Peter Bergen - Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos

Gentlemen, you cant fight in here! This is the War Room!

President Merkin Muffley in the movie Dr. Strangelove

The day began well enough. Six months into his young presidency, Donald Trump arrived at the front steps of the Pentagon on a muggy Thursday morning in late Juy. Alighting from the Beast, the heavily armored presidential limo, Trump was greeted by his favorite general, Secretary of Defense James Mad Dog Mattis. Mattis didnt care for this nickname, but Trump, whose experience of the military was limited to a stint at a military-style boarding school, reveled in the four-star generals on his team, especially the killers. Trump respected the raw power embodied by the US military.

As Trump ascended the front steps of the Pentagon on the morning of July 20, 2017, a reporter shouted, Mr. President: Are you sending more troops to Afghanistan? An intense and largely hidden battle was then consuming Trumps war cabinet about precisely this question.

At the top of the Pentagon steps, flanked by an honor guard and towering over his secretary of defense, the president responded with one of his favorite lines, saying, Well see.

Trump was at the Pentagon for a briefing that was planned by Mattis; Trumps chief strategist, Steve Bannon; Trumps national security adviser, Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster; the secretary of state, Rex Tillerson; and Trumps chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn. They all felt it would be useful for Trumpthe first American president not to have served in public office or the militaryto receive a briefing about what exactly the United States was doing around the globe as well as its economic relationships and security arrangements. They also wanted Trump to understand the tools at his disposal as the commander in chief, from the eleven US aircraft carriers to American nuclear weapons capabilities.

Trumps key advisers all had quite different goals for the briefing. Bannon was the standard-bearer of Trumps America First populism and he hoped that the briefing would show Trump how overextended and overcommitted the United States was overseas. Mattis and Tillerson wanted to make the case for the United States alliances that had shaped the world order since World War II. Those alliances, in their view, had benefited the United States tremendously, not only by hastening the peaceful implosion of the Soviet Union, but also more recently when a US-led NATO force had formed after 9/11 to oust the Taliban from power in Afghanistan. Cohn wanted to make the case for the economic rules-based international order that was built on free trade and had created unprecedented prosperity around the world.

On the surface, Bannon and Mattis didnt have much in common. A laconic, publicity-shy general and lifelong bachelor, Mattis had enlisted in the US Marines when he was eighteen and had spent his entire career in the military. Bannon, a voluble ringmaster of a man who had landed on the cover of Time for his role in guiding the Trump administrations strategy, had served an eight-year stint in the navy and then gone to work at Goldman Sachs and later as a Hollywood producer. More recently he had run the far-right media site Breitbart News.

Despite their different temperaments and experiences, both men shared a love of books and military history. If Bannon wasnt discussing American politics, he was almost a different person talking knowledgeably about Asia, financial markets, and Alfred Thayer Mahan, the American historian who was the most influential naval strategist in the world in the run-up to World War I.

A four-star general was likely to move around some two dozen times during the course of a long career. Typically, the general would move his family and household effects from one posting to the next. General Mattis instead moved his booksall seven thousand of them. In 2003 during the Iraq War, Mattis explained in an email to a fellow officer why deep reading about the history of warfare could help to save American lives on the battlefield: By reading, you learn through others experiencesgenerally a better way to do businessespecially in our line of work where the consequences of incompetence are so final for young men.