Roy Exum: In Just 23 Minutes

  • Saturday, February 25, 2017
  • Roy Exum
Roy Exum
Roy Exum

When ‘The Atlantic’ magazine came out with its online edition Tuesday, a story appeared about Donald Trump’s new National Security Advisor, Lt. General H.R. McMaster. It was written by a dear friend that the general and I both enjoy. Since the story appeared, it has been referenced in a myriad of other media outlets and its author has done numerous interviews. As I take the liberty to reprint it, please know that the fact I am Andrew Exum’s very proud father has little to do with the reason I pass this along.

Instead, I want the world and, more importantly, the doubters to know that I have it from a highly reputable source that the former West Pointer who just joined the president’s cabinet just may be one of the greatest military minds, and a hero as well, who we have ever had serve our country.

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TRUMP GETS AN UPGRADE AT NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER

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By replacing Mike Flynn with H.R. McMaster, President Donald Trump added one of the most talented officers the U.S. Army has ever produced to his team.

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By Andrew Exum, writing in The Atlantic

Let me be as clear as I can be: The president’s selection of H.R. McMaster to be his new national security advisor is unambiguously good news. The United States, and the world, are safer for his decision.

McMaster is one of the most talented officers the U.S. Army has ever produced. That sounds like hyperbole but isn’t. In the Gulf War, he led an armored cavalry troop. At the Battle of 73 Easting—a battle much studied since—his 12 tanks destroyed 28 Iraqi tanks, 16 armored personnel carriers, and 30 trucks. In 23 minutes.

In the next Iraq war, he led a brigade in 2005 and was among the first U.S. commanders to think differently about the conflict and employ counterinsurgency tactics to pacify Tal Afar—one of the most wickedly complex cities in Iraq. He excelled at two different echelons of command in two very different wars.

In between, he earned his Ph.D. in history and wrote a best-selling book, Dereliction of Duty. With great foresight, I neglected to read it until three months ago, so the book remains fresh in my memory today. One thing that stands out in the book is the way in which McMaster criticized the poorly disciplined national security decision-making process in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and especially the way in which the Kennedy administration made national-security decisions by a small group of confidants without a robust process to serve the president.

Like Ben Bernanke, a student of the Great Depression brought in to lead the Federal Reserve immediately prior to the Great Recession, McMaster comes to his job having carefully studied and criticized the national-security decision-making process for which he will now be responsible.

I have known McMaster for over a decade and cannot imagine a more decent man in his position today. This job is going to drive him crazy, because he does not suffer fools gladly. Unless he has been given some assurances about both staffing and process, he will struggle in a competition to influence the president—to be the last man in the room when the president makes a key decision.

But as Nick Schmidle observed in his very smart profile of Mike Flynn in The New Yorker this week, Flynn went into his job wanting to reduce the influence of the national-security staff but soon discovered that the staff and its processes gave him enormous leverage within the U.S. government. McMaster already understands that, and he will use it to his advantage.

The biggest challenge for any adviser to this president, however, is not other advisers but the president himself. Swedes weren’t the only ones scratching their heads this weekend about the way in which this president receives information and makes decisions. The vice president, the secretary of state, and the secretary of defense were all in Europe and the Middle East trying to reassure allies over the long weekend—but were met with justifiable unease about the president’s temperament and prior statements.

I fear this president and his known weaknesses will be too much for even as great a public servant as McMaster. But—and again, this is not hyperbole—I will tuck my sons into bed tonight feeling a little better about the country in which I am raising them.

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Andrew served as the U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Middle East policy from 2015 until this January in the Obama administration. He has served his country as a Captain in the Army, leading Rangers in Iraq and Afghanistan, and spent a number of years in the intelligence community. He and his wife Natalie have two sons, Ben, 2, and Isaiah, 6 months. His family currently resides in Washington and, while he is considering some attractive opportunities, he is now a contributing editor for The Atlantic. He was a guest earlier this week on NPR. He attended the University of Pennsylvania after graduating from McCallie School and hopes to someday return to East Tennessee to live with his family. His mother is Anne Exum and his sister, Mary Cady Bolin, lives with her husband and two daughters in Nashville. I am proud of each and every one of them.

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EXCERPT – ‘THE BATTLE OF 73 EASTING’

Note: Brian Adam Jones is co-founder and editor-at-large of wonderful military-themed website, Task & Purpose. He is a veteran of the United States Marine Corps and of the war in Afghanistan. Here is an excerpt from a story where he explained “The Battle of 73 Easting:”

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It was Feb. 26, 1991. McMaster’s regiment was tasked with serving as the forward covering element of the VII Corps as it advanced into Iraq. But McMaster’s small unit ran up against a much larger brigade of the Iraqi Republican Guard’s Tawakalna Division and elements of its 10th Armored Division. That enemy unit was commanded by a man McMaster refers to in his writing only as “Major Mohammed.”

Mohammed was an experienced combat officer who had been trained in the United States and was a graduate of the Army’s demanding Infantry Officer Advanced Course at Fort Benning, Georgia, according to a profile of the battle McMaster wrote in the online war journal, “The Strategy Bridge.”

“Mohammed’s defense was fundamentally sound. He took advantage of an imperceptible rise in the terrain that ran perpendicular to the road and directly through the village to organize a reverse slope defense on the east side of that ridge. He anticipated that upon encountering his strong point at the village, we would bypass it either to the north or south,” McMaster wrote.

“He built two engagement areas, or ‘kill sacks,’ on the eastern side of the ridge to the north and the south of the village, emplaced minefields to disrupt forward movement, and dug in approximately forty tanks and sixteen BMPs about one thousand meters from the ridge. (Note: That is 56 defense units.) His plan was to engage and destroy us piecemeal as we moved over the crest.”

McMaster’s unit was much smaller, comprising nine M1A1 Abrams tanks, 12 M3A2 Bradley fighting vehicles, (NOTE: That is 19 defense units.) as well as a small number of support vehicles, and a total of 140 soldiers. They wiped out Mohammed’s forces in 23 minutes, destroying roughly 30 tanks, 20 personnel carriers, and 30 trucks (Note: That is 80 defense units) in what would be called the last great tank battle of the 20th century.

Mohammed’s critical mistake centered around his assumptions about his enemy and what was possible. He assumed that the American forces would have to travel via the road, and oriented his tanks and other weaponry in that direction. He based that assumption on the idea that U.S. forces could not navigate across the desert with its indiscernible geographic conditions, apparently unaware of the new GPS technology that McMaster’s tanks and Bradleys were outfitted with. The technologically inferior Iraqi weapons had to back out of their entrenched fighting positions in order to adjust to McMaster’s coming onslaught.

In one instance, McMaster’s advantage in technology and tactics resulted in three tanks being destroyed in about 10 seconds. (Note: That is ten ‘ticks’ in one 60 ‘tick’ minute.)

McMaster wrote an in-depth account of how he pulled off the devastating victory soon after he had deployed to the United States in 1991. He wanted to create a bit of a manual on effective tank warfare that he felt he lacked as a young commander, as well as create a written account of Eagle Troop’s exploits for the American public.

“There is not much written … about pitched armored combat the small unit level,” he wrote. “I drafted this account immediately after the temporary cease-fire in hope that I could relate the Troop’s experience to the American people whose support we felt in a very direct manner.”

He detailed the battle blow by blow, stopping when he named every soldier (their state and hometown.) and sometimes said something about them personally. (Note; Leadership. McMaster’s troops would follow him anywhere.) It’s a masterful blend of doctrinal debrief and battlefield diary.

“My gunner, (Staff Sergeant Craig Koch of Williamsport, Pennsylvania,) laid the tank’s sight on the center of the target. He engaged the laser rangefinder and the digital display showed that the enemy vehicle was over two thousand meters away (think about a mile and a quarter),” McMaster wrote. “The tank’s computer allowed for the range, crosswind, and the speed of the target.”

McMaster’s battlefield conduct reveals his penchant of battlefield tactics, coolness under pressure, and perhaps most notably, his willingness to disobey superiors.

“[1st Lt.  John Gifford, Eagle Troop’s executive officer] called me from the command post to remind me that the 70 easting was the limit of advance. We were already beyond it. I told him, ‘I can’t stop. We’re still in contact. Tell them I’m sorry,’” McMaster wrote.

“Gifford explained the situation to the squadron headquarters on the radio. … If we had stopped, we would have forfeited the shock effect we had inflicted on the enemy. Had we halted, we would have given the enemy farther to the east an opportunity to organize an effort against us while we presented them with stationary targets. We had the advantage and had to finish the battle rapidly.”

The Battle of 73 Easting would go down as an epic demonstration of American superior military technology and tactics, but years later, McMaster would cite America’s success in the war as luring leaders into thinking the American military was indestructible. McMaster described the success as a result of Saddam Hussein’s mistake in engaging in conventional warfare against the United States.

“There are two ways to fight the United States military: Asymmetrically and stupid,” McMaster would later say in a National Geographic documentary. “‘Asymmetrically’ means, you are going to try to avoid our strengths. In the 1991 Gulf War, it’s like we called Saddam’s army out into the school yard and beat up that army.”

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H.R. McMasters – let’s face it – is our kind of guy.

royexum@aol.com

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