The Mattis perspective

Danger Room:

Meet the new prospective leader of all American forces in the Middle East and South Asia: Marine General James “Mad Dog” Mattis, whom Defense Secretary Robert Gates tapped this afternoon to take charge of U.S. Central Command. Not many intellectuals have such mean-muchacho nicknames. But Mattis is the kind of guy who rabidly gnarls through the gristle of pretty much every military shibboleth.

He was into counterinsurgency before it was dogma. At a time of tech-driven constant communication, he thinks the military should be switching its radios off. Want to ensure that all levels of the force are networked together? Mattis wants a hierarchical organization like the military to embrace decentralization. And now, pending Senate confirmation, this guy is going to be running the most important command the military has.

Don’t get it twisted: Mattis will mess you up. He has commanded Marines in both Iraq and Afghanistan and a coined a favorite Marine motto in the process: “No better friend, no worse enemy.” Nathaniel Fick, who served under Mattis as a young officer in both Iraq and Afghanistan, calls him “a Marine’s Marine. He’s a war fighter.” When he got tapped for his current position in charge of the military’s Joint Forces Command, a Marine Corps Times profile put him in the Corps’ pantheon, calling him “a leader with almost mythical, rock-star status like Chesty Puller and Al Gray.” Check the #Mattisisms hashtag on twitter.

But like the officer he’ll be succeeding and commanding, General David Petraeus, Mattis has a larger reputation as a big brain. When both were three-stars, Mattis helped Petraeus author the 2006 Army/Marine Corps counterinsurgency field manual. COIN may be conventional wisdom right now, but back then it was still a dissident preoccupation among the officer corps, adopted by those who thought the wars were going badly because they were waged without sufficient consideration of their complexities.

And from there, he’s not been satisfied with letting COIN win the debate. “He is a proponent of smart COIN, but he’s very quick to recognize its limitations, that it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution,” says Fick, now the chief executive officer of the Center for a New American Security. “He’s one who has maintained his ability to think despite being in one organization for many decades, and that’s rare.”

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... in the last few months, Mattis has launched broad and public rebukes of the military’s persistent love affair with technology. At a conference in May, he derided technological fixes “that take geniuses on the battlefield to operate.” All our generals and officers and grunts and drones getting networked together? Hates it. “I don’t think we have turned off our radios in the last eight years,” Mattis said. “What kind of systems are we creating where we depend on this connection to headquarters?” In his view, subordinates should be clear that they understand their commanders’ intent and then freed to implement it amidst the circumstances they confront — not the circumstances that a distant headquarters imagines over the radio.

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... At Central Command, he may get reacquainted with some of his other aphorisms, which Jason Sigger helpfully cataloged a few years ago. “Both the insurgency and the military force are competing for the same thing: the support of the people…. While learning from experience is good, learning from others’ experiences is better.” Get the man his own book of quotations.

He is a man who wants military leaders to deal with the complex nature of the battle space without their tether to headquarters. Perhaps he has been reading what the Chinese plan for us if we go to war. They believe that the way to defeat the US is to cut off our communication with the troops and our weapon systems. Mattis would show them there is still no worse enemy than troops he is commanding.