“When You Work for the President, You Work for the President”
“Giddy Up”
Although most of official Washington was at home the Saturday after Thanksgiving 2009, there was a crowd around President Barack Obama in the Oval Office. The commander in chief had called in his closest advisors, some dressed casually for the holiday weekend, to talk about the war in Afghanistan, which had just entered its eighth year. With the aides seated in a horseshoe around him, Obama asked for opinions on his options as the Taliban’s insurgency gained strength and the American military pushed for more troops.
In the discussion about one of the president’s first major decisions as commander in chief, only two of the staffers sitting before him had ever served in the US military. Doug Lute, nine years older than the president and with decades of service in the army and more than two years on the NSC, sat to Obama’s right, and John Tien, a forty-five-year-old army colonel, combat veteran, and NSC senior director, was a few seats down the line. After they both had said their piece and left Obama with his choice, Lute, knowing the weight of the opportunity to counsel a president, looked at Tien as they returned to their offices and said, “Well, you know, giddy up.”1
Just a year before, as Lute and Tien were working on the NSC, Obama and his campaign had won the White House during their own insurgency. The young candidate and his campaign had promised to change not just who controlled the White House but also the way of Washington itself, which the candidate and many of his young staff blamed for misleading the nation into an unnecessary war in Iraq. Yet, as he converted from candidate to commander in chief, Obama—needing experienced talent and worrying about unnecessary mistakes—came to rely on a cadre of advisors, including some from President George W. Bush’s White House.
Even with that change of perspective, Lute, who grew up in Michigan City, Indiana, was a surprise Bush holdover in Obama’s world. Hungry for more than the blue-collar jobs of the industrial Midwest and inspired by the television program The West Point Story, which dramatized the real stories of US Military Academy cadets, Lute himself graduated from and later taught at West Point before going on to two decades of army command and staff jobs.2 After getting his arm twisted into taking the war czar assignment in 2007, Lute was getting ready to leave the White House before being asked to stay on by the new president and his team.
Ten months after Obama first walked into the Oval Office, Lute was sitting there, at his right hand, and offering impassioned advice about what to do in Afghanistan. Lute knew better than most how badly the war there was going, and he had included more Afghanistan content in night notes he wrote for Bush and then Obama. By November 2009, the 67,000 US troops and a relatively small embassy staff looked powerless to stop Afghanistan’s downward trajectory as the Taliban and assorted militant groups, including al-Qaeda, grew more emboldened in their attacks and the Afghan government and security forces struggled in response.
As the new president sought to bring some order to the war that would soon be America’s longest, Lute earned Obama’s trust. Like the wartime staffers before him, the three-star-general-turned-NSC-staffer ensured the young commander in chief had what he needed to make his decisions on the war, including the big one facing him over Thanksgiving weekend. But on the way to the Oval Office that Saturday, Lute’s fight had frustrated many of his longtime Pentagon peers and, far worse to many in Washington, set a precedent for the aggressive and hands-on staff that would serve Obama throughout his term, lead to a new round of calls to reform the NSC, and come to serve the unconventional president who followed.
“War Czar”
The vote was one of dozens cast by then–US senator Obama in 2007. After taking charge of Capitol Hill in the 2006 elections, congressional Democrats like the junior senator from Illinois tried everything they could—threatening funding cuts, imposing deadlines, and more—to force a new direction on the unpopular Iraq War and the surge itself. When the Bush White House decided to establish a war czar on the NSC and appoint a serving general officer to the position, Congress, and in particular the Senate Armed Services Committee, had a legal say in the matter.
On Capitol Hill, deference is typically given to the president’s picks for the NSC and other White House staff positions, which do not require Senate confirmation, as well as to the Pentagon’s plans for the senior officer corps, even if each appointment is subject to congressional approval. The war czar position, however, was too high-profile for a pro forma vetting. In early June 2007, Lute, dressed in his army green uniform, three stars on his shoulders and six rows of campaign and commendation ribbons on his chest, sat in front of his wife, herself a former Clinton NSC staffer, and faced a withering interrogation by the Armed Services Committee.
In the tense hearing, senators of both parties questioned the wisdom of the surge in Iraq and its lack of results at that point. They also took the opportunity to criticize Bush’s war management: to some the job for which Lute was being considered felt like either an abdication or a replication of responsibilities held in some way by the president, the national security advisor, the secretary of defense, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Even US Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, a fellow West Point graduate and a friend of Lute, called the war czar position a “devastating critique of the national security apparatus.”3
Despite the condemnation of the job, Congress deemed Lute qualified for it: Obama joined ninety-three other senators in voting to confirm him.4 With Congress’s blessing, Lute took over O’Sullivan’s team and her portfolio on the NSC. But Lute, who wore a business suit to the NSC, did not sit at O’Sullivan’s desk in the Executive Office Building; instead he got a West Wing office around the corner from the White House Situation Room.5 From there, Lute sent the nightly war notes to President Bush and walked up to brief him first thing every morning.6
Even with this considerable access, Lute had promised Congress he would not issue orders in the military’s chain of command.7 Regardless, everyone in Washington, Baghdad, and Kabul knew the war czar had a direct line to the president, and Lute liberally gave out his White House business cards and encouraged people to call him personally if there was a problem.8 As a result, Lute’s calls and video-teleconferences on a secure desktop Tandberg system were returned more quickly and his suggestions carried greater authority with commanders, like General David Petraeus in Iraq, and diplomats in Baghdad and Kabul as well as those at the Pentagon and State Department.
Over the last two years of the Bush administration, Lute and his team, which grew to twelve members, prioritized requests from the frontlines, troubleshot presidential orders, and reminded the bureaucracy of the wars Washington sometimes forgot. Defense Secretary Bob Gates, who himself worried the Pentagon bureaucracy did not prioritize the warfighters, felt he owed Lute “big-time” for reluctantly taking the White House post.9 To the Pentagon chief and others in the military leadership, the war czar was an “important asset” in the Bush administration as the tide slowly started to turn in Iraq, but there were others who took issue with the way he fought in Washington and for whom: some considered him so beholden to those on the frontlines that Lute was sometimes called “Petraeus’s guy.”10
“Holding Action”
Lute, however, had another war to worry about. Even before the war czar arrived at the NSC, Bush’s staff had begun warning the president about the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, where the Taliban, the Sunni Muslim fundamentalists who had hosted Osama bin Laden, and al-Qaeda had been pushed out of power after September 11th.11 Since then, the Taliban and other militants had been attacking coalition forces and Afghan targets with impunity, aware of what everyone from Washington to the war zones knew: as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs said, “In Afghanistan, we do what we can. In Iraq, we do what we must.”12
In 2008, the American military could not do very much in Afghanistan. Lute, and others in the military who had opposed the Iraq surge, had been right about the availability of forces. With any extra troops sent to Iraq, the 31,000 Americans in Afghanistan at the end of the year were fighting a “holding action,” in the words of vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff James Cartwright, a Marine general.13 According to him, the US military simply did not have the resources, whether it was troops or technology, like the new and deadly predator drones, to “make it much more.”14
More than manpower and matériel, few in Washington had dedicated much intellectual muscle to Afghanistan. While O’Sullivan and her team had done review after review on Iraq, and General Petraeus and other military thinkers were reinvigorating counterinsurgency scholarship with an eye on that war, Afghanistan had just not received the same level of attention. As important a fight as it remained in the eyes of Americans, whose anger over the September 11th attacks still burned, to many in Washington it felt like an impossible war to manage.15
Compared with Iraq, Afghanistan was less modern, more rural, and perhaps even more aggressively resistant to outsiders. No central government in Kabul had ever completely controlled the country’s vast territory, and the US-backed regime under President Hamid Karzai was not promising to do so any time soon. Meanwhile, Afghan security forces, about 150,000 strong in 2008 but weakened by sectarian division and corruption, also struggled to hold ground against the resurgent Taliban and the remnants of al-Qaeda leveraging access to and tacit support from Pakistan.16
In summer 2008, as Iraq continued to improve, Bush ordered Lute to take a hard look at Afghanistan. To develop, as the staffer called it, a “soup-to-nuts” review of the war as well as a way forward, Lute traveled twice to Afghanistan and met for over forty hours on the fourth floor of the Executive Office Building with NSC colleagues and representatives from all the departments with responsibilities in Afghanistan.17 The war czar came away believing the United States, along with its NATO allies and Afghan partners, was fighting several different battles in the country, and yet no one seemed to have authority or a plan for the whole war.
Around the time of Obama’s victory, Lute put the finishing touches on his twenty-five-page report and delivered it to Bush. Lute told the soon-to-be-former president, “I know this is kind of bad timing, but here it is.” The briefing said, “We’re not losing, but we’re not winning, and that’s not good enough,” and Lute and the rest of the team saw three core reasons why: Afghan governance was spoiled by corruption, the nation’s opium trade was fueling the insurgency, and a Pakistani safe haven allowed the Taliban and al-Qaeda to operate freely.18
Although several on the Bush team, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, believed Lute’s report was too pessimistic, the president chose to let it serve as a transition document to the incoming administration. It was Obama’s, and his team’s, war now, and the recommendations for more military, civilian, and economic commitments and decisions—including one on the bulk of an outstanding request for 30,000 additional troops from the US commander in Afghanistan, who wanted the personnel to help secure the Afghan election scheduled for August 2009—were the new president’s to make.19
“Not on Reason but on Passion”
More than leaving a memorandum and a troop request, Bush also sent his war czar to brief the Obama transition team. When Lute arrived at the Obama team’s office in downtown Washington, the NSC staffer found a substantial operation, boosted by new federal support for post–September 11th handovers between administrations.20 Teams of young staffers and seasoned national security policymakers were hard at work studying the wars and what had become of government since Democrats last held the White House in 2001.
The well-established transition was a long way from the early days of Obama’s unlikely path to the White House. In 2002, years after his bleeding-heart battles under then–national security advisor Kissinger and blue sky conversations with then–NSC staffers Sandy Vershbow and Nelson Drew, former NSC staffer and national security advisor Tony Lake was asked after a speech in Chicago to give some advice to Obama, then a state senator. As one phone call led to more, and as Obama’s campaign for the US Senate in 2004 led to another for president four years later, Lake encouraged young foreign policy professionals to work for a candidate he believed was the “most talented person I’ve ever met.”21
Some came to share Lake’s opinion, in part because Obama had been right about the biggest foreign policy decision of the post–Cold War era. In October 2002, Obama rejected the proposed invasion of Iraq, a conflict he said was “based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.”22 What Obama called the “dumb war” was more than simply Bush’s fault, however. The candidate later explained, “The American people weren’t just failed by a president—they were failed by much of Washington.”23 The press, the foreign policy establishment, and Congress had not questioned the rush to the war, and to Obama, each deserved a share of the blame.
Many of the young campaign aides now working at the transition offices and preparing to join the White House had been attracted to Obama’s rejection of Washington’s conventional wisdom. Denis McDonough, who grew up in a big family in small-town Minnesota, had worked his way up on Capitol Hill, becoming a foreign policy advisor to a Democratic leader before the September 11th attacks. In the years after that day, the young aide labored and listened with concerns as Iraq War fever took over Washington.24 Five years later, he found himself in Chicago after helping elect Obama, and ready to join the NSC staff, at the age of thirty-nine.
Despite Obama’s unease with the ways of Washington and his promise of a “new dawn of American leadership,” he still appreciated the value of some of the town’s old hands.25 US Senator Joe Biden, a fixture of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had been Obama’s pick for vice president in part because of his more than three decades of congressional experience. To join Biden on the National Security Council, Obama built what was called at the time a “team of rivals,” based on a book of that name by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin about President Abraham Lincoln’s diverse and disagreeing cabinet. Obama convinced Gates, Bush’s secretary of defense, to stay on, and US Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Obama’s opponent for the Democratic Party’s nomination, to become secretary of state.26
The president-elect also selected a former Marine commandant, General James Jones, to be national security advisor on a strong recommendation from Brent Scowcroft, still a Washington wise man and the godfather of the modern NSC.27 In his interview with Obama, however, Jones admitted he was not naturally suited to be an aide to a principal. To make up for it and his still developing relationship with the soon-to-be president, the retired general hired several professional staffers and Obama loyalists to the NSC.28 His team included longtime Democrats such as Deputy National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, a lawyer and Washington operator who had been chief of staff to one of President Bill Clinton’s secretaries of state; and McDonough, who became the NSC director for strategic communications.
At transition headquarters, as Lute briefed a collection of senior and more junior members of the Obama team on what worried him about Afghanistan, the war czar was also worrying about his own future. Like everyone on the Bush team, the Obama transition, and the rest of Washington, he presumed his White House tour was over and had even started packing up his office. Lute expected to return to his army career after the inauguration, although no assignment had been finalized, and the lieutenant general’s years out of uniform—and fighting as “Petraeus’s guy” with the Pentagon bureaucracy to prioritize the surge in Iraq—put him in a delicate and likely diminished position for promotion.
Yet weeks after Lute’s first briefing to the transition, Jones asked him to stay at the NSC. The decision to keep a knowledgeable and respected staffer regardless of who hired him was “classic Obama,” according to McDonough.29 Looking at their inheritance, which included a global financial crisis that had begun in 2008 and staggered the American and international economies, the president-elect and his team had decided that Lute, who knew every detail of the two wars, could help the new commander in chief avoid unnecessary errors.
But not everyone on the new team was as ready to accept Lute, whom some derisively called “Bush’s guy.” These were heady days for an Obama cohort that came from nowhere to win the White House. Even more, many believed the victory had been a triumph over not just the Washington conventional wisdom but also its purveyors, who had taken the country down many wrong paths, including in the Iraq War Lute had helped manage. Eventually, the persistent questions about Lute’s loyalties led Jones to say, “He’s not a Bush guy, he’s a lieutenant general in the United States Army.”30
“Regular Order”
As Obama attended inaugural festivities after being sworn in at the US Capitol, Lute and others on his team showed up at the White House and the Executive Office Building on January 20, 2009, to continue to keep an eye on the wars. While a few Obama staffers started looking around for their new offices, Bush’s war czar and other holdovers were providing, by design and by the decision of the new president, continuity from one wartime staff to another.
Slowly, however, change came to the NSC and to Lute’s role in particular. The reform reflected some lingering distrust of Bush’s guy, but it was mostly about a commitment to a disciplined process, or “regular order,” a shibboleth brought from the Obama campaign to his White House. With a lot to do in the world, like facing the global financial crisis, and too little time to do it, the new team believed, as one member said, “regular order is your friend.”31 Jones wanted a “strategic,” “agile,” “transparent,” and “predictable” operation as a way of bringing reason to Washington and, according to one official, of “improving the quality of decisions” and avoiding mistakes like the Iraq War.32
To impose regular order, the Obama team had studied the Bush NSC and how its post–September 11th exertions abroad and the emphasis on homeland security at home had given rise to a wartime staff. Lute’s war czar position was exhibit A in how irregular the NSC had gone. As a result, Lute got a new title and became a senior advisor and coordinator for Afghanistan-Pakistan. With the new role, the staffer’s responsibilities were curtailed (after a few months Iraq went back to its regional home in the Middle East directorate), his status was lowered (he was no longer an assistant to the president, a cherished rank), his access shrank (he did not meet alone with the president first thing in the morning as he had under Bush), and his office moved from the West Wing to the Executive Office Building.
The Obama team, however, was not done changing the NSC. In May, the White House announced it was renaming and reforming the staff itself. The NSC was merged with the Homeland Security Council’s staff to create a single “National Security Staff,” or “NSS” for short, with more than two hundred members working on policy.33 The name change, which required new email addresses and business cards, sought to demonstrate a unity of effort and mission to both those inside the Executive Office Building and around government, but the new initials never caught on in Washington.‡
The unified staff and regular order were meant to support Obama, who believed Iraq was an unnecessary war not just because of its consequences, but because the math on the decision to invade had never added up. Accordingly, the president wanted every question asked, every assertion examined, and, as Jones explained, everyone on his team to have the opportunity to voice their opinions before a decision was made.34 If the president and his team played their respective parts, it was assumed, policy would improve and Washington might just come to make decisions based on reason and principle.
Along with Jones, Donilon—who had worked in and out of government since an internship in the Carter White House, including in the Clinton State Department during some of the darkest days of the Bosnia War—policed the process.35 He drove a system with exhaustive paper production and inclusive meetings: the two related features reflected the president’s (and Donilon’s) legal background as well as the Democratic administration’s commitment to full representation.36 But the punishing workload overtaxed and overscheduled National Security Council principals at the agencies, who had their own work to do and departments to manage, and grew to resent the heavy load.
The burden, of course, included the two conflicts, which frequently reminded Donilon and the rest of the Obama team that war does not always run on a regular order. Although Bush had sent 6,000 additional troops to Afghanistan before leaving office, he had deferred outstanding requests for an additional 24,000. After the Pentagon asked about the troops in late January, Obama reminded the National Security Council principals he had promised during the campaign to add personnel to Afghanistan, but the new president also explained, “When we send them, we need to announce it in the context of a broader strategy.”37
“Integrated Military-Civilian Insurgency”
To write such a plan, Obama, a few days in office, ordered a sixty-day, top-to-bottom review of the war and brought in an outsider to run it.38 When the new president telephoned Bruce Riedel on January 30, 2009, the thirty-year CIA veteran and former NSC staffer was three years into retirement, content to help put someone in the White House but never serve in it again.39 During the presidential campaign, Riedel was an early Obama advisor who helped develop the candidate’s promises on Afghanistan.40
Riedel, who had published a widely read think tank report on Afghanistan and Pakistan in August 2008, had a good idea what he was going to write for the new president, but time was of the essence and he only had a small team drawn from the agencies to help with the drafting. Although Lute and his staff were still managing both wars and a separate review of Iraq, Riedel took him up on the offer for support from NSC staff, some of whom had been working on Afghanistan for months and in some cases years. Since Riedel did not plan to stick around to implement his recommendations, it also made sense for the NSC to help with development and drafting in order to follow through on implementation.
On February 11, 2009, Riedel, Lute, and some staffers met in the Executive Office Building conference room with the other members of the review, who had all been given a copy of Lute’s Afghanistan briefing from the previous administration. From the Defense Department, Michèle Flournoy, a respected defense wonk and the newly sworn-in undersecretary of defense for policy, was a cochair for the review. Petraeus, who, after the perceived success of the Iraq surge, had been named commander at the department’s Central Command (CENTCOM), was also present.
The review’s other chair was Richard Holbrooke, who had delivered on the Bosnia endgame in the Dayton Accords and had been named by Clinton the State Department’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Eager to make history again, Holbrooke had ambitiously stocked his team with diplomats, scholars, and former military officers to end another conflict complicated by ethnic tensions. For those familiar with Holbrooke, or like some at the White House suspicious of his motives and his longtime support for Clinton, it appeared the new special representative was trying to build an NSC-like team to take control of the war.
Even though the review’s first session had begun with the still new team introducing themselves to their colleagues, Riedel promised a draft of the report would be written in two days. That speed surprised many in the room—including Lute, who had spent months writing his own report—and belied just how complicated the war, and strategy for it, had become.41 As would become clearer in the months ahead, the individuals around the table had subtle disagreements about almost every word of the eventual objective to “disrupt, dismantle, and eventually defeat al-Qaeda and its extremist allies, their support structures and their safe havens.”42
More than the ends, the members of the review struggled to find a novel way to achieve them. Even if most, including Lute, agreed with then-candidate Obama, who had said, “The solution in Afghanistan is not just military—it is political and economic,” those charged with solving Afghanistan, still plagued by pervasive corruption and governance issues, only had so many options to consider.43 After more than seven years of war, the military had come not just to dominate much of the discussion of national security policy but also its implementation, even jobs better suited to diplomats because US forces had greater capacity to take action in dangerous war zones.
With the perceived success of the surge, counterinsurgency had taken on a near miraculous status in military, as well as the broader foreign policy, conversations. It appeared to be the cure-all for every one of a tough war’s ails. Reflecting the military’s recent experience in Iraq and the State Department’s push to strengthen Afghan governance and economic development, Riedel eventually recommended the president pursue an “integrated civilian-military counterinsurgency.”44
“They Know What the Hell’s Going On”
But a full and honest accounting about what was needed to realize such a strategy was preempted by the military’s hard push in early February for the White House to approve a pending request and send an additional 13,000 troops to Afghanistan in time for the August elections. To Lute, something about the request and its urgency did not smell right. The Pentagon’s numbers looked suspicious, since he did not see enough of what are known as “enablers,” the personnel who provide transport, surveillance, and evacuations.
After catching the paperwork for the decision on its way to the president for signature, Lute cried foul and told Donilon, “These numbers are really soft,” and encouraged him to question the military’s math.45 When the deputy national security advisor did so, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, responded to the White House doubts by saying, “We’ve done our homework.”46 But it soon became clear the numbers and the military’s homework had indeed been wrong. In short order, the Pentagon sent a revised proposal, and Obama approved an additional 17,000 troops, a decision announced in a lone White House statement.47
Contrary to regular order and Obama’s commitment in one of his earliest meetings with the military, the president had sent more troops before the broader strategy was established. The entire incident, from proposal to press release, was an eye-opener for the new war managers in the White House, who worried about the bad math. Even more troubling, the staff thought it was their job to protect the president’s space and process for making decisions, which the rush for approval had curtailed.
The incident was also a bad first step in the civil-military relationship. The Pentagon’s sloppy work and insistence for approval struck many of the new Obama team as an attempt to take advantage of a new president, while the White House doubts and double-checking offended some in the brass. The incident had also proved the value of Lute, and the three-star general’s willingness to question the military, to his new NSC colleagues. As Donilon later said of him and other holdovers, “This is exactly why we kept these guys, because they know what the hell’s going on.”48
By mid-March 2009, the 44-page Riedel review, which included 20 recommendations and 180 subrecommendations, was complete. Although initial discussion of the report elicited further disagreements among the National Security Council principals—including those like Vice President Biden who worried the plan committed the United States and the new president to a long-term nation-building effort—the president accepted it. A few days later, Obama announced that he was sending an additional 4,000 military personnel to join the previously approved 17,000 troops as well as what became known as a “civilian surge” of agricultural experts, educators, and engineers to help develop the Afghan economy, infrastructure, and political and social institutions.49
“Tally Up the Bill”
With some trust earned, Iraq off his desk, and Riedel, who kept his vow to stay out of government, gone, Lute was charged with helping implement the new Afghanistan strategy. This was in some ways familiar territory: as he had done on the Iraq surge, Lute inherited a plan he had not written and tried to keep the president’s, and everyone else’s, eye on the ball by knowing the objectives, measuring progress, and keeping the policy on track.50 As the new strategy sought to apply some of the lessons of Iraq, Lute convinced John Tien, an army colonel detailed to the NSC the year before to work on that war, to again delay his return to an active regular service post and take on more responsibility on Afghanistan.
A child of Chinese immigrants and a graduate of West Point, Tien was part of a unit that had assumed responsibility for security in Tal Afar in 2006 after then-colonel H. R. McMaster had demonstrated the value of counterinsurgency in pacifying the Iraqi city.51 While on a fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School a year later, Tien was recommended to Lute as a potential addition to the war czar’s team. Rather than returning to uniform and his command tour, Tien found himself an active-duty army colonel wearing a business suit and working at the Old Executive Office Building in 2008.
A year later but under a new president, Lute and Tien took a page out of the Bush NSC’s playbook. That staff had developed a system to comprehensively track progress, or a lack of it, on the war’s objectives. These strategic implementation plans, which tried to establish and measure benchmarks at regular intervals, had become a useful tool at the White House, but the NSC had never formally adopted the practice on Afghanistan. With Jones’s permission, Lute developed a strategic implementation plan for the president’s new Afghanistan plan.
The minute the new strategy was exposed to metrics, however, the practice revealed some of the differences that had gone underexamined before Obama’s announcement of the strategy. After Lute shared the draft document with the Pentagon, members of Gates’s team changed one objective, from “disrupt” the Taliban, to “defeat.”52 It could have seemed a minor edit, as much a semantic point as a bureaucratic tiff playing out in track changes, but it concerned Lute, who worried that the Pentagon was pushing for the most expansive and thus most troop-intensive definition of the mission. Regardless, Jones and Donilon told Lute to go with “defeat.”53
But simply accepting the edit did not resolve the disagreement behind it. According to Lute, in part because the Pentagon’s February troop request and the president’s approval had preempted the discussion of what means the new strategy required, “We did not really get to the last step which is to tally up the bill.”54 Now charged with implementing counterinsurgency, the Defense Department, where Mullen said at the time, “The under-resourcing of Afghanistan was much deeper and wider than even I thought,” was looking for more: more troops, more intellectual energy, and more financial resources.55 The State Department as well was pushing for more personnel to go to Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, many in Washington, especially at the White House, got sticker shock as the bill started growing in terms of troop totals and economic commitment, at a time when the United States was reeling from a financial crisis. Obama himself was doing the math; he said, “A six-to-eight year war at over fifty billion dollars a year is not in the national interest.”56 The White House made a point of considering the costs in its strategic conversations and communications. More than just dollars-and-cents considerations, the president explained at the time, “My strong view is that we are not going to succeed simply by piling on more and more troops.”57
“Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot”
Trying to get the ground truth on what was needed, Jones and Lute dispatched Tien to Afghanistan in April 2009. The NSC staffer, a few years out of combat, knew the best way to see war’s reality and determine what was needed was to go outside the wire, or beyond the safety of the base. So the NSC staffer pulled back on his army combat uniform, grabbed a rifle, and went on patrol with several units in Southern Afghanistan.58 In the vast, ungoverned and unsecured swaths of the country, Tien saw how the United States was losing the initiative and how additional resources and troops might be required to realize a true counterinsurgency plan.
Many at the Pentagon agreed. Even more, they thought the entire operation required “fresh thinking.”59 In May, Mullen and Gates recommended that the American commander in Afghanistan be replaced by Army General Stanley McChrystal, who had become a legend in national security circles for leading counterterrorism raids in Iraq. At McChrystal’s confirmation hearing in May, the new commander said of the 21,000 additional troops Obama had approved, which took the total of American personnel in Afghanistan to 67,000: “You might properly ask if that is enough. I don’t know. It may be some time before I do.”60
With Obama’s decisions on the new strategy and troops only a few months old, Jones grew concerned about the Pentagon’s changes, McChrystal’s suggestive testimony, and whispers elsewhere in Washington that another troop request was coming the president’s way. When the national security advisor traveled with Tien and others from the NSC in late June to Camp Leatherneck in Afghanistan’s restive Helmand Province, Jones tried to send a message. He said if Obama heard about any new requests, the president was going to have a “whiskey, tango, foxtrot moment,” referring to the acronym for “What the fuck?”61
The colorful remark, which was reported on the front page by the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, whom Jones had invited on the trip, reflected the unease in the Obama team and its Afghanistan policy. Despite Riedel’s review, its strategy, as Obama later said, had “retained ambiguity about what our central mission was.”62 Because of the failure to fully air opinions about the ways and the means and tally the bill, when the military and State fought to implement their respective interpretations of the plan, it frustrated those at the White House and NSC who had their own perspectives.
Regular order took a further hit when everyone tried to take their case, as Jones had done with Woodward at Camp Leatherneck, to the press instead of the Situation Room. At the White House, all the leaks other than their own were seen as not just politically damaging, but as attacks on the president, his policy, and the process. The Obama team believed the military was trying to “jam” the president and limit what some at the White House called his “decision space” or freedom to make the choice he thought was best.63 Obama eventually felt compelled to ask Gates about the military’s leaks, “Is it lack of respect for me?”64
“We’re Being Fed a Pack of Bullshit”
Upon arriving in Afghanistan, McChrystal had set about drafting an assessment of the war and the way forward. After the general sent the sixty-six-page report to the Pentagon at the end of August, it was leaked, in full, to the Washington Post.65 With a click on the paper’s website, readers from the District of Columbia to Kabul learned that the new commander believed that if the United States failed to “gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months),” it may no longer be possible to win.66
That explosive conclusion and the leak itself shocked many in the Obama administration and contributed to the sense that events had drfited out of the control of everyone at the Pentagon, the Executive Office Building, and the White House. Even before the assessment leaked, the president had concluded, “We’ve got to get everybody in a room and make sure that everybody is singing from the same hymnal.”67 To try to find what he called “something that we could all agree to,” Obama, over the course of the next two-and-a-half months, would spend almost twenty-five hours in meetings with his team about Afghanistan.68
More than just the president’s time, the effort also required Lute to become Obama’s guy. Working with Jones, Donilon, Tien, and others at the White House, he helped organize a months-long conversation on Afghanistan that included draft after draft of papers and agendas and dozens of principals, deputies, and interagency sessions. As violence in Afghanistan remained worse than it had been the year before, Obama and the National Security Council principals debated every detail of the policy from whether the opponent was al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or both; whether “defeat” was better than “degrade”; how to define and measure both; and who should do the fighting.
After his assessment leaked, McChrystal submitted, in hard copy only, a formal request for additional troops. Though he included both a more limited and a higher option, the Afghanistan commander recommended the middle path: 40,000 additional troops for a counterinsurgency campaign. The president’s team, however, thought McChrystal was boxing in the president with what are known as Goldilocks options: two unpalatable paths that make the planner’s preferred one look just right. In late October, Obama, who wanted a choice of three distinct options, called out the maneuver and said: “We don’t have two options yet. We have 40,000 and nothing.”69
Some of this difference of opinion, and the resulting tension, was healthy and natural for a high-stakes policy debate among dedicated, passionate professionals. The military and the State Department were expected to give their best advice; but Obama, and those on his team, did not believe any agency’s judgment alone should be the only consideration when the president faced a decision. As Obama explained, he had “extraordinary commanders on the ground and a lot of good advisers who I have a lot of confidence in, but the president has to make a decision: will the application of military force in this circumstance meet the broader national-security goals of the United States?”70
Obama wanted—and he believed the Constitution bestowed on him the responsibility—to be the one to answer that question, but by the beginning of the review, the relationship on Afghanistan between the White House and Defense Department was rife with distrust. After the Pentagon’s bad math in February, the public hints about needing more troops, and all the leaks, the benefit of the doubt had evaporated to the point that innocent missteps were assumed to border on insubordination. More than hurt feelings, the result was a nasty cycle, according to one Pentagon official, of “second- and third-order effects.”71 When the NSC, including those with military experience like Jones, Lute, and Tien, began to more forcefully manage the Pentagon, there were additional frustrations and leaks at the Defense Department, which only led to stronger White House arm-twisting.
“Ghosts”
Of course, the arms being twisted were not always in a uniform. Holbrooke’s outsized ambitions for his job and outsized public persona, ruffled feathers at the White House. The special representative could never get in step with the NSC and Obama team, who distrusted him as Clinton’s guy. As Obama was settling into the role of commander in chief, some also saw the diplomat, with a way of making the story and history about himself, as a show-off.
Yet perhaps the biggest difference was generational. As they took on responsibility for managing the war in Afghanistan, many at the White House had taken to reading Gordon Goldstein’s Lessons in Disaster to learn about the NSC’s role in the escalation in Vietnam. But Holbrooke had lived it: as a young Foreign Service officer, he had dined with McGeorge Bundy in 1965 on one of the Kennedy and Johnson national security advisor’s fateful trips to Vietnam. Holbrooke saw lessons worth learning in the book and the broader history of Vietnam, but the president himself was less certain that the war, let alone the Vietnam syndrome, could shed much light on his Afghanistan deliberations. At one point in the Situation Room when Holbrooke made a point about Vietnam, Obama simply whispered to no one in particular, “Ghosts.”72
Lute, more than anyone, stood in the middle of these growing divides. To the dismay of Gates and Mullen especially, the former war czar chose to fight for his boss in the Oval Office, not the chain of command at the Pentagon.73 Lute warned those on the NSC not to participate in a scheduled war game since he believed it would by design end up boosting the Pentagon’s proposal.74 He worked to get fresh intelligence from Afghanistan and military sources outside the chain of command to arm and inform the White House.75 And Lute was willing to tell the president and others at the White House, as he did after one military briefing, “We’re being fed a pack of bullshit.”76
Beyond whom Lute chose to fight for, several in the national security team believed he fought dirty. The NSC staffer could wield invitations to meetings as weapons to exclude and send messages to those like Holbrooke.77 Even more, Lute was a magnet for information, particularly from those on the frontlines in Afghanistan, which many in Washington readily agreed was one of his jobs on the NSC. But rather than sharing the intelligence and keeping everyone at the NSC and elsewhere on the same page, Lute had a habit of giving it to his White House bosses alone, who would then discuss the information in meetings to the surprise of military leaders.78
At one point, according to Bob Woodward, Lute called Mullen and said directly, “Mr. Chairman, the president really wants another option.”79 When no additional proposals were presented by the Pentagon, save further tweaks to the number of troops, the White House tried to develop its own alternatives. Vice President Biden and his team, with help from Lute, others on the NSC, and the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, took the initiative to develop a more restrained concept, one with fewer troops targeting a smaller number of terrorists over a more modest patch of Afghanistan.
As the military options developed fitfully, the president and his team also looked for ways to improve the Afghan government, which was struggling after its August elections had been consumed by fraud. As one aide later said of Obama, he “believes the military can do enormous things, it can win wars and stabilize conflicts. But a military can’t create a political culture or build a society.”80 Yet with the State Department and Holbrooke’s civilian surge slow to get on the ground and show results, the Obama team considered how a troop surge could be used to entice the Karzai government to take the steps to improve governance, reduce corruption, and build its security forces.
“It Still Smells to Me like a Gamble”
Of course, because this sort of leverage, and even Biden’s more limited plan, required some additional troops, the White House began to discuss how long the supplemental personnel needed to be in country. With Lute and Donilon’s encouragement, the president pushed on the military’s timing. When a Pentagon graph showed it would take fifteen months for 40,000 additional troops to arrive in Afghanistan, Obama pointed to the chart and asked why it would take so long. Unsatisfied, the president said he wanted the whole graph shifted to the left, so the troops would arrive earlier and depart sooner, by a specific date.81
Obama knew the argument against a deadline was that it could reward a patient adversary, but the president still believed it necessary to “show some light at the end of the tunnel” to Americans, specifically those in Congress, who were worried about the costs of the war.82 Many in the military leadership were uncomfortable with the end date, but Gates, who appreciated that it might help signal that the United States was not planning a long-term occupation, convinced the White House to make the deadline contingent on “conditions on the ground.”83
Before the Thanksgiving holiday, the president made clear to Lute and the White House team he was likely to order a surge in Afghanistan. Obama also admitted, “I’ve got more deeply in the weeds than a president should.”84 After another round of confusion and frustration over the exact number of troops in the surge, the president thought he needed to go deeper still and told his team, “We should get this on paper and on the record.”85
Working with Donilon and leveraging the notes taken of all the conversations from the preceding months, Lute and his team drafted a remarkable six-page decision sheet, which became known as a “terms sheet,” to remove any ambiguity.86 Part war plan, part order, part tallied bill, and part contract, the terms sheet more tightly defined the US goal in Afghanistan: “to deny safe haven to al Qaeda and to deny the Taliban the ability to overthrow the Afghan government.”87 It also explicitly detailed the number of troops, how many enablers were to support their operations, when they would start coming home (July 2011), how much the whole operation would cost, and who would track the monthly progress (Lute’s NSC team).
As the president’s team finalized the terms, Obama spent most of the Saturday after Thanksgiving talking about Afghanistan. Sitting by the fireplace in the Oval Office, the president asked Lute, Tien, Donilon, McDonough, and other White House and NSC staffers for each of their opinions. Tien, who punctuated his comments with the perspective of having deployed outside the wire in Iraq, supported committing troops to counterinsurgency, since he believed it was based on the best military advice to achieve the mission the president had articulated earlier in the year. If Obama preferred to change the mission, Tien, who added that any new strategy should be given the resources to succeed, believed the military would faithfully back their commander in chief whatever his final decision.88
When it came time for Lute to speak, he was direct. “Mr. President, you don’t have to do this.” He had concluded that the review had not justified the surge. If all the months of discussion had done anything, it had made plain the various risks in the plan, and Lute did not see how the military’s proposed plan would overcome all of them by the deadline. Of the decision, Lute said, “It still smells to me like a gamble.” The terms sheet, which provided among other things an audit trail, was meant in part to check the amount wagered and provide a way to leave the table if necessary.89
“I Am Giving an Order”
After some more conversation, the president thanked Lute, Tien, and the others and continued to weigh the decision, the draft terms sheet, and the delicate act of being commander in chief. The day before, he had called upon a retired and even more reluctant general: Colin Powell. That Friday, the former national security advisor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and secretary of state walked into the Oval Office for a private audience with Obama. It was not their first meeting; the president had called on Powell earlier in the fall for advice on how to get the decision right. Now that it was made, the once-reluctant general told him, “You’re the commander in chief. These guys work for you.”90
The commander in chief called a Sunday evening meeting in the Oval Office with his principal military advisors Gates, Mullen, Cartwright, and Petraeus. After giving each a copy of the terms sheet, Obama asked if they had objections, and when none were raised, the meeting began to break up. Before it did, however, according to one recollection, Vice President Biden interjected that the military “should consider the president’s decision an order.” A moment later, Obama said, “I am giving an order.”91 Gates, who was “really disgusted” with the review, felt the same way about the directive: he later wrote it was “unnecessary and insulting, proof positive of the depth of the Obama White House’s distrust of the nation’s military leadership.”92
Two days later, on December 1, Obama traveled to West Point with most of his National Security Council principals. Speaking to somber cadets dressed in the gray wool uniform Lute himself had worn decades before, the president made the case for a surge that Lute did not think was worth the risk. The onetime war czar traveled to his alma mater, but he did not help much on the speech; instead, the pen was in the hands of his NSC colleague Ben Rhodes.
Rhodes, a New York native and ghostwriter, had become interested in foreign affairs after September 11th. More than simply sharing a frustration over Iraq, Rhodes had gotten to know then-senator Obama while working on legislation that would have precluded the surge in Iraq.93 After that, Rhodes joined Obama’s campaign and then his NSC, at the age of thirty, all the while developing what many called a “mind meld” with the president and his voice.94
The West Point remarks were not the only speech Rhodes was helping the president draft that week; the staffer had also begun to write the address Obama would give the following week in Oslo, Norway, upon accepting the Nobel Peace Prize. In his lecture, Obama tried to make the most of the symbolic incongruity of a war president, a relatively new one at that, accepting a peace prize. He explained how a commander in chief must wrestle with “two seemingly irreconcilable truths—that war is sometimes necessary, and that war at some level is an expression of human folly.”95
To many, including Obama, Lute, and the rest of the team, the drawn-out conversations before his surge decision were a reminder of both of those truths. As Obama had said, Afghanistan was a “war of necessity,” but that did not make figuring out how to win any easier.96 After more than a year in office, Obama had concluded, “War is hell.” Perhaps worse for a president and his team who had wanted to bring reason to management of Afghanistan, Obama also concluded, “Once the dogs of war are unleashed, you don’t know where it’s going to lead.”97
A “Guy without a Country”
The Obama team had also hoped to bring regular order to wartime Washington, yet the challenges of changing course in Afghanistan, not to mention Iraq, which was winding down, put such a goal out of reach. Instead, the White House relied on Lute, Tien, and others to continue to be wartime staffers to get the policy the president wanted even if it required working around, and breaking with, the common law and the chain of command to get the president operational details and deliverables.
For Lute, the war in Afghanistan, and the fights over it, led to bureaucratic confrontations with the Pentagon that often grew personal in the first years of the Obama administration. Like previous NSC staffers, Lute believed “when you work for the president, you work for the president.”98 Mullen, however, contends the NSC staffer “lost his way,” attracted by power at the White House.99 From the Bush administration to Obama’s, Gates’s judgment of Lute flip-flopped: the staffer was a help on the Iraq surge as Bush’s war czar, but during Obama’s Afghanistan review Lute had become an “advocate rather than a neutral party, contributing to a damaging split in the government.”100
Aside from personal accusations and partisan affiliations, the underlying disagreement appears to have been about what Lute was fighting for: it was one thing, in the minds of those at the Pentagon, to work to get a policy like the surge implemented, but it was another—and contrary to the military’s definition of honest brokering—for a staffer to push that hard to get a policy made. Regardless of why, McDonough explained, the lieutenant general had become a “guy without a country”: though he had been promised a return to uniform, the bridge, according to Gates, had been burned.101 Instead, Lute chose to retire from the army after thirty-five years and accept an offer to continue on at the NSC managing the war as a civilian political appointee.
Even with Lute out of uniform, the broader battle of attrition between the White House and the Pentagon continued. Though there were some areas of positive collaboration, whenever NSC staffers like Lute pushed hard on senior officers to get what the president and the warfighters needed, Defense Department officials accused them of micromanaging. The Pentagon’s frustrations grew so severe that at one point when Gates was at an air base in Afghanistan, he caught sight of a direct line to Lute at the White House, which of course meant the command was calling the NSC, not the other way around. Regardless, the irate defense secretary ordered it removed, and told the commander there, “You get a call from the White House, you tell ’em to go to hell and call me.”102
The continued disagreements even after the surge decision were worsened by how difficult changing events on the ground proved to be. The surge’s spotty success led some on the Obama team to question whether a war in Afghanistan could be won at all. Even Lute admitted as much when he said, of Obama’s Afghan surge: “When you ask people what makes this a sustainable plan, they just look at you. Because there’s nothing to say.”103 Although the additional troops helped deliver some security gains, Afghanistan continued to struggle with limited economic development, failing governance, and persistent corruption.
The surge’s mixed results brought to an end the counterinsurgency boomlet in Washington. Although Afghanistan is a tough test for any strategy, the failure to bring peace to the country meant the Pentagon once again relegated counterinsurgency to rather-not status. More than even the virtues of COIN in particular, any troop-heavy, time-intensive operations quickly became, in the years after the financial crisis and the two surges, harder sells for policymakers in general and the Obama team in particular.
Eventually, McDonough, Lute, and others from the NSC and around the interagency began to work to determine just what the United States and Obama could live with in Afghanistan. The quietly held sessions, where hard questions and trade-offs were considered (for example, just how much corruption was sustainable?), became known as the “Afghan good enough” project.104 The group’s discussion helped shape Obama’s decision to begin pulling American troops out, against the military’s recommendations, in 2011 and transitioning security to Afghan forces.105
“Don’t Do Stupid Shit”
Although Lute continued to work the wars as a civilian appointee, another retired general left the Obama NSC in 2010. Jones, who had never been fully in sync with Obama loyalists or the staff responsibilities of the national security advisor position, departed. Donilon replaced him, McDonough became deputy, and together they ran the largest NSC in history: by 2012, with the merger of the HSC staff complete, more than four hundred staffers worked in the Executive Office Building and elsewhere.
As in previous administrations, the total number of staffers was a misleading indicator, as not every individual on the Obama NSC worked exclusively on policy issues. A quarter of them, more than one hundred, were mostly technical specialists, who ran the White House Situation Room and maintained the technology that allowed the president to speak to anyone on Earth at any time of day. There were also dozens of administrative service staffers who handled secretarial work, maintained records, and provided human resources support. Still, in 2012, more than 215 staffers worked on policy, including those who focused on the war in Afghanistan under Lute.106
Although smaller in practice than the headlines suggested, for those in Washington who wanted to complain about the staff’s influence on policy or Obama’s decision-making, the size of the NSC became a target of convenience. Over the course of the administration, the large NSC staff was publicly accused of moving “far beyond its original advisory role,” symbolizing an “overbearing and paranoid White House,” and producing a process that was “sclerotic at best, constipated at worst.”107 Within government, the reviews of the NSC staff were more caustic, personal, and colored by four-letter words.
In many ways, that reputation found its start in Lute’s role, which of course had been created in the Bush administration, and in Obama’s management of the review that produced the Afghan surge. The Pentagon’s military and civilian leadership, under Gates and his successors, remained on guard against any perceived NSC overreach. At the State Department, some had been frustrated during the Afghanistan discussions, saying that the NSC formed a “Berlin Wall” that kept diplomats like Holbrooke and their ideas away from the president.108 In the diplomatic corps, many continued to blame the staff for Obama’s unwillingness to intervene to stop atrocities like those in Syria.
Despite the frustrations the staff inspired in the agencies and the flak it brought the White House, Obama clearly wanted a strong NSC to pursue his agenda. When the president was looking for everyone in the Situation Room to give their opinion about the decision, he called on the staff along the backbench. The result was that staffers, some like Rhodes who had arrived at the NSC directly from Obama’s campaign, gave their advice while cabinet secretaries listened on.
To many in Washington, it appeared the Obama NSC was not only developing but also seeking to implement its own agenda, breaking with common law. The NSC staff had become much more involved in actually carrying out the policies and operations, whether going on patrol in Afghanistan like Tien, reviewing targets and plans for drone strikes and counterterrorism raids, or doing some of the diplomacy to negotiate Iran’s nuclear deal. In the lead-up to Obama’s renewal of diplomatic relations with Cuba in 2014, Rhodes, with the support of another staffer, had on the president’s orders done most of the secret diplomacy.
To the administration’s defenders, however, the Obama team found in Lute, and his more operational approach, a hands-on wartime staff waiting in the Executive Office Building when they took office. It turned out to suit a hands-on president who felt hard questions were to be expected for a commander in chief. Lute’s role, and the precedent it represented, also came in handy for those who wanted to defend the president’s and NSC’s probing: as McDonough said of the complaints, “One man’s micromanagement is another person’s civilian control of the military, which happens to be a constitutional prerogative of the president.”109
A strong NSC also made sense for a president who distrusted the way Washington usually made decisions, especially risky ones. After the Afghanistan review, Obama said, “I can sum up my foreign policy in one phrase, ‘Don’t do stupid shit.’ ”110 In minding the regular order and fighting for rational choices, as Lute had in the Afghanistan review, the Obama NSC staff reviewed, requested, tested, and edited options for the president to consider and then monitored implementation aggressively. The staff also kept a tight leash on National Security Council principals and their agencies to avoid stupid mistakes.
Ironically, Lute soon became one of those the NSC staff kept an eye on. In 2013, Obama nominated the now retired general to be US ambassador to NATO. Six years after joining the Bush NSC amid questions about the White House’s ability to manage its wars, Lute left an Obama staff accused of micromanaging the nation’s warriors. In the years ahead, Ambassador Lute found himself on the other side of the video-teleconferences, as the Obama NSC developed responses to Russian provocations, the rise of the Islamic State, and more.
“Right-Sizing”
Although the president’s manner and ambitions did not change much in his last term, the staff did with the departures of Lute, Donilon (who left the administration), and McDonough (whom the president named White House chief of staff in 2013). In July 2013, Susan Rice became national security advisor. Rice, a staffer on Bill Clinton’s NSC and Obama’s first US ambassador to the United Nations, brought unique experience to the job as a former member of both the staff and National Security Council.
As a staffer reporting to Clinton National Security Advisors Lake and Sandy Berger, Rice laid the foundation for a policy career that would take her to the highest levels in government. She also came to appreciate the NSC, a small, collegial, flat institution made up of policy wonks like Sandy Vershbow and Nelson Drew. In the 1990s, according to Rice, when there was a debate or disagreement about a decision, “You walked down the third-floor hallway of the Executive Office Building, and you knocked on the door for whoever was the issue and you sat with them until it was resolved.”111
Upon her return to the NSC, Rice was heartbroken to discover the NSC had lost its “intimacy and collegiality.”112 The sheer number of staffers and the overreliance on email and desktop video-teleconferences made meetings rarer and deliberations far less personal. The creation of new layers of management, like Lute’s positions of deputy national security advisor and then coordinator, made the institution more hierarchical. Although Rice’s youth on the Clinton NSC had been an exception, the younger and less experienced Obama staffers also had fewer relationships at the Pentagon and the State Department and within the intelligence community.
The staff, in Rice’s opinion, had also been “bastardized” when its name was changed to the NSS in 2009. The advisor recalled: “I knew the meaning of being an NSC staffer. It had a name, it had a point, it had a certain cachet.”113 Many staffers missed it, and some complained about the name to the new national security advisor on her return. So Rice and the president changed it back, rebranding with an executive order in 2014.114 The reversal was a rare Obama White House surrender to the ways of Washington: as Rhodes admitted at the time of the earlier change, “Frankly, everyone kept calling us the N.S.C. anyway.”115
More consequential than the name change was Rice’s commitment to recalibrating, or as the effort became known, “right-sizing” the staff.116 Driven by Rice’s personal concerns rather than Washington’s complaints, the national security advisor launched a review in winter 2015 to determine how the NSC could better serve both the president and national security policy. The months-long process included interviews and focus groups with staffers, their counterparts at the agencies, and cabinet secretaries in order to establish what was working and what was not.
In May of that year, Rice stood before a full South Court Auditorium, a drab theater-style room in the Executive Office Building that looks and feels like the setting for a high school musical, and explained the way ahead for the NSC. Rather than firing staffers, the review determined which directorates could shrink, and as staff billets expired, replacements were not appointed, while Rice and her team added staff to directorates that needed more manpower. At the end of the administration, the NSC had fewer than 180 policy staffers.
More than simple numbers, Rice and her team aimed to right-size the role of the NSC. The national security advisor sought to pull the remaining staffers back within the common law and from the more operational, wartime posture the Bush team and then Lute and his staff had adopted. In June 2015, she issued a memorandum instructing the staff that they could no longer directly contact ambassadors, military commanders, and CIA station chiefs, unless it was an emergency.
In addition to Rice’s own prerogatives, the White House was facing increased calls for NSC reform on Capitol Hill. Members of Congress and their staffs had taken aim at the NSC, partly because of complaints from the Pentagon. Various size limits (at one point it was 100, then 150) were considered—and Rice’s team briefed congressional representatives on the right-sizing effort—before Congress finally included a 200-person restriction on staffers in “policy roles” in the defense authorization bill signed by Obama in December 2016.117
The new limit was an important moment for the NSC, which had so often escaped congressional reform in its seventy-year history. Yet Congress’s bark was worse than its bite: the “right-sized” Obama NSC met the limit at the end of the administration, and the only regulation on staff behavior remained a matter of common law. Besides, Lute’s service had been a reminder of just how consequential only one staffer, with support from the president, the capacities of the wartime NSC, and the willingness to bend and break the restraints, could be.
“From the Top Down”
The New York Times headline from February 12, 2017, said it all: “Turmoil at the National Security Council, From the Top Down.”118 After just a little more than three weeks in the White House, President Donald Trump had managed to turn the NSC, one of the most secret parts of government, into one of the most discussed topics of his very tumultuous first month in office. With changes the new president and his team had made, the staff became the subject of celebrity tweets, newspaper editorials, and congressional action.119
The reaction to Trump’s decisions was as much a testament to the perceived importance of the NSC as it was to concerns about the president himself and his newly appointed national security advisor Michael Flynn, a retired lieutenant general turned consultant-for-hire and campaign supporter. Flynn, who grew up in Rhode Island the son of a soldier, had risen quickly through the army’s ranks to lead the Defense Intelligence Agency before Obama fired him for insubordination.120
Despite an unusual warning from the outgoing president, Trump named Flynn national security advisor, and the controversial choice quickly brought controversy to the job.121 In the administration’s first weeks, Flynn reorganized the staff, hired several aggressive and unconventional staffers, known to some in Washington as “Flynn Stones,” and gave Steve Bannon, the president’s political advisor, a seat on the high-level Principals Committee.122
Then after less than a month in office, Flynn was forced to resign over misleading White House officials about his meetings and communications with foreign governments during the transition. As the news media was still digesting Flynn’s stormy tenure and departure, Trump quickly named Army Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster to be national security advisor. McMaster, well known in national security circles for—among other career highlights—leading the counterinsurgency campaign in Tal Afar, Iraq in 2005, was introduced to the country wearing his army uniform and sitting next to Trump in a gilded room at the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
Shaved-headed and straight-laced, McMaster was an unconventional choice for an unconventional president. The three-star army officer did not have a preexisting relationship with Trump. McMaster was also stepping into a political position in Washington, a city with which he was familiar enough but had never worked in during all his years in uniform. And national security advisor was a role in which few active-duty military officers had served. With Congress’s approval of his new assignment, McMaster chose to stay on active duty, even if he spent most days in a business suit, making the lieutenant general the fourth active-duty officer in the job after Brent Scowcroft, John Poindexter, and Colin Powell.
Even with a new advisor, Trump’s election had unleashed forces intent on changing Washington, the NSC included. As in previous administrations, much of the staff serving Trump in his first year had arrived under his predecessor. Like Lute, Tien, and hundreds of others before them, these career nonpartisan officials, often loaned to the NSC from their home agencies, were meant to ensure continuity during the change in administration. Yet to some Trump loyalists outside of government and even a few in the White House and Executive Office Building, these career public servants were called “Obama holdovers” and targeted as part of a “deep state” opposed to the new president.123
Amid this contentious environment, McMaster, who had written a well-received book, Dereliction of Duty, about the Vietnam decision-making of President Lyndon Johnson, spoke with every living national security advisor about the NSC to determine what worked, what did not, and what might help a president like Trump. After some reflection, McMaster got to work on fundamentals: bolstering a demoralized staff, refining policy products to work for Trump, and establishing a policy process that had barely gotten underway. One of his first steps was writing and distributing to the staff an NSC mission statement: they were to help the president “plan and execute integrated national security strategies to protect United States citizens and the homeland while prioritizing American interests and values.”124
“Thanks NSC Staff!”
At his first all-hands meeting in the Executive Office Building’s auditorium, McMaster made clear that the staff not only needed to be “valued and trusted as an honest broker,” but that they also needed to trust each other.125 By not using the terms “holdovers” and “Flynn Stones” himself, the new national security advisor made clear the labels, and the divisions each represented, were not to be tolerated.126 In new hires, McMaster worried less about political background than competency: he brought on several staffers who had worked in the Obama administration and even its NSC. McMaster also had little patience for those who continued to stir intrigues on the staff, including one Flynn hire who was removed for seeking to spy on his NSC colleagues, and another who was fired after circulating an extraordinary memo arguing some in the government, including the very NSC on which he served, were bent on subverting Trump’s agenda.127
McMaster knew that each of the NSC’s “products have to serve the president not the other way around.”128 To better serve Trump, McMaster and the staff helped draft some of the commander in chief’s tweets. They also sought to get the president more digestible information: as a result, the NSC shortened their briefings from the long tracts preferred by Obama, and they prioritized creative ways, including charts, graphs, and photographs, to communicate important points, some of which tested assumptions Trump had brought to the White House.
For example, after tweeting before running for president that the United States “should leave Afghanistan immediately,” Trump had to confront many of the same issues on the war Obama did in his own first year.129 As the new president considered his options, McMaster and his team presented him with over sixty photographs—some from before the Soviet invasion in 1979, twenty after the Taliban took over, and others that were more recent—to demonstrate that US investments in Afghanistan had made the country demonstrably better.130
Although much of the deliberation behind Trump’s choice in August 2017 to halt Obama’s scheduled drawdown in Afghanistan is still cloaked in secrecy, the NSC’s fingerprints and photographs can arguably be seen on the president’s decision. In his announcement speech, Trump admitted that his instinct had been to “pull out.” But he had been reminded that “decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk in the Oval Office; in other words, when you’re President of the United States.”131
Afghanistan was one of many challenges facing the new commander in chief, so McMaster and the staff sought to “develop strategies and action plans in key regional and functional areas to shift the global balance of power in favor of US interests and values.”132 Doing so for Trump, who had little governing or national security experience, required changes to the policy process established in Flynn’s early administration memorandum. With the president’s approval, Bannon, whose political position caused an outcry when he was appointed to the Principals Committee, was removed from it.133 Compared to the deliberative Obama NSC’s heavy schedule of meetings, McMaster called far fewer Principals and Deputies Committee meetings and tried to keep sessions focused at the strategic level, while leaving tactical details to the agencies.
Even with fewer meetings, McMaster and his team sought to restore what he called “strategic competence” and to set, and often reset, the government’s course for a list of challenges determined in consultation with the president.134 In the first year of Trump’s presidency, the NSC staff developed and the president approved more than a dozen integrated strategy documents, on both regional (the Asia-Pacific) and functional (like US nuclear posture) areas as well as on acute matters like the civil war in Syria and longer-term issues like the rise of China.
Though nearly all remain classified, Trump’s National Security Strategy, a version of which has been required by law since 1986, is an example of both the ambitions and efficiency of McMaster and the NSC team, including his deputy Nadia Schadlow, a longtime defense hand with a doctorate from the Johns Hopkins University’s School for Advanced International Studies. The strategy, which for the first time ever was completed in an administration’s first year, fundamentally realigned US policy to engage in what some took to calling “great power competition” with China and Russia.135 The NSS, as it is known in Washington, was also widely commended upon its release in December 2017: one NSC veteran, who had previously criticized Trump, called the document “first-rate.”136
With McMaster’s management, Trump’s decision on Afghanistan, and products like the National Security Strategy, the NSC staff in the Executive Office Building were a source of some regular order in a chaotic Trump world. For much of its first year, the administration was marked by turnover at the White House, including Flynn’s departure, and turbulence at the agencies where then–defense secretary Jim Mattis’s Pentagon was understaffed, and the State Department, due in part to a heavy-handed reorganization launched by then–secretary of state Rex Tillerson, was in crisis despite the arrival of Secretary of State Michael Pompeo. Still, steady leaks about friction between the agencies and the NSC and rumors about McMaster’s future made any calm feel fragile.137
In March 2018, Trump chose to replace McMaster with firebrand and former US ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton. The wily new national security advisor moved to reform the NSC, even as staffers worked to coordinate the cancellation of the Iran Deal as well as diplomatic overtures to North Korea. Among other changes, Bolton got rid of the NSC’s cyber defense coordinator and downgraded its team focused on global health issues.138 Complicating NSC-Pentagon relations, the new national security advisor also cut down on coordination meetings and hired a deputy who was known to have a contentious relationship with other senior Defense Department leaders.139
As in much of the rest of his unlikely administration, Trump’s national security management has been hard to predict. No one knows whether Bolton will continue as advisor or be fired over Twitter tomorrow. As the world and Washington wait and interpret Trump’s tweets for the latest on who’s up and down in a mercurial White House, the NSC’s history, with its tendency to fight for the president and capitalize on disorder in government, makes the Trump and Bolton staff worth watching closely, particularly as the president pushes for more aggressive policy on trade, Iran, and more.140
Although much about Trump’s Washington is unclear, one thing is certain: the NSC has won another fight. After suggesting early in his term that some officials in Washington were part of a “deep state” working against him, by September of his first year, Trump had changed his tune some about at least a few public servants in Washington. He tweeted: “ 70 years ago today, the National Security Council met for the first time. Great history of advising Presidents-then & now! Thanks NSC Staff!”141
* “NSS” will not be used in this book since few in government used it and the name later reverted back.