wrong. No matter how short our Marines cut their hair or how fast they run three miles, if we get the concepts wrong, as the Israelis saw in Second Lebanon War, our service people, no matter how brave, are going to catch RPGs in the chest and we’re not going to accomplish our objectives.
When concepts are incorrectly done, we really pay a price. Our job is not to get it 100 percent correct—this will never happen. We just can’t afford to get it completely wrong.
I was asked to talk about 21st Century warfare. We will fight in coalitions—first, last and always. We will be fighting against enemies in hybrid conditions. War is war; I accept that. Some people have challenged me, “Why do you use the term ‘irregular war’?” We do so because if we don’t set up some kind of tension, some kind of magnet to pull the department out of its good old mano-a-mano conventional war, then we won’t shift the budgeting, we won’t shift the focus over to where it has to go. Really, we’re going to have to be able to fight hybrid enemies, and that could be something like the Second Lebanon War, which we’re looking at very closely, where a high-tech cruise missile could take out a ship, where an enemy hiding among the people could set off IEDs, where they’re using cyber warfare, they have a good information operations campaign, they’ve learned how to influence the international media—all of the things we all have been hearing about.
The bottom line is we do not want the U.S. forces to be dominant and irrelevant in the future. That is what we must avoid by identifying the problems and getting the solutions right. Today, if you take on the U.S. Air Force, naval aviation, Marine aviation or NATO’s air forces at 15,000 feet in a fighter, you only have one role—fugitive. You’d better fly away real fast or you’re going to get shot out of the air. You take on the U.S. Navy on the high seas, they’ll burn you to the water line—that’s all there is to it. You take on the U.S. Army in the open desert and open terrain in mechanized warfare, the Army will annihilate you—that and taking on whatever the air forces leave untouched, which won’t be much. But the area that we are not superior in is irregular warfare, and we are going to make irregular warfare—per Secretary Gates’ speech about balance1—a core competency of the U.S. military. We’re not going to hold our breath. We’re not going to say it’s going to go away— that’s not going to happen. And we’re going to figure this thing out and decide who does what in this effort. It doesn’t mean that every service is 50/50 conventional and irregular. Actually, it means an awful lot of our troops are going to have to fight across that entire spectrum. And if the Roman Empire could have troops that held the borders and were still disciplined inside against guerrillas and uprisings; if the British troops could hold the Indian subcontinent, I believe it was with 22,000 British regulars by bringing on board the British Indian Army, then surely there is a way for us to figure out how to do this thing right with a mix of soft and hard power. So the bottom line is we’ve identified what we think is the fundamental problem—and that is gaining competency at the national level and right down to the tactical level, under the strategic tactical compression, in irregular warfare, without surrendering our nuclear superiority and our conventional superiority, behind which the international community gains great benefit.
Now, some paradigms are being broken. A year ago, I would have told you that chances of borders being changed by force in Europe were pretty much gone, right? We resolved that, said it’s over with. Well, borders were changed in Europe, if we consider Georgia part of Europe. Borders have been changed by force, and not much happened, did it? A lot of newspaper articles were written, but not much happened. So what does that tell us about the future?
One thing is we surrender our superiority and conventional war at our own peril. If anyone thinks it’s expensive to keep a conventional war force alive, it’s a lot more expensive to have to fight a conventional war. So we don’t have the freedom, with America where it’s at in this point in its history, to say that we’re going to surrender some part of the spectrum. The paradox of war is that the enemy will always move against your perceived weakness, so either we maintain conventional war superiority with very well-trained and educated leaders—and that includes enlisted leaders who can fight across the spectrum and adapt to the kind of surprises that we know are coming—or we’re going to end up creating the very thing we don’t want, which is a conventional war.
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