The issue of global warming continues to be a reliable and simple litmus test. If someone believes in global warming, then you can be sure he is a globalist who loathes Western civilization.

Then there was his support for the Islamist Anne Patterson, loathed by the Egyptian people for her support for the Muslim Brotherhood.

Then there was the matter of allowing one of his underlings to throw Fox Company, of Task Force Spartan in Afghanistan in 2007, under a bus so he could advance his own career.

Since that article, Mattis's charge sheet has expanded somewhat. Trump wanted to get trannies out of the military simply because of the costs involved in having them. Mattis pushed back and slow-walked the order. Gender dysphoria is one of the worst mental illnesses, with a 50 percent suicide rate. Who in his right mind would leave people suffering from this condition near weapons or machinery? Someone who ranks ideology above effectiveness and unit cohesion would.

Mattis argued the case for staying in Afghanistan, overriding Trump's gut instinct. There is no point in staying in Afghanistan. When someone stops paying for the imported grain that allows Afghanistan's population to double every 25 years, then Afghanistan will collapse. Mattis's reasoning for staying in Afghanistan is that we either fight them there or fight them here. The opposite is true. By continuing to feed them, we are creating more future terrorists. The way to keep this country safe is to forbid them to enter.

Mattis entered into a "suicide pact" with Steve Mnuchin and Rex Tillerson with the effect that if any one of them was fired, the other two would resign. Normally an employer, upon hearing that his employees have entered into such an undertaking, would fire all three straight away. The president didn't do that, and Tillerson showed how ineffectual he was. Tillerson won't be taking much of his time leading the Boy Scouts of America from now on; he allowed gay troop leaders, and now the venerable institution is considering bankruptcy in response to gay rape claims. Like Mattis, Tillerson rose through projecting an image. The reality fell far short of that.

Then Mattis did something that is either inspired or shows that he has a tenuous grip on reality: he ordered fighter aircraft availability to jump to 80% by September 2019 while at the same time reducing operating and maintenance costs. Mattis's order is looking delusional. For example, the F-35C had a 15 percent "fully mission capable" rate in 2017. For the USAF's F-35s, Lt. Gen. Jerry Harris said in a congressional hearing in March that "the newer F-35s with 3I or 3F software were available to fly 60 to 70% of the time, which is a good number, but that the Air Force's 100-block 2b and older F-35s' availability percentage sat in the low 40s. He said the cost of operation differed based on production block and usage but was approximately $50,000 per hour."

Mattis seemingly ordered the increase in availability without looking into the causes of why aircraft availability is so low.

What do we need in the next secretary of defense? For starters, someone who sees the need to kick Turkey out of NATO. All the money spent in Syria has been spent fighting proxy forces of our purported allies. Somone who has never ridden in a defense contractor's corporate jet and has no desire to do so. Someone who will tell the president to get rid of the secretary of the Air Force, who is an agent of Lockheed Martin. And the chosen one must not believe in global warming.

David Archibald's latest book is American Gripen: The Solution to the F-35 Nightmare.