"Mad Dog" Military Advisor to the UAE
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In keeping with federal law, Mattis applied in June 2015 for permission from the Marines and the State Department to advise Mohamed and the UAE on “the operational, tactical, informational and ethical aspects” of the war in Yemen, according to previously undisclosed documents obtained by The Washington Post through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit.
His request was highly unusual: a legendary four-star Marine asking to work for a foreign head of state as a personal consultant about an ongoing war.
The cover page of Mattis's 2015 application seeking federal approval to work for the UAE. The highlighted portions show that Mattis stated he would be paid and that he would advise the UAE on the war in Yemen. The Post obtained the document after suing the Marine Corps and State Department under the Freedom of Information Act. (Washington Post illustration; State Department document)Complicating matters, the U.S. military had become entangled in the conflict. Soon after the bombing started, the Obama administration agreed to support the Arab coalition’s air forces, led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, with aerial refueling and intelligence. But U.S. officials were growing alarmed by the number of innocent Yemenis dying in coalition airstrikes.
Nonetheless, U.S. officials swiftly approved Mattis’s request. Then they fought to conceal his advisory role in the war in Yemen and his work for Mohamed. After The Post sued in 2021 for records of retired U.S. military personnel employed by foreign governments, federal agencies took 2½ years to release the ones about Mattis.
Mattis did not publicly reveal his consulting job for the UAE when he returned to the Pentagon in January 2017 to become secretary of defense in the Trump administration. He omitted it from his public work history and financial disclosure forms that he filed with the Office of Government Ethics. Though he reported it confidentially to the Senate Armed Services Committee, multiple senators said they were not informed. He also did not mention it in his 2019 memoir.
