Retired general James Mattis of the U.S. Marine Corps recently spoke with Military History about lessons learned from his 41-year career.
Here’s an excerpt:
How did the Marine Corps prepare you for warfare? The Corps made very clear that I was responsible for my own learning, and that it would guide me with a required reading list. We learned the Corps was as serious about that as it was about 3-mile runs and pull-ups. It set an institutional expectation with a moral tone to it: War is bloody enough without having to have amateurs send young men into a fight. Don’t superior firepower and combat training alone adequately prepare a warrior? We deal with a fundamentally unpredictable phenomenon called war, and the idea you’re going to solve this with just technology or training alone does not hold up in a study of history. Yes, the training is critical, that you have ingrained the muscle memory, so when you employ this force in close contact with the enemy, you have a vicious level of harmony built on brilliance in the basics. But you educate them for what we don’t know will happen. They’re like two rails of a railroad track. If you want to run your locomotive down a track, you need both rails.
Read the whole thing here.
