— From a Pentagon press announcement Monday afternoon reporting that President Obama has recommended to Congress that H.R. McMaster, Army soldier-scholar and the author of Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam, be promoted to major general. McMaster, who recently briefed reporters at the Pentagon on the challenges of corruption in Afghanistan, has won plaudits as an innovative Army thinker, three words that tend not to travel together very often.