James Mattis Quotes
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Perhaps if you are in support functions waiting on the warfighters to spell out the specifics of what you are to do, you can avoid the consequences of not reading. Those who must adapt to overcoming an independent enemy's will are not allowed that luxury.
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There are many people who do not know if the U.S. Army has 60,000 men or 6 million. They do not have a clue about that.
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Since coming back from overseas, this is more of a foreign country than the places overseas. I don't understand it. It's like America has lost faith in rational thought.
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I don't write policy for my government.
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To Marines, love of liberty is not an empty phrase... Rather, it's displayed by blood, sweat, and tears for the fallen.
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There are a lot of self-imposed restrictions by people who somehow believe they have to fall in with a certain military cant. There was always a sense that we had to put things into words that would touch our troops' hearts, not just their heads.
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Policy makers who have never served in the military continue to use the military to lead social change in this country.
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For a sitting U.S. president to see our allies as freeloaders is nuts.
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I consider ISIS nothing more than an excuse for Iran to continue its mischief.
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I have never thought it necessary to patronize the American people.
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No war is over until the enemy says it's over.
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I can't tell you the number of times I looked down at what was going on on the ground, or I was engaged in a fight somewhere, and I knew within a couple of minutes how I was going to screw up the enemy. And I knew it because I'd done so much reading.
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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.
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Now from a distance, I look back on what the Corps taught me: to think like men of action, and to act like men of thought!
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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.
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There is no God-given right to victory on the battlefield. You win that through the skill and the devotion, the valor and the ferocity of your troops.
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I don't think the U.S. military is conservative. It's pragmatic.
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Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat-footed by any situation, never at a loss for how any problem has been addressed... It doesn't give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead.
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Treachery has existed as long as there's been warfare, and there's always been a few people that you couldn't trust.
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Iran is not a nation-state; it's a revolutionary cause devoted to mayhem.