To be honest, if his colourful quotes were intended to alarm me, they actually had quite the opposite effect.
“Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.”
– James Mattis
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Well I must say James Mattis sounds like an interesting fellow!December 2nd, 2016 |
 40 comments to Well I must say James Mattis sounds like an interesting fellow! |
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I have quite a few contacts amongst our militarily-employed.
They really, really like this guy.
(Well, except for the women failing SF school, and the easily offended snowflakes. They’re not happy at all.)
Actually, he is apparently quite a serious fellow, and not necessarily of the hawkish variety.
BTW, word is that he was fired without so much as a phone call.
Some great quotes there. Sounds like the right guy.
“… they actually had quite the opposite effect.”
True to the word.
“Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.”
– James Mattis
Basic Survival 101
Fantastic!
If Trump can also get John Wick as head of the CIA everything will be peachy.
“BTW, word is that he was fired without so much as a phone call.”
You can be the world’s greatest military and realpolitic mind, but if you fail to bow and scrape to the egos of Obama’s worthless political staff – a staff that has consistently made the wrong calls in every dangerous and/or strategic situation that has arisen – you are out on your rear.
One of O’s biggest failures was surrounding himself with idiots who were convinced that he was a god and they were gods-in-training. In truth, their stupid blunders killed many, many people. College sociology majors with no experience in . . . anything . . . shouldn’t be running a military.
When Mattis’ name came up I happened to be hanging out with some former and current MC guys who were ecstatic; the guy seems to have a reputation only slightly poorer than that of Chesty Puller.
From the article Alisa linked to:
“I’d call him a tough-minded realist, someone who’d rather have tea with you than shoot you, but is happy to end the conversation either way.”
How lame was the Obama administration that even Trump makes it seem like the grownups are in charge again?
Heh, Ace of Spades said that, after reading those quotes, “For the first time in my life as an American I had gay thoughts”.
I was out drinking with a bunch of former US Marines when Mattis’ name came up in conversation.
General consensus is that while Mattis isn’t the reincarnation of Chesty Puller, he isn’t a bad facsimile. The guys think Mattis is terrific. Some reservations were made about his ability to deal with ‘all the Oval Office bullshit’, and how he’d actually handle being a REMF.
More about General Mattis. He’s a really excellent choice.
From the article with the quotes:
That was written in 2010. Six years later, the same could be said of the President Elect.
‘Kill everybody’ isn’t really the object of the military, although it’s usually the main tactic. The real object is to have enough force in the right place at the right time that killing anyone is unnecessary.
I presume that General Mattis was being droll. Droll is OK, but if it won battles, the French would have won at Sedan.
They all seemed pretty reasonable to me. Is there something wrong with me?
I guess it depends on whether you see a nation’s military as a kind of police force, or the ultimate manifestation of state power.
I fall into the latter camp, so my bigger concern is not what the military do and how much death and mayhem they cause, but what they are directed to do by, and the political aims of the Executive Branch.
I read that as both droll and serious – but when the latter, as meant in a narrow sense such as on a battleground, where there really is ‘us’ an ‘them’. In those real-life situations anyone who is not literally with you, is at least potentially against you and are out to kill you and those with you, unless you kill them first.
Sorry, but that really sounds too much like the UN peace-keeping forces (quite a misnomer, that one). Yes, speak softly and carry a big stick – but be prepared to use it, and probably more often than you’d like. I think Gen. Mattis speech is as soft as one can expect from a guy with that size of a stick 🙂
Alisa, I can’t really disagree with that, but I really do think that the purpose of the military should *only* be as a physical threat which is one legitimate command away from “blowing shit up and killing people”.
Of course, the devil is in the details. Why, who, when, and how much death and destruction shouldn’t be within the military’s purview – that is not for them to determine, nor should it be.
.. and re: “the real object … killing anyone is unnecessary” – yep, we’ve all read Sun Tzu talking about supreme excellence in generalship, the reality is that military operations and three-dimensional chess are very different activities. “Having enough force in the right place and the right time” would require a level of battlefield intelligence, materiel, personnel and managerial omniscience that beggars belief.
I agree, Bod.
… and right on cue …
I served with James Mattis …
My favorite Mattis line is “Engage your brain before you engage your weapon.”
Oh, don’t forget “PowerPoint makes us stupid.”
Mattis is hardly original. Most of those quotes, adjusted for available technology, were probably old to Enembargesi.
Mattis isn’t what anyone could reasonably call a hawk – he’s very good at war but also intimately aware of its downsides, which is exactly the sort of person you want in that job.
Indeed Eric, I have actually seen the cuneiform tablet in the British Museum where Enmebaragesi himself first wrote: “PowerPoint makes us stupid”… the man was prescient.
NopeNopeNope… a military that is forbidding has always been the desideratum. Having to fight is a sign of poor planning. But since poor planning happens, once the balloon goes up utter ferocity is the only thing. Mattis seems to understand this.
UN peace-keepers have a different mission, although what it is eludes me; something about making the diplomats feel virtuous, I think. The diplomats have a weakness for softly fought wars that drag on and on, accomplishing little except extensive bloodshed over extended time.
“Be insulting, be dishonest, have a plan to betray everybody you have a duty to.”
–the unofficial motto at the Atlantic and most mainstream news media
You say that like it’s a bad thing. One of the things about Mattis is that he’s keener to learn from history than repeat it.
Well yes, ideally – although in the real world I don’t see how a military can be forbidding, if it and its government have always been so good at planning that they never had to fight at all.
Among other things, yes. Mainly though, I suspect that it’s just another source of income for a certain kind of people in certain places.
Indeed, TomJ – I am increasingly impressed by this guy. Now we’ll have to see if the incoming administration will show a greater ability to listen to people such as him than the previous one.
“Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.”
Okay. 😎
I’ll ring the note of caution. I’m a veteran of the OIF/OEF years, and Mattis is well beloved far beyond his own Marine Corps. He’s really the only general officer with influence among the rank and file simply on name recognition. And I do like his hard-talking persona. But officers, especially general officers, don’t get there by not playing politics. Mattis may have just been playing the political game from a different angle. He’s a bright guy, and I think this could be a good choice. But I’m not on board with being uncritical about the SecDef based on some memed quotes of his. We will see how he does.
That is a point not being made nearly often enough.
I doubt you’d find many, if any here guilty of that. That said, in this age of political correctness those quotes are not just merely refreshing, but are in fact productive.
He’s bringing in his own brand of politics, whatever they may be, and replacing people whose politics have decreed that physical requirements should be dropped no matter the impact on effectiveness, that pay can be stagnant or even dropped, that sues veterans for tens of thousands of dollars of back-pay because some states paid too much in enlistment bonuses a decade ago, that has developed billions of dollars worth of surprisingly-useless weaponry that isn’t as good as the old stuff, that has publicly committed to paying the medical costs for gender-dysphorics’ trans-surgery but can’t turn billions of tax dollars into good medical care for vets but manages to pay large yearly bonuses to bureaucrats convicted of misuse and theft of Veterans’ Administration money.
I’ll take my chances with the new guy.
Hey, I’m cautiously optimistic. But I’m also a contrarian, so when I see this much glee, I like to emphasize the “cautiously” part.
Tarrou
Old B 1 Bob Dornan liked to say “Once you’ve got more than one star, it’s all politics.”
That said I think it needs to be pointed out that Mattis is a former protege of Al Grey who was an outstanding Marine leader back in the 1980s.
For the moment I fully agree with the “cautiously” attitude.
One indication will be if the guys at the pointy end of the stick get a weapon that is not yet another version of the 50 year old M-16- America’s Brown Bess.
James Mattis is a fellow admirer of the “Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius – so he will do.
Of course Bill Clinton said it was his favorite book – but I suspect he was joking.