I heard this guy on the radio the other day. I thought they introduced him as in charge of the DOD's Department of Forced Transformation, which I thought was a funny name for Iraq and subsequent projects. Turns out it was Force Transformation.

He spoke very well. Newspapers say he first saw combat as a battalion commander in Desert Storm. I don't know how many bullets, if any, he may have put in to people. But Marines are deadly, and they won't work well under a pantywaist. In his Patton-like prep speech before Kandahar, he told them: ""The first time they [Taliban and Al Qaeda] run into U.S. Marines, I want it to be the most traumatic experience of their miserable lives," Mattis told his Marines. "I want them to fear us and never want to engage us again."

A kindler, gentler machine gun hand can't properly be mandated for Marines.

All that said, he slipped, no doubt. He said a stupid thing that he will regret, a bit of language that does not transfer from Marine Corp culture to the civilian world.



Preemptive war is wrong for many reasons.