Commander Wolffe Quotes

Somehow it felt familiar, an old story retold, the claws in my shoulder, my arms twisted behind my back, the drag down the street, Will assisting my father and thinking how much fun it was to hunt someone down. I knew it all. Each snarled command was a line from an old but faithless song. “Pipe down! I’m not going to hurt you! I just want to talk to you! This is for your own good!

If the Trump White House was as unsettling as any in American history, the president’s views of foreign policy and the world at large were among its most random, uninformed, and seemingly capricious aspects. His advisers didn’t know whether he was an isolationist or a militarist, or whether he could distinguish between the two. He was enamored with generals and determined that people with military command experience take the lead in foreign policy, but he hated to be told what to do. He was against nation building, but he believed there were few situations that he couldn’t personally make better. He had little to no experience in foreign policy, but he had no respect for the experts, either.

Others were now recruited and, despite their obvious impressions of the man, agreed to sign on. Jim Mattis, a retired four-star general, one of the most respected commanders in the U.S. armed forces; Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil; Scott Pruitt and Betsy DeVos, Jeb Bush loyalists—all of them were now focused on the singular fact that while he might be a peculiar figure, even an absurd-seeming one, he had been elected president

Finally, there was a new rationale that Flynn should be fired not because of his Russian contacts, but because he had lied about them to the vice president. This was a convenient invention of a chain of command: in fact, Flynn did not report to Vice President Pence, and he was arguably a good deal more powerful than Pence.

some had idly speculated about how long he would go on if he could command time as well as language. The consensus seemed to be forever. The sound of his own voice, his lack of inhibition, the fact that linear thought and presentation turned out not at all to be necessary, the wonder that this random approach seemed to command, and his own replenishing supply of free association—all this suggested that he was limited only by everyone else’s schedule and attention span.

military figures like James Mattis, H. R. McMaster, and John Kelly: they found themselves working in an administration that was in every way inimical to basic command principles.

Bannon was, once again, gobsmacked. “When Ivanka and the Mooch can talk the commander in chief of the United States into thinking that people will believe that you had a double negative problem, you’ve left the Cartesian universe.

An authoritative command must … be distinguished from a persuasive argument. When I am commanded to do something, I may choose to comply even though I am not being threatened, because I am brought to believe that it is something which I ought to do. If that is the case, then I am not, strictly speaking, obeying a command, but rather acknowledging the force or rightness of a prescription. … But the person himself [sic] has no authority—or, to be more precise, my complying with his command does not constitute an acknowledgment on my part of any such authority.

Wolff’s ultimately empty promises of a dramatic German surrender that would advance U.S. and British forces far to the east captivated Dulles and his OSS colleagues in Switzerland. Dulles intervened on a half-dozen occasions in an effort to keep the Operation Sunrise negotiations on track, even after the joint U.S.-British military command in Italy ordered him to desist.

If all men have a continuing obligation to achieve the highest degree of autonomy possible, then there would appear to be no state whose subjects have a moral obligation to obey its commands. Hence, the concept of a de jure legitimate state would appear to be vacuous, and philosophical anarchism would seem to be the only reasonable political belief for an enlightened man.

The White House, realized former naval officer Steve Bannon after a few weeks, was really a military base, a government-issue office with a mansion’s façade and a few ceremonial rooms sitting on top of a secure installation under military command.

He held his face in his hands for a moment and then looked up again. “I’m pretty good at coming up with solutions, I came up with a solution for his broke-dick campaign in about a day, but I don’t see this. I don’t see a plan for getting through. Now, I gave him a plan, I said you seal the Oval Office, you send those two kids home, you get rid of Hope, all these deadbeats, and you listen to your legal team—Kasowitz, and Mark Dowd, and Jay Sekulow, and Mark Corallo, these are all professionals who have done this many times. You listen to those guys and never talk about this stuff again, you just conduct yourself as commander in chief and then you can be president for eight years. If you don’t, you’re not, simple. But he’s the president, he gets a choice, and he’s clearly choosing to go down another path … and you can’t stop him. The guy is going to call his own plays. He’s Trump.…

The issue was not that he might act precipitously and recklessly because he didn’t understand the consequences of doing so. The issue was that he could not comprehend the actual choices that needed to be made in order to act; indeed, he could not even stay in the room long enough to decide on a course of action. For Trump, the fog of war would waylay him before the first command could be given.