Before he became the Defence Minister, he held the rank of admiral as Chief of the General Staff of the Yugoslav People's Army from 1979 to 1982.

[1][2] Mamula remarked on the Yugoslav People's Army's (JNA) failure to respond to Slobodan Milošević's rise in Serbia, in his 2000 book Slučaj Jugoslavija (transl.

Case Yugoslavia): The military leadership of the JNA bears responsibility for not carrying out a coup d'état.

Instead, it allowed the nationalist leaders and the separatist behaviour of the two western republics to push the JNA into the hands of Greater Serbian nationalism, which unscrupulously utilised the Army in the inter-ethnic war, and eventually rejected it.

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