Background and Context
In the winter of 2003–04 the 1st Marine Division was home from the invasion of Iraq and getting ready to go back, this time to hold Anbar Province in the west. Mattis wanted his Marines to work differently from the Army units they were replacing: less heavy-handed with ordinary Iraqis, and quicker to separate the few who meant harm from the many who didn't. He gave them a short set of rules to live by, and this was one of them. It was written for young Marines at checkpoints, on foot patrols, and in crowded markets, where nearly everyone they met would be harmless and anyone might not be.
Interpretation
Politeness and professionalism are about how a Marine comes across. The plan is about what he carries in his head.
The word doing the work there is plan. Mattis could have said be ready to kill or trust nobody, and either would have made suspicion the Marine's job. A plan is something else. It's a set of practical questions: where are this man's hands, where is cover, what do I do if the car doesn't stop. Answering them keeps the mind busy with the situation rather than with the fear, and a Marine who already knows what he'd do has less reason to do something rash.
Then everybody. The rule makes no exceptions, so it also asks the Marine to make no judgments about who looks dangerous — the call most likely to be wrong, and most likely to insult the person on the receiving end. The courtesy and the plan both go to everyone, and nobody is singled out for either.
Current Relevance
American policing has spent the last decade arguing over whether officers should think of themselves as warriors or guardians — a federal task force on policing came down on the guardian side in 2015. Mattis's rule doesn't pick a side in it. What it offers instead is a method: the courtesy goes to the person in front of you, and the vigilance goes into a plan rather than a mood.
The same split turns up anywhere ordinary service carries a small, real chance of violence: emergency rooms, social workers making home visits, night-shift security. The people who do that work well tend to be warm with everyone and to have thought ahead about the one in a hundred. The rule says out loud what that looks like.
Impact and Legacy
The line reached a wide audience through Thomas Ricks's Fiasco in 2006. It has since become one of the handful of sentences that define Mattis's public image, alongside the 1st Marine Division's motto, "No better friend, no worse enemy," which makes the same pairing in six words. It sums up in one sentence how the division meant to behave in Anbar: courteous as a matter of policy, with lethal force always available.
Mattis went on to help lead the writing of the joint Army and Marine Corps counterinsurgency manual published in late 2006. The manual's central demand — protect and win over the population while staying ready to fight — is close to this rule at book length.
Contrasting Views or Controversies
Critics of the occupation point to what the rule assumes about the people it's applied to. A plan to kill everybody treats every farmer, shopkeeper, and child at a checkpoint as a possible target, and some argue a mindset trained on that assumption drifts, under fear and fatigue, from planning into reflex. Iraqis didn't experience the courtesy separately from the rifles.
It may also be less considered than all this: a commander giving young men a sentence with some swagger to it, the kind that sticks because of its last four words. The Marines who repeat it today mostly repeat those.
Practical Application
- Individual: if your work puts you in front of strangers with some real risk, do your worrying in advance. Decide what you'd do in the bad case, and you can spend the actual encounter paying attention to the person.
- Organizational: give staff the plan formally — exits, alarms, a word that means "get help now" — so nobody is left to decide on gut feeling whom to be wary of.
- Civic: be careful when an institution borrows this rule for use on its own fellow citizens. An army abroad answers to its own chain of command. A police force answers to the people it's making plans about, and they're entitled to a say in how much of the plan they'll accept.
Background on the Author
James Norman Mattis (b. 1950) spent more than four decades in the Marine Corps and retired as a four-star general in 2013. He grew up in Richland, Washington, enlisted in the Marine Corps Reserve in 1969, and was commissioned in 1972 after graduating from Central Washington State College. He commanded the 1st Marine Division from 2002 to 2004, later led U.S. Joint Forces Command and served as NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Transformation, and finished his career as commander of Central Command, responsible for American forces across the Middle East. In 2017 Congress waived the usual waiting period for retired officers so that he could serve as Secretary of Defense, a post he held until his resignation at the end of 2018. His memoir, Call Sign Chaos, written with Bing West, appeared in 2019.