Mike Flynn was only twenty-four days on the job as national security adviser when he was forced to resign because he had lied to Vice President Mike Pence. Flynn told Pence during the transition that he hadn’t discussed lifting Obama-era sanctions against Russia with the Russian ambassador to the United States when, in fact, he had. Misled by Flynn, Pence then went on CBS’s Face the Nation and asserted that Flynn hadn’t discussed lifting sanctions with the ambassador. In an interview at the White House, Flynn also lied to FBI agents about the same issue.
Bannon told Trump that he liked Flynn, but Flynn had to go as he wasn’t “salvageable.”
No American national security adviser had served as briefly as Mike Flynn. Losing Flynn was a bitter pill for the president; it was his first experience with how his own law enforcement agencies could hurt him.
Retired vice admiral Bob Harward, who was Mattis’s top deputy when he was the CENTCOM commander, was Trump’s first choice to replace Flynn as national security adviser. Appointing Harward as the national security adviser would have given Mattis a close ally inside the White House. But Harward, who was making serious money for the first time in his life in a senior job with Lockheed in the United Arab Emirates, declined, citing family reasons to White House officials. He took a look at the chaos then unfolding at the White House and pronounced it “a shit sandwich” to a friend.
Trump officials flirted with the idea of offering the national security adviser position to Petraeus, but having had Harward already turn down the job, they were not looking to have the news cycle dominated by another bad story. They already knew that Petraeus had turned over classified materials to his biographer, Paula Broadwell. Now Broadwell suddenly popped up on CNN, where she observed to Anderson Cooper that Petraeus was still reporting to a probation officer, having pled guilty to a misdemeanor about his handling of classified materials.
For the time being, Trump appointed retired lieutenant general Keith Kellogg to be acting national security adviser. Trump started seriously considering offering the retired general the top national security job. Kellogg, seventy-two, was a Trump favorite. Kellogg was one of the five obscure national security advisers Trump had announced a year earlier during the campaign and Trump valued his loyalty. Where others on the campaign had started abandoning what looked like a sinking ship a month before the presidential election when the Access Hollywood tape had aired, Kellogg had kept the faith.
After the election, Bannon had asked Kellogg to join the National Security Council staff in a senior role as the chief of staff for the council. Kellogg regularly traveled around the country with Trump on Air Force One, keeping the president company and shooting the shit with him. Kellogg didn’t read briefing papers, but neither did the president.
NSC staffers found Kellogg to be lazy, uninformed, and not smart. The national security adviser’s office had a peephole and staffers would look through it to see if Kellogg needed something, but he would be asleep at his desk. If he wasn’t napping, Kellogg was watching Fox News. To the extent that he had firm foreign policy views, Kellogg was an isolationist.
Kellogg also had the reputation of being a loose cannon who catered to Trump’s worst instincts. During one Oval Office meeting, when Trump was receiving the highly classified President’s Daily Brief, he expressed some concern about what to do about the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Kellogg told the president, “Just bomb his fucking compound.” Since bombing Assad’s residence would contravene longstanding American laws about assassinating the leaders of other countries, another official gently steered the discussion in a different direction, saying, “You know, you should really look at taking out Assad’s infrastructure or military installations.”
Concerned about Kellogg’s competence and inclinations, a small group of NSC staffers decided they would slow roll anything of substance getting to Kellogg. They tried to reduce the amount of times that Kellogg could get in to see Trump in the Oval Office, and they cut back on his calls with senior foreign officials, figuring there was no way that Kellogg would be tapped for the key role of national security adviser and the best way to mitigate any damage he might cause was to keep him as much out of the loop as possible.[*]
The Trump White House was now in full scramble mode to find a new national security adviser as soon as feasible to tamp down the multiplying stories of White House chaos. Candidates for the job were summoned to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida estate, over the weekend of February 18 and 19, 2017. They included Lieutenant General Robert Caslen, the superintendent of West Point; John Bolton, a neoconservative who had served in Republican administrations since the Reagan era; and Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster, who was recommended by Republican senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a veteran of the Iraq War and a key early supporter of Trump. When McMaster received the call from the White House to go to Mar-a-Lago, he was preparing to retire from the military.
Caslen came for his interview with Trump straight from central casting, dressed in his full dress uniform and looking like Clint Eastwood. Trump told aides that Caslen was “the best gunfighter in the US Army. This guy’s a soldier’s soldier.” But Caslen dealt himself out of consideration, telling the president, “Look, I’ve spent one tour in Washington and it’s really not my deal.”
Jared Kushner urged his father-in-law to move fast on the decision, telling him, “We’re getting so much heat in the media because we don’t have a national security adviser. We’re getting lit up on Morning Joe.”
Up next was McMaster, who was wearing a suit, not his dress uniform. Trump asked the general, “Can you stay in uniform, or do you have to retire?”
McMaster explained that if he remained active duty in the role, it wouldn’t set a precedent: Colin Powell had served as Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser when he was an army lieutenant general.
Trump chatted with McMaster for twenty minutes and concluded by saying, “You’re terrific. I love my generals, so it’s good to meet you.”
After the interview, Trump turned to Bannon, asking him, “Is that guy really a general?”
Bannon assured the president that McMaster was indeed “a very highly decorated general. Silver Star.”
Trump focused on the cut of McMaster’s suit, saying, “He looks like a beer salesman.”
The final candidate was John Bolton, a ferocious bureaucratic infighter who had worked in the Washington swamp since the era when Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical” was America’s number one song. Bolton was a frequent Fox News talking head, memorable for his distinctive, massive walrus mustache. Trump, always hung up on appearances, didn’t appreciate the mustache. Trump was also concerned about Bolton’s proclivity to call for preemptive wars against enemies of the United States, as he had recently advocated for publicly with both Iran and North Korea.
Trump told Bolton during their interview, “John, there are huge problems everywhere, but, John, you can’t be bombing everywhere, John.”
Despite his qualms about McMaster’s suit, Trump appointed him to be his next national security adviser. White House press secretary Sarah Sanders talked to Trump about doing an official announcement in the Oval Office when he returned to Washington.
Trump said, “Well, how about we just do it right now? We’ll pull this couch over here.”
Trump started directing staff to rearrange the furniture in one of the grand reception rooms of Mar-a-Lago. Sitting next to McMaster, who was now in his dress uniform, Trump said he was “a man of tremendous talent and tremendous experience.”
McMaster wasn’t a surprising choice for national security adviser. After all, he was arguably the most capable military officer of his generation. McMaster had led American victories on the battlefields of both the 1991 Gulf War and the Iraq War more than a decade later, and he had also served in Afghanistan, running an anticorruption task force.
During the Gulf War, then-captain McMaster had led a US tank troop in what became known as the Battle of 73 Easting on February 26, 1991. McMaster’s armored forces, acting as scouts, suddenly encountered a large force of the Iraqi army. McMaster could see the enemy with his naked eye; they were at very close range. In a battle that lasted only twenty-three minutes, McMaster’s force destroyed more than thirty Iraqi tanks, some twenty personnel carriers, and more than thirty trucks. Young US military officers continue to study this battle as the exemplary case study of high-intensity conventional combat.
After the shooting was over, McMaster suddenly became aware of how filthy he was; he hadn’t bathed in six days. McMaster stood naked on the back deck of his tank and took a crude bath with a washcloth in front of a group of Iraqi prisoners that his tank troop had captured. McMaster recalled, “The prisoners, from a culture which imbues them with physical modesty, were visibly shocked by my behavior.”
McMaster’s tank troop had taken no casualties. McMaster and his soldiers offered prayers of thanks to God. “We did not gloat over our victory,” recalled McMaster.
According to McMaster, the lesson of that victory was “there are two ways to fight the United States military: asymmetrically and stupid. Asymmetrically means you’re going to try to avoid our strengths. In the 1991 Gulf War, it’s like we called Saddam’s army out into the schoolyard and beat up that army.”
Almost a decade and a half later, McMaster was back in Iraq. This time he wasn’t fighting the orderly tank regiments of Saddam Hussein’s conventional army, but instead the guerrilla forces of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which had taken over much of western Iraq and were proving to be a far harder nut to crack than Saddam’s military. Al-Qaeda had also learned from the Gulf War and wasn’t fighting “stupid,” it was fighting “asymmetrically” and not engaging the US military in a conventional war.
In 2005, then-colonel McMaster led the first successful full-scale battle against al-Qaeda in the western Iraqi city of Tal Afar, a city of two hundred thousand people. McMaster recalled that al-Qaeda had turned Tal Afar into a living hell: “All the schools were closed because of violence; all the marketplaces were closed. There was no power. There was no water. The city was lifeless. People lived in abject fear.”
McMaster established twenty-nine small outposts in the city. His regiment lived among the Tal Afar population and partnered with tribal elders to offer protection against al-Qaeda. The citizens began to trust the Americans and provided them with intelligence on al-Qaeda’s movements. Within a few months, al-Qaeda had retreated from Tal Afar.
McMaster’s approach was the exact opposite of the dominant US strategy of the time, which was to hand over ever more control to the Iraqi army and withdraw the bulk of American soldiers to massive bases. Instead of reducing the American footprint, McMaster pursued a strategy in Tal Afar of increasing the US military presence there in an effort to tamp down the intensifying Iraqi civil war and to undermine al-Qaeda. McMaster also implemented “clear, hold, and build” counterinsurgency operations.
McMaster’s Tal Afar campaign was considered by many military experts to be the classic example of counterinsurgency tactics during the Iraq War. His work there would become a model for the George W. Bush administration’s new military strategy in Iraq. In October 2005, Bush’s secretary of state Condoleezza Rice in congressional testimony said that “our political military strategy has to be to clear, hold, and build. To clear areas from insurgent control, to hold them securely, and to build durable national Iraqi institutions.” This approach would also soon be codified in the US military’s new counterinsurgency manual, written by General Petraeus with an assist from General Mattis.
A key to McMaster’s thinking was his 1997 book, Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam. Published two decades before McMaster assumed his role as national security adviser and when he was only a major, Dereliction of Duty caused something of a sensation in the US military because it took the Pentagon’s leaders to task for their derelictions of duty during the Vietnam War. McMaster painted a devastating picture of the Joint Chiefs, who told President Lyndon Johnson only what he wanted to hear about how the Vietnam War was going. He described how they went along with Johnson’s ill-considered attempt to find a middle ground between withdrawing from Vietnam and fighting a conventional war there that—divorced from on-the-ground realities—had no chance of success. The Joint Chiefs never provided Johnson with useful military advice about what it might take to win the war. Instead, they accepted Johnson’s preference for what the president termed “graduated pressure” against the North Vietnamese. This took the form of a gradually escalating bombing campaign that did not bend the North Vietnamese to American will and instead confused activity—bombing raids and body counts—with progress on the battlefield.
The major problem Johnson and his military advisers had was that they went to war in Vietnam without a strategy. McMaster explained: “The war in Vietnam was not lost in the field, nor was it lost on the front pages of the New York Times or on the college campuses. It was lost in Washington, D.C.”
Despite McMaster’s record of battlefield success in two wars as well as his groundbreaking book about the Vietnam War, the army in 2006 and again in 2007 passed him over for promotion from colonel to the rank of one-star general. McMaster wasn’t the typical army officer that promotion boards favored. McMaster was a wounded war hero with a PhD, but some of his superior officers whispered that he “wasn’t a team player.” It took the intervention of General Petraeus, who was then the commander of the Iraq War, for McMaster to be promoted to brigadier general. Petraeus traveled from the Middle East to the United States to chair the army’s 2008 promotion board that awarded McMaster his first star.
After Trump announced McMaster as his national security adviser, Dereliction of Duty became an instant bestseller on Amazon. Its lessons weighed on McMaster as he entered the White House. The problem with Johnson, in McMaster’s mind, was that he wanted a Vietnam policy that conformed to his domestic political priorities. As a result, there was never an examination of a broad range of options about what to do in Vietnam, nor was there an exploration of the advantages and disadvantages associated with different courses of action.
McMaster was determined not to make the same set of mistakes. He always aimed to present multiple options to Trump, and he believed that the president was ill served if those on whom he relied for advice didn’t tell him what they really thought. This was all driven home for McMaster the first day he arrived at his new White House office; it was exactly the same office where Johnson’s national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, had once sat and coordinated the policies that ultimately led to the failures in Vietnam.
McMaster quickly moved to make Trump’s National Security Council a more professional institution. Bannon was removed from his permanent seat on the NSC because it gave the appearance that politics would play a role in national security decision-making. Another NSC official McMaster sidelined was Deputy National Security Adviser K. T. McFarland. She was offered the consolation prize of ambassador to Singapore, but McFarland withdrew her nomination after it stalled in the Senate because of misleading answers she gave to lawmakers about the Russia investigation.
McFarland’s farewell party from the NSC was a warm affair. Jared Kushner spoke and gave a homily about the nature of the US government. “This morning I was meeting with these congressmen and a bunch of them had Texan accents and some of them had California accents and some of them had New England accents and I was just like, this country is so amazing! This is how the Congress works. They come from all corners.” NSC staffers, most of whom were longtime civil servants, found Kushner’s sermon faintly amusing: Whad’ya know—congressmen come from all corners of the country!
The day after he started as national security adviser, McMaster called an all-hands staff meeting in the basement auditorium of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which adjoins the White House and is where most of the White House staff work. McMaster held up a copy of Peter Rodman’s book Presidential Command and urged everyone to read it. Rodman was a longtime Republican national security official who had made a deep study of how to make the NSC function well. McMaster aimed to follow the “Scowcroft Model.” Brent Scowcroft, the only national security adviser to have served in two administrations in that role, saw his job as acting as an honest broker between key departments such as the Pentagon and State Department with an eye toward teeing up a good range of policy options for the president to choose from.
McMaster told the group that he wanted to end the use of the pejorative term “holdovers” employed by some Trump staffers to refer to putative Obama-era “deep state” enemies of the Trump project who were working at the NSC. In fact, the vast majority of the NSC staffers were not political appointees. They were intelligence officials, military officers, or career civil servants who were detailed to the NSC from the CIA, Pentagon, and State Department.
In his address to the NSC staffers, McMaster cited Sir Halford Mackinder, the British geographer who more or less invented the modern concept of geopolitics with a paper he published in 1904, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” which explained that whoever controlled the Eurasian landmass controlled the world. McMaster said the two revisionist powers of Russia and China were the key strategic problems the United States faced, notwithstanding the continuing threat posed by transnational terrorists.
“We’re not going to call it radical Islamic terrorism,” McMaster told the NSC staff, “because what that does, it just plays into their hand. This terrorism is not Islamic. It’s irreligious; a perverted interpretation of Islam to justify criminal acts mainly against their own people.” McMaster preferred the term “Islamist terrorism,” which underlined that the terrorists were espousing “Islamism,” a thoroughly politicized version of Islam that was not fundamental to Islam.
Sebastian Gorka, however, remained on a jihad to name the threat “radical Islamic terrorism.” And when Trump gave his speech to the joint session of Congress five weeks after taking office, he pointedly said that his administration was taking steps to protect the nation from “radical Islamic terrorism.” Even as Trump was still speaking, Gorka tweeted triumphantly, “ ‘RADICAL ISLAMIC TERRORISM!’ Any questions?” The day after Trump’s speech, Gorka tweeted, “After 8 years of obfuscation and disastrous Counterterrorism policies those 3 words are key to Victory against Global Jihadism.”
It was unclear why Gorka believed that using different terminology would in itself be crucial to the defeat of ISIS. The defeat of ISIS in Iraq and Syria was actually accomplished by tens of thousands of Iraqi special forces soldiers and Kurdish fighters, advised by American special forces, all backed up by considerable US airpower, in a concerted effort that began in the summer of 2014, two and a half years before Trump had assumed office.
McMaster beefed up the NSC, appointing a top deputy for strategy, Egyptian-born Dina Powell, who had served in the George W. Bush administration, spoke Arabic, and had worked at Goldman Sachs. Powell was widely respected; she was also close to Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner.
McMaster also brought on defense expert Nadia Schadlow to write the Trump administration’s national security strategy. Schadlow had recently published a book, War and the Art of Governance, which examined how to turn “combat success into political victory,” a relevant question as ISIS was beginning to crumble and the Trump administration started planning for what the “day after” ISIS looked like in Iraq.
As McMaster settled into his job, he told NSC staffers they needed to adapt to the style of the commander in chief. Trump was not going to read seventy-page briefing papers. He might read one-pagers, but even so, the staff should aim to fit an issue onto an index card. The NSC wasn’t a faculty lounge; it had to compress complex issues into an elevator pitch. And when a “decision package” about a particular national security issue was sent up to the president, it would be smart to include some suggested tweets.
NSC staffers found McMaster refreshing. He had done his homework and he had strategic ideas about the world beyond the sloganeering of Make America Great Again. He also wasn’t obsessed with some supposed “deep state” conspiracy that was purportedly undermining the Trump administration as some of the more conspiracy-minded Trump officials were, and he quickly went about creating a solid process to bring some order to the chaos that had engulfed the White House during its first month. Emblematic of that chaos was the rollout of the travel ban.