Retired Marine Corps General James Mattis answers some questions about the importance of educating warriors for the challenges of modern-day warfare:
You often quote Ecclesiastes 1:9: “There is nothing new under the sun.” What does it mean to you?
Read about history, and you become aware that nothing starts with us. It started long ago. If you read enough biography and history, you learn how people have dealt successfully or unsuccessfully with similar situations or patterns in the past. It doesn’t give you a template of answers, but it does help you refine the questions you have to ask yourself. Further, you recognize there is nothing so unique that you’ve got to go to extraordinary lengths to deal with it.
How did the Marine Corps prepare you for warfare?
The Corps made very clear that I was responsible for my own learning, and that it would guide me with a required reading list. We learned the Corps was as serious about that as it was about 3-mile runs and pull-ups. It set an institutional expectation with a moral tone to it: War is bloody enough without having to have amateurs send young men into a fight.
How did such training inform your decisions?
It meant I was never really bewildered for very long by anything an adversary did. I remember in 2001 when the fleet commander [Vice Adm. Charles W. Moore Jr.] asked if I could get the Marines from the Mediterranean and the Pacific together and move against Kandahar, Afghanistan. I did my reconnaissance in a Navy antisubmarine plane with beautiful telescopes on board. I could see the fighting up north, a little bit going on further east. Out west there wasn’t much. And then down south at Kandahar, this big dark area—no one down there, not scouts, not even patrols. And I knew right away.…I didn’t care how brave their boys were. I didn’t care how many guns they had. I knew I was going to stick a knife in their back. Based on all that reading the Marine Corps had required at each rank, I could see exactly how to take this enemy down.
Who tops your reading list?
Colin Gray from the University of Reading is the most near-faultless strategist alive. Then there’s Sir Hew Strachan from Oxford, and Williamson Murray, the American. Those three are probably the leading present-day military theorists. You’ve got to know Sun-tzu and Carl von Clausewitz, of course. The Army was always big on Clausewitz, the Prussian; the Navy on Alfred Thayer Mahan, the American; and the Air Force on Giulio Douhet, the Italian. But the Marine Corps has always been more Eastern-oriented. I am much more comfortable with Sun-tzu and his approach to warfare.
How would you answer critics who accuse you of espousing “old school” values?
It takes a military with what could be considered old-fashioned values or quaint values to protect the country. There’s always going to be a bit of a tension, a dynamic that has to be understood by those responsible for leading a progressive America that does not want to be militarized yet needs certain military attributes for protection.