Secretary of Defense Mattis Said the Military Doesn’t “Do Stunts”

The Washington Post begs to differ.

Indraneel Chowdhury/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

In response to a caravan of “roughly 3,000 to 4,000” migrants, the United States military is preparing to send as many as 15,000 troops to guard the US-Mexican border. As my colleague Noah Lanard pointed out, that figure is “more than the entire US military presence in Afghanistan.” 

The large number of soldiers at the border, who, by law, are prevented from enforcing immigration laws, has led to criticism that this huge expense of time, resources, and money is just an election ploy by President Donald Trump to gin up anti-immigrant sentiment before next Tuesday’s midterm elections.

In response, Secretary of Defense James Mattis told reporters Thursday, “We don’t do stunts in this department.”

The Washington Post decided to fact check this claim and assembled a list of some of times when the Department of Defense opted for more showmanship than serious military activities.  

In mid-October, for example, actor Gerard Butler addressed the Pentagon press corps.

Pentagon reporters have for months criticized limited access to Mattis and other top officials, who, on the occasional chance they are made available, have been sometimes instructed to only answer narrow questions in an effort to avoid contentious issues.

Enter Gerard Butler. In promotion of his Navy-endorsed submarine film “Hunter Killer,” the actor was invited to helm a Pentagon news conference Oct. 15.

That means he has held more news conferences recently than White, who has not held a briefing since May.

During the George W. Bush administration, the Pentagon had to cope with the Army’s deceptive handling of NFL player-turned-serviceman Pat Tillman’s death by friendly fire.

His family later accused the military of warping Tillman’s life and death. His brother, fellow Ranger Kevin Tillman, testified in 2007 that the military told “deliberate and calculated lies” to transform the fratricide into an “inspirational message.”

Tillman himself feared his potential death would be used in such a way by government officials, his biographer Jon Krakauer told The Post in September. Krakauer said Tillman’s death was also used to distract from incidents like the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal and an insurgency spinning out of control in Iraq.

In 2007, the Pentagon’s independent watchdog agency said the Army was at fault for how it reported Tillman’s death. “Our failure in fulfilling this duty brought discredit to the Army and compounded the grief suffered by the Tillman family,” the Army’s acting secretary, Peter Geren, said at the time.

The Obama administration also engaged in what Mattis might consider “stunts.” During his time in office, the Pentagon spent millions on “giant flags, welcome home moments and somber tributes” without an apparent benefit:

Those flyovers, gigantic U.S. flags, welcome home ceremonies and stirring military tributes at events like NFL games cost taxpayers more than $50 million from 2012 to 2015, and the Pentagon has struggled to show how effective they are, a Senate report concluded in 2015.

But they do make good Instagram posts.

Pentagon spokesperson Dana W. White didn’t return the Post‘s request for comment. Perhaps Gerard Butler will.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate