I Love Mattis, But I Don’t Love Him as SecDef

[corbe]

I Love Mattis, But I Don’t Love Him as SecDef

Erin Simpson

November 25, 2016

Among those in the Marine Corps I taught and deployed with, Gen. (ret.) Jim Mattis is a legend. The quotes, the foxholes, the knife hands. Everyone has their favorite story. I once handed Mattis a Diet Coke out of a cooler at Quantico. A mundane act? Yes. But I’ve remembered it fondly for 12 years.

He is Chaos, Mad Dog, and the warrior monk. But we should not add secretary of defense to that list.

I have long thought of Mattis as a “break glass in case of emergency” type of leader. He was uniquely suited to his roles in the early years of the War on Terror. He is a warrior and a leader of men in the application of violence. He is not, however, a man for all seasons. Many in defense circles have been so overjoyed as the prospect of a qualified

secretary, that they seemed to have forgotten to stop and ask if Mattis would, in fact, be right for the job. He is not a politician, or a wonk, or a bureaucrat. To ask him to be any of those things would be like trying to keep a wave upon the sand.

As with all nominees, there are tradeoffs to Mattis running the Defense Department. He is a strategic thinker with a strong sense of history — his library is one of those aforementioned legends. He is a well-regarded leader who inspires fierce loyalty. But I fear Mattis may be wasted atop the vast expanse of the Pentagon. There are ultimately three primary reasons why we shouldn’t hope Chaos becomes secretary of defense.

1. Mattis a recently retired general and is therefore statutorily prohibited from serving as secretary of defense. And while a legislative solution is possible, this law exists for good reasons and overriding it bodes poorly for long-term civil-military relations.

2. Warfighters rarely make good bureaucrats. The Pentagon is one of the world’s largest bureaucracies, and Mattis has shown little patience for management and administration.

3. His boss won’t listen.



<..snip..>

Entire Article at Link Below

http://warontherocks.com/2016/11/i-love-mattis-but-i-dont-love-him-as-secdef/

[geronl]

Anyone who says it is "fun" to kill other human beings should probably be in a padded cell

[Maj. Bill Martin]

What DoD needs more urgently than anything else is change its focus from social justice and social engineering to warfighting, and that will require lopping off the heads of a lot of social justice warriors infecting DoD, eliminating LGBTQ sensitivity training, etc. Also, reversing the mandate to place women in combat units and have gender-neutral physical testing.

All that stuff needs to go, and it needs a real leader to make that happen.

Mattis is absolutely perfect for what currently ails DoD.

[geronl]

Trumpists were just as viciously PC, if not more-so, than the liberals ever were. Any dissent from the Trumpodoxy was treated as a capital offense.

[Maj. Bill Martin]

Trumpists were just as viciously PC, if not more-so, than the liberals ever were. Any dissent from the Trumpodoxy was treated as a capital offense.

I have no idea what that has to do with Mattis.  And if there's one thing we know about Trump from those recordings, he's not exactly PC.