Jim Mattis on Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead

welcome to uncommon knowledge I'm Peter Robinson James Norman Madison listed in the United States Marine Corps in 1969 that is half a century ago Jim at the age of nineteen during a Marine Corps career of more than four decades he commanded in combat in the first Gulf War in Afghanistan and then once again in Iraq he retired as commander of the United States Central Command in 2013 four years later general mattis became secretary mattis serving from 2017 to 2019 as the nation's 26th Secretary of Defense now secretary mattis has co-authored a book with his old Marine Corps friend captain Bing West callsign Kaos learning to lead I have here the galleys not the final book callsign Kaos Jim welcome may I call you Jim I should let's just establish you and I know each other your secretary mattis first two three times I see during the day but by about now your Jim explain that title chaos well Peter I'd spent over four decades in the Marines in the marine infantry I've learned a lot of lessons traveling around the world been in a lot of campaigns obviously and Kaos had been part and parcel of my life on the battlefield but also in our own organization where you try to disrupt the organization a little bit to keep it at the top of its game however on the battlefield you try to introduce chaos early in the enemy's problem so that you can dominate them on the battlefield I thought I would write down the lessons I've learned over those 40 odd years passing those lessons on to young folks the book ends with a letter you sent to president Trump resigning a Secretary of Defense quote because you have a right this is to the president because you have a right to a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours than mine on certain issues that you specify I believe it is right for me to step down and in almost 250 pages you say not one additional word about your tenure as Secretary of Defense how come Big West and I began writing this book in September of 2013 shortly after I left active duty before for four years before you became secretary absolutely four years before the book was virtually done by the end of 2017 but once I received the phone call about being nominated for Secretary of Defense at that point the federal ethics rules went into effect and I could not publish the book so basically the book was written it had nothing to do with my time as Secretary of Defense and these were the lessons I learned and wanted to pass on to young leaders in business in the military in communities service wherever that might be applied all right let's begin at the beginning I'm gonna ask in a moment why you decided to make a career of the Marines but first how you ended up in the Marines in the first place and I'm going to tell you a story that you told me that you were visiting your late mother when you were still active duty and you had four stars on your shoulder at this point as I recall you're setting the scene you were reading a newspaper a magazine and your mother was on the other side of the room and she kept glancing up at you and smiling and finally you put down your newspaper and said mom what are you smiling about and your mother said to a four-star general in the United States Marine Corps Oh Jim I'm just so happy you're not in the penitentiary well give us the context for that one my mother was always a very pragmatic lady one of the greatest generation who was very proud of government service and I think having seen some of my antics as a young person growing up she'd grown increasingly concerned I was on the wrong path so against all odds she turned out to be quite proud of me and that I was not in fact getting in more trouble I was getting paid to do things in defense of the country all right so you grow up in Central Washington State in rough-and-tumble country and I don't want to press you for details here but you were a rough-and-tumble young man yourself I enjoyed hiking around picking fruit in the summers swimming in the rivers to me it was a it was a great place to grow up a great time to grow up and I thoroughly enjoyed growing up in the Pacific Northwest with all it had to offer yes but rough-and-tumble we enjoyed sports we enjoyed the outdoors and and I was just out to get every bit of fun out of it that I could find and what took you from that fun to the core 50 years ago well of course in 1969 when I was coming of age I was in college but it was obvious that we were those of us who were physically ok we're going to end up getting drafted my brother was in the Marines and so I decided to follow in his footsteps it wasn't it wasn't a real deep thought out long career plan I assumed I'd go in for a few years and do my patriotic duty and then I would get out and return to the northwest and and be a sports coach and probably teach history or physics in high school that was my plan all right didn't work out that way 44 years in the Corps why did you stay that's an interesting question because there were jobs I had in the Marines from recruiting duty to finding our way through minefields that I didn't like a whole lot but I grew to love the kind of young man who would crawl into minefields looking for something they didn't want to find in order to make certain their buddy didn't get hurt and it was the bravery it was the rambunctious high-spirited nature it was the selflessness of the Marines and the sailors I served alongside and years later looking back I realized that I'd stumbled into a decision Peter that said I'd rather have crummy jobs at times and work with great people than have a great job and not work with people as good as I experienced in the in the naval service all right I'd like to take a couple of incidents here that you described the book takes your career step by step by step and so there's a lot to this book you just mentioned that you've written it for young leaders who may find the lessons of use it occurred to me reading the book that it's abuse for any citizen who's going to have to vote and I'll explain that as if I make going through a couple of specific incidents that you treat almost as case studies here's one Tora Bora by just where this is during the Afghanistan war by December 2001 Osama bin Laden and about 2000 of his best fighters have retreated to the Tora Bora cave complex which is in eastern Afghanistan right on the border with Pakistan you were in command of task force 58 which had established you had established a base deep inside Afghanistan from which you were operating callsign chaos I stated my concern this is to your superiors I stated my concern that bin Laden could escape if we didn't quickly seal the valley exits close quote now can you from the military point of view what what could you have done to seal off those exits what were you thinking needed to happen right well first of all our intelligence appeared to be quite accurate we had good reason to believe he was in one of two valleys both of which were right there on the border Tora Bora and the border of Pakistan so he knew which way he was going to go as well so if you know where someone's at which way they're going to go then you compose a campaign to make certain that he can't get away having read about general crooks campaign on the Arizona border against Geronimo and general miles campaign we knew how to put in the locations that would block those kind of replicating the Geronimo campaign basically go ahead stop there you're in Afghanistan dealing with a 21st with a 20th century terrorist and you're thinking back to having read about a campaign against Geronimo in the late 19th century in the American West just explain how your mind works and how reading or how you bring to bear your wide reading in military history on problems like this well I think a Marine Corps philosophy perhaps unstated is that if you don't read you can't lead specifically at each rank and the Marine Corps you're given a new set of books that you're supposed to master you're supposed to study sergeants get a new set when they make sergeant majors get a new reading list when they make major generals get a new set of books they have to read and so as you go through your career you're always learning from other people's mistakes other people's successes in this case along the Arizona border they'd put in heliographs station stations where from one mountaintop to another that could signal with mirrors where the the renegade Indians as they called them were located so in this case we did a computerized study of where we would have to be on the mountaintops in order to seal off the border a visibility diagram and then we had the helicopters that could lift the troops in and we had the right kind of troops that could also push up the valleys and that's trap or sama bin Laden all right once again I'm quoting callsign KS quote instead general franks this is army general Tommy Franks who was in command of the overall effort in Afghanistan instead general franks sent in Afghan tribal fighters loyal to warlords from the north they were out of their tribal element in Tora Bora poorly equipped and strangers among the locals many of the enemy leaders fled unscathed to Pakistan we let bin Laden get away well I'm not sure that my plan got all the way to general Frank's it was his headquarters all right that basically decided to determine to employ that tribesman in that area they were not from the area they were not familiar with the area any more than we were but I thought we had a better plan and so I proposed my plan sometimes in life things don't work out the way you want it you just have to deal with it all right you quote an article in The New York Times quote this is you you quoting The Times in his desire to let the military call the shots President George w bush missed the best opportunity of his entire presidency to catch America's top enemy close quote and then you add this is your own voice my view was a bit different we in the military missed the opportunity not the president close quote explain that the I I'm quite certain the president was not giving that kind of tactical direction he would have been quite satisfied if we had a plan to stop Osama bin Laden from leaving what I learned from this so the lesson I learned from this Peter was that you have to spend time when you have a good idea persuading those above you they may have very little time to address your your point they may not see the same opportunity that's fleeting so I learned something from this and that was to spend the time to inform and cooperate with others in a way that they would embrace your solution you had to show them that you had a solution for the problem they faced and I'm not certain I did a sufficient job on that all right you also said one more question on Tora Bora that'll come up again and in the next case study if I may bring it up you also said in callsign Kaos President Bush was quite rightly deferring to his military commanders and that stopped me for a moment because if Lincoln had deferred to McClellan the South would have won Franklin Roosevelt advanced George Marshall over others and then George Marshall in turn reached fairly far down in the officer corps to pull up Eisenhower at Franklin Roosevelt's prodding so we have examples of chief executives of commanders in chief who don't always defer to the General Staff who are pushing and prodding and asking questions and reaching down to advanced officers it's confusing because we think one of the lessons of Vietnam as I understand it I'm a layman you're the you're the warrior here but one of the lessons of Vietnam is that the civilians got into the civilians failed to defer to the officers and yet one of the lessons of the Civil War and the lessons of the Second World War is that the commander and chief needed to push his officer corps around how do you sort that through this is why leadership and learning to lead is critical because each situation is different and what works right in one situation is not right for another in this case the commander in chief the elected commander in chief the President Bush had made very clear we were to go after Osama bin Laden he has done his job at that point he's given my very clear guidance then he is monitoring what's going on there was a push on us all the time to get into Afghanistan following 9/11 hmm I mean here it is Thanksgiving time and I've got a thousand Marines and we're building up higher than that inside Afghanistan the CIA the special force has been operating there since late September we were on the hunt we were going after them and this was a tactical decision this was not a strategic decision that strategic decision the president had been clear on he expected us to carry it out I thought that the failure was in the military realm not at the political level all right thank you second case study different conflict now we're in Iraq the first early part of the of the Iraq war Fallujah this is a more complicated story March 2004 insurgents in Fallujah ambushed a convoy of four American private military contractors who were conducting a delivery for food caterers they killed the men they burn their bodies they dragged the bodies through the streets and then they hang the bodies from a bridge over the Euphrates and this being the 21st century it's on media all around the world instead of invading Fallujah you yourself commanding decided better not do it I'm quoting you in a call sign chaos I didn't want to provoke an already aroused population further so before we go into what happened when you were given different orders what were you thinking about not going in to Fallujah what was your rationale Fallujah was a tribal city we knew there were tribes in the city that disagreed strongly with the tribe that had attacked these people I had no doubt that we could find the culprits the boys the ones who had done this we could get the bodies of the slain civilians back and return them to return them home and then we would hunt down those who had done this and kill them I had no doubt that we had tribal elements inside the city who would help us and this is a city remember Peter of three hundred thousand three hundred and fifty thousand people most of those back in the middle of Iraq so it's got chicken ports in the Sunni triangle as well so you've got to look at this and remember that every battlefield in a war like this is also a humanitarian field you have innocent people caught up in the midst of all this and so we had a different way to approach it where I thought that we could take out those who had conducted the terrorists who had conducted the attack but I did not want to go in a full-fledged attack on the city assault on the city all right and by April you're overruled President Bush gives the order to attack and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld says in public the United States quote had to send a message callsign Kaos I believed we had a more effective sustainable approach which you just explained but that was the order attack I made one strong statement up the chain of command once we assault don't stop us close quote you've made your argument you've been overruled you say yes in we go but can you explain how that how does that work you have discretion as a commander to say I'm going to do this but or no explain your thinking Yeah right this is why it's called orders Peter's not called likes it's not you have to like something in this case the political consideration was to send the message my concern was great nations don't get angry don't get angry make cool hard strategic choices and if the choices that we were going in and once we're committed to that don't stop us going in in other words you don't want to get wobbly to put it in Prime Minister Thatcher's words once you make a commitment to a course of action like this all right April for your forces move in to fighting is bloody and your forces are destroying one group after another you described and callsign chaos I have to say it's absolutely fascinating reading the way disorganized groups of tribal terrorists I suppose make one run after another but they're disorganized they're not supporting each other in Fallujah and you just knock them down and the next group comes and your side knocks them down again by April 7th the insurgents are starting to run out of ammunition but news reports on the destruction your forces are causing inside Fallujah are raising concern around the world callsign chaos the coalition had no effective response to the propaganda although damage and death in the city were real that damage was not difficult for policymakers to anticipate when ordering us to attack I was reporting our increasing progress but that truth was submerged and on April 9th when you're convinced you're only a couple of days days single digit number of days away from getting the job done you're ordered to halt callsign chaos you don't order your men to risk death and then go wobbly close quote and that's as close as you've come in this book to a real display of anger how that must have been more than frustrating what are you thinking at that stage you didn't want to go in they you get orders to go in you say okay but bear this in mind once we start don't stop us and then they stopped you this is just as I said for a civilian it's just an ordinary citizen reading that you're saying wow there is just a disconnect between the commander on the ground and the the guys up the chain including the civilians well it's frustrating because at this time the news media was full of on fortunately false reporting some of it as a result of stringers who were using photography that was taken in other cities for example showing artillery strikes going into Fallujah I have used artillery if I needed it but we never fired one artillery round into Fallujah during the First Battle of Felucia he didn't need it and yet there was repeatedly shown on international news media both here and in Europe the impact of artillery rounds allegedly in Fallujah was not the case so there was a fair amount of political uproar over this talking about the innocent people are being killed most of whom hundreds of thousand of whom had evacuated the town already given them plenty of time we've we expedited them out of the city we did everything we could to make certain they were taken care of when they were turned forced into refugee status by the battle but the bottom line is that deep inside the city we worked or we were ordered to halt and I would just tell you that one of the things you learn as a leader as a young leader and as you go up you have to practice your you're not put in a leadership position to express your exasperation you have got to figure out how to deal effectively because there's a lot of 18 19 20 year-old sailors and Marines who are counting on you to deal with this in a very pragmatic and and as wise a way as you can so we brought in a lot of snipers I think every SEAL sniper who heard about battle came down to join us and we in close contact to the enemy we went on basically a stationary or static position and we began negotiating with them at that point mm-hmm you describe a chilling scene in which you drive into the city uncertain of your own security to negotiate in person so a stalemate takes shape that lasts for weeks you write in callsign chaos every day our position was becoming increasingly untenable by late April you develop a plan to resume the offensive once again you're ordered to hold off on the attack and a few days later news breaks of the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison callsign chaos quote the imposed halt in Fallujah and the rogue guards at Abu Ghraib had cost us the moral high ground right May 1st American forces withdraw from Fallujah callsign Kaos I had been raised by vietnam-era Marines who drummed into me the importance of making sure the policymakers grasp the nature of the war don't get trapped into using halfway measures I had never before left a job unfinished yet I was leaving my troops playing defense close quote it just will you read that and think of course these were the lessons of Vietnam and we hadn't learned them well you know you look at what Fallujah is that the correct conclusion from Fallujah was it so specific that it doesn't really represent anything larger than itself I am concerned more broadly that we don't really learn from history mmm that were not teaching history of what happened when powerful armies meet or what powerful forces there are in the world that you have to deal with we're more and more teaching history into niche components which I'm not against it all but we'd better remember there are a larger currents that work in the world and if we do not master those currents if we cannot understand those currents if we cannot figure a way to deal with complex situations at times looking at how others in history of dealt successfully or unsuccessfully with those situations then we will make the same mistakes again in this case I believed it was a mistake and that was proven because some months after I left command of course the Marines and the soldiers the sailors had to go back into Fallujah and we lost hundreds more killed and wounded because the enemy now had time to restore their ammunition stocks build bunkers inside homes it was a very very tough fight alright your final posting I'm jumping toward the toward the end of the book here your final posting commander of CENTCOM the United States Central Command with responsibility for the Middle East and Central Asia including Afghanistan and Iraq just listen to a few items a little litany from the book your description of your period as commander of CENTCOM Iraq you become convinced that Prime Minister Maliki is - secretary in a figure to rebuild the country and that the United States would have to leave troops on the ground to ensure the safety of ordinary Iraqis callsign chaos in October 2011 Prime Minister Maliki and President Obama agreed that all US forces would leave Iraq at the end of the year close quote Afghanistan callsign chaos and repeated situation-room meetings I propose that at least 10,000 American troops remain in Afghanistan without any specified timeline for withdrawal close quote instead the Obama administration insists on troop levels far below the number you specified and insists on imposing rigid timelines for withdrawal last item Iran the Obama administration makes a deal if Iran agrees to restrictions that will stretch out the time it will require to acquire nuclear weapons to ten years then the United States and Europe will lift economic sanctions call-sign chaos in my military judgment America had undertaken a poorly calculated longshot gamble close quote summing up your time as commander of CENTCOM quote during my three years at CENTCOM American policy errors compounded the turmoil close quote the greatest democracy on earth and the most powerful and sophisticated military forces in all of human history and we made things worse this is this is infuriating heartbreaking baffling and where were the lessons of Vietnam this is you would get toward the end of your book and it's just it's it's I mean here's here's sorry let me back up for a moment at the at the if this is the right way to put it at the tactical level this book is thrilling and heartening the story of you as a young man becoming a leader the story of the courage and valor and discipline of ordinary troops that is tremendously heartening the idea that the United States can still feel troops like that in the 21st century is staggering against that on the strategic side what are we doing in the world with these brilliant troops and all of this marvelous equipment and the leaders as thoroughly versed as you and here we have what we think are the lessons of Vietnam and in Tora Bora half-measures in Fallujah the it appears that the civilian leaders call it wrong again and again and then at the strategic level one year at CENTCOM Iran Afghanistan Iraq screwing up every single one of them so there are aspects of call-sign case that are heartwarming but aspects that are heartbreaking talked me out of it the Western democracies include in America have a strategic deficit right now we don't teach enough military history and our universities strategy I don't believe is taught well at all I would just point out that there is mmm this this draw of young Patriots into our armed forces young people who look beyond the hot political rhetoric and rally to the flag in the infantry case infantry is named for a young soldier infant soldier they're 18 19 20 year olds under 22 year old 24 year old sergeants and lieutenants and they're willing to put it all on the line and we owe them a good strategy we owe them a strong policy that defends America and then a strategy to carry it out I think at the higher levels what we have in today's Information Age is a sense that they really know what's going on on the front lines because they see these pictures on the news or they can immediately pick up the phone and listen to conversations down below but there needs to be a division of labor where once the strategy is determined then there's a feedback loop to keep the political leaders fully informed there should be no surprises but you take your hands off the steering wheel and you turn that over to the young officers on the battlefield that have been trained and educated to carry out those responsibilities another point is though that you bring up is the lessons learned why are we making the same mistakes part of it is the human condition war is a fundamentally unpredictable phenomenon and at times you just can't predict what can go wrong once you start out in this in this direction one of the mentors and again remember that in this book I'm really passing on a lot of lessons I learned if you are but one of the mentors one of the wisest mentors I had has written don't ever tell your adversary what you will not do and that is a guiding principle for me in other words if we are going to pull out of a fight don't tell the enemy you're going to do that because then they know when you're not going to fight any longer don't put yourself in a position where the enemy can simply wait you out force the enemy onto the horns of a dilemma and create chaos and the enemy's camp don't reassure them even if you're not going to do something don't reassure them in advance in this case we were reassuring the adversary that by telling the enemy in Iraq we're going to pull out our intelligence community called it exactly right when they warned us if you pull all your troops out if you have no more influence over helping the Iraqi army defeat this enemy then they are going to come back stronger than ever and you and I know now that Isis did exactly that we had to reintroduce the true once again but the thousands killed the 10 mm winded the hundreds of thousands millions forced into refugee status we've seen the heartbreak of what happens when you make a bad strategic decision so you have to come to grips with reality you cannot deny reality or reality will feed you a very very tough dose a few few closing questions here you write and call sign when you're appointed NATO commander for transformation in 2007 you went on a kind of listening tour and you write in callsign chaos it struck me as odd that the generals and state statesmen whom I asked for advice were all retired in a country that no longer teaches military history it should come as no surprise close quote and you put you include in the book in the appendix a list you include in callsign chaos a list of the books that you have found most helpful in your career that list must run 250 or more books it's a long list and it goes from the ancient world you've got Marcus Aurelius there through standard histories of the Second World War and so forth and I thought looking at that list very few of those books very few of those books show up in the history curriculum in any college or university in America today with the exceptions of the military academies and does that concern you the civilian life seems to be drifting away from even considering military war is a fact of I mean just state the obvious it's it's it's true it's trivial to state it but that the civilian universities and colleges don't even consider that a fit subject for study any longer yeah it's perplexing when you realize the gravity of a decision in a democracy to go to war to put our young men and women into that situation you would want people who are very studied in the in the history of it you can't simply graph current events and fully understand them if you don't have a historical understanding it's almost like we go to the medical school and say you know cancer is such an ugly thing we're not going to study cancer it's just it's a it's an ugly thing well reality is there are ugly things in this world and you've got to study them especially if you want to try to prevent them deter them or end them as early as possible so it is it is frustrating it is frustrating sometimes to realize that the persons in in oversight roles do not have the most basic understanding we wouldn't have a reporter for example reporting on football that didn't understand the game and yet it's not unusual to have reporters show up on the battlefield who this is the first time they've ever been around a military organization I've seen that so yeah it's frustrating hmm but at the same time it's something that can be solved it's something that we simply have to roll up our sleeves and say we're going to solve this that's one of the reasons I put the books in there - one of the reasons I wrote the book is so that we can look at these problems and say what's a better way to lead a country and perhaps prevent wars that don't need to be fought or end them quickly on our turns when they do need to be fought Jim mr. secretary as far as I can tell President Bush the elder President George HW Bush is the last chief executive well whom you treat in callsign Kaos is strategically sound quote President George HW Bush knew how to end a war on our terms when he said we would take action we did he approved of deploying overwhelming forces he avoided sophomoric decisions like imposing a ceiling on the number of troops are setting a date when we would stop fighting George HW Bush was the also the last chief executive who saw action himself so this gets to this gets to this deep question I saw a statistic I don't know how you measure these things but I start to assist a statistic the other day that 1% of the population has either been in combat or know of the American population today has been in combat itself or knows someone personally who has 99 percent have no clue of your business is that just fundamentally bad for democracy and if it is what on earth do we do about it well I don't think it's necessarily bad for democracy I'm rather proud of the fact that the majority of American people are not intimately aware of what war is because it's a pretty ugly thing you're happy with a volunteer military for example you don't want to all state a draft I would copy out that by saying I think it's a good idea that we look at a country a little bit like a bank if you want to get something out of it you need to put something into it I don't think the military is right for everybody we don't need that many people in the military as if we're going to put a draft in that would bring every all young men and women in but I think you have to do something whether it's support the Peace Corps serve in the Peace Corps or the military being the you know help out on teaching and inner-city schools the teachers for America exactly volunteers and support of the communities there there should be something you do for more than just yourself because as a world war ii Marine put it you know if the country is worth living in it's worth fighting for it's worth supporting so I think we need to do that but I mean you take a look at one of the best presidents we ever had was President Lincoln and he was quite fond of saying the only military experience he had was fighting mosquitoes when he was called up for for an Indian war so I think it has to do with the degree of humility the degree of study of history and the degree of team-building and the willingness to listen to people who may have good ideas military and civilian because what we want is our diplomat solving most problems and with a strong military that's properly organized trained and equipped and used appropriately our diplomat stay in the lead of our foreign policy as they should we're not turning to the military every time there's something that we disagree with in the world two less questions call-sign chaos quote my command challenge was to convey to my troops a seemingly contradictory message be polite be professional but have a plan to kill everyone you meet close quote and that gets it something that has always puzzled me about you we've known each other five six years now it was your business to see and do and think about terrible things and yet Jim mattis is one of the most cheerful men I've ever known how do you pull that off well I think too there's there's some ancient books some some books from history that tell you the only thing you control in this world is how you react to what goes on around you and I've lived around grim things for a long time and combat itself will take the veneer of civilization right off you but I've seen the very best of America the most selfless young people they're in their teens by and large the ones who do the close combat the close close quarters fighting hmm I've seen them keep their spirits up under the most difficult of circumstances and you just develop an attitude of gratitude as you are around people like this I remember and it's in the book I'm sure you recall this where a marine and a sailor are walking back dripping wet having bathed in an era get a dirty irrigation ditch the only thing clean on them is their weapons really and I said how you doing there young men and the marine said uh living the dream general living the dream and the sailor chimed in with no Maserati nope there was there's a kind of a devil-may-care attitude for the young people who go into these very very rugged circumstances and to be around them was probably the greatest honor you could ever come up with people say thank you for your service believe me the country's worth it but I had what I contribute the greatest honor possible to serve alongside these young people and as far as I was concerned even when I was a four-star general those privates and lance corporals were my equal because they were just as equally committed to carrying out the mission and I was I had a different role but we were comrades in arms and there was a sense I think when you come back to the United States just a gratitude for all that we have here that keeps you cheerful you remember those young men it just it just inspires you last question it's related to what you just said but a little bit different you joined the Marines again in 1969 it's half a century half a century let's suppose that listening to this interview right now there's a young Jim mattis and maybe he's a little bit of a Hellraiser the way young Jim mattis sounds as though he was or maybe he's just looking for something to believe and something to do with himself something to give himself to there's a lot in this book about how this country can't get lessons of war through its head there's a lot in this book about how our understanding of strategy has degraded over the last generation or two and how in some ways despite the advances in weaponry and Intel we have less sense of what we're doing with this country and with those forces than we had 50 years ago what do you say to a 19 year old kid who's listening to this interview what would you tell that kid about whether joining up today half a century after you did the armed force the United States still represent a worthy or a noble way of leading your life well you used the right words I would just I would tell them absolutely sign up you'll never regret it it'll have some of the best days of your life and some of the worst days of your life but this experiment this experiment we call America is worth defending and on its worst day it does learn from its mistakes it does develop better ways to do things we were born with the birth defect in our country and every year we've gotten better and we keep getting better it's not a racial society it's not a selfish Society mmm it's not a out for me Society and it's worth defending if you watch the news all day and that's the stuff that hits the news of course because it's pretty ugly so that sells I guess advertising but this is still the most generous country on earth it is still the country that's the greatest hope and it's worth fighting for is the bottom line it's worth fighting for and you'll never regret it if you sign up Jim mattis author of callsign chaos thank you for 44 years of service two years as a Secretary of Defense and a pretty impressive life you're worth it Peter Wow okay thanks I'm Peter Robinson for uncommon knowledge the Hoover Institution and Fox Nation thank you [Music] you

Channel: Hoover Institution

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Length: 43min 49sec (2629 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 03 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/RickSmith87]

He spent a lot of time justifying his decision to fire the RCT commander. His rushing may or may not have been the best choice to push the Iraqi army back, but he laid down just as much as Franks and the other senior commander for Bush and the Neocons' asinine plan to disband the army and grossly understaff the occupation.

A real leader would have told Bush that Paul Bremmer was both stupid and unwilling to learn

[u/Slyder_2077]

General.. I know you think its a prison sentence.. Please reconsider..