One of the first senior officials that President-elect Donald Trump has tapped to help guide his administration as it takes power is a retired military officer and highly regarded scholar who actively assisted Pentagon efforts to nation-build in Iraq and Afghanistan — something Trump has repeatedly criticized. Retired Army Brig. Gen. Michael J. Meese was a senior adviser to Gen. David H. Petraeus in both countries, and spent nine years teaching at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y. He deployed from there to serve as Petraeus’s assistant chief of staff in Afghanistan for a year beginning in July 2010, and to Iraq in both 2007 and 2009 to guide the surge and eventual withdrawal of U.S. troops there that Petraeus led. He also earned a doctorate from Princeton University while serving.
Retired Army Col. Peter R. Mansoor, Petraeus’s former No. 2 officer, said that Meese is known as bright, talented and conscientious among his peers. In Afghanistan, he was in charge of alliance relations in the headquarters of the International Security Assistance Force in Kabul, a complicated job at an especially bloody time in the war after the Obama administration surged tens of thousands of troops to battle the Taliban.“Anyone who can keep that group heading in the same direction should be well suited to assisting the Trump team with government transition in the weeks ahead,” Mansoor said. Read More