Insight into General Mattis From Huntington (1957)

Today in class we talked about the first four chapters of Huntington's (1957) classic: The Soldier and the State.  In the third chapter, Huntington outlines the professional military ethic, or what he calls the "military mind."

One quote from this description of the outlook of military men on the world stood out to me in particular: "The military ethic...places unusual value upon the ordered, purposive study of history.  History is valuable to the military man only when it is used to develop principles which may be capable of future application" (Huntington 1957, 64).

I was checking up on an old friend who had messaged me on Facebook earlier.  He had a link to an article about General Mattis, the Trump nominee for Secretary of Defense.  The article is about an email that he sent during his tour in Iraq in 2003 about the value of reading, and the fact that the email has recently "gone viral."

I read the story and the email and was struck by how much, nearly 60 years since Huntington began describing the profession of military officers, Mattis played to type. After outlining the books he's read before and during various deployments, Mattis has this to say about war and the obligations of officers to the profession (emphasis mine):

We have been fighting on this planet for 5000 years and we should take advantage of their experience. “Winging it” and filling body bags as we sort out what works reminds us of the moral dictates and the cost of incompetence in our profession. As commanders and staff officers, we are coaches and sentries for our units: how can we coach anything if we don’t know a hell of a lot more than just the TTPs? What happens when you’re on a dynamic battlefield and things are changing faster than higher HQ can stay abreast? Do you not adapt because you cannot conceptualize faster than the enemy’s adaptation? 

I started the class out last week with a blog article about the potential dangers of trump nominating generals who are still relatively "fresh" out of the military to key civilian posts. It will be interesting to see if Mattis can be successful in a "political" role when he has been very professional as a soldier.  Huntington gives much more credence to the political role - it is wider, more ambiguous, and more difficult than the narrowly applied application of violence to carry out the political goals of the state.

Reading Huntington and then Mattis, I can agree with him on one point: there is nothing new under the sun.
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Huntington, Samuel P. 1957. The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA.