Defense Secretary Mattis Quotes

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The problem has become so acute that successive secretaries of defense have asked Congress to provide the necessary funds for the Department of State. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, before he took on that role, famously stated that “if you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition.
Marie Yovanovitch (Lessons from the Edge: A Memoir)
President Trump is a good listener, Mattis said, as long as you don’t hit one of his third rails—immigration and the press are the two big ones. If you hit one, he is liable to go off on a tangent and not come back for a long time. “Secretaries of Defense don’t always get to choose the president they work for.” Everyone laughed.
Bob Woodward (Fear: Trump in the White House)
Amoral leaders have a way of revealing the character of those around them. Sometimes what they reveal is inspiring. For example, James Mattis, the former secretary of defense, resigned over principle, a concept so alien to Mr. Trump that it took days for the president to realize what had happened, before he could start lying about the man.
James Comey
Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, Director of the National Economic Council Gary Cohn, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had grown alarmed over the first six months of the Trump administration by gaping holes in the president’s knowledge of history and of the alliances forged in the wake of World War II that served as the foundation of America’s strength in the world.
Philip Rucker (A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America)
The fears of militarization Holbrooke had expressed in his final, desperate memos, had come to pass on a scale he could have never anticipated. President Trump had concentrated ever more power in the Pentagon, granting it nearly unilateral authority in areas of policy once orchestrated across multiple agencies, including the State Department. In Iraq and Syria, the White House quietly delegated more decisions on troop deployments to the military. In Yemen and Somalia, field commanders were given authority to launch raids without White House approval. In Afghanistan, Trump granted the secretary of defense, General James Mattis, sweeping authority to set troop levels. In public statements, the White House downplayed the move, saying the Pentagon still had to adhere to the broad strokes of policies set by the White House. But in practice, the fate of thousands of troops in a diplomatic tinderbox of a conflict had, for the first time in recent history, been placed solely in military hands. Diplomats were no longer losing the argument on Afghanistan: they weren’t in it. In early 2018, the military began publicly rolling out a new surge: in the following months, up to a thousand new troops would join the fourteen thousand already in place. Back home, the White House itself was crowded with military voices. A few months into the Trump administration, at least ten of twenty-five senior leadership positions on the president’s National Security Council were held by current or retired military officials. As the churn of firings and hirings continued, that number grew to include the White House chief of staff, a position given to former general John Kelly. At the same time, the White House ended the practice of “detailing” State Department officers to the National Security Council. There would now be fewer diplomatic voices in the policy process, by design.
Ronan Farrow (War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence)
Back in America, Donald Trump had, as a candidate, preached the virtues of withdrawal. “We should leave Afghanistan immediately,” he had said. The war was “wasting our money,” “a total and complete disaster.” But, once in office, Donald Trump, and a national security team dominated by generals, pressed for escalation. Richard Holbrooke had spent his final days alarmed at the dominance of generals in Obama’s Afghanistan review, but Trump expanded this phenomenon almost to the point of parody. General Mattis as secretary of defense, General H. R. McMaster as national security advisor, and retired general John F. Kelly formed the backbone of the Trump administration’s Afghanistan review. In front of a room full of servicemen and women at Fort Myer Army Base, in Arlington, Virginia, backed by the flags of the branches of the US military, Trump announced that America would double down in Afghanistan. A month later, General Mattis ordered the first of thousands of new American troops into the country. It was a foregone conclusion: the year before Trump entered office, the military had already begun quietly testing public messaging, informing the public that America would be in Afghanistan for decades, not years. After the announcement, the same language cropped up again, this time from Trump surrogates who compared the commitment not to other counterterrorism operations, but to America’s troop commitments in Korea, Germany, and Japan. “We are with you in this fight,” the top general in Afghanistan, John Nicholson, Jr., told an audience of Afghans. “We will stay with you.
Ronan Farrow (War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence)
Besides Theranos’s supposed scientific accomplishments, what helped win James and Grossman over was its board of directors. In addition to Shultz and Mattis, it now included former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, former secretary of defense William Perry, former Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Sam Nunn, and former navy admiral Gary Roughead. These were men with sterling, larger-than-life reputations who gave Theranos a stamp of legitimacy. The common denominator between all of them was that, like Shultz, they were fellows at the Hoover Institution. After befriending Shultz, Elizabeth had methodically cultivated each one of them and offered them board seats in exchange for grants of stock.
John Carreyrou (Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup)
In a terse letter of resignation, Secretary of Defense James Mattis—the only member of Trump’s cabinet with a truly independent and bipartisan reputation—wrote, “Our strength as a nation is inextricably linked to the strength of our unique and comprehensive system of alliances and partnerships.” The storied former U.S. Marine general declared, “We must be resolute and unambiguous in our approach to those countries whose strategic interests are increasingly in tension with ours.” And he stated that his “views on treating allies with respect and also being clear-eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors are strongly held and informed by over four decades of immersion in these issues.” He was stepping down, he concluded, because the president has “the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with” his own.
Susan Hennessey (Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump's War on the World's Most Powerful Office)
Bannon veered from “Mad Dog” Mattis—the retired four-star general whom Trump had nominated as secretary of defense—to a long riff on torture, the surprising liberalism of generals, and the stupidity of the civilian-military bureaucracy. Then it was on to the looming appointment of Michael Flynn—a favorite Trump general who’d been the opening act at many Trump rallies—as the National Security Advisor. “He’s fine. He’s not Jim Mattis and he’s not John Kelly … but he’s fine. He just needs the right staff around him.” Still, Bannon averred: “When you take out all the never-Trump guys who signed all those letters and all the neocons who got us in all these wars … it’s not a deep bench.
Michael Wolff (Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House)
And less than a week after General Kelly resigned, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis resigned with a scorching letter to the president that got a ton of attention. So now we’d have a second defense secretary in two years. But that was a whole other drama that I wasn’t really in on.
Stephanie Grisham (I'll Take Your Questions Now: What I Saw at the Trump White House)
Although he was known as a scholarly and deeply reflective officer, Trump latched on to Mattis’s reputation and, uncomfortably for Mattis, a nickname that he deeply disliked: “Mad Dog.” When Mattis was introduced to a crowd for the first time as Trump’s nominee, Trump delighted in the fact that the crowd started chanting, “Mad Dog! Mad Dog!” Almost from that point forward, the mismatch—the oil-and-water personalities of the superficial, glib, impetuous Trump and that of his intellectual, measured, deeply principled secretary of defense—began to slowly fall apart. For Mattis “it was just a matter of time.” The split finally occurred in 2018, following President Trump’s decision to withdraw US troops from Syria and abandon America’s long-standing and courageous Kurdish allies.
David Rothkopf (American Resistance: The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation)
Former secretary of defense James Mattis told colleagues he would often get late-night calls from Trump, in which the president fulminated about an issue, often threatening to carry out wildly irresponsible actions. These included, according to a source close to Mattis, the belief that we should immediately attack North Korea (during the early days of his intemperate Twitter campaign against that country). In each of these instances, the cerebral, seasoned Mattis would adopt what became an approach emulated by many in Trump’s cabinet. He would hear out the president’s late-night rant and then, to defuse the issue, promise to think about it and ask to meet the next day to discuss it. Often by then Trump’s “temperature had gone down a few degrees,” said one very senior Trump Pentagon official. “Or at least you could invite other people into the room—the calls late at night were often one on one—and ideally some of them were more rational and would help talk the president off the ledge.
David Rothkopf (American Resistance: The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation)