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(CNN)President Donald Trump’s appointment of Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster to be his national security adviser is a brilliant decision.
McMaster, 54, is the smartest and most capable military officer of his generation, one who has not only led American victories on the battlefields of the 1991 Gulf War and of the Iraq War, but also holds a Ph.D. in history.
McMaster is, in short, both an accomplished doer and a deep thinker, a combination that should serve him well in the complex job of national security adviser.
McMaster’s views
A key to McMaster’s thinking is 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 ago when McMaster was only a major, “Dereliction of Duty” caused something of a sensation in the US military because it took US military leaders to task for their dereliction of duty during the Vietnam War.
McMaster painted a devastating picture of the Joint Chiefs, who told President Lyndon Johnson 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, according to McMaster.
McMaster established 29 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 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 in an effort to tamp down the intensifying Iraqi civil war and undermine al Qaeda. McMaster also implemented classic “clear, hold and build” counterinsurgency operations.
McMaster’s Tal Afar campaign is considered by many military experts to be the classic example of counterinsurgency tactics during the Iraq War.
His work there would also 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 Gen. David Petraeus and Gen. James Mattis, who is now the secretary of defense.
McMaster’s lesson from the Iraq War: “We didn’t adapt fast enough, largely because in the beginning of the war in Iraq we were in denial. We wouldn’t even call it an insurgency. We wouldn’t call it insurgency because it evoked the images of Vietnam.”
Al Qaeda in Iraq would eventually morph into ISIS, which controls the city of Tal Afar today. McMaster knows this ground well, which will help him as the new plans are presented to the President in coming days about how to shape the final phase of the war against ISIS.
After Iraq, McMaster deployed to Afghanistan, where he was tasked by Petraeus to lead an anti-corruption task force.
Again, McMaster’s on-the-ground expertise in Afghanistan will be very useful as President Trump considers his options there.
The Taliban now control or contest a third of the Afghan population. That’s 10 million people; more than ISIS controlled at the height of its power in summer 2014, when it might have controlled 8 million people at most.
Whether with Afghanistan or the fight against ISIS, McMaster has his work cut out for him, but he is the best man for the job and credit should go to President Trump for making this inspired choice.
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