Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/January 2020/Book reviews




 * By Hawkeye7

Jim Mattis is a retired four-star United States Marine Corps general who served in the Gulf War, Iraq War and the War in Afghanistan, and later as Secretary of Defense under Donald Trump. Bing West, ten years older, was a fellow Marine who served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. As far a biographies go, this one isn't very good. It is saturated in shibboleths, but sparse on specifics. I got 202 pages in before discovering that Mattis is a bachelor. While the book did indeed make The New York Times Best Seller list, it is poorly written for the most part. Moreover, while we've become accustomed to autobiographical books being largely if not entirely written by the co-author (who at least gets second billing here), this is the first time I've seen appendices with copies of the original primary documents to prove it.

There's a section on Mattis's two tours as a recruiter in his home state of Washington, a job I would think most Marines would rather avoid, but of which Mattis is quite proud. Unfortunately, he does not cover the aspect that would be of most interest to the military historian, namely how you go about persuading young men and women to enlist at a time of low unemployment and when, in the wake of the war in Vietnam, the prestige of the services was at an all-time low.

The book contains a plethora of platitudes, but the frequent references to military history too often sound vacuous, as if coming from an undergraduate who recites but does not really understand. On the one hand, Mattis provides a good explanation of mission command, but curiously does not use the term. Our article on the subject is a prime example of the hash the US military has made of this simple concept. In his example, Mattis gives a unit an order to seize a bridge in order to cut of the enemy's retreat. The in order part is the commander's intent. The unit commander's mission to implement not the letter of the order, but its purpose. Thus, waiting until the enemy has crossed and then capturing the bridge does not fulfil the intent.

At the same time, there is the section on effects-based operations (EBO) doctrine. The book reproduces part of Mattis's 2008 memorandum scrapping it, but never clearly explains how the concept became distorted, so the reader is none the wiser. Our article attempts to do this, but does not accomplish it too well. EBO was the concept of using force to compel the enemy to what you want. The problem is that when dealing with an alien culture, how things will be perceived, and therefore what the reaction will be, can be hard to judge. Moreover, as Mattis points out, it is staff-centric rather than battlefield commander-centric, and tended to sap the initiative of the subordinates through centralisation. Mattis goes on say how he dislikes Powerpoint presentations, but its not entirely clear if it is really the scourge of critical thinking that he claims it to be or merely a symptom of the classic Boomer discomfort with technology.

A major omission is that the book does not cover Mattis's ill-fated two years as Secretary of Defense, a job he should never have taken on, and after he had already reached his level of incompetence. The book attracted the ire of reviewers for its criticisms of the Bush and Obama administrations, which are at times ill-informed and unfair, although correctly reflecting the view from below, while remaining silent on the failings of current administration. While direct criticism of Trump is avoided, it does reproduce his letter of resignation, and there is a great deal of implicit criticism, especially when Mattis's fulsome support for allies is repeated over and over, and is his at times irrational dislike of Iran.

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