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An esoteric, but legally significant, point is being raised by the Senate Armed Services Committee regarding Lt. Gen. H.R. McMasters appointment as national security adviser.

Even though the president can install anyone he wants in the post without getting consent from the Senate, the law requires a confirmation vote for any three- or four-star general. All generals of this rank are appointed to their posts by the president and Senate-confirmed, so a change in post in this instance from Director of the Army Capabilities Integration Center to national security adviser requires that the Senate reconfirm McMasters rank as a three-star general.

An aide to the Armed Services Committee says that in order for McMaster to keep his current rank, he would have to be reappointed by the president and reconfirmed by the Senate in that grade for his new position.

Alternatively, McMaster could retire or step down a grade, to two-star.

White House spokesman Sean Spicer seemed perplexed when a reporter asked him about this today, pointing out that then-Lt. Gen. Colin Powell served as Reagans national security adviser while retaining his military rank.

But Spicer apparently didnt know this same issue was raised for Powell in 1987. AsUPI reported then, the Reagan White House agreed that Powell would serve in an acting capacity until the Senate could vote to reconfirm his rank.

The Senate re-confirmed Powell as a lieutenant general by a voice vote on Dec 18, 1987, a month after Reagan announced his new assignment.

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McMaster will need Senate confirmation to serve as NSA - WDEF News 12

I think Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster will be the next national security advisor. Like Vice Adm. Bob Harward, General David Petraeus reportedly has withdrawn over the issue of being able to bring in his own staff. And Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, the acting NSA, is probably too old for a job this demanding, especially in this administration.

That leaves just two. I dont know about Bolton. Id be surprised, though, if he fit the Trump template.

Picking McMaster is not a bad thing. Ive known him since he was major. Hes smart, energetic, and tough. He even looks like an armored branch version of Harward. (Thats him, working out with a punching bag in Iraq, in the foto. I took it in the citadel in downtown Tell Afar one sunny winter day about 10 years ago.) (Btw, Harward was scheduled to appear on ABCs This Week yesterday morning, but backed out an hour before airtime. )

As I said at the end of my Friday post, once Trump was turned down by Harward, it became more likely that he would turn to the active duty military for his 3rd pick for the job. McMaster is among the best of them out there. For his Ph.D. dissertation, he wrote one of the best books on the Vietnam War, Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam.

He has good combat experience, he was a good trainer, and he led the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment well in his deployment to Iraq, most notably in pacifying Tell Afar, to the west of Mosul.

I wrote about his operations there in my book The Gamble. I am traveling so I dont have it with me, but I remember him telling his soldiers that understanding counterinsurgency really wasnt hard: Every time you disrespect an Iraqi, youre working for the enemy. They even had Customer Satisfaction Forms that detainees were asked to fill out upon release: Were you treated well? How was the food? What could we do better?

There are two big differences between him and Harward: First, he is on active duty. (Though the Army inexplicably couldnt find a four star job for him, and had told him to plan to retire later this year.) Second, his wife wont kill him if he takes the job, as Harwards wife might have.

That said, the basic problems remain. To do the job right, McMaster needs to bring in his own people. And it remains unclear if he can get that.

As for relations with the Pentagon: McMaster knows Mattis, but not well. (They both spoke at a conference at the University of North Carolina in April 2010.) But they are similar people and will respect each other.

I dont know how McMaster will work Trump. McMaster once wrote that the American war plans for Afghanistan and Iraq were at times . . . essentially narcissistic. (Good line, but I think it is more illuminating to say that they were minimalist plans for maximalist goals, which is of course a bad combination.) At any rate, McMaster may learn a lot more about narcissism in the coming months.

Over the weekend, I did an informal poll of people who have worked for McMaster, asking if they would be willing to follow him to the National Security Council staff. To a surprising degree, they replied, Yes, they would. Thats an indication of loyalty to and confidence in him.

For extra credit, here is a reading list from McMaster.

Meantime, over the weekend, an NSC staffer who had been hired by General Flynn was canned for criticizing the Trumps at a think tank meeting. I actually dont have a problem with this. Either you work for someone or you dont. If you cant be loyal, at least be discreet. I think we may be seeing more such departures throughout the Trump administration, people who are effectively resigning in public.

Photo credit: Thomas E. Ricks

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Last man standing: McMaster for NSA? - Foreign Policy (blog)

Ad will collapse in seconds CLOSE February 20, 2017 02/20/2017 4:23 p.m. By Adam K. Raymond

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President Donald Trump has found his national security adviser and once again, its a general. On Monday, Trump named Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster as his replacement for former NSA Michael Flynn and called the 54-year-old a man of tremendous talent and tremendous experience.

Trump made the announcement while sitting on a golden couch at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, where he also said that acting NSA Keith Kellogg, a retired lieutenant general, will serve under McMaster as chief of staff. Additionally, Trump said that former U.N. ambassador John Bolton, a candidate for the NSA job, will be asked to work with us in a somewhat different capacity.

A career Army officer, McMaster previously served as the director of the Army Capabilities Integration Center, described by USA Today as an internal think tank that looks at future threats and how to deal with them. In 2014, he was named to Time magazines 100 most influential list and called the architect of the future U.S. Army. In the magazine, retired Lieutenant General Dave Barno described McMaster as an iconoclast who repeatedly bucked the system and survived to join its senior ranks.

The West Point graduate also has a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dissertation was turned into the 1997 book Dereliction of Duty, which CNN said in 2006 is considered the seminal work on militarys responsibility during Vietnam to confront their civilian bosses when strategy was not working.

While McMasters academic bona fides may stand in contrast with Trumps the Times says hes seen as one of the Armys leading intellectuals he shares the presidents opinion that the U.S. military is too small. We are outranged and outgunned by many potential adversaries, he said at a 2016 hearing of the Air-Land subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Our army in the future risks being too small to secure the nation.

McMaster, who has been described as a blunt-spoken bulldog, joins Defense Secretary James Mattis, whose nickname is Mad Dog, and Homeland Security head John Kelly, a no-nonsense pragmatist, as one-time generals who have signed up to work in the Trump administration.

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The silly-sign makers were out in full force on Monday.

He was previously in charge of designing the Army of the future.

The right-wing provocateur came under fire for a video in which he defends relationships between younger boys and older men.

The Kremlin is trying to better understand Trump as worries reportedly grow in Moscow about his ability to lift sanctions.

The Defense Secretary arrives in Baghdad as a part of his world tour of walking back Trump statements.

Many opposed giving the right-wing provocateur a speaking slot even before seeing his defense of relationships between younger boys and older men.

The other two people involved with the plan were a pro-Putin Ukrainian lawmaker and a Trump business associate with links to the mafia.

Trumps fake Swedish news reflects a misleading right-wing narrative about refugee-perpetrated crime.

He warned that suppressing the media is how dictators get started, though he mostly avoided direct references to the president.

Trump has already chosen his 2020 opponents: the press and any version of reality that doesnt come from him.

Meanwhile, Trump is still looking for his next national-security adviser.

But the White House insists nobody is getting enhanced access to the president.

The senator (ambivalently, agonizingly) takes on the president.

An elite school allegedly had to cancel a field trip to the Central Parks Trump-affiliated Wollman Rink.

The Associated Press has a draft of a memo that suggests deploying as many as 100,000 National Guard troops.

Scott Pruitt will spearhead the Trump administrations efforts to increase water pollution and accelerate man-made climate change.

Michels displacement by Newt Gingrich is widely seen as a landmark on the road to partisan polarization. The path continues ever downward today.

25-year-old Siti Aisyah had apparently been paid for similar acts before.

The House Oversight chair is seeking charges against the exState Department employee who helped set up Hillary Clintons private email server.

A quest to repeat the Bush tax cuts, but without the fatal weakness.

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Trump Picks HR McMaster, Army Strategist, As National Security Adviser - New York Magazine

(PJMedia) This story, from the Jan. 12, 2017, edition of the New York Times, was little-remarked upon at the time, but suddenly has taken on far greater significance in light of current events:

In its final days, the Obama administration has expanded the power of the National Security Agency to share globally intercepted personal communications with the governments 16 other intelligence agencies before applying privacy protections.

The new rules significantly relax longstanding limits on what the N.S.A. may do with the information gathered by its most powerful surveillance operations, which are largely unregulated by American wiretapping laws. These include collecting satellite transmissions, phone calls and emails that cross network switches abroad, and messages between people abroad that cross domestic network switches.

The change means that far more officials will be searching through raw data. Essentially, the government is reducing the risk that the N.S.A. will fail to recognize that a piece of information would be valuable to another agency, but increasing the risk that officials will see private information about innocent people.

One of the central questions behind the Mike Flynn flap that should have been asked but largely wasnt is: who was wiretapping the general? The answer, we know now, was the National Security Agency, formerly known as No Such Agency, the nations foremost signals-intelligence (SIGINT) collection department.

The remainder of this article is available in its entirety at pjmedia.com

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Surprise: At the End, Obama Administration Gave NSA Broad New Powers - The Christian Truther

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Product Support - SonicWALL NSA Series