But several veterans of the White House have noted in conversations over the past two years that the secure video does not lend itself to open, vigorous debate. Instead, it can squelch it. The picture is being piped into too many places; field commanders don’t want to speak their mind to the president if their immediate superiors at the Pentagon or Central Command are tuned in, too. There may be recordings for posterity, or presidential libraries.

One recently departed National Security Council official noted earlier this year that in his view, the problem is that the system is largely in the hands of war-fighters; only on a rare day, and only toward the end of his presidency, did members of Provincial Reconstruction Teams and other aid workers involved in nation-building pop up on Mr. Bush’s screen.

“The technology tends to skew the nature of the advice you hear,” this former N.S.C. member said, declining to speak on the record because the sessions he witnessed were classified. “You spend a lot more time talking about hitting a house of full of bad guys in Waziristan than you do talking about why our effort to build schools and roads is moving so slowly.”

It is not yet clear what Mr. Obama thinks of the high-tech toys he will soon have at his disposal, but at the announcement of his new national security team on Monday in Chicago, he was clearly aware of the problem they can accentuate. “One of the dangers in a White House, based on my reading of history, is that you get wrapped up in groupthink and everybody agrees with everything and there’s no discussion and there are no dissenting views.” He insisted he would be “welcoming a vigorous debate inside the White House.”

A few hours later, ABC News broadcast an interview in which Mr. Bush told Charles Gibson that “the biggest regret” of his presidency arose from his administration’s best-known group-think debacle. “A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein,” Mr. Bush said, according to the White House transcript. “And you know, that’s not a do-over, but I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess.”

Mr. Bush, once again, declined to be drawn into the great what-if of his presidency: Would history had been different if the Iraq intelligence had been accurate, or if someone on one of those screens had debated the implications if it turned out to be wrong?

He had designed the 2002 “Bush doctrine”  the declaration that after 9/11, the United States could no longer take the risk of allowing imminent threats to the country gather  for a world in which technology allowed near-perfect information flow, enabling the president to make accurate, black-and-white calls about whether that threat exists. Instead, in its first application to a real-life conflict, the debate turned into an endless feedback loop, reinforcing faulty assumptions. People talked about how many days would be required to get to Baghdad, not whether the evidence for invasion was good enough, or the possibility that the occupation would go awry.

Even the face-to-face discussions took on an element of virtual reality.