The Union Cavalry Raid That Inspired James Mattis

By Robert Beckhusen,War Is Boring

This piece was originally published last year.

On April 17, 1863, a former music teacher with a fear of horses — he was kicked in the head by one as a child — set off with 1,700 Union soldiers, the scouts in Confederate uniforms, on a raid deep into Mississippi.

The raid by Col. Benjamin Grierson would amount to “the most spectacular cavalry adventure of the war,” American Civil War historian James McPherson later wrote.

More than 138 years later in October 2001, future defense secretary James Mattis was a brigadier general in command of Task Force 58, which comprised the 15th and 26th Marine Expeditionary Units along with the USS Bataan and Peleliu Amphibious Ready Groups.

Mattis was the first Marine commander of a U.S. Navy ARG — a shift in traditional American doctrine due to the particular nature of the mission.

Mattis was to invade southern Afghanistan, secure a forward operating base, seize the airfield at Kandahar and disrupt Taliban operations as U.S. special operations assisted the Northern Alliance’s push on Kabul, Mazar-i-Sharif, Herat and elsewhere.

That the Marines would enter Afghanistan by air from the Arabian Sea — traveling across and over Pakistan along the way — was a shift from the way Marines traditionally fight by amphibious assaults onto enemy-held beaches, which would normally entail a Navy officer leading the operation.