“The Hollywood image of the fire-breathing Marine commander” does not fit the “small, slight and bespectacled” Maj. Gen. James Mattis, the Armed Forces Journal wrote of Donald Trump’s lead candidate for secretary of defense.

Having arrived at the battlefields of Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq armed with Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius’s Stoic “Meditations,” the man Trump has reportedly chosen to be secretary of defense, is indeed unique among generals.

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A thinking and erudite warrior who preached cultural sensitivity toward occupied populations, Mattis indeed lacks George Patton’s impulsiveness, Douglas MacArthur’s arrogance, or Bernard Montgomery’s eccentricity. Even so, making him secretary of defense will be a grave mistake.

The civilian in charge of the generals should be a lifelong civilian. That is what Israelis have learned, the hard way, over 68 years during which nine of 17 defense ministers were retired generals. Though there have exceptions on both columns of this equation, the bottom line is clear.

Arrogance and adventurism

David Ben-Gurion, whose military career peaked as a corporal in the Ottoman army, was the defense minister who led the Israel Defense Forces to spectacular victories in the wars of 1948 and 1956. His successor, former treasurer Levi Eshkol, built the army that in 1967 defeated three armies in six days, the way FDR’s secretary of war, Wall Street lawyer Henry Stimson, built the army that won history’s biggest war.

On June 1, 1967, facing three enemy armies’ impending attack, Israel’s panicked politicians forced the Defense Ministry’s handover to war-hero Moshe Dayan. Initially that move seemed fine, as the war that broke out the following week was won. Its folly became manifest the following decade, when Israel arrived unprepared for its neighbors’ surprise attack of 1973.

Victory now came at an exorbitant price of more than 2,200 fatalities, because the military had been supervised by a retired general who inspired arrogance among the active generals, rather than make them admire the enemy and humbly prepare for its supreme tests, as the civilian ministers did.

The following decade, the same folly repeated itself, twice. First, in 1982, when Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, hero of the 1973 war, invaded Lebanon, which he hoped to turn into Israel’s ally, only to see it become Israel’s Vietnam, from which it retreated 18 years and 1,000 fatalities later.

Dayan’s conceit and Sharon’s adventurism were then followed by Yitzhak Rabin’s blindness, when the hero of the 1967 war, as defense minister in 1988, dismissed as rubbish assessments that the South African apartheid regime’s days were numbered, and that defense ties with it must be severed. The new South Africa’s consequent hostility, the product of a military man’s narrow political prism, remains a problem to this day.

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To top it all, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Israel’s most decorated soldier, agreed to sell sensitive spy planes to China in 2000, only to make a fuming U.S. force the cancellation of the $200 million deal. The general thus hit with one slingshot Israel’s relations with two superpowers, and also cost it a $350 million cancelation fee that China rightly demanded and he sheepishly paid.

On top of all this, generals hate cutting defense budgets.

In 1985, when the Israeli economy faced catastrophe, Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin resisted the required 20% cut in defense spending until then-prime minister Shimon Peres imposed it on him. Back in the ‘50s, Ben-Gurion sharply cut military spending despite the chief of staff’s protest resignation. Unlike the soldiers, Ben-Gurion understood that creating new towns, jobs, roads and schools for thousands of new immigrants superseded the military’s fiscal appetite.

Finally, given the opportunity, retired generals will meddle in the active generals’ work as generals.

For instance, Britain’s secretary of war during World War I, Field Marshal Horatio Kitchener, and imperial chief of staff Field Marshal John French became enemies as the war evolved because the former was undermining the latter’s military authority.

Back in Israel, Ehud Barak was so micromanaging as defense minister that he insisted on approving every colonel’s appointment, thus losing the IDF chief of staff’s trust, respect and cooperation.

Castrated generals

The principle all this implies is that generals should be empowered on the battlefield, and constrained outside it. If the military is supervised by a retired general, the result is the opposite: castrated generals overseen by a competing general, who in addition is a political amateur and potentially loose cannon, one who rather than be the civilian among the generals, becomes the general among the civilians.

This recipe for disaster was apparent to American lawmakers, twice: first, when they legislated a long break — originally 10 years, now seven — before a general can become secretary of defense. And second, when in practice they avoided even such an appointment, with the exception of George Marshall’s 1950-51 stint.

Now Donald Trump says that “it’s time, maybe, for a general,” as if this prospect had been a longtime quest that just awaited a strong leader’s vision and resolve.

With U.S. defense spending at nearly $600 billion, larger than the next seven biggest military budgets combined, and with Trump’s planned tax cuts threatening to more than double today’s budget deficit of 3.2% of gross domestic product, American defense spending will have to be cut.

Yet if a general is assigned with the grounding of warplanes, beaching of aircraft carriers, dismantlement of brigades and mass layoffs of colonels and generals that this will entail — he will drag his feet, because this will run against his emotional structure, even if he is an avid reader of history and philosophy.

Mattis spent 44 of his 66 years in the Marines, where he was nicknamed “Mad Dog,” surely with reason, some of which echoed during a 2005 panel in which he said “I like brawling” and also “it’s fun to shoot some people.”

No one should be fun to shoot, and that’s why many generals need civilians’ adult supervision.