In picking Gen. Jim Mattis for Defense secretary, President-elect Donald Trump has said that he found his 'Gen. George Patton.' Yet that label may not really capture what makes Mattis a distinctive choice.
Truman fired the popular Gen. Douglas MacArthur because he disobeyed orders in the Korean War. Johnson knew that he had reached the endgame in Vietnam when Gen. William Westmoreland, the top commander in Vietnam, requested 240,000 more troops in 1968 for the prolonged war that also could not be won.
Mattis has been sharply critical of President Barack Obama's policies on Iran and Obama's capping of troop numbers and campaign end-dates in theaters of war such as Afghanistan and Iraq. Mattis also appears to be a skeptic of the Obama-era policy of putting women into combat roles.
Intergenerational support is crucial. I feel like generations give up on each other. If you're Gen Z, you're like, "Gen X is never gonna get it." If you're Gen X, you're like, "Those Millennials are such idiots."
Gen. Tommy Franks told me the war was being compromised as specialized personnel and equipment were being shifted from Afghanistan to prepare for the war in Iraq - a war more than a year away.
A warrior is not a person that carries a gun. The biggest war you ever go through is right between your own ears. It's in your mind. We're all going through a war in our mind, and we have to callus our mind to fight that war and to win that war.
Gen Y is really quite distinct from Gen X; it's really self-involved and very narcissistic - their cameras are filled with pictures of themselves; Facebook, it's about me. It's a generation that's been pampered by their parents and their schools, given prizes for just taking part.
The Gen X generation never got past 'Reality Bites,' apparently, and my generation, the Gen Yers... Facebook? Maybe a conservative revolution?
General [James] Mattis has got a really intellectual mindset about how the United States should go about protecting its national security.
Nicknamed 'Mad-Dog Mattis' by his men, he was a command warrior in the old George Patton mode. He wasn't an armchair general by any definition of that much-maligned term. If a Marine re-upped at a location where he was present, he would personally go to that Marine and thank him or her for rejoining.
Gen Y consume most of their media online and mobile. Gen Y, as the Baby Boomers drop off, are the largest cohort with the largest amount of money - despite the fact that half of them are unemployed.
What is not conservative about saying, 'Don't go to war unless we go to war properly with a full declaration of war and no other way?'
I could literally go on for pages upon pages about Mattis and how influential this man was to me and many others who fought alongside him.
Barack Obama has done more than anyone else to promote the dangerous illusion that we can choose whether to have a war or not. But our enemies have already made that choice. Retired Marine Corps General James Mattis said: “No war is over until the enemy says it's over. We may think it's over, we may declare it over, but in fact, the enemy gets a vote“.
I think that our weakness is understanding that when we go to war, we go to war to win.
I don't believe war is a way to solve problems. I think it's wrong. I don't have respect for the people that made the decisions to go on with war. I don't have that much respect for Bush. He's about war, I'm not about war - a lot of people aren't about war.