Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead
Jim Mattis and Bing West
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead
Jim Mattis and Bing West
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Call Sign Chaos, Mattis’s memoir, is a readable look at more than four decades as a marine. Co-written with Bing West, a former marine and Reagan Pentagon alumnus, the book spans Mattis’s career, from enlistment through retirement. It contains veiled disapproval of Trump and is sharper in expressing disagreements with his Oval Office predecessors.
Jim Mattis’s Call Sign Chaos will disappoint readers hoping for a tell-all account of his tenure as Donald Trump’s first secretary of defense, but they will still learn a lot about the man who held that position.
Mattis mentions Trump by name only four times, all in the prologue's first two pages — each instance taking place prior to the president's taking office. That said, he does imply criticism, without directly taking shots.
Those looking for explicit answers in Call Sign Chaos...will be disappointed. 'I don’t write about sitting presidents,' he declares at the outset. Mattis’ book instead focuses on articulating universal leadership qualities. Kudos for that. Public sniping between elites often only exacerbates what the general astutely sees as the biggest problem now facing that grand experiment known as American democracy: tribalism.
Mattis’s leadership lessons border on the banal...but his blunt assessments of U.S. foreign policy can be memorable.
[Mattis] focuses on his military career, during which he rose through the ranks and replaced Gen. David Petraeus as head of the U.S. Central Command; and on the leadership lessons he learned in the field and on base.