American military culture

Secretary of Defense James Mattis’ terse and unequivocal disavowal on Wednesday of Trump’s Twitter declaration that the time for talk with North Korea had ended was greeted as just another Wednesday in the age of Trump. But Mattis’ relative outspokenness—and those of his civilian and uniformed colleagues—raises a broader question that, during any other period, would put a critical focus on the bedrock American principle of civil-military relations.