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the jurogan experience so how does that work like who so if a person like you is a national security advisor like in a general where who who comes to you with these ideas and plans well it's your job to kind of convene the you know the the president's cabinet right the principal's committee of the national security council and and you know joe i you know i i write about this in in the book i i i walked into that office really unexpectedly obviously right you know i i've been walking down walnut street in philadelphia pennsylvania on my way to a think tank my job at the time was designed to design the future army so i'm an active duty lieutenant general and i was gonna brief this think tank community get their thoughts on a study that we had commissioned uh almost a two year long study on russia's annexation of crimea and invasion of ukraine and russian new generation warfare and what it meant right for developing the future army and the future military and my phone rings and it's a partially blocked number from you know from the you know from the from the white house oh boy and they say hey uh hey the president would like you to interview for the job national security adviser mar-a-lago it says partially so it just says 202 which is 202. that's it that's it yeah but that's something like batman [ __ ] so that's that's why that's why i answered it typically i wouldn't answer my phone on the way to the meeting but maybe i had to answer this one so so uh you know it came that came out of the blue and so that was a friday right and sunday i'm interviewing for the job wow he hires me on you know president's day monday i fly back to washington right you know on on everything you interviewed at mar-a-lago at moral so you're having like shrimp cocktails hey i didn't know how to get food there man so what so after after the first interview right they said hey the president would probably like to talk to you again so i i stayed they just kept me there for the rest of the day i went into the military aids office you know because i know they'll know those guys and we're on the military so i'm hanging out in their
office i'm doing emails for my regular job and you know of course calling my wife and and calling katie and talking to her about it and and there's there's no food i don't know how to get food so i ate everything that those guys had i ate their pistachio nuts man i i left my note hey sorry guys i'll have to replenish your supplements you can't ask trump hey buddy where's the man get a statement i probably could have gotten some meatloaf or something i'm sure i'm sure i could have missed opportunity but but so so anyway that one day i fly back to dc and uh i didn't even live in dc so they had these osprey aircraft waiting to take me back to my house in in in tidewater virginia i packed a bag and i started on tuesday man i mean so so it was quick but i had this you know i had this great gift that the army gave me which is the opportunity to study history you know and and so i walk into to me mcgeorge bundy's office the guy who was national security advisor when vietnam became an american war and i wrote a book called dereliction of duty about how why vietnam became an american war and identified all the deficiencies in the decision-making policy-making process right in in washington so i resolved at least okay i'm not gonna make the same mistakes right and and so those one of those mistakes or what you're alluding to is you know they they didn't spend enough time thinking about the nature of the problem right they didn't frame out the problem use kind of design thinking to think about it right so when i came into the job you know we we uh we established you know what i thought were the the top 16 challenges to our security and prosperity in the world right and and then we organized a framing effort around those and we put together a meeting called a principal small group framing session where the president's cabinet right the secretary of state and defense and the all the heads of the intelligence community um you know come together to to to really approve how we've described the problem associated with
chinese communist party aggression with russian aggression with iran and iran's pursuit of a nuclear weapon with north korea and north korea's nuclear prop program and and and other threats from north korea is threats that are that are occurring more frequently and are more consequential in cyberspace for example and and so i as i came into the job i was grateful for the opportunity to study it from a historical perspective anyway well you're you're famously non-partisan you're you're a guy who didn't even vote while you were in active duty you you decided a long time ago that that was the best course of action to stay completely unbiased and to concentrate entirely on the goals and objectives of the military right right so when you're with a guy like trump you're going to be associated politically like if you're a part of the trump administration it's like right you're immediately associated with trump and then with uh all the good and the bad that comes with that so was that a shock to the system like what was that like to go from you get this phone call from this weird number all of a sudden you're in mar-a-lago trying to find some food and then uh you're the national security advisor well you know you know uh i really think it was a benefit to stay on active duty you know and and and i i really think that i mean i i know like you do i when i look at the polarization our society today this partisan politics i think okay why can't we just talk about what we can agree on so i think in the area of foreign policy that ought to be an area where we could agree like who wants iran to have a nuclear weapon right who wants to only hereditary communist dictatorship in the world you know the kim family regime of north korea to have the most destructive weapons on earth who wants russia to intimidate all the countries on his periphery develop destabilizing nuclear weapons try to coerce us like they're doing now who wants china to eat our lunch economically okay let's talk about that across partisan lines right you shouldn't be partisan issues so i think donald trump was the fifth the fifth commander-in-chief i served in uniform right when i took the oath of office at
west point with the oath at west point as a you know as a pleb there you know in in uh gosh the summer of 1980 right reagan was president right so it didn't matter to me who the commander-in-chief was i was going to do my best to to fulfill my oath which was to to support and defend the constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic right and to bear true faith and lead us to the same you know and and i felt like i could serve trump well by you know by helping him determine his agenda he's the guy that got elected right and then and then once he made decisions to help orchestrate the sensible implementation of his decisions and that's that's the job i took on you