Allahpundit:
Hats off to him on a strong and surprising pick. Every time you worry that he’s going to throw another Flynn at you, he turns around and gives you a Mattis or Gorsuch. McMaster’s in that class.
President Trump picked Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, a widely respected military strategist, as his new national security adviser on Monday, calling him “a man of tremendous talent and tremendous experience.”…
General McMaster is seen as one of the Army’s leading intellectuals, first making a name for himself with a searing critique of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for their performance during the Vietnam War and later criticizing the way President George W. Bush’s administration went to war in Iraq.
As a commander, he was credited with demonstrating how a different counterterrorism strategy could defeat insurgents in Iraq, providing the basis for the change in approach that Gen. David H. Petraeus adopted to shift momentum in a war that the United States was on the verge of losing.
McMaster’s known to the public primarily for two things. One, as noted by the Times, was the success of his counterinsurgency strategy in Tal Afar in Iraq at a moment when most of the rest of the military was flailing. McMaster’s insight at the time was that shows of might wouldn’t pacify the Iraqi population; respecting the local culture and establishing permanent bases in cities to reassure residents that Americans would be there around the clock to protect them were key. The New Yorker wrote about it in 2006:
McMaster and the 3rd A.C.R. had been stationed in Tal Afar for nine months. When they arrived, in the spring of 2005, the city was largely in the hands of hard-core Iraqi and foreign jihadis, who, together with members of the local Sunni population, had destabilized the city with a campaign of intimidation, including beheadings aimed largely at Tal Afar’s Shiite minority. By October, after months of often fierce fighting and painstaking negotiations with local leaders, McMaster’s regiment, working alongside Iraqi Army battalions, had established bases around the city and greatly reduced the violence…
In Colorado, McMaster and his officers, most of them veterans of the war’s first year, improvised a new way to train for Iraq. Instead of preparing for tank battles, the regiment bought dozens of Arab dishdashas, which the Americans call “man dresses,” and acted out a variety of realistic scenarios, with soldiers and Arab-Americans playing the role of Iraqis. “We need training that puts soldiers in situations where they need to make extremely tough choices,” Captain Sellars, the troop commander, said. “What are they going to see at the traffic control point? They’re possibly going to have a walk-up suicide bomber—O.K., let’s train that. They’re going to have an irate drunk guy that is of no real threat—let’s train that. They’re going to have a pregnant lady that needs to get through the checkpoint faster—O.K., let’s train that.” Pictures of Shiite saints and politicians were hung on the walls of a house, and soldiers were asked to draw conclusions about the occupants. Soldiers searching the house were given the information they wanted only after they had sat down with the occupants three or four times, accepted tea, and asked the right questions. Soldiers filmed the scenarios and, afterward, analyzed body language and conversational tone. McMaster ordered his soldiers never to swear in front of Iraqis or call them “hajjis” in a derogatory way (this war’s version of “gook”)…
Sellars told me, “I don’t know how many times I’ve thought, and then heard others say, ‘Wish I’d known that the first time.’ “ The rehearsals in Colorado, he said, amounted to a recognition that “this war is for the people of Iraq.”
McMaster’s success eventually caught the eye of the new commander in Iraq, David Petraeus. He became one of Petraeus’s most renowned and influential aides, helping him literally write the book on counterinsurgency, the new Army Counterinsurgency Field Manual. When Petraeus took over in Afghanistan a few years later, he brought McMaster with him. The lesson of his success in Tal Afar was that McMaster wasn’t afraid to try a strategy disdained by much of the rest of the military at the time.
Which brings us to the second thing he’s known for, and what makes his appointment by Trump even more of a surprise. Petraeus favored scholars among his top advisors and McMaster was no exception, having earned a Ph.D in history with a dissertation about the management of the Vietnam War. That dissertation became the book “Dereliction of Duty,” noteworthy for the extent to which McMaster, a military officer, laid the blame for failure in Vietnam at the feet of the military leadership at the time, not the Washington bureaucrats who supposedly wouldn’t let the armed forces fight the war they needed to in order to win. From the Times’s 1997 review:
Better then some whining little snowflake hillary would have chosen
Tom Ricks:
I contacted HR after he returned from Tal Afar and prior to me mobilizing to Iraq for my 3rd tour. He sent me a 3″ binder with his specific philosophies on fighting insurgencies. After his return from Tal Afar, his unit, 3rd ACR, enlisted in formation to honor him and his command, This man is a special officer who only appears once a century when his country is in need of men like him!