Jim Mattis Quotes

If you haven't read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren't broad enough to sustain you.

You don’t always control your circumstances, but you can always control your response.

The first is competence. Be brilliant in the basics. Don’t dabble in your job; you must master it.

By traveling into the past, I enhance my grasp of the present.

any general who isn’t connected spiritually to his troops is not a combat leader.

Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.

I’ll tell you what leadership is,” he said. “It’s persuasion and conciliation and education and patience. It’s long, slow, tough work. That’s the only kind of leadership I know.

Reading is an honor and a gift from a warrior or historian who—a decade or a thousand decades ago—set aside time to write. He distilled a lifetime of campaigning in order to have a “conversation” with you.

Business management books often stress “centralized planning and decentralized execution.” That is too top-down for my taste. I believe in a centralized vision, coupled with decentralized planning and execution. In

Attitudes are caught, not taught.

recruit for attitude and train for skills.

By doing self-controlled acts, we come to be self-controlled, and by doing brave acts, we become brave.

listen, learn, and help, then lead,

you can’t talk freely with the most junior members of your organization, then you’ve lost touch.

The details you don’t give in your orders are as important as the ones you do. With all hands aligned to your goals, their cunning and initiative unleashed, you need only transparent sharing of information (What do I know? Who needs to know? Have I told them?) to orchestrate, as opposed to “control” or “synchronize,” a coordinated team.

PowerPoint is the scourge of critical thinking. It encourages fragmented logic by the briefer and passivity in the listener.

If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you,

If the risk takers are punished, then you will retain in your ranks only the risk averse.

I was out to win their coequal “ownership” of the mission: it wasn’t my mission; rather from private through general, it was our mission.

What do I know? Who needs to know? Have I told them?

It now became even more clear to me why the Marines assign an expanded reading list to everyone promoted to a new rank: that reading gives historical depth that lights the path ahead.

State your flat-ass rules and stick to them. They shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. At the same time, leaven your professional passion with personal humility and compassion for your troops.

How do you prepare your men for the shock of battle? For one thing, you need to make sure that your training is so hard and varied that it removes complacency and creates muscle memory—instinctive reflexes—within a mind disciplined to identify and react to the unexpected.

Trust is the coin of the realm for creating the harmony, speed, and teamwork to achieve success at the lowest cost.

But having a plan counts for nothing unless those above you are made confident that you can execute. As the leader, you maintain communications connectivity up, not just down.

If you don’t like problems, stay out of leadership.

Yet over the course of my career, every time I made a mistake—and I made many—the Marines promoted me. They recognized that those mistakes were part of my tuition and a necessary bridge to learning how to do things right.

The 2009 debate over Afghanistan troop levels both typified and further fueled the mutual mistrust between the White House and senior military officials.

If there's something you don't want people to see, you ought to reconsider what you're doing.

Never advantage yourself at the expense of your comrades.

The Taliban had left their back door open. Memo to young officers: I can appear brilliant if I fight enemy leaders dumber than a bucket of rocks.

After a rebellion…power tends to flow to those most organized, not automatically to the most idealistic.

You cannot allow your passion for excellence to destroy your compassion for them as human beings.

As Churchill noted, “A lie gets halfway around the world before truth gets its pants on.” In our age, a lie can get a thousand times around the world before the truth gets its pants on.

Leaders at all ranks, but especially at high ranks, must keep in their inner circle people who will unhesitatingly point out when a leader’s personal behavior or decisions are not appropriate

Today, many senior military officials complain of feeling baffled and shut out by a White House that combines micromanagement with a near total inability to articulate coherent strategic goals.

Field Marshal Slim wrote in World War II: “As officers,” he wrote, “you will neither eat, nor drink, nor sleep, nor smoke, nor even sit down until you have personally seen that your men have done those things. If you will do this for them, they will follow you to the end of the world. And, if you do not, I will break you.

the Corps, I was taught to use the concept of “command and feedback.” You don’t control your subordinate commanders’ every move; you clearly state your intent and unleash their initiative. Then, when the inevitable obstacles or challenges arise, with good feedback loops and relevant data displays, you hear about it and move to deal with the obstacle.

Well it seems to me that there are books that tell stories, and then there are books that tell truths...," I began. "Go on," she said "The first kind, they show you life like you want it to be. With villains getting what they deserve and the hero seeing what a fool he's been and marrying the heroine and happy ending and all that. Like Sense and Sensibility or Persuasion. But the second kind, they show you life more like it is. Like in Huckleberry Finn where Huck's pa is a no-good drunk and Jim suffers so. The first kind makes you cheerful and contented, but the second kind shakes you up." "People like happy ending, Mattie. They don't want to be shaken up." "I guess not, ma'am. It's just that there are no Captain Wentworths, are there? But there are plenty of Pap Finns. And things go well for Anne Elliot in the end, but they don't go well for most people." My voice trembled as I spoke, as it did whenever I was angry. "I feel let down sometimes. The people in the books-the heroes- they're always so...heroic. And I try to be, but..." "...you're not," Lou said, licking deviled ham off her fingers. "...no, I'm not. People in books are good and noble and unselfish, and people aren't that way... and I feel, well... hornswoggled sometimes. By Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and Louisa May Alcott. Why do writers make things sugary when life isn't that way?" I asked too loudly. "Why don't they tell the truth? Why don't they tell how a pigpen looks after the sow's eaten her children? Or how it is for a girl when her baby won't come out? Or that cancer has a smell to it? All those books, Miss Wilcox," I said, pointing at a pile of them," and I bet not one of them will tell you what cancer smells like. I can, though. It stinks. Like meat gone bad and dirty clothes and bog water all mixed together. Why doesn't anyone tell you that?" No one spoke for a few seconds. I could hear the clock ticking and the sound of my own breathing. Then Lou quietly said, "Cripes, Mattie. You oughtn't to talk like that." I realized then that Miss Wilcox had stopped smiling. Her eyes were fixed om me, and I was certain she'd decided I was morbid and dispiriting like Miss Parrish had said and that I should leave then and there. "I'm sorry, Miss Wilcox," I said, looking at the floor. "I don't mean to be coarse. I just... I don't know why I should care what happens to people in a drawing room in London or Paris or anywhere else when no one in those places cares what happens to people in Eagle Bay." Miss Wilcox's eyes were still fixed on me, only now they were shiny. Like they were the day I got my letter from Barnard. "Make them care, Mattie," she said softly. "And don't you ever be sorry.

The first is competence. Be brilliant in the basics. Don’t dabble in your job; you must master it. That applies at every level as you advance. Analyze yourself. Identify weaknesses and improve yourself. If you’re not running three miles in eighteen minutes, work out more; if you’re not a good listener, discipline yourself; if you’re not swift at calling in artillery fire, rehearse. Your troops are counting on you. Of course you’ll screw up sometimes; don’t dwell on that. The last perfect man on earth died on a cross long ago—just be honest and move on, smarter for what your mistake taught you.

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.

The perception is widespread in the military that civilians are insensitive to its culture—more than insensitive: intolerant.

Is there tension between a self-regarding “only 1 percent serve” attitude among the military and a “you signed up for this” attitude among the public?

data show a worrisome trend toward distrust of the military among elites—especially self-described “very liberal” elites—

Wise leadership requires collaboration; otherwise it will lead to failure.

I learned then and I believe now that everyone needs a mentor or to be a mentor—and that no one needs a tyrant. At the same time, there’s no substitute for

A life is not important except in its impact on other lives.

Acting without orders…yet always within the overall intention.

a leader’s role is problem solving. If you don’t like problems, stay out of leadership. Smooth sailing teaches nothing,

Men who are familiarized to danger meet it without shrinking; whereas troops unused to service often apprehend danger where no danger is.

Risk aversion will damage the long-term health, even survival, of the organization, because it will undercut disciplined but unregimented thinking.

E pluribus unum.

I may not have come up with many new ideas, but I’ve adopted or integrated a lot from others.

Note to all executives over the age of thirty: always keep close to you youngsters who are smarter than you.

Reading sheds light on the dark path ahead. By traveling into the past, I enhance my grasp of the present.

But doctrine is the last refuge of the unimaginative

Slowly but surely, we learned there was nothing new under the sun: properly informed, we weren’t victims—we could always create options.

You make mistakes, or life knocks you down; either way, you get up and get on with it. You deal with life. You don’t whine about it. I

In keeping with George Washington’s approach to leadership, I would listen, learn, and help, then lead.

Allowing bad processes to stump good people is intolerable.

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.

From Slim to Fulford—both promoted to four-star general—came the same message: at the executive level, your job is to reward initiative in your junior officers and NCOs and facilitate their success.

The trinity of chance, uncertainty, and friction [will] continue to characterize war,” Clausewitz wrote, “and will make anticipation of even the first-order consequences of military action highly conjectural.

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

Instillation of personal initiative, aggressiveness, and risk-taking doesn’t spring forward spontaneously on the battlefield. It must be cultivated for years and inculcated, even rewarded, in an organization’s culture.

Without mavericks, we are more likely to find ourselves at the same time dominant and irrelevant, as the enemy steals a march on us. Further, calculated risk taking is elemental to staying at the top of our competitive game.

They do identify a large increase in civilian ignorance or apathy about military issues and also in civilian deference to the military on conduct of the wars, which they consider may be connected to decline in trust of civilian leadership.

What is the present state of my understanding? For here lies all indeed. As for all other things, they are outside the compass of my own will; and if outside the compass of my will, then they are as dead things to me, and as it were, mere smoke.

Problems which bear directly on the future of our civilization cannot be disposed of by general talk or vague formulae—by what Lincoln called ‘pernicious abstractions,’ ” he stated. “They require concrete solutions for definite and extremely complicated questions.

Living in history builds your own shock absorber, because you’ll learn that there are lots of old solutions to new problems. If you haven’t read hundreds of books, learning from others who went before you, you are functionally illiterate—you can’t coach and you can’t lead.

Esper had not directly criticized the commander in chief, but his predecessor, Jim Mattis, finally delivered the rebuke of Trump he had held in for years. “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us,” Mattis told the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, before invoking “the Nazi slogan for destroying us . . . ‘Divide and Conquer.’ “We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort,” Mattis went on. “We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society.

At U.S. Central Command with hundreds of thousands of troops assigned to me, I had in my command group a U.S. Army Ranger sergeant major and a U.S. Navy admiral who didn’t give a damn what I thought of them: if they thought that I had made a bad call, with door closed they would quickly make their point loud and clear. I trusted them to do this, and they never let me down.

There is also among some civilians the temptation to treat warfare as just another arena of politics, with public indifference giving latitude for the imposition of social choices—conservative or progressive—uninformed by the grim exigencies and atavistic demands of warfare. This can translate into a perceived lack of respect by civilians in a military culture steeped in respect.

Attempts to “buy” veterans with generous entitlements is likely to fail. The best way to gain or retain the trust of veterans is to ensure that they receive “genuine gratitude. Not sympathy or pedestals; but real gratitude. . . . Every civilian should understand that the veteran has done nothing less, and also nothing more, than what is sometimes required to maintain liberty.”[46]

Critics of the military often contend that people join the military because they have no other economic options, but it is more likely the case that most in the military are motivated by some degree of patriotism and a sense of service. Those who do are more likely to possess or seek the traditional virtues normally associated with military service in the public mind: discipline, loyalty, courage, honor, and self-sacrifice.

The key to healthy civil-military relations is trust on both the civilian and military sides of the negotiation: the civilians must trust the military to provide its best and most objective advice but then carry out any policy that the civilian decision makers ultimately choose. The military must trust the civilians to give a fair hearing to military advice and not reject it out of hand, especially for transparently political reasons. Civilians must also understand that dissent is not the same as disobedience.

there’s no substitute for constant study to master one’s craft. Living in history builds your own shock absorber, because you’ll learn that there are lots of old solutions to new problems. If you haven’t read hundreds of books, learning from others who went before you, you are functionally illiterate—you can’t coach and you can’t lead. History lights the often dark path ahead; even if it’s a dim light, it’s better than none. If you can’t be additive as a leader, you’re just like a potted plant in the corner of a hotel lobby: you look pretty, but you’re not adding substance to the organization’s mission.

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.

At 5:21 p.m. Trump tweeted: “General Jim Mattis will be retiring, with distinction, at the end of February… General Mattis was a great help to me in getting allies and other countries to pay their share of military obligations… I greatly thank Jim for his service!” But three days later, Trump said that Mattis would be leaving early, on January 1. At a cabinet meeting the next day, Trump said, “What’s he done for me? How has he done in Afghanistan? Not so good. I’m not happy with what he’s done in Afghanistan and I shouldn’t be happy.” Trump continued, “As you know, President Obama fired him, and essentially so did I.” Later he called Mattis “the world’s most overrated general.” When I asked Trump about Mattis a year later, the president said Mattis was “just a PR guy.” Mattis summarized, “When I was basically directed to do something that I thought went beyond stupid to felony stupid, strategically jeopardizing our place in the world and everything else, that’s when I quit.

Yet, despite our country’s having suffered 85 percent of its post–World War II casualties in infantry units, we had no simulators for those at the tip of the spear.

Gradually, the generals and several others, notably Secretary of State Tillerson, would communicate and share strategies for how to manage the sometimes challenging, sometimes downright irrational requests that would come out of the White House. Kori Schake described it this way: “I think what the people, particularly in the Pentagon, did was try and explain to the president and his top aides why things weren’t possible. There’s this beautiful saying in Portuguese. It’s what the Portuguese administrators in the colonies, like Brazil, used to answer when the government in Lisbon would ask them to do something that was undoable, inappropriate: ‘I obey, but I do not comply.’ And that, I think, is a lot of what happened. People weren’t saying, ‘No, I’m not going to pull troops out of Afghanistan.’ What they would say was ‘If we pull troops out of Afghanistan, here are the things that are going to happen. Are you comfortable with those outcomes?’ That’s a lot of how Jim Mattis, for example, handled his relationship with the president.

Analyze yourself. Identify weaknesses and improve yourself. If you’re not running three miles in eighteen minutes, work out more; if you’re not a good listener, discipline yourself; if you’re not swift at calling in artillery fire, rehearse. Your troops are counting on you. Of course you’ll screw up sometimes; don’t dwell on that. The last perfect man on earth died on a cross long ago—just be honest and move on, smarter for what your mistake taught you.

As legendary Marine Jim Mattis had once said, when going to a gunfight it was wise to bring all your friends with guns.

over a third of those that call themselves “very liberal” believe the military gets more respect than it deserves

Some 48.7 percent of Americans believe that the military offers more opportunity than the rest of society for minorities

A very liberal administration is likely to base its military and security policies on ideas that the uniformed military will find hard to accept.

the Obama administration has failed to develop a strategy for dealing with events in the world, including the emergence of ISIS, Iran’s nuclear ambitions and its quest for regional hegemony, Russian aggression against Ukraine, and a rising China

the defense budget has declined precipitously, and force structure has contracted to levels not seen in decades.

The disparity in sacrifice between the uniformed military and civilians has left some veterans bitter.

The NSS wants to run the show, day to day and minute to minute,” one former senior military official told me, “so they have no time—they’re almost incapable of strategic thinking. It’s often just crisis du jour over there.” Meanwhile, military recommendations go unheeded because senior White House staff have come to assume that a risk-averse Pentagon exaggerates every difficulty and inflates every request for troops or money.

Cultural or opinion gaps between the general public and the military community worry us, but there is little evidence that they cause actual harm. The mistrust and mutual ignorance that often characterizes relations between high-level civilian and military decision makers is another story: here, misunderstandings and mistrust lead to arbitrary decisions and can do genuine harm both to the military and to US interests.

the American public may know little about the military, but we recognize that it is the only reasonably well-functioning public institution we have these days.

Warfare, wrote Qiao and Wang, will soon “transcend all boundaries and limits. . . . [T]he battlefield will be everywhere . . . [and] all the boundaries lying between the two worlds of war and non-war, of military and non-military, will be totally destroyed.

War, wrote the nineteenth-century Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz, is “an act of violence to compel our opponent to fulfill our will.”[58] But our increased interconnectedness and dependence on interlinked electronic technologies has created new means for clever actors—be they states or individuals—to achieve war’s traditional ends.

The current all-or-nothing approach to military careers does not serve the nation well. It keeps talented people out of the military and makes it risky or impossible for military personnel to branch out and then return without career penalties.

This raises an interesting paradox: the leaders recognized and selected by the Army to serve at strategic levels—where uncertainty and complexity are the greatest—tend to have lower levels of one of the attributes most related to success at strategic level.”[67]

General Robert Scales penned an op-ed for the Washington Post claiming that serving officers “are embarrassed to be associated with the amateurism of the Obama administration’s attempts to craft a plan that makes strategic sense. None of the White House staff has any experience in war or understands it.”[6]

It was a matter of faith for Americans that standing armies were a threat to liberty and that the militia in the form of a “people numerous and armed” was the only acceptable way to defend a republic.

The Marine Corps in particular was very vocal in its opposition to opening infantry positions to women. This affair will be a major test for civilian control on both the civilian and military side. Will the military simply acquiesce in establishing double standards, violating a key component of military culture—fairness? Will officers either salute and obey or leave the service,

personal and professional honor do not require a request for reassignment or retirement if civilians order one’s service, command, or unit to act in some manner an officer finds distasteful, disastrous, or even immoral. The military’s job is to advise and then execute lawful orders. . . . If officers at various levels measure policies, decisions, orders, and operations against personal moral and ethical systems, and act thereon, the good order and discipline of the military would collapse.”[33]