Trump Needs a Secretary of Defense Who Agrees With Him
The president wants to withdraw from foreign military adventures. To pull that off, he’ll require a secretary who actually thinks he’s right.
James Mattis was an unusual choice for secretary of defense, an explicitly civilian role. It wasn’t so long ago that Mattis was the commander of Centcom, America’s sprawling military presence in the Middle East and Central Asia. Sure enough, there was a widespread sense in the Pentagon that Mattis was more inclined to trust senior military officials, many of whom he came to know over the course of his decades-long career as a
