Obama's new defense shield: Jones

If National Security Adviser James L. Jones’s status within President Barack Obama’s White House inner circle once seemed uncertain, it doesn’t seem that way anymore.

The recent tension between Obama and his top on-the-ground commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, has made Jones, the only former general on Obama’s national security team, a crucial player in asserting Obama's authority over the military and in giving the president breathing room as he considers the force increase McChrystal has publicly advocated.

By his own admission, Jones was dismayed in his first months in the National Security Council job by the blurred lines of authority in the Obama White House. But he has emerged as one of Obama’s most effective defenders against a primal fear of Democratic presidents for more than 40 years — being branded as weak on national security issues.

I.M. Destler, co-author of a book on the NSC, said he was skeptical Jones was a good fit for the job in a free-wheeling White House like Obama’s. But now he sees Jones as “helping enlarge the president’s space” to make his own policy.

“Jones is playing something of a role he should be playing. If the problem is the president’s relations with the military,” Destler continued, then the fact that Jones is a retired four-star general “obviously is useful. One has to believe that occurred to Obama when he appointed Jones.”

The gentle but obvious scolding Jones administered to McChrystal on a talk show Sunday —"Ideally, it's best for military advice to come up through the chain of command," he said — was a clear signal that the White House was not going to tolerate an independent campaign by McChrystal — and that Jones was the best person to convey that message.

In a speech to a military audience the next day, Defense Secretary Robert Gates underscored the point that advisers should give their counsel to the president “candidly and privately.”

David Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official who has also studied the NSC, said the recent McChrystal episode demonstrates “where Jones adds value.”

“In saying, ‘Look, I know the way this works,’ he used very loaded military language, which is that he [McChrystal] is down in the chain of command,” he said. “Jones played it exactly right [and] tried to bring it all under control in a dignified way.”

Other observers say Jones has adapted to Obama’s preferences for a more wide open process.

“He keeps the door open and that is the role of national security adviser and what Condi Rice didn’t do,” said Simon Serfaty, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies who is an old friend of Jones. “He keeps the president exposed to all options, and that is what this president wants.”

“In this case,” as well, Serfaty adds, “the general may give the president an alibi to what he wants to do, which is split the difference.” That would mean an increase of 12,000-15,000 U.S. combat troops, according to Serfaty.

For Serfaty and other supporters, this is what they imagined when the former Marine Corps commandant was Obama’s surprise choice for national security adviser, but it was not a role Jones seemed to easily embrace in the opening months of the administration.

Instead, Jones seemed to vanish into the bureaucracy, traveling widely and focusing on broad strategic concepts while his low-profile deputy, Tom Donilon, ran the interagency apparatus day-to-day and Obama himself was the sole face of American power. Appearing somewhat aloof in meetings, Jones did little to mask his unhappiness that deputies two rungs lower than him were often accompanying the president they had grown close to during the campaign to meetings. He was blunt about his discomfort, telling the Washington Post in May: "I'm a former general. … I'm used to staffs, and I'm used to a certain order. ….When I first went into the Oval Office, I didn't expect six other people from the NSC to go with me.”

“There were multiple centers of power from the beginning,” in the Obama White House, one Democratic transition official said. “There would be meetings when Obama would have Donilon, [deputy national security adviser Denis] McDonough and Lippert all sitting there having completely different views, and Jones was not used to this. He was used to more normal military chain of command.”

Jones did himself no favors by telling the Post that he sometimes biked home to McLean, Va., for lunch, and thought aides who worked late into the night were not being efficient.

But early chatter about whether Jones would last waned over the summer as Jones seemed to carve out a role for himself as a principal among principals, rather than a staffer helping deliver the president options synthesized in the interagency process.

He showed his media savvy when he allowed Bob Woodward, The Post’s veteran White House chronicler, to accompany him on a trip to Afghanistan and write about it. In a more recent interview with Woodward, shortly after Woodward had revealed McChrystal’s classified assessment justifying the request for 40,000 more US troops to be deployed to Afghanistan, he said the White House would conduct a strategy review before answering McChrystal’s request.

A recent New York Times article revealed that Jones was, along with Vice President Joe Biden, among the Afghan surge skeptics in Obama’s national security cabinet.

“He is much more assertive than early on,” said one Democratic foreign policy expert who did not want to be named. “That is partly the result of knowing that they can’t afford for him to leave.”

In his relations with the military — as in his attempts to alter the health care system — Obama has tried to avoid the problems that undermined President Bill Clinton. The former Arkansas governor, who, like Obama, never served in the military, began his administration with an unexpected fight with the Pentagon over overturning the ban on open gays and lesbians in the armed services. The relationship never really recovered.

Jones, with his reserved John Wayne style and Midwestern accent and the credential of having informally advised both Obama and Sen. John McCain, came recommended by outsiders such as former Sen. Chuck Hagel, the Nebraska Republican, as well as by Obama’s longtime foreign policy adviser, Mark Lippert, who is leaving the NSC to resume service in the Navy.

“From a political perspective, I think having a widely respected retired Marine four-star general in your administration makes things a lot easier to disagree with the uniformed services than it would if [Obama’s] national security adviser were a Washington lawyer,” said Andrew Exum, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, and a veteran of the war in Afghanistan who served as an adviser to McChrystal’s initial assessment team.

While acknowledging that Jones is not from the same counterinsurgency-oriented, "all star" officers personified by McChrystal and his boss, Gen. David Petraeus, Exum said it would be a mistake to underestimate the respect a retired four-star such as Jones commands.

"There may be disagreements within the current uniformed military and with Gen. Jones, but those are strategic disagreements," Exum said.

But while Jones’ public profile and private clout both appear ascendant, some Democrats say it was his job to anticipate and head off the public divisions that now seem to have overtaken the Obama administration’s Afghan policy.

“He should have been flagging this stuff,” said the Democratic foreign policy expert. “And he should have been helping them with how to deal with the military if they rethink the policy and set it up [so the military] will not go bonkers. And if anybody knows it, if should be Jones.”

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