Battlegrounds

COPYRIGHT

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF WilliamCollinsBooks.com This ebook first published in Great Britain in 2020 by William Collins First published in the United States by Harper in 2020 Copyright © H.R. McMaster Maps © 2020 by Springer Cartographics LLC Cover design by Milan Bozic Cover photograph by Ray Kachatorian H. R. McMaster asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Information on previously published material appears here. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Source ISBN: 9780008410407 Ebook Edition © September 2020 ISBN: 9780008410414 Version: 2020-05-27

For Katharine, Colleen, and Caragh—­the real KCC detectives,

who inspired much more than bedtime stories, including this book

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Preface

Special Characters

Introduction

Part I: Russia

Chapter 1: Fear, Honor, and Ambition: Mr. Putin’s Campaign to Kill the West’s Cow

Chapter 2: Parrying Putin’s Playbook

Part II: China

Chapter 3: An Obsession with Control: The Chinese Communist Party’s Threat to Freedom and Security

Chapter 4: Turning Weakness into Strength

Part III: South Asia

Chapter 5: A One-­Year War Twenty Times Over: America’s South Asian Fantasy

Chapter 6: Fighting for Peace

Part IV: Middle East

Chapter 7: Who Thought It Would Be Easy? From Optimism to Resignation in the Middle East

Chapter 8: Breaking the Cycle

Part V: Iran

Chapter 9: A Bad Deal: Iran’s Forty-­Year Proxy Wars and the Failure of Conciliation

Chapter 10: Forcing a Choice

Part VI: North Korea

Chapter 11: The Definition of Insanity

Chapter 12: Making Him Safer Without Them

Part VII: Arenas

Chapter 13: Entering the Arena

Conclusion

Notes

Recommended Reading

Selected Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by H. R. McMaster

About the Publisher

PREFACE

THIS IS not the book that most people wanted me to write. Friends, agents, editors, and even family, asked me to write a tell-­all about my experience in the White House to confirm their opinions of President Donald Trump. Those who supported the president would have liked me to depict him as an unconventional leader who, despite his brash style, made decisions and implemented policies that advanced American interests. Those who opposed the president wanted an account to confirm their judgment that he was a bigoted narcissist unfit for office. And they wanted me to write it immediately, so that the book might influence the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. Although writing such a book might be lucrative, I did not believe that it would be useful or satisfactory for most readers. The polarization of America’s polity and that of other free and open societies is destructive, and I wanted to write a book that might help transcend the vitriol of partisan political discourse and help readers understand better the most significant challenges to security, freedom, and prosperity. I hoped that improved understanding might inspire the meaningful discussion and resolute action necessary to overcome those challenges.

SPECIAL CHARACTERS

Chapter 3: An Obsession with Control

Chapter 4: Turning Weakness into Strength

Chapter 12: Making Him Safer Without Them

Introduction

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

—SAUL BELLOW

ON FRIDAY, February 17, 2017, I was in my hometown of Philadelphia on the way to the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a think tank. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the findings of a study I had commissioned on Russia’s annexation of Crimea and invasion of Ukraine in 2014. As the lieutenant general director of the clunkily named Army Capabilities Integration Center, my job was to design the future army. To fulfill that responsibility, I sought to understand how Russia was combining conventional and unconventional military capabilities along with cyber attacks and information warfare—what we were calling Russia new-generation warfare (RNGW). The study recommended how to improve the future army’s ability to deter and, if necessary, defeat any forces that employed similar capabilities against the United States or our allies. We modeled the effort on General Donn Starry’s study of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. Starry’s findings helped drive a renaissance in the post–Vietnam War army based on changes in fighting doctrine, training, and leader development. It was clear to me that Russia, China, and other nations had studied the U.S. Army after the lopsided U.S. victory over Saddam Hussein’s armed forces in the 1991 Gulf War and the initially successful U.S. military campaigns during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. As a trained historian as well as a soldier, I believed that the old saying “The military is always prepared to fight the last war” was wrong. Militaries that encountered the greatest difficulties at the onset of war studied their recent past only superficially.1 Learning from history, I believed, was essential if the U.S. military were to maintain its competitive advantages over potential enemies.

I intended to begin the discussion at the institute with a description of how RNGW combined disinformation, denial, and disruptive technologies for psychological as well as physical effect. Russian president Vladimir Putin and his generals wanted to accomplish their objectives below the threshold of what might elicit a military response from the United States and countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). RNGW seemed to be working, and we were likely, I thought, to see more of it. The stakes were high. Russian aggression in the last decade had taken many forms, from cyber attacks to political subversion to assassination and the use of military power such as the invasion of Georgia in 2008. Russia had changed the borders of Europe by force for the first time since the end of World War II. It seemed likely that Putin, emboldened by perceived success, would become even more aggressive in the future.

It was warm for February. I was enjoying the walk down Walnut Street when my phone rang, displaying a partially blocked Washington, DC–based number. It was Katie Walsh, the White House deputy chief of staff. She asked if I could travel to Florida that weekend to interview with President Trump for the position of assistant to the president for national security affairs. I said yes and called my wife, also named Katie, as I walked the last block. Katie was used to phone calls that suddenly changed our lives. This was one of them.

I had scheduled a premeeting with the Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Trudy Rubin. Trudy was always ahead of other analysts in her understanding of the complex problem set in the Middle East. I benefited from our conversations about the region. She predicted many of the difficulties that the United States encountered in the second Iraq War and characterized our unpreparedness for those challenges as “willful blindness.”2 We both agreed that while many often debated whether the United States should have invaded Iraq, the better question was who thought it would be easy and why. Trudy was about to return to Syria to report on the humanitarian catastrophe associated with the Syrian Civil War and the rise of the terrorist group Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. The most difficult part of that campaign, we agreed, would be how to get to a sustainable political outcome in Syria and Iraq that led to the enduring defeat of ISIS and an end to the humanitarian catastrophe across the Middle East. I told her in confidence about the unexpected phone call I had just received. She replied that she hoped I would be selected. Trudy was not a supporter of President Donald Trump, but he was the elected president, and there was work to be done. She and I both felt that, in recent years, the balance of power and persuasion had shifted against the United States and other free and open societies. Much of that shift, we believed, had been self-inflicted due to failures to understand fully the emerging challenges to American security, prosperity, and influence.

Service in our army gave me the opportunity to work alongside dedicated and courageous men and women in our armed forces, intelligence agencies, and diplomatic corps to implement the policies and strategies that came from Washington, DC. I would soon enter my thirty-fourth year of service as an officer, and I was considering retirement. I felt privileged to have served, especially in command positions. I had spent nearly half my career overseas and over five years in combat. I would look back fondly on the tremendous, intangible rewards of service, especially being a part of endeavors much larger than myself and being a member of teams that took on the quality of a family, in which the man or woman next to you was willing to give everything, even their own life, for you. I was reluctant to retire because I felt a sense of duty to my fellow servicemen and women, many of whom were still serving in battlegrounds overseas.

Service in combat was rewarding, but the experience was also difficult and sometimes frustrating. It was difficult because one bears witness to the horror of war and the sacrifices of young men and women who fight courageously and selflessly for our nation and for one another. It was frustrating because of the wide gap between the assumptions on which some policies and strategies were based and the reality of situations on the ground in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. Serving as national security advisor might give me an opportunity to help a new, clearly unconventional president challenge assumptions and close gaps between reality overseas and fantasy in Washington. Trudy knew that I was apolitical; in the tradition of Gen. George C. Marshall (the architect of victory in World War II), I had never even voted. If selected, I would do my duty under President Trump as I had under five other presidents.

I BELIEVED we were at the end of the beginning of a new era. At the end of the last era, the United States and other free and open societies had reason to be confident. The Cold War ended in victory over Communist totalitarianism. The Soviet Union collapsed. Then, during the 1991 Gulf War, America put together a broad international coalition and demonstrated tremendous military prowess to defeat Saddam Hussein’s army and free Kuwait. But after the end of the Cold War, America and other free and open societies forgot that they had to compete to keep their freedom, security, and prosperity. The United States and other free nations were confident—overconfident. Overconfidence led to complacency. I bore witness to that growing confidence.

In November 1989, our cavalry regiment was on patrol near Coburg, West Germany, the town where Martin Luther translated the Bible into German in the sixteenth century. As a captain in the Second Armored Cavalry Regiment, I saw the need to compete as obvious. Our regiment patrolled a stretch of the Iron Curtain that divided democracies and dictatorships in Europe.3 It was really an iron complex, one designed to keep the subjugated peoples in and freedom out. Fortifications began well east of the actual border between the two German states—with a ten-foot-tall, steel-reinforced fence covered in electric trip wires. Then there was a road. East German border guards drove their jeeps along that road, monitoring the soil next to it for footprints. A steep ditch prevented would-be escape vehicles from plowing through. Beyond the ditch stood two more fencerows, separated by a one-hundred-foot-wide minefield. Those who made it past the mines then had to cross a three-hundred-foot-wide no-man’s-land. Some of our sergeants had seen East German guards shoot unarmed civilians there. It was a formidable system. But it was artificial. And then, on November 9, 1989, it collapsed. A confused East German Politburo member announced that East Germans could use all border crossings to “permanently exit” the nation. With people gathering at the gates near Coburg, guards stepped aside and threw the gates open. Hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands of East Germans flooded across. Scouts from Eagle Troop, on patrol that day, received countless hugs, bouquets of flowers, and bottles of wine. There were tears of joy. Meanwhile, Berliners were celebrating as they chiseled away at the wall that had divided them since 1961. The wall fell. The East German government withered away. The Soviet Union broke apart. We had won the Cold War.

But then came a hot war far away from the Iron Curtain. In 1989, Saddam Hussein’s first decade as Iraq’s dictator was coming to a close. He should have been fatigued. In 1980 he had started a disastrous eight-year war with Iran that killed more than 600,000 people. Since seizing power in 1979, he had employed a Stalinist model of repression, murdering more than another million of his own people in a country of 22 million, including an estimated 180,000 Kurds in a genocidal campaign in which he used poison gas to massacre entire villages of innocent men, women, and children. But in 1990, Saddam felt more underappreciated than fatigued. Had he not defended the Sunni Muslim and Arab world against the scourge of Iran’s Shia Islamist revolution? Did not Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and other Arab states owe him a debt of gratitude—and cash to cover the cost of that war?

Saddam’s tanks rumbled toward Iraq’s southern border in July 1990, and on August 2, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq was in London when the first of more than three hundred thousand Iraqi troops poured into Kuwait to make that small but wealthy nation Saddam’s nineteenth province. President George H. W. Bush and his team got a coalition of thirty-five nations to agree that the annexation “would not stand.”

Those same troopers who were patrolling the East-West German border in November 1989 arrived in Saudi Arabia almost exactly one year after they watched the Iron Curtain part. Three months later, Eagle Troop was leading the so-called left hook, a massive envelopment attack, to crush Saddam’s Republican Guard and kick the door open to Kuwait with a blow from the western desert.

As our troop moved out on February 26, heavy morning fog dissipated. It was replaced by high winds and blowing sand. Visibility was limited. Our scout helicopters were grounded. It was just after 4 p.m. We moved in formation. One scout platoon, Lt. Mike Petschek’s First Platoon, led with six Bradley armored fighting vehicles, which carry a scout squad and were armed with a 25 mm chain gun and a TOW antitank missile launcher. The other scout platoon, Lt. Tim Gauthier’s Third Platoon, moved along our southern flank. Our tanks moved behind the lead scouts in a nine-tank wedge, with my tank in the center. Lt. Mike Hamilton’s Second Platoon was to my tank’s left and Lt. Jeff DeStefano’s Fourth Platoon was to my tank’s right. Our 132 troopers were well trained and confident, in their equipment and in one another—men bound together by mutual trust, respect, affection. As a twenty-eight-year-old captain, I was proud to command that extraordinary team.

The troop was not very high-tech by twenty-first-century standards. We had three of these new devices called Global Positioning Systems, or GPS. But given that they worked only sporadically, we navigated mainly by dead reckoning in the flat, featureless desert. Because the troop had no maps, leaders did not know that they were paralleling a road that ran through a small abandoned village and then into Kuwait. We also did not know that we were entering an old Iraqi training ground recently reoccupied by a Republican Guard brigade and an armored division. Their mission was to halt our advance.

The Iraqi brigade commander, Major Mohammed, knew the ground well. Mohammed had attended the Infantry Officer Advanced Course at Fort Benning, Georgia, in the 1980s, when the United States was cultivating an ill-conceived relationship with Iraq to balance against Iran. Mohammed’s defense was sound. He fortified the village with anti-aircraft guns and put his infantry in protected positions. He took advantage of an imperceptible rise in the terrain that ran perpendicular to the road running east to west through the village to organize a “reverse slope” defense. He built two engagement areas, or “kill sacks,” on the eastern side of the ridge, emplaced minefields, and dug in approximately forty tanks and sixteen BMPs, Russian-made infantry fighting vehicles, on the back side of the ridge. His plan was to destroy us piecemeal as we moved across the crest. Hundreds of Iraqi infantry occupied bunkers and trenches between the armored vehicles. He positioned his reserve of eighteen more T-72 tanks and his command post along another subtle ridgeline farther east.

At 4:07, Staff Sergeant John McReynolds’s Bradley drove on top of an Iraqi bunker positioned to provide early warning. Two enemy soldiers emerged and surrendered. McReynolds’s wingman, Sgt. Maurice Harris, was scanning into the village through the blowing sand when his Bradley came under fire. As Harris returned fire with his 25 mm cannon, Lieutenant Gauthier moved forward and fired a TOW antitank missile. Thus began twenty-three minutes of furious combat.

As our tanks fired nine high-explosive rounds simultaneously into the village, we received permission to advance to the 70 Easting, a north–south running grid line on a map. We switched to a tanks lead formation. I instructed Second and Fourth Platoons to “follow my move” and we passed through the scouts’ Bradleys. As our tank came over the crest of that imperceptible rise, our gunner, Sgt. Craig Koch, and I identified the enemy simultaneously: eight T-72 tanks in prepared positions faced us at close range. Koch announced, “Tanks direct front.” The crew acted as one. The gun recoiled, and the breech dropped. The enemy tank exploded in a huge fireball. Pfc. Jeffrey Taylor loaded a tank-defeating “sabot” round, which thrusts a fourteen-pound depleted uranium dart out of the gun tube at two kilometers a second. He armed the gun and yelled, “Up!” as he threw his body against the turret wall to get out of the gun’s recoil path. Our tank crew destroyed the first three tanks in about ten seconds. When our other eight tanks crested the rise, they joined in the assault. In about a minute, everything in the range of our guns was in flames. Our tank driver, Spec. Chris Hedenskog, informed me, “Sir, we just went through a minefield.” He knew that it would be dangerous to stop right in the middle of the enemy’s kill sack, the area in which all his tanks could concentrate their fire. We had a window of opportunity to shock the enemy and take advantage of the first blows we had delivered, to turn physical advantage into psychological advantage. So, our tanks drove around the antitank mines, with the Bradleys and other vehicles following in our tracks. We ran over antipersonnel mines, but they popped harmlessly. Our training was paying off. As McReynolds recalled, “We did not have to be told what to do; it just kinda came natural.”

Just as we cleared the western defensive positions, our executive officer, John Gifford, radioed, “I know you don’t want to hear this, but you’re at the limit of advance; you’re at the 70 Easting.” I responded, “Tell them we can’t stop. Tell them we have to continue this attack. Tell them I’m sorry.” Stopping would have allowed the enemy to recover. I felt that we had the advantage and had to finish the battle rapidly. The army’s cavalry culture encourages initiative, and the stakes were too high not to take advantage of the hard blow we had just delivered.

We crested a second rise and entered the reserve’s circular perimeter. Iraqi tank commanders were trying to deploy against us. They were too late. We destroyed all eighteen tanks at close range. Then we stopped. There was nothing left to shoot. Our fire support officer, Lt. Dan Davis, called in a massive artillery strike on fuel and ammo stocks farther east. There was some more fighting to do, but the main attack had lasted twenty-three minutes.

Eagle Troop destroyed a much larger enemy force that had all the advantages of the defense and took no casualties. Our fight was a lopsided victory in a larger battle and war that were lopsided victories. As confidence grew based on the military victory in the Gulf War, analysts undervalued the qualitative advantage of U.S. forces and the narrow political objective of simply returning Kuwait to the Kuwaitis. They assumed that future enemies would repeat Saddam’s mistake of trying to fight the U.S. and coalition military forces on our own terms rather than asymmetrically. And, as many reflected on the victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War, they forgot how the United States and its allies and partners had competed based on a clear understanding of their adversary, what was at stake, and the long-term strategy designed to ensure their security, promote prosperity, and extend their influence.

IN RETROSPECT, what those cavalry troopers experienced in Coburg, Germany, and what would become known as the Battle of 73 Easting in the Iraqi desert, marked the end of an era.4 It was then, in the 1990s, that American leaders, flush with victories in the Cold War and the Gulf War, forgot that the United States had to compete in foreign affairs. Coburg was also the birthplace of Hans Morgenthau, who fled the Nazis in 1937 and became one of the fathers of the discipline of international relations. In 1978, in his last coauthored essay with Ethel Person, titled “The Roots of Narcissism,” Morgenthau lamented preoccupation with self in foreign policy because it led to alienation from other nations and aspirations that exceeded the limits of ability. It was there in Coburg, near Morgenthau’s birthplace, that American confidence grew as the Cold War ended and the world entered what the political analyst Charles Krauthammer called “the unipolar moment.” America’s stature as the only superpower encouraged narcissism, a preoccupation with self, and an associated neglect of the influence that others have over the future course of events. Americans began to define the world only in relation to their own aspirations and desires.5