February 20, 2017

President Donald Trump, right, shakes hands with Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, left, at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., Monday, Feb. 20, 2017.

Susan Walsh / AP

President Donald Trump announced on Monday that Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster is his new National Security Adviser, replacing Michael Flynn, who resigned last week.

He also announced that acting-national security adviser Keith Kellogg would service as the National Security Council chief of staff.

Making his announcement from Mar-a-Lago, Trump called McMaster, “a man of tremendous talent and tremendous experience.”

“I would just like to say what a privilege it is to be able to continue serving our nation,” McMaster, a career Army officer and strategist, said Monday. “I’m grateful to you for that opportunity, and I look forward to joining the national security team and doing everything that I can to advance and protect the interests of the American people.”

McMaster is currently the director of the Army’s Capabilities Integration Center. He formally served as the commander of the Maneuver Center of Excellence at Fort Benning.

He’s a 1984 graduate of the United States Military Academy. He earned a PhD. in military history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In 1997, McMaster wrote a book called Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam, which was highly critical of US leadership during that war.

Trump said “the country is lucky” to have McMaster and Kellogg working together.

Trump said he also interviewed John Bolton, the former ambassador to the United Nations under George W. Bush, for the job, but decided that Bolton will ultimately serve the administration in some other capacity.

Flynn resigned from the position last week after withholding information from Vice President Mike Pence about a phone call he had with Russia’s ambassador to the US prior to Trump being inaugurated.