President Obama's pick to replace General David Petraeus and head Central Command out of MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa is Marine Corps. General James Mattis, who is considered an experienced ground combat commander.
However, in the wake of the General Stanley McChrystal Rolling Stone magazine debacle that led to his ouster recently, no doubt the Pentagon has warned Mattis that he better check himself now that he's got a much wider platform to utter some of his classic lines, such as 2005 comment about the Taliban that "it's fun to shoot people." Say What? Check it out below.
And to Iraqi military leaders in 2003, he said: ""I come in peace. I didn't bring artillery. But I'm pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you [expletive] with me, I'll kill you all."
On the positive side, Slate.com's John Dickerson wrote a very interesting profile of General Mattis a few months ago. It's a long piece, and includes detailed observations, such as:
Mattis is an evangelist for risk with two core principles. The first is that intellectual risk-taking will save the military bureaucracy from itself. Only by rewarding nonconformist innovators will the services develop solutions that match the threats conceived by an enemy that always adapts. The second is that technology cannot eliminate, and sometimes can't even reduce, risk. Mattis warns about the limitations of sophisticated weapons and communications. They can be seductive, luring military planners into forgetting war's unpredictable and risky nature, leaving troops vulnerable.
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This article appears in Jul 8-14, 2010.