Warriors and Citizens Quotes

“Today, many senior military officials complain of feeling baffled and shut out by a White House that combines micromanagement with a near total inability to articulate coherent strategic goals.”
― Jim Mattis, Warriors and Citizens: American Views of Our Military

“The 2009 debate over Afghanistan troop levels both typified and further fueled the mutual mistrust between the White House and senior military officials.”
― Jim Mattis, Warriors and Citizens: American Views of Our Military

“Attempts to “buy” veterans with generous entitlements is likely to fail. The best way to gain or retain the trust of veterans is to ensure that they receive “genuine gratitude. Not sympathy or pedestals; but real gratitude. . . . Every civilian should understand that the veteran has done nothing less, and also nothing more, than what is sometimes required to maintain liberty.”[46]”
― Jim Mattis, Warriors and Citizens: American Views of Our Military

“Critics of the military often contend that people join the military because they have no other economic options, but it is more likely the case that most in the military are motivated by some degree of patriotism and a sense of service. Those who do are more likely to possess or seek the traditional virtues normally associated with military service in the public mind: discipline, loyalty, courage, honor, and self-sacrifice.”
― Jim Mattis, Warriors and Citizens: American Views of Our Military

“The key to healthy civil-military relations is trust on both the civilian and military sides of the negotiation: the civilians must trust the military to provide its best and most objective advice but then carry out any policy that the civilian decision makers ultimately choose. The military must trust the civilians to give a fair hearing to military advice and not reject it out of hand, especially for transparently political reasons. Civilians must also understand that dissent is not the same as disobedience.”
― Jim Mattis, Warriors and Citizens: American Views of Our Military

“They do identify a large increase in civilian ignorance or apathy about military issues and also in civilian deference to the military on conduct of the wars, which they consider may be connected to decline in trust of civilian leadership.”
― Jim Mattis, Warriors and Citizens: American Views of Our Military

“data show a worrisome trend toward distrust of the military among elites—especially self-described “very liberal” elites—”
― Jim Mattis, Warriors and Citizens: American Views of Our Military

“Is there tension between a self-regarding “only 1 percent serve” attitude among the military and a “you signed up for this” attitude among the public?”
― Jim Mattis, Warriors and Citizens: American Views of Our Military

“The perception is widespread in the military that civilians are insensitive to its culture—more than insensitive: intolerant.”
― Jim Mattis, Warriors and Citizens: American Views of Our Military

“There is also among some civilians the temptation to treat warfare as just another arena of politics, with public indifference giving latitude for the imposition of social choices—conservative or progressive—uninformed by the grim exigencies and atavistic demands of warfare. This can translate into a perceived lack of respect by civilians in a military culture steeped in respect.”
― Jim Mattis, Warriors and Citizens: American Views of Our Military

“On the one hand, the military must have a voice in strategy making, while realizing that politics permeates the conduct of war and that civilians have the final say, not only concerning the goals of the war but also how it is conducted. On the other hand, civilians must understand that to implement effective policy and strategy requires the proper military instrument and therefore must insist that soldiers present their views frankly and forcefully throughout the strategy-making and implementation process.”
― Jim Mattis, Warriors and Citizens: American Views of Our Military

“Overwhelmingly, the military respondents felt that unethical orders ought to be resisted in various ways while the civilians felt that they ought to be carried out; the officers felt that unwise orders should be met with a smart salute while the civilians thought they should be “appealed” and “resisted.” It may be relevant to note, however, that the civilian respondents, both veteran and nonveteran, were also much more likely than the military respondents to expect that officers would seek to avoid carrying out orders with which they disagree.”
― Jim Mattis, Warriors and Citizens: American Views of Our Military

“The disparity in sacrifice between the uniformed military and civilians has left some veterans bitter.”
― Jim Mattis, Warriors and Citizens: American Views of Our Military

“a president has every right to choose the generals and admirals he wants, but it is also the case that he usually then gets the generals and admirals he deserves. If a president indicates by his actions that he does not want smart, independently minded generals who speak candidly to their civilian leaders, the message that generals and admirals may receive is that they should go along to get along.”
― Jim Mattis, Warriors and Citizens: American Views of Our Military

“Those who argue that healthy civil-military relations are characterized by comity and a low number of disagreements between civilian and military decision makers ignore or discount the possibility that this may be the result of promoting yes men who are politically safe and who will not really fulfill their obligation to provide their best military advice as forcefully as possible.”
― Jim Mattis, Warriors and Citizens: American Views of Our Military

“The Marine Corps in particular was very vocal in its opposition to opening infantry positions to women. This affair will be a major test for civilian control on both the civilian and military side. Will the military simply acquiesce in establishing double standards, violating a key component of military culture—fairness? Will officers either salute and obey or leave the service,”
― Jim Mattis, Warriors and Citizens: American Views of Our Military

“the defense budget has declined precipitously, and force structure has contracted to levels not seen in decades.”
― Jim Mattis, Warriors and Citizens: American Views of Our Military

“the Obama administration has failed to develop a strategy for dealing with events in the world, including the emergence of ISIS, Iran’s nuclear ambitions and its quest for regional hegemony, Russian aggression against Ukraine, and a rising China”
― Jim Mattis, Warriors and Citizens: American Views of Our Military

“A very liberal administration is likely to base its military and security policies on ideas that the uniformed military will find hard to accept.”
― Jim Mattis, Warriors and Citizens: American Views of Our Military

“Some 48.7 percent of Americans believe that the military offers more opportunity than the rest of society for minorities”
― Jim Mattis, Warriors and Citizens: American Views of Our Military

“over a third of those that call themselves “very liberal” believe the military gets more respect than it deserves”
― Jim Mattis, Warriors and Citizens: American Views of Our Military

“personal and professional honor do not require a request for reassignment or retirement if civilians order one’s service, command, or unit to act in some manner an officer finds distasteful, disastrous, or even immoral. The military’s job is to advise and then execute lawful orders. . . . If officers at various levels measure policies, decisions, orders, and operations against personal moral and ethical systems, and act thereon, the good order and discipline of the military would collapse.”[33]”
― Jim Mattis, Warriors and Citizens: American Views of Our Military

“It was a matter of faith for Americans that standing armies were a threat to liberty and that the militia in the form of a “people numerous and armed” was the only acceptable way to defend a republic.”
― Jim Mattis, Warriors and Citizens: American Views of Our Military

“General Robert Scales penned an op-ed for the Washington Post claiming that serving officers “are embarrassed to be associated with the amateurism of the Obama administration’s attempts to craft a plan that makes strategic sense. None of the White House staff has any experience in war or understands it.”[6]”
― Jim Mattis, Warriors and Citizens: American Views of Our Military

“This raises an interesting paradox: the leaders recognized and selected by the Army to serve at strategic levels—where uncertainty and complexity are the greatest—tend to have lower levels of one of the attributes most related to success at strategic level.”[67]”
― Jim Mattis, Warriors and Citizens: American Views of Our Military

“The current all-or-nothing approach to military careers does not serve the nation well. It keeps talented people out of the military and makes it risky or impossible for military personnel to branch out and then return without career penalties.”
― Jim Mattis, Warriors and Citizens: American Views of Our Military

“War, wrote the nineteenth-century Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz, is “an act of violence to compel our opponent to fulfill our will.”[58] But our increased interconnectedness and dependence on interlinked electronic technologies has created new means for clever actors—be they states or individuals—to achieve war’s traditional ends.”
― Jim Mattis, Warriors and Citizens: American Views of Our Military

“Warfare, wrote Qiao and Wang, will soon “transcend all boundaries and limits. . . . [T]he battlefield will be everywhere . . . [and] all the boundaries lying between the two worlds of war and non-war, of military and non-military, will be totally destroyed.”
― Jim Mattis, Warriors and Citizens: American Views of Our Military

“the American public may know little about the military, but we recognize that it is the only reasonably well-functioning public institution we have these days.”
― Jim Mattis, Warriors and Citizens: American Views of Our Military

“Cultural or opinion gaps between the general public and the military community worry us, but there is little evidence that they cause actual harm. The mistrust and mutual ignorance that often characterizes relations between high-level civilian and military decision makers is another story: here, misunderstandings and mistrust lead to arbitrary decisions and can do genuine harm both to the military and to US interests.”
― Jim Mattis, Warriors and Citizens: American Views of Our Military