James Mattis's Reading List

"Reminds you of the penalties that are paid by the private soldiers who have to carry out your orders."

"When you go up to the operational level of war, where you look at operational and strategic, you can’t go wrong when you read Grant’s Memoirs."

"If you look at Bob Gates’ book — I was the executive secretary for two secretaries at Defense, I worked closely with three others — and when you read Gates’ book Duty, you get a real sense of the breadth and the gravity of what faces people at that level."

"Any Marine who has not read Lucas Phillips’ book The Greatest Raid of All should. This is about the raid that shattered the dry dock at Saint-Nazaire, France, so that Bismarck would never have a place to be repaired if they went out to sea. You see how you can apply strategy to operations to the tactical costs and all."

"You look at our reliance on communications today, on cyber and all this stuff, and then you read Andrew Gordon’s book on T he R ules of the G ame about what went wrong for the Royal Navy between Nelson’s navy at Trafalgar and Admiral Jellicoe’s navy one hundred years later at Jutland, and you get a real reminder of how you can take fundamental errors that just screw you up royally."