James Mattis as Defense Secretary

Fred Kaplan takes a critical look at former Defense Secretary James Mattis in The Defeat of General Mattis New York Review of Books 11/21/2019; accessed 10/29/2019.

Mattis served as Trump's Secretary of Defense in 2017 and 2018. Kaplan uses restrained language, but nevertheless portray Mattis as unprepared for the Secretary's job, disrespectful of civilian control over the military, and a tendency to pompous rhetoric of principle not matched by his behavior. Mattis was " in over his head" in that position, writes Kaplan. But he also notes that Mattis' memoir contains very little information about his actual work in that position and also limited information about his dealings with Trump.

James Mattis, US Secretary of Defense 2017-2018

Kaplan calls attention to this historical item:

Mattis didn’t just quit near the end of his second year as secretary of defense; he resigned in protest. He stated that he was leaving not to spend more time with his family (he’s a lifelong bachelor) or to pursue other opportunities, as most departing officials do, but explicitly because of disagreements with the president over policy - something that no cabinet member had done since 1980, when Cyrus Vance resigned as Jimmy Carter’s secretary of state over the (ultimately disastrous) attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran. Mattis’s resignation letter, which he released to the public, lauded the “international order” and asserted that “we cannot protect our interests…without maintaining strong alliances and showing respect to those allies” - sentiments that he knew Trump despised. He concluded, addressing the president, “Because you have the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects, I believe it is right for me to step down from my position.” Before Trump read the letter, he tweeted that Mattis would be “retiring, with distinction, at the end of February” and thanked him “greatly” for his service. After he read the letter, he ordered Mattis to leave immediately. [my emphasis]

I tend to think a more robust tradition of senior officials resigning in protest would be a good thing. It all depends on how meaningful their protest is, of course.

Despite Mattis' paying lip service to civilian supremacy over the military, Kaplan observes that Mattis' behavior wasn't consistent with either that formal deference to the Constitutional structure of the government or with having resigned in protest against Trump policies on handling allies:

Ten months after Mattis’s departure from the White House, when Trump flagrantly betrayed the US alliance with the Syrian Kurds - withdrawing troops from northern Syria and giving Turkey a green light to cross the border to crush the Kurds, the most potent and self-sacrificing fighters in the battle against ISIS - he still refused to criticize the president. “I won’t make political assessments right now,” Mattis said during an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press. “Remember that the Defense Department stays outside of politics for a reason,” he went on. “There’s a longstanding tradition why you do not want the military to be engaged in politics.”

But this is his problem: he regards “the Defense Department” and “the military” as synonyms, when in fact the former is supposed to supervise and, when necessary, rein in the latter. We don’t want the military to be engaged in politics; but the Defense Department is inherently political, and so is the office of secretary of defense. Yet during his time in that position, Mattis saw himself above all as a general, not as a cabinet secretary whose obligations to the public and the Constitution superseded his military creed. Evidently, he still does. [my emphasis]

Just to be clear, when Kaplan says that Mattis "saw himself above all as a general, not as a cabinet secretary whose obligations to the public and the Constitution superseded his military creed," he is describing a militarist Secretary of Defense, although he doesn't employ that word. Militarism is a Siamese twin to authoritarianism.

Kaplan also points to a management style that can be damaging to any organization, but is especially problematic in the national security context:

He also sidestepped the vast array of civilians, especially the undersecretary of defense for policy and the specialists on his staff. In most administrations, these are the officials who prepare the analyses, itemize the options, serve as expert sounding boards for the secretary’s ideas. Mattis ignored them and, in meetings with his coterie of staff officers, ridiculed the few papers that he read. Before long, civilians left; expertise dried up; Mattis was left flat-footed.

But four-star generals are creatures of enormous self-confidence, which their loyal staffs tend to feed, so at the center of his tight inner circle, Mattis barely noticed the myopia. The result was classic “groupthink,” [Guy ] Snodgrass observes. “We were getting answers to the questions we were asking,” he writes, but, he wonders skeptically, “were we asking the right questions?” They lacked the analytic tools even to notice that they were not. [my emphasis]

Kaplan has a good statement on why the common Pentagon attitude, shared by Mattis, about never completely leaving a war is a really bad idea:

With due respect, “this is getting too costly” is often an excellent reason for pulling out of a war, if only to keep more sons and daughters from dying, especially if the war wasn’t worth fighting in the first place. Another former combat officer, John Kerry, made the point more cogently while testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in 1971, as head of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” In [John] Kelly’s view, which Mattis fully endorses, there would have been no “last man to die” in Vietnam, or any other battlefield of folly, because war would have gone on forever. [my emphasis]