President Donald Trump has picked one of the military’s leading warrior-scholars to restore order to the National Security Council — but also one who has staked out a decidedly more hawkish position on Russia and gone out of his way to assert that the war against terrorism must not morph into a war against Islam.

Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, Trump's newly named replacement for ousted national security adviser Michael Flynn, is considered one of the Army’s top intellectuals. When he was a young major he published a best-selling book about failed military leadership during the Vietnam War and later went on to help pioneer counterinsurgency operations in Iraq.


The first active-duty officer to hold the post since Colin Powell under President Ronald Reagan, he has also attained legendary status in military circles for his willingness to buck conventional wisdom.

It is a pedigree that might soon come in handy in his new post as the top national security policy official in the Trump White House.

McMaster is currently the director of the Army Capabilities Integration Center, where his job has been to figure out what the Army should look like in 2025 and beyond. He has placed particular emphasis on preparing to counter the kind of tactics and weapons that Russia, which he considers a rising threat to global stability, has used in its incursion in Ukraine.

This emphasis could put him at odds with Trump, who says he wants to improve relations with Russia and has expressed little concern about its aggressive behaviors in Eastern Europe and contends that Vladimir Putin can be bargained with.

But McMaster's views will likely help build bridges with hawks in Congress who have been some of Trump’s fiercest Republican critics.

“I give President Trump great credit for this decision, as well as his national security cabinet choices,” Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) said in a statement after the announcement. “I have had the honor of knowing [McMaster] for many years, and he is a man of genuine intellect, character, and ability. He knows how to succeed.”

McCain added that he “could not imagine a better, more capable national security team than the one we have right now.”

Trump announced the selection Monday at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, flanked by McMaster and Keith Kellogg, a retired Army lieutenant general who was Flynn’s chief of staff and is set to stay on under McMaster.

“He’s a man of tremendous talent and tremendous experience,” Trump said of his new national security adviser. “I watched and read a lot over the last two days. He is highly respected by everyone in the military, and we’re very honored to have him.”

McMaster faces a daunting challenge trying to right the ship following the rocky tenure of Flynn, who departed after it became clear he misled Vice President Mike Pence about the nature of his pre-inauguration contacts with Russia’s ambassador.

Trump’s first pick to replace Flynn, retired Vice Adm. Bob Harward, turned down the job — in part, according to an individual familiar with his thinking, because he wasn’t given assurances he would be able to select his own staff and have autonomy from Trump's close-knit political advisers — led by Steve Bannon, who Trump elevated to a permanent position on the National Security Council, and Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Monday that Trump had given McMaster “full authority” to hire “whatever staff he sees fit."

But Philip Carter, a defense analyst at the Center for a New American Security, said McMaster will be tested to try to “impose order and discipline on a White House national security structure and process that has seen neither since Election Day.”

“This challenge will be particularly hard given the political winds within the White House, and the fact that McMaster comes to the White House as an outsider and relative political neophyte,” Carter said.

Retired Lt. Gen. Dave Barno, who has known McMaster for years, said the new national security adviser is a hard-charging and forceful personality who grasps the political challenges he will face in addition to the national security ones.

“He’s going to have to build a relationship with the boss, get in to see the boss,” said Barno. “There’s no question something he will do daily is tell the boss hard things that he doesn’t necessarily want to hear. And I think the president hired him with that expectation.”

McMaster is already winning praise from GOP defense hawks on Capitol Hill.

"H.R McMaster is one of the finest combat leaders of our generation and also a great strategic mind,” Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas said in a statement. “He is a true warrior scholar, and I'm confident he will serve both the president and the country well."

Michael O’Hanlon, a defense analyst at the Brookings Institution, called him “quite possibly the single most talented 3-star in the U.S. military today.”

“He is accomplished across wide domains of military operations as well as integrated political-military challenges like counterinsurgency warfare in general, and fighting corruption in Afghanistan in particular,” O’Hanlon said. “He is affable and likeable and charming but not afraid to challenge and provoke.”

McMaster’s book — “Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, The Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam” — is considered a key text about the military’s role in the Vietnam War. He wrote it as a major as part of his Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

He served in the first Gulf War as well as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He played a key role with retired Gen. David Petraeus in rewriting the Army’s field manual on counterinsurgency operations — pioneering the “clear, hold, build” strategy of clearing a town with U.S. forces and then building up local security forces to maintain control.

Petraeus, in a statement to POLITICO, called McMaster "a truly strategic thinker and a great team builder with superb organizational skills."

"I was privileged to have him lead three major strategic reviews during the Surge in Iraq and then to establish the task force on anti-corruption during the Surge in Afghanistan. He is exceedingly well qualified to serve as National Security Adviser," he added.

McMaster was even mentioned by President George W. Bush in a 2006 speech about the war in Iraq, with Bush quoting the then-colonel’s description of Al Qaeda’s brutality.

But McMaster is also known for a willingness to ruffle feathers — and sometimes run afoul of his superiors. He was twice passed over for promotion from colonel to brigadier general before Petraeus insisted his success in Iraq be recognized, author Mark Perry wrote in POLITICO Magazine last year.

In a nod to the potential tensions that could emerge between McMaster and Trump on Russia, the new national security adviser has warned that the U.S. is losing its potential edge against Russia in land warfare.

McMaster led a secret Army study of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014, which was designed to figure out how the Army should adapt to Russia’s military advances.

“It is clear that while our Army was engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq, Russia studied U.S. capabilities and vulnerabilities and embarked on an ambitious and largely successful modernization effort,” McMaster told the Senate Armed Services Committee last year. “In Ukraine, for example, the combination of unmanned aerial systems and offensive cyber and advanced electronic warfare capabilities depict a high degree of technological sophistication.”

In another departure from some of the rhetoric of Trump and Flynn, McMaster has sought to separate the depravity of Islamic terror groups from the wider religion.

For example, in a recent speech at Virginia Military Institute, he said, “We will defeat today's enemies, including terrorist organizations, like [the Islamic State], who cynically use a perverted interpretation of religion to incite hatred and justify horrific cruelty against innocents.”

He joins an administration that includes many retired generals, including Defense Secretary James Mattis and Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly.

Some defense analysts remain concerned about what they see as the militarization of the national security apparatus.

“Like Mattis, McMaster's appointment commands great respect because of his military record, but also raises civil-military relations questions,” Carter said. “This continues a pattern of President Trump using military personnel and institutions to do political things. One of McMaster's great challenges will be to resist Trump's further politicization of the military, and do so while on active duty.”

But Max Boot, a conservative military scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations and a longtime critic of Trump, spoke for many so-called "Never Trumpers" in the Republican Party.

"McMaster is one of the most impressive army officers of his generation — a rare combination of soldier and scholar," Boot said. "I cannot imagine a better choice for national security adviser."

Yet, like many, he also has doubts that McMaster can succeed if Trump does not moderate his rhetoric and insists on giving both Bannon and Kushner their own foreign policy portfolios.

"Not even the most talented individual will succeed in that job as long as Bannon and Kushner continue to run their own foreign policies and as long as Trump continues to make outlandish statements questioning basic American commitments and valued allies."

Connor O'Brien and Michael Crowley contributed to this report.