H.r. Mcmaster Quotes

It's so damn complex. If you ever think you have the solution to this, you're wrong and you're dangerous.

Military operations alone cannot defeat an insurgency because only economic development and political action can address most sources of disaffection. If military operations are not conducted consistent with political objectives or occur without economic development, they are certain to alienate the population further, reduce the amount of intelligence available to [...] security forces, and strengthen rather than weaken the enemy.

If the Chiefs had successfully pressed with the president their position that the United States needed to act forcefully to defeat the North, they might have forced a difficult choice between war and withdrawal from South Vietnam. Through their own actions as well as through the manipulation of Taylor and McNamara, the Chiefs missed their opportunity to influence the formulation of a strategic concept for Vietnam, and thereafter always found themselves in the difficult position of questioning a policy that the president had already approved. The intellectual foundation for deepening American involvement in Vietnam had been laid without the participation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. 5

All descriptions of how near certainty is to be achieved are based primarily on emerging technologies. A Global Information Grid of “persistent surveillance” will gather information and share that information in a networked “collaborative information environment.” Automated systems will fuse that intelligence and make possible “virtual collaboration among geographically dispersed” analysts who will generate intelligence and, ultimately, knowledge. Some even assume that this “robust intelligence” will deliver not only a clear appreciation for the current situation, but also generate “predictive intelligence” that will allow US forces to “anticipate the unexpected." Despite its enthusiastic embrace, the assumption of near-certainty in future war is a dangerous fallacy.

Back in America, Donald Trump had, as a candidate, preached the virtues of withdrawal. “We should leave Afghanistan immediately,” he had said. The war was “wasting our money,” “a total and complete disaster.” But, once in office, Donald Trump, and a national security team dominated by generals, pressed for escalation. Richard Holbrooke had spent his final days alarmed at the dominance of generals in Obama’s Afghanistan review, but Trump expanded this phenomenon almost to the point of parody. General Mattis as secretary of defense, General H. R. McMaster as national security advisor, and retired general John F. Kelly formed the backbone of the Trump administration’s Afghanistan review. In front of a room full of servicemen and women at Fort Myer Army Base, in Arlington, Virginia, backed by the flags of the branches of the US military, Trump announced that America would double down in Afghanistan. A month later, General Mattis ordered the first of thousands of new American troops into the country. It was a foregone conclusion: the year before Trump entered office, the military had already begun quietly testing public messaging, informing the public that America would be in Afghanistan for decades, not years. After the announcement, the same language cropped up again, this time from Trump surrogates who compared the commitment not to other counterterrorism operations, but to America’s troop commitments in Korea, Germany, and Japan. “We are with you in this fight,” the top general in Afghanistan, John Nicholson, Jr., told an audience of Afghans. “We will stay with you.

McMaster said he had been completely in the dark about this. The secretary of state had not consulted or even informed him in advance. He had learned from press reports! In a news conference in Qatar, Tillerson had said the agreement “represents weeks of intensive discussions” between the two governments so it had been in the works for a while. Porter said Tillerson had not gone through the policy process at the White House and had not involved the president either. Clearly Tillerson was going off on his own. “It is more loyal to the president,” McMaster said, “to try to persuade rather the circumvent.” He said he carried out direct orders when the president was clear, and felt duty bound to do so as an Army officer. Tillerson in particular did not. “He’s such a prick,” McMaster said. “He thinks he’s smarter than anyone. So he thinks he can do his own thing.” In his long quest to bring order to the chaos, Priebus arranged for each of the key cabinet members to regularly check in. Tillerson came to his office at 5:15 p.m. on Tuesday, July 18. McMaster had not been invited but joined the meeting anyway. He took a seat at the conference table. The national security adviser’s silent presence was ominous and electric. Tell me, Priebus asked Tillerson, how are things going? Are you on track to achieve your primary objectives? How is the relationship between the State Department and the White House? Between you and the president? “You guys in the White House don’t have your act together,” Tillerson said, and the floodgates gushed open. “The president can’t make a decision. He doesn’t know how to make a decision. He won’t make a decision. He makes a decision and then changes his mind a couple of days later.” McMaster broke his silence and raged at the secretary of state. “You don’t work with the White House,” McMaster said. “You never consult me or anybody on the NSC staff. You blow us off constantly.” He cited examples when he tried to set up calls or meetings or breakfasts with Tillerson. “You are off doing your own thing” and communicate directly with the president, Mattis, Priebus or Porter. “But it’s never with the National Security Council,” and “that’s what we’re here to do.” Then he issued his most dramatic charge. “You’re affirmatively seeking to undermine the national security process.” “That’s not true,” Tillerson replied. “I’m available anytime. I talk to you all the time. We just had a conference call yesterday. We do these morning calls three times a week. What are you talking about, H.R.? I’ve worked with you. I’ll work with anybody.” Tillerson continued, “I’ve also got to be secretary of state. Sometimes I’m traveling. Sometimes I’m in a different time zone. I can’t always take your calls.” McMaster said he consulted with the relevant assistant secretaries of state if the positions were filled. “I don’t have assistant secretaries,” Tillerson said, coldly, “because I haven’t picked them, or the ones that I have, I don’t like and I don’t trust and I don’t work with. So you can check with whoever you want. That has no bearing on me.” The rest of the State Department didn’t matter; if you didn’t go through him, it didn’t count.

There was now a fair amount of back-of-the-classroom giggling about who had called Trump what. For Steve Mnuchin and Reince Priebus, he was an “idiot.” For Gary Cohn, he was “dumb as shit.” For H. R. McMaster he was a “dope.” The list went on.

military figures like James Mattis, H. R. McMaster, and John Kelly: they found themselves working in an administration that was in every way inimical to basic command principles.

In “Flag Plot,” the naval operations room, Anderson became irritated with McNamara’s specific instructions on how to run the blockade. The admiral told McNamara that the Navy had been conducting blockades since the days of John Paul Jones and suggested that the defense secretary return to his office and let the Navy run the operation. McNamara rose from his chair and retorted that the operation was “not a blockade but a means of communication between Kennedy and Khrushchev,

partners to make progress toward clearly defined goals. The work, however, should begin with identifying challenges and understanding them on their own terms and from the perspective of “the other.” I asked our team not only to map the interests of rivals, adversaries, and enemies, but also to consider the emotions, aspirations, and ideologies that drive and constrain them. The options we developed, if approved, would become integrated strategies. I insisted that these strategies must identify not only goals, but also our assumptions—especially assumptions concerning the degree of agency and control that we and our partners could expect in order to make progress toward those goals. The strategies needed to be logical with regard to the means employed and the desired ends. We would also work hard to describe what was at stake and to explain why accomplishing those ends was worth the risks and potential cost in treasure and, especially, blood. I then laid out what I saw, from my more than three decades in the military and from studying national security as a historian, as the four categories of challenges to national and international security. These would be our priorities as we developed integrated strategies for the president.

Освіта життєво важлива не лише для того, щоб громадяни розпізнавали небезпеки російських дезінформаційних кампаній, а й щоб відновилася довіра до демократичних принципів, інституцій і процесів.

Поки вони підривають школи для дівчаток в Афганістані, їхні діти ходять до приватних шкіл.

Many factors concerning the prospects for peace between Israel and the Palestinians depend on the Palestinian people, such as whether an alternative to Hamas will develop in the Gaza Strip or if the Palestinian Authority will evolve in a way that produces not only a renewed desire to negotiate final status, but also the ability to enforce an agreement.

Other factors depend on the Israeli people, including whether the highly personalized Israeli political landscape allows the sincere pursuit and eventual approval of an agreement. Progress also depends on the United States’ ability to pressure Israel and the Palestinian Authority or mediate between the two, an ability dependent on whether both sides view the United States as an honest broker.

peaking at 100,000 and dropping to 8,400 with heady expectations, later abandoned, that the combat mission against the insurgent Taliban could end. But internally the experts knew it was futile. White House coordinator Lieutenant General Douglas Lute labeled the war “a house of cards” in a 2010 meeting soon after Obama added another 30,000 troops. Dr. Peter Lavoy, Obama’s deputy assistant secretary of defense for Asian and Pacific security affairs, later in charge of South Asia for the Obama NSC staff, was a soft-spoken authority on South Asia—Pakistan and Afghanistan. Lavoy was largely unknown to the public but critical to the functioning of the defense and intelligence world. He was both academic and practitioner. He believed the obsession with U.S. troop numbers had been the Achilles’ heel of the Obama administration policy in Afghanistan. “There are literally thousands of sub-tribes in Afghanistan,” Lavoy said. “Each has a grievance. If the Taliban ceased to exist you would still have an insurgency in Afghanistan.” Victory was far-fetched. Winning had not been defined. H. R. McMaster saw he would have a major confrontation with President Trump on the Afghanistan War.

education combined with the restoration of civility in public discourse can reduce the vitriol that widens the fissures in society that Russia and others exploit.

This—insulting Donald Trump’s intelligence—was both the thing you could not do and the thing—drawing there-but-for-the-grace-of-God guffaws across the senior staff—that everybody was guilty of. Everyone, in his or her own way, struggled to express the baldly obvious fact that the president did not know enough, did not know what he didn’t know, did not particularly care, and, to boot, was confident if not serene in his unquestioned certitudes. There was now a fair amount of back-of-the-classroom giggling about who had called Trump what. For Steve Mnuchin and Reince Priebus, he was an “idiot.” For Gary Cohn, he was “dumb as shit.” For H. R. McMaster he was a “dope.” The list went on.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep. —SAUL BELLOW

The president and many of those who served him were sympathetic to the New Left interpretation of foreign affairs, one that considers so-called Western capitalist imperialism as the primary cause of the world’s problems. “We have history,” President Obama said. “We have history in Iran, we have history in Indonesia and Central America. So we have to be mindful of our history when we start talking about intervening, and understand the source of other people’s suspicions.” An underlying premise of the New Left interpretation of history is that an overly powerful America is more often a source of, rather than part of the solution to, the world’s problems.

The over-optimism that energized U.S. foreign policy under the George W. Bush administration contributed to an underappreciation of the risks of action, such as the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The pessimism about the efficacy of U.S. engagement abroad that influenced U.S. foreign policy under the Barack Obama administration led to an underappreciation of the risks of inaction, such as the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq in 2011 or the decision to forgo military reprisals for the Assad regime’s mass murder of Syrian civilians with chemical weapons in 2013. Both forms of strategic narcissism were based mainly on wishful thinking and the definition of problems as one might like them to be as a way to avoid harsher realities.

Consistency and will are, therefore, important dimensions of strategic competence. But our will is diminished. As our foreign policies swung from over-optimism to resignation, identity politics interacted with new forms of populism. That interaction divided us and diminished confidence in our democratic principles, institutions, and processes.

Upon publication of Woodward’s new book, it was immediately evident that one of his key sources was H. R. McMaster, the three-star general who had joined the Trump administration in February 2017 as national security advisor, replacing Michael Flynn.