Mattis to high-school reporter: 'Get the political end state right' before going to war

pulse

July 10, 2017 7:17 PM

During an interview with a reporter from a high-school newspaper, the secretary of defense outlined why past US wars have become protracted conflicts.

Secretary of Defense James after a NATO defense ministers meeting in Brussels, June 29, 2017.

During a 45-minute interview with a high-school reporter who got his phone number from a photo published in The Washington Post, Defense Secretary James Mattis underscored the need to define a political end state before going to war.

Mattis, who retired in 2013 as a general after a 41-year career in the Marine Corps, cited several conflicts the US has plunged into since the end of World War II to illustrate the consequences of failing to plan for what political conditions war is meant to effect.

"If you look at the wars from probably Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, dare I say Afghanistan, every time we go into a war and we don’t figure out what the political end state is, we get into wars and we don’t know how to end them. Then you’ve got a real problem." Mattis replied, referencing a 2013 Atlantic article by James Wright, a retired Marine and professor at Dartmouth, titled "What we learned from the Korean War."

"We went in with more troops than we needed and we ended it quickly, because he had the political end state right," Mattis said. (Some have argued that, despite the limited nature of Desert Storm itself, the sanctions, no-fly zones, and airstrikes on Iraq after Desert Storm form part of a longer campaign of hostilities toward the country.)

The US and its allies are still dealing with the reverberations from the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003, respectively.

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