Trump picks Mattis for Defense chief
Retired general will need a waiver because he hasn’t been out of the military for long.
James N. Mattis is a highly respected retired Marine four-star general. President-elect Trump, in announcing the key Cabinet choice, compared Mattis to World War II legend Gen. George Patton.
WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump has chosen James N. Mattis, a highly respected retired Marine four-star general, to head the Defense Department, filling in a critical national security position in the emerging Cabinet.
Mattis served 44 years in the Marine Corps before he retired in 2013. He headed U.S. Central Command in his final three years and oversaw the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as other military operations in the Middle East.
Trump announced his pick Thursday night at a rally in Cincinnati, urging his supporters to keep the news quiet. “We’re not announcing it until Monday so don’t tell anybody,” he joked.
He compared Mattis to Gen. George Patton, the legendary front-line general who helped liberate Europe in World War II.
Unmarried all his life, Mattis, 66, was known as a hard-charging but scholarly figure who issued heavy reading lists to subordinates and who carried “Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius on his deployments.
In speeches, he was as likely to quote from Shakespeare or an ancient Greek poet as from traditional military strategists Carl von Clausewitz or Sun Tzu. His nicknames included “Mad Dog” and “Warrior Monk.”
“He is the combination of strategic thinker and successful operator at all levels of warfare,” said retired Marine Maj. Gen. Arnold Punaro, author of “On War and Politics: The Battlefield Inside Washington’s Beltway.” “His entire life has been learning about and implementing a strong national defense.”
The GOP-led Congress would need to grant Mattis a waiver to confirm him as head of the Pentagon because he has not been out of uniform for seven years. The limit was set under a law intended to maintain civilian control of the military.
Winning a waiver shouldn’t be difficult. Mattis has powerful backers in Congress, including Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who chairs the Armed Services Committee, which is responsible for overseeing the confirmation process.
“Gen. Mattis is one of the finest military officers of his generation and an extraordinary leader who inspires a rare and special admiration of his troops,” McCain said after Mattis first emerged as a candidate.
Mattis clashed with White House aides before he retired over the Obama administration’s outreach to Iran, which he considered unwise. He was openly critical of the Iran nuclear deal that was signed after he left the military.
Mattis shares a deep distrust of Iran with Trump and Michael Flynn, a retired Army general who Trump has named as White House national security advisor. During the campaign, Trump called for ripping up or revising the nuclear deal.
“Among all the issues facing us in the Middle East, I think Iran is actually foremost,” Mattis said in April at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington. “And yet at the same time, it appears here in Washington that we’ve forgotten how to keep certain issues foremost.”
But more recently Mattis has said that it’s too late to rip up the Iran deal because it’s being implemented by the world powers who negotiated it with Tehran: the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and Germany.
Whether he and Trump share the same worldview in other areas is unclear.
Trump pledged during the campaign to scale back America’s military involvement around the globe; Mattis has always espoused a muscular role to advance U.S. interests overseas.
Mattis has embraced diplomatic efforts to craft a two-state solution in Israel, backed Obama administration efforts to provide weapons to Syrian rebels, and supports the NATO military alliance, all issues where he and Trump may disagree.
“We need to stay engaged in the world and resist isolationism,” Mattis said in August in a speech at Washington State University.
Mattis already has had an impact on Trump’s thinking. In a recent interview with the New York Times, the president-elect indicated he was reconsidering his calls for waterboarding terrorism suspects after talking to Mattis.
“He said — I was surprised — he said, ‘I’ve never found it to be useful,’” Trump said. “He said, ‘I’ve always found, give me a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers and I do better with that than I do with torture.’ And I was very impressed by that answer.”
If confirmed, Mattis would oversee a Pentagon that is battling Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, has lost ground to a renewed insurgency in Afghanistan, is grappling with Russian aggression in Ukraine and is facing a growing Chinese presence in the South China Sea.
Trump has vowed to boost Pentagon spending for more soldiers, ships and aircraft, and this week said he would seek a new strategy for cyberdefense.
Mattis is best-known for leading U.S. Marines into the battle of Fallouja in Iraq in late 2004.
Since retiring, he has served on several corporate boards, including General Dynamics and Theranos.