“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”

- Sun Tzu quotes

On Tuesday Defense Secretary Jim "Mad Dog" Mattis said while testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, "We are not winning in Afghanistan right now."

That made a few headlines, but it turns out he said something else far, far more important that day.



Defense Secretary James Mattis offered a disturbing assessment Tuesday of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, its longest running war. "We have entered a strategy-free time," he told Congress, sobering words given the 8,400 U.S. troops at risk there and Mattis' further acknowledgement that the U.S. and its Afghan and coalition allies are "not winning."

This is mind-blowing to me.

Saying that the people running the war have no strategy is something that a hippie, anti-war protestor is supposed to say. Not the actual people running the war!

And yet, the very next day things got much, much worse.



President Trump has decided to let Secretary of Defense (and retired four-star general) James Mattis set U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan—a move that amounts to yet another indication, in some ways an admission, that the commander in chief is not up to the job.

Trump has effectively turned over the running of a failed war to a general that has said such things as:

"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them. Actually it's quite fun to fight them, you know. It's a hell of a hoot. It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right up there with you. I like brawling."

Do you think that someone like that is going to arrive at the same conclusion as United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres who said there is no military solution to the conflict in Afghanistan? Not likely.

As if that wasn't enough for yesterday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson think that regime change in Iran is a swell idea.



“Well our Iranian policy is under development,” Tillerson replied.

Is that like "strategy-free"?