President Trump Is Relinquishing The Title Of Commander In Chief

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President Trump Is Relinquishing The Title Of Commander In Chief
By Jascon Kander - Huggington Post 6-21-17
RE: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/...on=us_politics

Note: He wants to be able to take credit when military operations go well and blame others when they don’t.

As an Afghanistan veteran, I’m concerned by the news that President Donald Trump is removing himself from the process of deciding whether or not we send more American troops to that country, because I believe he is putting political safety ahead of national security. As he’s already shown, he wants to be able to take credit when military operations go well and blame others when they don’t.

If military leaders determine an increased troop level is necessary, the president will say it was their decision, not his, in an effort to shield himself from public opinion. If, God forbid, Americans are killed in a new surge of troops, President Trump is positioning himself to blame generals – just like when he said “they lost Ryan,” referring to Navy SEAL Ryan Owens, who was killed during a Trump-approved raid in Yemen.

Later, when President Trump was asked whether he had authorized the dropping of the largest non-nuclear bomb in the U.S. arsenal, he replied, “Uhh, everybody knows exactly what happened.” What likely happened is that Donald Trump didn’t know the outcome of the mission, or what popular opinion was going to be, so he had yet to decide whether to take credit for it.

This is not what a leader does, and it follows a previous Trump decision to remove himself from the responsibility of setting troop levels in Iraq and Syria. Despite what President Trump has claimed, this is not about saving time for the military; it’s about saving face for a president with a notoriously fragile ego and a habit of skipping intelligence briefings.

It is a stunning sign of weakness to the country and the world.

The president is in charge of the military so that a single individual – accountable to Americans – is responsible for its successes and failures. Yet President Trump hasn’t even spoken with our commanders in Afghanistan or Iraq since taking office. I am not saying the president should micromanage every decision made on the battlefield. But a decision of great magnitude should come from the Commander in Chief. At a minimum, the president should have an overall military plan that his commanders can follow, but president Trump doesn’t seem to even have that.

Because President Obama had an overall strategy, military and civilian leaders under his command could make reactive decisions that advanced the president’s goals. In the military, we call that commander’s intent: When there’s a decision to be made and you don’t have exact guidance at that moment, you at least know overall what your boss wants. There is no commander’s intent right now because the commander-in-chief has no plan and, apparently, no interest in the role.

I believe the president should be closely involved in certain military decisions, such as whether to conduct a raid in a nation where we have a limited troop presence or whether to use a weapon we’ve never used before. Regardless, when he refuses to say whether he is responsible for a military decision, it is a stunning sign of weakness to the country and the world. And even if you disagree in the above examples, certainly we can all agree on this: The president should be the final decision-maker when it comes to increasing the number of Americans we send into harm’s way.

As a former Captain in the Army National Guard, I trained hundreds of soldiers to lead troops into combat. Some of them could be called to service if the Pentagon decides to send more troops to Afghanistan. President Trump owes them and their families the acknowledgment that the order to put their lives on the line came from their Commander in Chief.

The men and women of the American military have the courage to follow orders. They deserve a commander-in-chief with the courage to give them.

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Trump Shifting Authority Over Military Operations Back to Pentagon
By MICHAEL R. GORDONMARCH 19, 2017
RE: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/19/u...-pentagon.html

WASHINGTON — President Trump is shifting more authority over military operations to the Pentagon, according to White House officials, reversing what his aides and some generals say was a tendency by the Obama White House to micromanage issues better left to military commanders.

The change is at the heart of a re-engineering of the National Security Council’s role under its new leader, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, and reflects Mr. Trump’s belief that the N.S.C. should focus less on military operations and tactics and more on strategic issues. A guiding precept for the president and his team is that the balance of power in the world has shifted against American interests, and that General McMaster should focus on developing foreign and economic policy options in concert with the Pentagon, State Department and other agencies to respond to that challenge.

The new approach to managing military operations was evident this month when a Marine artillery battery and a team of Army Rangers — some 400 troops in all — arrived in northern Syria. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis signed off on the deployments and notified the White House. But General McMaster neither convened a meeting at the White House to discuss whether to send the forces nor presented the Pentagon with questions about where, precisely, the troops would operate or what risks they might confront.

Though the streamlined decision-making has been welcomed by many in the military, it could raise questions about whether Mr. Trump, who has drawn heavily from current and former generals to fill key jobs in his administration, is exercising sufficient oversight.

“For President Trump, it is very early days, but he appears to be going back to a model of greater delegation of authority,” said Michèle A. Flournoy, who was the Pentagon’s top policy official under President Barack Obama and is the chief executive of the Center for a New American Security, a Washington-based policy group.

“The benefit is that it allows the military campaign to go forward without undue pauses, interruptions or delays,” Ms. Flournoy added. “That enables it to create more momentum and to be more responsive to changes on the battlefield. But there is a risk if there is inadequate oversight and the president stops paying close attention. It can be detrimental, even dangerous, if a commander in chief does not feel ownership of the campaign or loses touch with how things are evolving on the ground.”

Mr. Trump has already drawn criticism for being quick to approve the military’s plans to carry out a raid in Yemen in January that led to the death of one American commando and at least several civilians. The United States also conducted an airstrike last week in Syria that the American military said killed dozens of Qaeda fighters but that local activists said hurt civilians.

At the same time, Mr. Trump has yet to announce a new strategy to defeat the Islamic State, something he repeatedly said during the presidential campaign that he would do. That suggests that Mr. Trump’s main contribution may be to ensure that the basic strategy he inherited is carried out more quickly.

General McMaster — who replaced a retired general, Michael T. Flynn, whose tumultuous tenure as national security adviser lasted less than a month — has a reputation as a strategic thinker. So far, he has not undertaken any fundamental restructuring of the N.S.C., according to White House officials who did not want to be identified because they were discussing internal planning. But he has made some appointments to assist in the effort to forge a new strategy.

Dina Powell, Mr. Trump’s senior counselor for economic initiatives, has been named the deputy national security adviser for strategy to spearhead the preparation of policy options and oversee their execution once Mr. Trump decides on them.

Nadia Schadlow, a former Pentagon official and the author of a recent book that examined cases in which the United States Army intervened abroad, was hired to draft a security strategy. In the past, that document has often been little more than a rehash of the White House’s policies, but for a Trump administration struggling to translate its promise to “make America great again” into a coherent foreign and economic agenda, it might emerge as an important statement.

How General McMaster will navigate rival centers of power within the White House that have their own deep-seated views on security policy remains to be seen. When Mr. Mattis hosted the Saudi defense minister at the Pentagon on Thursday, General McMaster was one of five White House officials who attended the meeting. The others were Stephen K. Bannon, who remains a full member of the National Security Council’s “principals” committee; Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law; Ms. Powell; and Derek Harvey, the chief Middle East expert on the N.S.C. staff.

“General McMaster’s problem is not how to deal with defense secretary and other principals; it is how to deal with the many competing powers in the White House,” said Ivo Daalder, the president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and the co-author of a book on the National Security Council. “That was underscored when five senior White House officials traipsed over to the Pentagon for a meeting that normally might be attended by a single N.S.C. aide.”

An immediate focus for General McMaster, however, is making good on Mr. Trump’s vow during his speech to a joint session of Congress last month to “demolish and destroy” the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. Mr. Trump, who claimed during the campaign to have a secret plan to defeat the militant group, instructed the Pentagon and other key agencies in late January to submit a preliminary plan within 30 days to do so.

More than seven weeks later, no new strategy has been announced, and there has been some speculation that the White House will not decide one key question — whether to arm the Kurdish Y.P.G. militia in Syria — until after a Turkish referendum on April 16 on whether to expand the powers of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. While American commanders generally believe that the militia would greatly help what is expected to be a hard-fought operation to take Raqqa, Syria, the self-proclaimed capital of the Islamic State, Turkey has denounced the group as a terrorist organization.

The steps the Trump administration has taken so far, such as deploying Marine artillery in Syria, generally reflect the Obama administration’s approach of providing firepower and advisers so local forces can do the main fighting on the ground.

But while it still expects the White House to be consulted, the Trump administration is prepared to give the Pentagon more leeway in deploying forces than the Obama administration did. The Obama White House’s scrutiny of military deployments reflected its fear of being drawn into a quagmire, as well as strains with the military that went back to 2009 deliberations over Afghanistan strategy.

While the approach the Obama administration took ensured that the president was well-informed on military details, it also meant that modest steps, such as resupplying arms to Syrian fighters battling the Islamic State or sending military teams to scout out a potential base in Iraq, often could not be taken without time-consuming deliberations.

“In defense of the Obama administration, every single time we went to the president and asked for something more, we eventually got it, though we often had to jump through a lot of hoops,” said Andrew Exum, a former Army Ranger who held a senior position at the Defense Department under Mr. Obama. “The episode that took the cake was toward the end of the administration, when we literally had cabinet secretaries debating the movement of three helicopters from Iraq to Syria.”

While it remains unclear whether the new administration will come up with a strategy significantly different from its predecessor’s, the Trump team may have an effect on how the one it inherited is carried out.

“Potentially, by giving field commanders more leeway to exploit opportunities on the battlefield, the Trump administration can execute the Obama administration’s strategy more efficiently,” Mr. Exum said.

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A Dangerous Choice?
By Kenneth T. Walsh | Contributor - June 23, 2017, at 6:00 a.m.
RE: https://www.usnews.com/news/the-repo...-choice-so-far

President Donald Trump's decision to give the Pentagon the authority to make policy in Afghanistan is one of his most important, far-reaching and dangerous choices as commander in chief so far.

In the near term, it will almost certainly mean an escalation of the conflict with the addition of thousands of U.S. troops to the war zone. The fighting in Afghanistan has already lasted for 16 years and is America's longest sustained war, extending over the tenure of three presidents of both major parties – George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Only the U.S. commitment to Vietnam came close to this mark, and it was a very polarizing, detested venture and ended in a defeat that Americans want to avoid repeating.

Over the long term, it means more U.S. entanglements in a region that few Americans understand, that U.S. policy makers often misjudge, and that has been the graveyard for potential occupiers and conquerors such as Alexander the Great, Great Britain and the Soviet Union.

The United States appears to be doing better than other great powers that have invaded Afghanistan, but the most recent news has been troubling. Gains have been reported by the Taliban and other terrorists and militant groups, prompting Defense Secretary James Mattis to say the United States is "not winning" and argue that it's time for re-escalation of the American role there. U.S. officials were deeply unsettled when a truck bomb exploded recently in Kabul, Afghanistan's capital, killing more than 150 people. Another setback came Monday when unidentified gunmen attacked Afghan troops near the massive U.S.-run Bagram Air Base, killing eight people who were apparently on their way to work at the facility. The Taliban claimed responsibility. On Thursday, a car bomb exploded outside a bank in Lashkar Gah, a provincial capital, killing at least 30 people. The Taliban again claimed responsibility.

All this added to concerns that the government of President Ashraf Ghani may be in danger of collapse, The New York Times reports.

Mattis has signaled that he will send 3,000 to 5,000 more U.S. troops to join about 10,000 (estimates vary and troop strength can fluctuate) who are already in Afghanistan, in hopes of stabilizing the country. At best, the situation now seems to be a stalemate. Mattis recently told a congressional hearing, "We're not looking at a purely military strategy.

All wars come to an end. Our job is to end it as quickly as possible without losing the very mission that we've recognized, through several administrations, that was worth putting those young Americans on the line for." But this comment seemed too vague to some legislators who called for a more precise exit strategy and a more comprehensive statement of U.S. goals.


The problem is that, as other occupiers have learned, even if an outside power does well at first, eventually the cultural and religious enmities, rivalries among warlords, age-old personal hatreds and traditional xenophobia re-emerge and nullify the gains of the "great power" doing the invading of the moment.

"A commander in chief keeps control of limited wars by defining missions, selecting commanders and setting troop levels," retired Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, a former top commander and U.S ambassador in Afghanistan, told The New York Times. "To delegate any of these is dangerous."

Michele Flournoy, a former senior Pentagon official during the Obama administration, told the Times, "The 3,000 to 5,000 may prevent a near-term backsliding, but it is not going to be decisive in turning the tide of this war. The administration needs to accompany any troop increase with a new political and economic strategy to help the Afghans achieve greater stability."

Rudyard Kipling provided an indication of how difficult all this will be when he wrote about the horrors and the hopelessness of war in Afghanistan in his 1895 poem, "The Young British Soldier." The concluding lines read:

"When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier."

This kind of fatalism, based on the realities in Afghanistan, should serve as a warning to today's Pentagon policy makers and to Trump that re-escalating the war may come at a high price and end badly.

(Personal Note: If the Pentagon doesn't give it's Field Commander's "A Quick" Authorization (many folks could get wounded or KIA). Trump won't take the blame - rather it falls to the Pentagon - then be they will be the whipping boy. In part I like the idea of not having to go to the President for advice & all the time delays - a golden opportunity may present itself only once? But here again Trump is covering his ass if anything fails. It will then be the Pentagon's fault - but if it works well then he can pump up his chest and say he did the right thing.

I recall field commander's wanting to make decisions - but they had to wait for authorization (for leadership to authorize this operation). Many field commander's have long suffered the ramifications of having to wait for the higher up authorizations. If a quick call in the field can be made and not suffer heavy loses in the process - they could gain a rare advantage. The White House folks don't like these decisions because if they go bad (or suffer many losses) - it could cost them a re-election. Only time will tell how field orders are modified so that all field Commander's (or Leaders) can make the call - when opportunity arises). Boats