Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis is known to speak candidly during, and his speech Wednesday at the Air Force Association Air, Space and Cyber conference was no exception.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
During his keynote address, Mattis cheekily answered a question about his reported nickname, \u201cMad Dog.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt was a slow news day I think and somebody made it up,\u201d Mattis said, noting that even his troops laughed when they read the news.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cMy call sign was \u2018Chaos,\u2019\u201d Mattis continued to laughter and applause from the audience. \u201cBut I must confess how I got that name.<\/p>\n\n\n \u201cIt\u2019s probably because, you know, the great Chinese classical warfare strategist, Sun Tzu. You copied him or something like that,\u201d he continued. \u201cI\u2019d love to tell you it was for a dignified reason like that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n When the call sign originated, the then-colonel was a regimental commander in Twentynine Palms where, according to Mattis, \u201cthere\u2019s nothing to do but go blow up the desert.\u201d As he was leaving his operations office, he noticed the word \u201cChaos\u201d written on the operations officer\u2019s whiteboard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI said, \u2018What\u2019s this about?\u2019 I\u2019m curious, you know. We all are. He says \u2018oh you don\u2019t need to know that,\u2019\u201d which only further piqued curiosity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cFinally, he kinda said, \u2018Well it means the colonel has an outstanding solution,\u2019 and it was very much tongue in cheek, ladies and gentlemen. They didn\u2019t consider all my solutions quite as outstanding as I enthusiastically promoted them,\u201d said Mattis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mattis ended up adopting the moniker as his call sign.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThere was never a \u2018Mad Dog\u2019 in there,\u201d he said, \u201cother than some press person who needed a little bit of a fantasy life fulfilled I think.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “There was never a ‘Mad Dog’ in there.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":56773,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":70,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[12,70],"tags":[],"coauthors":[256],"class_list":["post-27412","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-your-army"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"IWVK7SPZIFCRPEVVUG4NDNIQYA","arc_canonical_url":"\/news\/your-marine-corps\/2017\/09\/21\/mattis-explains-the-origin-of-the-call-sign-chaos\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n