(CNN)In picking General Jim Mattis, President-elect Donald Trump said Thursday night that he has found his "General George Patton." Yet that label may not really capture what makes Mattis a distinctive choice. Mattis has been sharply critical of President Barack Obama's policies on Iran, and Obama's capping of troop numbers and campaign end-dates in theaters of war such as Afghanistan and Iraq. Mattis also appears to be a skeptic of the Obama-era policy of putting women into combat roles.
Mattis, 66, is a storied retired Marine general beloved by his troops whose skeptical views on Iran and appetite for a robust military that is unencumbered by political correctness align closely with those of his new boss. But Mattis is also a warrior-intellectual who easily and unpretentiously quotes both the Roman stoic Marcus Aurelius and Eliot Cohen, the Republican military strategist who was a leader of the "never Trump" movement.
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Similarly, when Mattis prepared for the invasion of Iraq he "mandated that every major and above in the division read Russell Braddon's 'The Siege,'" which was one of the only books ever written about fighting a war in Iraq. It chronicled the British fight there during World War I. Third, Mattis issued very clear "commander's intent" guidelines so that all his Marines understood the purpose and goals of the fight they were embarking upon.
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Fourth, he pushed the responsibility for decision-making during the battles he led down to the lowest levels possible. So what do Mattis' views and history as a military leader suggest about how he might help to shape policy in the Trump administration? A greater troop presence? Clearly, an urgent priority will be what to do about Afghanistan where the Taliban now control or contest territory in which 10 million Afghans live and where ISIS has established a foothold. The Obama administration has signaled that US troops will eventually be pulling out of Afghanistan since as early as December 2009 when Obama first announced a surge of US troops into the country, but also announced their withdrawal date. Mattis clearly finds this deeply unsatisfactory and we can expect him to push for a more robust troop presence in Afghanistan unconstrained by arbitrary pullout deadlines.
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