Donald Trump nominates James 'Mad Dog' Mattis as secretary of defense

Donald Trump has selected the retired marine general James Mattis to serve as his first Pentagon chief, the first of his national-security appointments that will reassure the establishment defense circles Trump scorned on the campaign trail.

Trump made the announcement at an Ohio rally on the first day for his “thank you tour”.

“I don’t want to tell you to this, I refuse to tell you, don’t let it outside of this room. I will not tell you that one of our great great generals, don’t let it outside, we are going to appoint Mad Dog Mattis as our secretary of defense and we’re not announcing it until Monday so don’t tell it to anybody.”

Mattis, has deep wells of support on Capitol Hill and in the military. Unlike Trump’s other announced nominees, Mattis is unlikely to receive a contentious confirmation hearing for the defense secretary job, even though he will need a special waiver from Congress because he has not been out of uniform for the requisite seven years.

The nomination comes after Mattis met with Trump at the businessman’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, last month.

The retired general declined to talk to the media at the time, but Trump praised him. “All I can say is he is the real deal. The real deal,” he said.

The appointment of Mattis, which had been first reported by the Washington Post on Thursday afternoon, was initially denied by Trump’s transition team. In a tweet written three hours before Trump took the stage in Cincinnati, senior communications adviser Jason Miller insisted, “No decision has been made yet with regard to Secretary of Defense. #TrumpTransition.”

Mattis’s appointment comes with much establishment hope attached. Many in Republican national security circles who opposed Trump have faith that the forceful Mattis can moderate Trump and bureaucratically neutralize Mike Flynn, the president-elect’s pick for national security adviser. But Mattis has enough points of policy agreement with Trump to make his integration with the Trump hardliners as strong a possibility.

“Jim Mattis has a deep respect and affection for the men and women who put their lives on the line for our country, and the allies who help us. He’ll be a terrific secretary of defense,” said Kori Schake, a former defense adviser to John McCain, a prominent “never Trump” conservative, and Mattis’s co-editor on a recent book.

Unusually, days before the announcement, McCain released a statement that all but openly campaigned for Mattis’s appointment, calling the retired general “impressive” and an “extraordinary leader”. As the chairman of the Senate armed services committee, McCain’s endorsement will be critical to Mattis’ confirmation.

Establishment hopes that Mattis could rein in Trump appeared to be bearing fruit even before his appointment. Trump told the New York Times Mattis had made a forceful case against torture in a private conversation, apparently telling Trump: “I’ve always found, give me a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers and I do better with that than I do with torture.” Trump said he was “was very impressed by that answer”, although it had not totally changed his mind.

“Mad Dog” Mattis’s highly quotable blend of wit and bluntness has earned him esteem within the military – and even a hashtag, #Mattisisms. In uniform, he relished attacking the sacred cows of the Pentagon, the broader military and the marines specifically. Yet Mattis’s mouth has gotten him in trouble, as has a hawkishness on Iran that alienated many in Barack Obama’s White House.

A now-famous quote has Mattis, then the senior marine in the volatile Iraqi province of Anbar, informing a local interlocutor: “I come in peace. I didn’t bring artillery. But I’m pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: if you fuck with me, I’ll kill you all.”

A speech he gave in 2005 mused that it was “fun to shoot some people” in Iraq and Afghanistan, a statement called callous by Marla Ruzicka, the head of a civilian-advocacy group that worked with the military in Iraq. Mattis was defended by marine leadership but instructed to watch his tone.

Those who know Mattis say his bluster is intentionally over-the-top and leavens his intellectual streak. Despite being a marine, he co-authored the army’s counterinsurgency field manual with David Petraeus, which cautioned restraint and discrimination in lethal force. His allies say he took Ruzicka’s criticisms to heart, particularly after she was killed in Iraq by a suicide bomber.

Mike Rogers, a former Republican congressman who was the national security advisor on the initial Trump transition team, portrayed Mattis as a scholar-general. “He might have a TV in his house, but I’m not convinced of it. His library is about 10,000 books and he’s read every one of them, and those are just the ones he kept.

“The guy ... understands the big picture. He’s an internationalist and he understands engagement. He also understands the judicious use of military power. He’s not looking for a fight but he’ll always finish the fight,” he said.

“He’s a visionary, and yet he’s molded out of the same grit as [legendary world war two marine] Chesty Puller,” the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Martin Dempsey, once reflected about Mattis.

Obama elevated Mattis to the leadership of US Central Command, but the fit proved to be a bad one. Mattis, Obama’s Middle East aides said, displayed an eagerness to confront Iran far out of sync with an administration focused on diplomacy with Tehran. In 2012 congressional testimony, Mattis suggested the Syrian civil war provided the US with an opportunity to deal “the biggest strategic setback for Iran in 25 years” through deposing Iranian ally, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. Obama fired Mattis the following year.

As a civilian, Mattis has become a critic of Obama’s.

In January 2015 congressional testimony, Mattis advocated a “refreshed national strategy” that reversed what he saw as Obama’s “reactive crouch”. More recently, he has said the US posture in the Middle East suffers from “strategic atrophy”. But while he has sought a resolution of the Syrian civil war, Mattis in 2013 warned against Americanizing what would be a “very, very serious war”. He has advocated placing regional Muslim-majority countries in a leading role, a posture that has yet to materialize in any coherent manner after six years of conflict.

Similarly, Mattis’s emphasis on partnerships with Muslim-majority nations in the Middle East places him at odds with the Trump camp’s willingness to denounce Islam as synonymous with terrorism. Mattis has instead said terrorists hide behind “false religious garb”. Mattis favors arming Syrian rebels fighting Assad, something Trump has signaled he considers a distraction from fighting Isis and which places Mattis at odds with CIA director-nominee Mike Pompeo.

While Trump has signaled a warmth to Vladimir Putin, Mattis has criticized “the unfortunate and dangerous mode the Russian leadership has slipped into”, warning Nato allies against accommodating “Russian violations of international law”.

Yet Mattis is firmly in line with the emerging Trump administration’s confrontational posture with Iran. He has said Iran is “a special case that must be dealt with as a threat to regional stability”, a position shared by Flynn and Pompeo.

The retired marine general apparently wasn’t Trump’s first choice. In an interview with NPR last month, retired four-star general Jack Keane said he had turned down the position. Keane, an architect of the surge in Iraq who is close to McCain, said he instead recommended both Mattis and his army protege, Petraeus, whom Trump is considering for secretary of state.

Additional reporting by Julian Borger