Mattis said the one exception he had witnessed to State-Defense combat occurred when he was a colonel and military assistant to Secretaries of Defense William Perry and William Cohen during the later Bill Clinton years from 1996 to 1998. At the time, Madeleine Albright was secretary of state and Sandy Berger was national security adviser. The trio of Albright, Cohen and Berger had regular lunches and meetings. “Every week they settled things,” Mattis said.
