The Anonymous Trump Resistance, Mattis
Meet the resistance
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| https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/422696-The-education-of-James-Mattis |
Excerpt from James Durso *
The real question for Secretary Mattis is: did he know in April the military couldn’t do the job in six months? If so, why didn’t he admit it then so we could have saved a few billion dollars and some lives?
It’s not clear why Mattis volunteered to be Trump’s Secretary of Defense — we’ll have to wait for the book deal and speaking tour to learn that — but he was ill-equipped to serve a President who arrived at the White House uninterested in being beholden to the ways of the national security bureaucracy, "…the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.”
Trump entered office without the retinue of advisors that follows most candidates, and the “Never Trump” foreign policy experts who safely protested his candidacy when he was a long shot against Hillary Clinton deprived the administration of experienced hands. Trump’s work style is non-traditional: At the Trump Organization, he dealt directly with the other bosses, like the Mayor of New York or the Chairman of the New Jersey Casino Control Commission, so why not the head guys of Turkey or Russia?
Trump built hotels and a casino — the men in that business pride themselves on knowing, to the day, years in advance, when the doors will open to paying customers. To them, “conditions based” is a luxury for people who don’t have to pay back investors, and a semi-annual update of those “conditions” is just a muddle, an exercise in goalpost shifting.
Surveying Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, Trump no doubt feels his executives in charge of the defense, diplomacy, and reconstruction subsidiaries have failed to deliver after two decades and unlimited funding. They’re not ready to go to market, so it’s time to liquidate some assets.
Thus, Mattis was faced with a boss who thinks in terms of schedules and deliverables, and return on investment (ROI), with an added obligation to keep his promises to the voters. Mattis’s instincts should have been at their most acute, but he failed to understand that Trump really was getting the U.S. out of Syria, because as he said of the “moderate” Syrian fighters “we have no idea who these people are.”
Are all flag officers fated for failure when working closely with a President? No, they are not. Many have successfully navigated politics at the highest level.
Fleet Admiral William Leahy served as FDR’s Chief of Staff; General of the Army George C. Marshall served as Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense under President Harry Truman; General Maxwell Taylor served as the Military Representative in the Kennedy White House before becoming Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Lieutenant General Brent Scowcroft served as the National Security Advisor under Presidents Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush. None of these military leaders were yes-men, but they all had one critical skill: they knew how to disagree with the President of the United States and leave him happy they did so.
Mattis spent much of his time telling whoever would listen that he was at the Pentagon to protect it from the Commander-in-Chief, which is pedestrian Washington, D.C. image management, at odds with the selfless, soldier-scholar image he cultivated. Mattis the man is not the Mattis of myth.
*James Durso (@james_durso) is the Managing Director of Corsair LLC, a supply chain consultancy. He was a professional staff member at the 2005 Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission and the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mr. Durso served as a U.S. Navy officer for 20 years and specialized in logistics and security assistance.
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