Commanders Of The United States Central Command

"The fighting in Fallujah was fierce. And the reaction among Iraqis to the American offensive was uniformly hostile. Members of Bremer’s Governing Council threatened to resign if the attack continued, imperiling the handover of authority to Iraqis now scheduled for June 30. At this point Bremer blinked, then Rice blinked, and then Bush blinked. Late on April 8, just one day after his blistering pep talk, the president instructed Abizaid and Sanchez to halt the offensive in Fallujah. The following day, the troops were ordered to stand down. The Marines were furious. Thirty-nine Marines and U.S. soldiers had been killed in four days of fighting, and combat commanders believed they were relatively close to seizing their final objectives. “If you are going to take Vienna, take fucking Vienna,” Mattis snarled at Abizaid, updating a famous comment made by Napoleon. Bush had scarcely provided the robust leadership he advertised. One minute he was tough, the next he knuckled under. General Sanchez called it a strategic disaster for the United States."

"General James 'Mad Dog' Mattis, who is being considered for Secretary of Defense, was very impressive yesterday. A true General's General!"

"I didn't like his 'leadership' style or much else about him, and many others agree. Glad he is gone!"

"Mattis still saw Iran as the key destabilizing influence in the region. In private, he could be pretty hard-line, but he had mellowed. Push them back, screw with them, drive a wedge between the Russians and Iranians, but no war. Russia had privately warned Mattis that if there was a war in the Baltics, Russia would not hesitate to use tactical nuclear weapons against NATO. Mattis, with agreement from Dunford, began saying that Russia was an existential threat to the United States. Mattis had formed a close relationship with Tillerson. They tried to have lunch most weeks. Mattis's house was near the State Department and several times Mattis told his staff, "I'll walk down and say hello to him." McMaster considered Mattis and Tillerson "the team of two" and found himself outside their orbit, which was exactly the way they wanted it."

"White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, who was a commander in the Naval Reserves, tried several times to persuade Mattis to appear on Sunday talk shows on behalf of the administration. The answer was always no. "Sean," Mattis finally said, "I've killed people for a living. If you call me again, I'm going to fucking send you to Afghanistan. Are we clear?""

"Mattis, Tillerson and Coats are all conservatives or apolitical people who wanted to help him and the country. Imperfect men who answered the call to public service. They were not the deep state. Yet each departed with cruel words from their leader. They concluded that Trump was an unstable threat to their country. Think about that for a moment: The top national security leaders thought the president of the United States was a danger to the country."

"In 2013, after being fired by Obama, Mattis returned to Richland, Washington, a civilian for the first time in over four decades. Over the years, he had written more than 800 letters to the families of those who had died under his command. These were the Gold Star families. He would often get replies from the families asking him to come see them. Or someone in the fallen Marine's unit would forward a copy of a handwritten note or letter. Mattis would have someone investigate to make sure it was authentic, and if so, would forward it to the family with a note from him: Here's what we found out about your son or husband. Often the family would then say, please come see us. Then, with time on his hands, Mattis hit the road in his light brown 1998 Lexus sedan. He would stop to speak at organized groups of veterans or Gold Star families, or to an individual family. He would pull into a town, get a hotel room, read the folder about the fallen Marine or soldier, put on a suit and go pay his respects. Sometimes this led him to a mobile home, sometimes to the home of a very wealthy family."

"He especially remembered a visit to a family in Utah with a large, beautiful home. He drove up a winding hill. Inside, he took a seat. Tall windows fronted the house. The father, a doctor, was home early. The mother, a professor at a local college, had perfectly painted nails and every hair just right. They were stoic. Their son had a four-year college football scholarship but had joined the Marines instead. He had died in combat years earlier. The mother talked about their deceased son, the mountains he had climbed. They took Mattis to a boy's bedroom still fully intact, preserved almost as a museum. They showed Mattis all the pictures- their son as a baby, grammar school, high school, the prom. The full American story. Mattis could only listen so long. There was only so much to say. After an hour, the visit was petering out. The mother said General Stanley McChrystal, the commander in Afghanistan, had asked for 40,000 more troops in 2009, and President Obama had given 30,000. She had her history correct. If there were more, a million troops available, she asked, why didn't McChrystal get 80,000? Mattis mumbled something about how the president had to weigh options. Finally, Mattis said, "You know, I can't give you a good answer other than we thought that was probably sufficient.""

"Were you trying to make it fair for the enemy?" she asked. There was no anger in her voice, just sorrow, as if the wounds of the loss would never heal. All of a sudden the father became enraged and looked directly at Mattis- an unforgettable look. "We certainly weren't trying to do that," Mattis answered defensively. "We've studied you," said the mother. "We've read all the things you've done." Mattis was not the problem. "We know you were trying to be loyal." The father stood and shook Mattis's hand, holding it for what seemed like 30 seconds, straining for some connection. The mother- cultured, refined, proper, educated- had one final thought about Washington: "General, no one in that town back there gives a fuck about what our family lost."

""We must not declare victory," said France's Minister of the Armed Forces Florence Parly, leaning forward, "and walk away and wonder why it comes right back at it." On the verge of victory was the time to stay the course and avoid the temptation of a premature withdrawal. Everyone seemed to be nodding. Perfect, thought Mattis. Everyone was on board. He could ignore his written talking points. He wouldn't have to say a word. The sale was made. Finally the meeting was turned over to him as the representative of the lead nation. Mattis summarized the others' points and said he couldn't agree more strongly. Then they all discussed how they would keep their troops there, the exact words to explain the essential rationale underlying their plans: They had to persist because the fight against ISIS was not over. My God, this is great, Mattis thought. He called White House chief of staff John Kelly. "John, the nations are with us. They're not pulling. They're going to stay on the ground. It's time to force it into the Geneva peace process"- to support the Kurds, who had done most of the fighting. "I'll talk t o Mike Pompeo." Back in Washington on Wednesday, December 19, Mattis saw a tweet pop up from the president: "We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency." Later that day, Trump released a one-minute video and tweet underscoring his earlier message: "After historic victories against ISIS, it's time to bring our great young people home!" The United States was withdrawing from Syria."

"Mattis was shocked. Once again Trump had not consulted his secretary of defense and made a major announcement with no warning. His first thought: How could we break with our allies? His second was the timing: It was just two weeks after the Ottawa meeting with all the commitments and pledges. He sat there and thought, my God, they're going to think I lied to them. They won't believe I had no idea about this. And now we're going to leave them high and dry. We're going to do what Obama did when he said we're going after the Syrians for the chemical weapons use and the French planes were armed, and they were ready to go when he walked. And the Kurds were going to be left unprotected and possibly slaughtered by Turkey. "John," Mattis said in a call to John Kelly, "I need an hour with the boss." "You got it," said Kelly. Mattis figured that Kelly knew what it was about, but the chief of staff, who had been blindsided by the president so many times and announced ten days earlier that he would soon be leaving, did not ask. Nine months earlier, Mattis had watched Rex Tillerson fired by tweet. The decision announcements by tweet were all wrong, in Mattis's view. Trump lived in his own head and if he wanted, out came an idea or a decision. It did not matter what anybody else thought. Mattis once said, "In any organization you become complicit with what the organization is doing." For nearly two years Mattis had gone along. As commander in chief, Trump called the shots. Mattis decided he was no longer going to be complicit. He went to his Pentagon office and began writing his resignation letter."

"At the White House, Mattis found the president in a good mood. They walked into the Oval Office and sat down. "Mr. President, we've got to come to an understanding here. This enemy is not going away." He noted that he had been through this before, when Obama walked away in Iraq. "These terrorist groups regenerate." The U.S. military had to win not just the fighting but the peace. "Our allies are there, and we can force this thing to closure now if we still have traction, if we still have our troops there." Mattis was like a broken record, repeating that the strongest military presence gave the diplomats the leverage to speak with authority- work with the diplomats, avoid the use of additional military force. "You guys will have us fighting forever," Trump said. "No," Mattis said. "The Kurds have done the fighting. Let's be right up front." "It's cost us billions." "Well, a lot of other nations too- 77 nations plus Interpol, Arab League, NATO." Trump was not moving, Mattis could see. There was no give. He had decided, and that was it. Mattis had seen it before. Nothing. It was over. "We beat them," Trump said. "There's no need." "We're not taking casualties," Mattis said. "But we haven't beaten them. We've done the military part. Now we have to win the part that's going to make sure we don't have to go back in, like your predecessor who pulled out of Iraq too early and we have to go back in." Trump did not agree. Mattis knew he could only quit once. "Mr. President, it's probably best you read this.""

"The General is a small man in his mid-fifties who moves and speaks quickly, with a vowel-mashing speech impediment that gives him a sort of folksy charm. A bold thinker, Mattis' favorite battlefield expression is "Doctrine is the last refuge of the unimaginative." On the battlefield, his call sign is "Chaos." His plan for the Marines in Iraq would hinge on disregarding sacred tenets of American military doctrine. His goal was not to shield his Marines from Chaos, but to embrace it. No unit would embody this daring philosophy than First Recon."

"Saddam had viewed this route, with its almost impenetrable terrain of canals, villages, rickety bridges, hidden tar swamps and dense groves of palm trees, as his not-so-secret weapon in bogging down the Americans. Thousands of Saddam loyalists, both Iraqi regulars and foreign jihadi warriors from Syria, Egypt and Palestinian refugee camps, would hunker down in towns and ambush points along the route. They had excavated thousands of bunkers along the main roads, sown mines and pre-positioned tens of thousands of weapons. When Saddam famously promised to sink the American invaders into a "quagmire," he was probably thinking of the road from Nasiriyah to Al Kut. It was the worst place in Iraq to send an invading army. Mattis planned to subvert the quagmire strategy Saddam had planned there by throwing out a basic element of military doctrine: His Marines would assault through the planned route and continue moving without pausing to establish rear security. According to conventional wisdom, invading armies take great pains to secure supply lines to their rear, or they perish. In Mattis' plan, the Marines would never stop charging."

"Good afternoon, Marines. Thank you for your attention so late on a Friday. I know the women of Southern California are waiting for you, so I won't waste your time."

"For decades, Saddam Hussein has tortured, imprisoned, raped and murdered the Iraqi people; invaded neighboring countries without provocation; and threatened the world with weapons of mass destruction. The time has come to end his reign of terror. On your young shoulders rest the hopes of mankind. When I give you the word, together we will cross the Line of Departure, close with those forces that choose to fight, and destroy them. Our fight is not with the Iraqi people, nor is it with members of the Iraqi army who choose to surrender. While we will move swiftly and aggressively against those who resist, we will treat all others with decency, demonstrating chivalry and soldierly compassion for people who have endured a lifetime under Saddam’s oppression. Chemical attack, treachery, and use of the innocent as human shields can be expected, as can other unethical tactics. Take it all in stride. Be the hunter, not the hunted: never allow your unit to be caught with its guard down. Use good judgment and act in best interests of our Nation. You are part of the world’s most feared and trusted force. Engage your brain before you engage your weapon. Share your courage with each other as we enter the uncertain terrain north of the Line of Departure. Keep faith in your comrades on your left and right and Marine Air overhead. Fight with a happy heart and strong spirit. For the mission’s sake, our country’s sake, and the sake of the men who carried the Division’s colors in the past battles-who fought for life and never lost their nerve-carry out your mission and keep your honor clean. Demonstrate to the world there is "No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy" than a U.S. Marine."

"For all the ‘4th Generation of War’ intellectuals running around today saying that the nature of war has fundamentally changed, the tactics are wholly new, etc., I must respectfully say, ‘Not really’: Alexander the Great would not be in the least bit perplexed by the enemy that we face right now in Iraq, and our leaders going into this fight do their troops a disservice by not studying — studying, (versus) just reading — the men who have gone before us. We have been fighting on this planet for 5,000 years and we should take advantage of their experience. ‘Winging it’ and filling body bags as we sort out what works reminds us of the moral dictates and the cost of incompetence in our profession."

"None of the widely touted new technologies and weapons systems "would have helped me in the last three years [in Iraq and Afghanistan]. But I could have used cultural training [and] language training. I could have used more products from American universities [who] understood the world does not revolve around America and [who] embrace coalitions and allies for all of the strengths that they bring us.""

"Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet."

"I come in peace. I didn’t bring artillery. But I’m pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you fuck with me, I’ll kill you all."

"The first time you blow someone away is not an insignificant event. That said, there are some assholes in the world that just need to be shot. There are hunters and there are victims. By your discipline, cunning, obedience and alertness, you will decide if you are a hunter or a victim. It’s really a hell of a lot of fun. You’re gonna have a blast out here!"

"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them. Actually it's quite fun to fight them, you know. It's a hell of a hoot. It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right up there with you. I like brawling."

"There is only one ‘retirement plan’ for terrorists."

"PowerPoint makes us stupid."

"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."

"I have the forces to squash the Iran military if I need to; but I've seen a lot of war and really don't want to kill young Iranian boys,"

"Treachery has existed as long as there’s been warfare, and there’s always been a few people that you couldn’t trust."

"When you were the commander of the Central Command, how much time, worry did you have on Iran? Was that your primary concern? I don't have worry and stress. I cause worry and stress."

"Combining al Qaeda's significant fighting capabilities with a stronger focus on the administrative capabilities that might permit it to hold ground, the Islamic State copied the latter from Hezbollah's model. Basically, Islamic State is a combined al Qaeda and Lebanese Hezbollah on steroids, destabilizing the region, dissolving borders/changing the political geography in the mid-east, and hardening political positions that make mid-east peace-building more remote by the day."

"John Dickerson: What keeps you awake at night? James Mattis: Nothing, I keep other people awake at night."

"That China “harbored long-term designs to rewrite the existing global order,”...The Ming Dynasty appears to be their model, albeit in a more muscular manner, demanding that other nations become tribute states kowtowing to Beijing."

"I had to be a complete son of a bitch to get any results, which often entailed losing my temper five or six times in a day. Being calm and reasonable just didn't work. For one thing the antiwar protests were mounting in the United States and a lot of our draftees knew they'd been sent to an unpopular war and didn't want to fight. Then there was the Army's policy of keeping Vietnam tours to one year, which meant a constant stream of raw recruits and a constant exodus of experienced men. When these new kids arrived, they'd immediately be exposed to a bogus combat-veteran culture that was in reality no more than an accumulation of bad habits. Some other troops would tell them: "Forget that crap you learned in basic training. This is how we do it around here. This is the real thing.""

"My view of the Vietcong never changed. I saw them as opportunistic brigands who with guns and encouragement from the North Vietnamese oppressed the peasants, stole their money and crops, and bullied them into cooperation. I'd have loved to fight a full-scale battle against the Phantom 48th. We had a competent battalion staff and I was quite confident we could have outmaneuvered and destroyed them. But the war had degenerated by then into piecemeal engagements that played to our weaknesses: our shortage of capable junior officers and NCOS, and our draftees' reluctance to fight."

"Three black soldiers stopped me in the hallway. "Colonel, we saw what you did for the brother out there," one said. "We'll never forget that, and we'll make sure that all the other brothers in the battalion know what you did." I was stunned. It hadn't registered on me until that moment that the kid in the minefield was black."

"I took the red-eye out of San Francisco to Baltimore/Washington International Airport on Thursday, July 23, 1970. As we made our final approach early on Friday morning, we flew straight into a thunderstorm. Wind buffeted the plane, lightning flashed, and just as we reached the runway I watched the right wing outside my window dip sickeningly toward the ground. "Great," I thought, "Ive survived two tours in Vietnam and I'm gonna crash here in front of my wife.""

"That summer of 1970, the Army War College issued a scathing report- commissioned by General William Westmoreland, who was now chief of staff- that explained a great deal of what we're seeing. Based on a confidential survey of 415 officers, the report blasted the Army for rewarding the wrong people. It described how the system had been subverted to condone selfish behavior and tolerate incompetent commanders who sacrificed their subordinates and distorted facts to get ahead. It criticized the Army's obsession with meaningless statistics and was especially damning on the subject of body counts in Vietnam. A young captain had told the investigators a sickening story: he'd been under so much pressure from headquarters to boost his numbers that he'd nearly gotten into a fistfight with a South Vietnamese officer over whose unit would take credit for various enemy body parts. Many officers admitted they had simply inflated their reports to placate headquarters."

"The increasing pressure to launch the ground war early was making me crazy. I could guess what was going on figured Cheney and Powell were caught in the middle. There had to be a contingent of hawks in Washington who did not want to stop until we'd punished Saddam. We'd been bombing Iraq for more than a month, but that wasn't good enough. These were guys who'd seen John Wayne in The Green Beret, they'd seen Rambo, they'd seen Patton, and it was easy for them to pound their desks and say, "By God, we've got to go in there and kick ass! Gotta punish that son of a bitch!" Of course, none of them was going to get shot at. None of them would have to answer to the mothers and fathers of dead soldiers and Marines."

"I detest the term "friendly fire." Once a bullet leaves a muzzle or a rocket leaves an airplane, it is not friendly to anyone. Unfortunately, fratricide has been around since the beginning of war. The very chaotic nature of the battlefield, where quick decisions make the difference between life and death, has resulted in numerous incidents of troops being killed by their own fires in every war this nation has ever fought. Even at the National Training Center, where "kills" are simulated by lasers and computers, incidents of fratricide are observed. This does not make them acceptable. Not even one such avoidable death should ever be considered acceptable."

"The exact words from the citation of a Medal of Honor recipient state: "For conspicious gallantry and intrepidity, at the risk of life above and beyond the call of duty." Those last words are particularly meaningful: "above and beyond the call of duty." Duty. Robert E. Lee used that word in explaining why he had to leave the Union Army and go into the Confederate Army. He said, "Duty is the sublimest word of them all." Lee was a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, the institution I also attended. Its motto is "Duty, Honor, Country.""

"Over the years I've met many people who were heroes, and the interesting thing I've found about every single one of them, bar one, was that they did not think of themselves as heroes. They would say things like, "I couldn't leave my buddy out there. I couldn't do that." Or, someone would say, "Those bastards were shooting at us, and I was going to shoot back before one of my men got hurt." Or, "Shucks, sir, it was my duty." They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Well, valor is also in the eye of the beholder. Not one of the people who hold the Medal of Honor said at the time he took action, "Well, I think I'm getting ready to carry out a heroic act." Absolutely not. In the minds of every single one of them at the time was something like, "Gosh, I've got to do it, because it's my duty to my country." Not even that. Rather, "It's my duty to my outfit." And not even that. "It's my duty to my buddy on my right, or my buddy on my left. That's what it was all about, as the stories in this volume will show. That's truly what it was all about. And somebody else- the recipients probably don't even know to this day who- saw them do it. And said, "There's a hero." And truly the recipients of this great award, I am sure, even to this day would say, "Gosh, it was just my duty. It was just my job. It was just my buddy It was just my outfit. I had to do it." And that's what makes them heroes in my mind. The men who tell their stories in this book- indeed all the recipients of the Medal of Honor- embody the sense of duty in its deepest form. We thank them for doing their duty in serving their country."

"Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. But if you must be without one, be without the strategy."

"US forces were having no luck finding and destroying Iraqi Scud surface-to-surface missiles before they could be launched at Israel and elsewhere. So it was with welcome surprise that Colin Powell, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, learned that Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf had told the press that several Scuds had been located and destroyed on their launchers. Before Powell had time to rejoice, though, his intelligence chief warned that an imagery analyst on Schwarzkopf’s own staff had concluded that what had been destroyed were not Scuds but oil tanker trucks. Powell called Schwarzkopf at once, but Schwarzkopf badmouthed the imagery analyst and delivered himself of such a rich string of expletives that Powell decided to let the story stand–a decision he regretted the next day when CNN showed photos of the destroyed Jordanian oil tankers."

"A professional soldier understands that war means killing people, war means maiming people, war means families left without fathers and mothers. All you have to do is hold your first dying soldier in your arms, and have that terribly futile feeling that his life is flowing out and you can’t do anything about it. Then you understand the horror of war. Any soldier worth his salt should be anti-war. And still there are things worth fighting for."

"As far as Saddam Hussein being a great military strategist: He is neither a strategist, nor is he schooled in the operational art, nor is he a tactician, nor is he a general, nor is he a soldier. Other than that, he's a great military man."

"It doesn't take a hero to order men into battle. It takes a hero to be one of those men who goes into battle."

"Do what is right, not what you think the high headquarters wants or what you think will make you look good."

"True courage is being afraid, and going ahead and doing your job."

"I believe that forgiving them is God's function. Our job is to arrange the meeting."

"When placed in command — take charge."

"The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it."