Former Marine Gen. James Mattis was the first person confirmed to the Cabinet of President Donald Trump.

Mattis took office as secretary of the Department of Defense the same day as Trump, on Jan. 20.

“None of this happened in the Reagan administration where the president and his secretaries of state and defense, George Schultz and Caspar Weinberger, saw eye to eye.”

But in the six weeks since Mattis began running the Pentagon, he hasn’t named a single deputy for Senate confirmation that has been approved by the White House. Reports in The Wall Street Journal and Politico indicate the White House and Mattis are clashing over the positions, a very troubling sign given that rebuilding the U.S. military is one of Trump’s top priorities.

Trump is not exaggerating when he says the armed services are short on readiness and supplies. As Kimberly Strassel of The Wall Street Journal noted in her Feb. 24 column, half of the Navy’s planes are grounded and the Air Force doesn’t have enough pilots.

Former President Obama steadily chipped away at Pentagon funding, while Army numbers dropped. The U.S. military’s readiness got so bad, Obama’s former secretary of the Army, John McHugh, complained to the Association of the United States Army in October 2015: “We are in an extraordinarily rare position in American history where are our budgets are coming down but our missions are going up.”

McHugh said then that the Army was at the “ragged edge of readiness.”

The Army will reduce its force more than 20 percent from 2012, going from a wartime high of 570,000 active Army soldiers to a low of 450,000 by the end of fiscal year 2018, according to the Army Times.

The administration has made the reversal of the military’s decline the primary mission for Mattis. But Mattis cannot seem to get on the same page as the Trump White House.

The picks Mattis makes for his deputies must be confirmed by the Senate. These are not just personnel decisions — they are policy decisions.

Mattis misfired with one of his first choices, for deputy secretary. Mattis wanted to choose Michele Flournoy, who served as undersecretary of defense for policy in the Obama administration. Reports indicate pushback from the Trump team in the White House led Flournoy dropped out.

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The White House did not return emails seeking comment on Mattis’ personnel choices, but Flournoy was one of Obama’s first picks for the Pentagon — a superlative that would likely make any Republican-led White House skeptical.

Before Flournoy worked for Obama, she co-founded the Center for a New American Security, a liberal but hawkish think tank that specializes in terrorism and “irregular warfare,” both priorities of Trump and Mattis.

But the center also specializes in energy and the consumption of natural resources, and how the issues affect national security. The inclusion of climate change in defense studies is often seen in liberal circles but is not a priority with the Trump White House.

Mattis’ eyeing of former Obama officials seems tone-deaf, as Trump is furiously working to remove Obama loyalists from all major agencies. The leaks of sensitive military and foreign-policy details are also driving Trump to carefully weigh appointments.

One foreign policy expert says clashes between the White House and Cabinet members are not uncommon in recent administrations.

“President Trump’s veto of several choices falls in line with President Obama, who routinely rejected selections he did not like,” said Robert Kaufman, professor of public policy at Pepperdine University and author of “In Defense of the Bush Doctrine.”

“None of this happened … in the Reagan administration where the president and his secretaries of state and defense, George Schultz and Caspar Weinberger, saw eye to eye,” said Kaufman.

Mattis now wants Anne Woods Patterson to be undersecretary of defense for policy. The Trump White House is pushing back against Mattis’ choice, telling reporters they are concerned about Patterson’s chumminess with the Muslim Brotherhood’s former leader of Egypt.

Ambassador to Egypt from 2011-2013, Patterson worked closely with former Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi and his Islamist government, according to Politico. Patterson even used her influence to discourage protests against Morsi’s government, which was eventually overthrown.

And while the White House has rejected other choices for deputy slots within the Cabinet, both The Wall Street Journal and Politico report that Mattis is deliberately being stubborn. It’s unclear as to why. One theory is Mattis wants loyal lieutenants. But he also seems to be unaware of the political implications of staffing the Pentagon with Democrats.

Mattis is generally a blank slate on the political front. His voter registration in Washington State is unknown, as the state doesn’t require political affiliations to be public. On the other hand, after he retired as a general, Mattis went to work for a conservative think tank, the Hoover Institution.

Usually, a general being a blank slate is not good for conservative policymakers. One example is former Gen. Colin Powell, who Republicans once thought of asking to run for president. Despite serving President Ronald Reagan, former Powell turned out to be a disappointment to Republicans.

On policy, Mattis has broken with Trump several times. Mattis has reaffirmed Obama’s positions on the use of enhanced interrogation and a commitment to NATO.

Most recently, Mattis broke with Trump on press criticism, saying he didn’t have problems with the U.S. media. He also backed women in combat, which is more unusual, as Trump has spoken against it in the past. The U.S. Marines also expressed concern when Obama approved the policy in 2015, commissioning a study that found women in combat is less common in other countries than popularly believed.

Kaufman believes both sides should look to compromise.

“President Trump should be very careful about alienating Mattis, who gives the administration credibility in an area where the president sorely needs it,” Kaufman said. “Perhaps the president and Gen. Mattis can reach a reasonable compromise, with the latter having wide discretion so long as the deputies he chooses are not former officials in the Obama administration.”

“That line in the sand seems reasonable to me, given the wide divergence between President Trump’s worldview versus President Obama’s,” Kaufman continued.