Tcswrgp's List: General James N. Mattis

• First, command and control implies trust
• As part of this need to share, commanders must ask three questions: What do I know? Who needs to know it? Have I told them?
• Constant feedback loops are the key. Thus, a change in terminology is needed, from “command and control” to “command and feedback.” This is more than a rhetorical change; it is a change in how to think about and conduct operations.
• It also is important to ask, “Does the network support my need to share?” In other words, the network should support how commanders want to fight. Commanders should not have to fight based on the constraints or limitations of the network.
• Second, commander’s intent often allows for faster decision making than the fastest electronic means because war is time competitive.
• Third, commander’s intent accepts the reality of thinking, cunning enemies—not a passive, compliant enemy—who will conduct operations against the military’s designs.
• Fifth, training and education play a prominent—if not the predominant—role in command and control and the exercise of commander’s intent, no matter how rudimentary or sophisticated the C² system.

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• in conjunction with a U.S. Marine Corps team under the direction of Lieutenant General James Mattis.
• The doctrinal manual was built around two big ideas: first, that protecting the population was the key to success in any counterinsurgency campaign, and second, that to succeed in counterinsurgency, an army has to be able to learn and adapt more rapidly than its enemies.
• And most recently, the Army Capstone Concept, entitled Operational Adaptability, was published December 21, 2009. Written under the direction of Brigadier General H.R. McMaster
• the manual’s twin pillars of protecting the population and constantly learning

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• But I spend most of my time on forward-looking concepts.
• 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.
• The fundamental nature of war will change about the same time the fundamental chemical composition of water changes.

• 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.
• 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.
• Actually, it means an awful lot of our troops are going to have to fight across that entire spectrum.
• 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.
• 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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