PRESS RELEASE
Trump Appoints McMaster as His National Security Advisor
Feb. 20, 2017 (EIRNS)—President Trump’s appointment of Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster as his National Security Advisor, appears to be, in all respects, a very solid appointment, and refutes once again the media lie that the administration is in disarray.
McMaster has a reputation as one of the smartest men in the army, with a Ph.D. in history from the University of North Carolina; as a solid strategist; and as someone who is not afraid to make waves when what he sees as the truth collides with the accepted so-called narrative. McMaster is very likely to give Trump his best advice without any consideration as to alternative narratives that he considers to be less than truthful.
McMaster first came to prominence when his doctoral thesis, "Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson; Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the lies that led to Vietnam," was published as a book in 1997. In that book, McMaster charged, with backup from then-newly available declassified documents, that the leadership of the military, up to and including Gen. Maxwell Taylor, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Earle Wheeler, succumbed to the lies about Vietnam of the Johnson Administration and therefore failed to carry out their Constitutional duty.
The book made waves throughout the military, from rejection by some circles in the Army who couldn’t countenance the idea of Taylor of being called a liar, to the opposite response of Gen. Hugh Shelton, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs at the time that the book was published. As recounted in many locations, Shelton bought copies of the book for all of his service chiefs and commanders and ordered them to read it and to follow its lessons, to always express disagreements with superiors, even at the risk of being treated poorly as a result.
More recently, McMaster became known as a harsh critic of the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs, the theory that information-age technology would change the nature of warfare such that the U.S. military would always dominate on the battlefield, because of its superiority over "industrial-age" armies such as that of Saddam Hussein in the 1991 Gulf War. In remarks at a conference in Virginia in May of 2009, McMaster ridiculed the RMA concepts “that lead to the idea that you have perfect knowledge and can apply military power perfectly.” He told his audience that, instead, “It is time to divest ourselves of this unrealistic thinking and get back to real war.” Since then, McMaster, as a senior officer in the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, has been deeply involved in questions of what future warfare will look like and how the Army should be organized to fight it.
