Quotes of the Week
USMC GEN James M Mattis, Commander, United States Central Command:
Take the mavericks in your service, the ones that wear rumpled uniforms and look like a bag of mud but whose ideas are so offsetting that they actually upset the people in the bureaucracy. One of your primary jobs is to take the risk and protect these people, because if they are not nurtured in your service, the enemy will bring their contrary ideas to you.
-- Speaking to an assembly of newly promoted one-star generals
In this age, I don’t care how tactically or operationally brilliant you are, if you cannot create harmony—even vicious harmony—on the battlefield based on trust across service lines, across coalition and national lines, and across civilian/military lines, you need to go home, because your leadership is obsolete. We have got to have officers who can create harmony across all those lines.
-- At JFCOM annual conference, May, 2010
posted by Concerned American | 5:09 AM
11 Comments:
Does the good flag officer Mattis mean to have unity, peace, friendship with all who our mighty military may have to confront? According to Mattis get all who you associate with.... superiors, peers, subordinates, allies TO LIKE YOU and you may get the enemy to like you too. Whatever happened to military leadership ?
Mattis is in perfect lockstep with HIS usurping boss in the Oval Office, Barack Hussein Obama. In Mattis' eyes General George Patton is a scoundrel. Ol' George must be rolling in his grave.
Mattis....one more in the ever growing longggg line of American flag officers who "harmonize" with the progressives, the liberals, the leftists.
Let's have harmony here and I don't mean in the musical sense. Now....let's all grab a cup of Joe....errr I mean Herbal Tea....and sing Kumbaya.
DAN
III
Interesting article. I wonder how much "harmony" this brass hat will have with his fellow citizens when he is tasked by his C-in-C to send his Marines to our houses to confiscate our arms and round us up for the detention camps? Remember the Twenty-Nine Palms survey of the 1990's. Tempus fugit.
Been a fan of Mattis for a while:
http://restoretheconstitution.wordpress.com/2010/05/22/some-quotes-from-arguably-the-greatest-living-human-being/
Very Good CA.
I think these quotes got your point across nicely.
-Amnon Shadow Walker
.......AAAAAANNNNNND thank you! something comes to mind.there are people that put down people like Glenn Beck-that he's a NEOCON or this or that.it makes me think of when we pick the lesser of two evils EVERY election.
and in the end we live with it for 4 MORE.yet, a person like Beck has so much pull & influence that for me to pile on (regardless of his inequities) would be stupid, since he's so far ahead in the influence dept.
if out of 10 he gets,..say..6 right, i have to get behind the guy cuz the Constitution is getting blurrier and blurrier....and at least he's talking about it and has a big microphone-
BTW voter turnout in Tampa Florida yesterday was dismal.we deserve whatever we get.
h.
I don't know anything about GEN Mattis, but I assume that in his second quote he meant that interservice infighting, squabbling between allies, and mutual fear and loathing between civilians and military unacceptably impair effectiveness and increase the chances of failure and defeat.
And if I remember my reading, GEN Patton took a dim view of these things as well, for the same reasons.
Dave
CA,
Thanks for this thought-provoking post. I was formerly allied with those who say our rules of engagement are far too damaging and unsafe for our troops, but over the past few months - including especially this post - I can see where "winning the hearts and minds" actually IS important. It is true that some of our commanders lean WAY too far in the PC direction of accepting zero collateral damage, but I think Mattis is more restrained than that, asserting that _when possible_ consideration for the populace breeds fewer insurgents and the possibility of better assistance and/or intelligence from the locals.
I believe an earlier post on your blog or Mike V's listed the efforts of some SF forces to befriend and support local Afghani tribal families (or was it Kurds?), with much better results than had been obtained by a "scorched earth" campaign.
All in all, I think some of our brethren may dismiss Mattis' insights too quickly. He appears to be quite willing to kill the bad guys (Instead of bowing to them like the CIC ), but doesn't want our troops to wade through the bodies of civilians to do it. That makes sense to me.
You missed the point, IMO.
Looks like he's talking about team-building, and risking one's ass to provide "cover" for the truly valuable individuals with unorthodox, untested, but revolutionary ideas.
There's nothing in here about getting everyone to like you. It's about building a cohesive team that is able to close with and destroy the enemy.
Only with a cohesive team can one hope to achieve the violence of action (look it up, this does not just mean physical violence) necessary to be a decisive "finisher" or victor.
Anon 6:32, you're selling this man short. During my active service, my squad at one time consisted of an admitted "ex" LA gang member (yeah right, "ex"), a "closet" muslim, and three good old boys from down south. Oh yeah, and an out and out liberal. Was there tension? Yes. Did they all like me? No. We put all that aside though, to do what we had to do. We were a team, and we functioned like one in spite of our differences. Those were some damn good soldiers, and I would trust my life to them any day.
I could have let it fall apart, and blamed my team members. As a leader, it was my job to make it work, and we did.
That, anon 6:32, IS military leadership.
Or is your definition of military leadership to be in drill sergeant mode all of the time? Sorry, it doesn't work. Diversity at any cost is wrong, but we must work with what we're given -AS IS- or FAIL.
I disagree with the recent "diversity at any cost" philosophy coming from Washington. I disagree with the philosophy of apologizing and kowtowing to our enemies, but that is not what this is about, IMO.
Justin
That's a very dangerous officer.
If he's ordered to come after us, he'll be very efficient.
That's bad.
When the southern states lawfully seceded from the Union, 35% of the US Army officer corps resigned and headed south.
A very small percentage of US Naval and Marine officers did so, most of them accepted their unlawful orders to attack the southern states.
That's a bad precedent.
Justin,
I agree that I missed the point on protecting your "unconventional thinkers" and on "harmony", basically because I never addressed them. I agree with your post on that score. However, if you clicked the link that took you to the Slate story on Mattis, I think you'll find the reasoning for my post, and perhaps discover I wasn't that far off the mark on the part I did address.
Next time I'll try to be more specific about what part of the story I am speaking to.
And Daniel, thanks for the URL providing some of his quotes. Killing bad guys (once you've got positive target ID) _should_ be fun. As old and out of shape as I am, I'd love to be alone in a room with the SOB who cut off his sister-in-law's nose and ears (posted on the cover of Time, I heard.) I might not prevail, but it would indeed be fun making the attempt. (Shooting him would be easier, but not as satisfying. I'd rather cut off some of _his_ parts and feed them to him.)
(Sorry for the bloodthirsty digression from reasonable discourse.)
Thanks,
Reg T
Justin,
I agree that I missed the point on protecting your "unconventional thinkers" and on "harmony", basically because I never addressed them. I agree with your post on that score. However, if you clicked the link that took you to the Slate story on Mattis, I think you'll find the reasoning for my post, and perhaps discover I wasn't that far off the mark on the part I did address.
Next time I'll try to be more specific about what part of the story I am speaking to.
And Daniel, thanks for the URL providing some of his quotes. Killing bad guys (once you've got positive target ID) _should_ be fun. As old and out of shape as I am, I'd love to be alone in a room with the SOB who cut off his sister-in-law's nose and ears (posted on the cover of Time, I heard.) I might not prevail, but it would indeed be fun making the attempt. (Shooting him would be easier, but not as satisfying. I'd rather cut off some of _his_ parts and feed them to him.)
(Sorry for the bloodthirsty digression from reasonable discourse.)
Thanks,
Reg T
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home