Chief on the Job

He is the first president in four decades with a shooting war already raging the day he took officetwo,in fact,plus subsidiariesand his education as a commander in chief with no experience in uniform has been a steep learning curve. He has learned how to salute. He has surfed the Internet at night to look into the toll on troops. He has faced young soldiers maimed after carrying out his orders. And he is trying to manage a tense relationship with the military.

Along the way,he has confronted some of the biggest choices a president can make,often deferring to military advisers,yet trying to shape the decisions with his own judgments. His evolution from antiwar candidate to leader of the worlds most powerful military will reach a milestone on Tuesday when he delivers an Oval Office address to formally end the combat mission in Iraq while defending his troop buildup in Afghanistan.

A year and a half into his presidency,Obama appears to be a reluctant warrior. Even as he draws down troops in Iraq,he has been abundantly willing to use force to advance national interests,tripling forces in Afghanistan,authorising secret operations in Yemen and Somalia,and escalating drone strikes in Pakistan. But advisers said he did not see himself as a war president in the way his predecessor did. His speech on Tuesday is notable because he talks in public about the wars only sporadically,determined not to let them define his presidency.

Where George W. Bush saw the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan as his central mission and opportunities to transform critical regions,Obama sees them as problems that need managing, as one adviser put it,while he pursues his mission of transforming America. The result,according to interviews with three dozen administration officials,military leaders and national security experts,is an uneasy balance between a president wary of endless commitment and a military worried he is not fully invested in the cause.

Senator Jack Reed,a Rhode Island Democrat who sometimes advises Obama,said the president was grappling with harsh reality. He came into office with a very sound strategic vision, Reed said,and what has happened in the intervening months is,as with every president,he is beginning to understand how difficult it is to translate a strategic vision into operational reality.

A former adviser to the president said that Obamas relationship with the military was troubled and that he doesnt have a handle on it. The relationship will be further tested by years end when Obama evaluates his Afghanistan strategy in advance of his July deadline to begin pulling out. As one administration official put it,His commander in chief role is about to get tested again,and in a very dramatic way.

Running for president of a country at war,he had plenty to learn,even basics like military ceremonies and titles. His campaign recruited retired generals to advise him. But it still took time to adjust when he became president. The first time he walked into a room of generals,an aide recalled,he was surprised when they stood. Come on,guys,you dont have to do that, he said,according to the aide.

Perhaps his most important tutor has been Robert M Gates,the defense secretary appointed by Bush and the first kept on by a president of another party. Obama has relied on Gates as his ambassador to the military and deferred to him repeatedly. When Gates wanted to force out Gen. David D. McKiernan in May 2009 as commander in Afghanistan in favor of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal,Obama signed off.

Even on his signature campaign promise to pull out of Iraq,Obama compromised in the early days of his tenure to accommodate military concerns. Instead of the 16-month withdrawal of combat forces he promised,he accepted a 19-month timetable,and he agreed to leave behind 50,000 for now rather than a smaller force.

But as he grows in the job,Obama has shown more willingness to set aside Gatess advice. When General McChrystal got in trouble in June for comments by him and his staff in Rolling Stone magazine,Gates favoured reprimanding the commander. Obama decided instead to oust him and replace him with Gen. David H. Petraeus,who led the troop increase in Iraq. Although General McChrystal was described in Rolling Stone as calling Obama intimidated in meeting with military commanders early in his tenure,other attendees disagreed. He didnt look to me like he was one bit intimidated, Bruce O. Riedel,a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who led Obamas first Afghanistan review,said. He did look like someone who was taking it all in and a bit frustrated that what seemed for him to be simple questions he was getting complicated answers tolike how many troops do you really need?

Wars as a Distraction

With the economy in tatters and health care on his agenda,Obama was determined to keep the wars from becoming a major distraction. When he held a videoconference on Iraq on his first full day in office,officials recalled,he said: Guys,before you start,theres one thing I want to say to you and that is I do not want to screw this up.

But while he had given much thought to ending the war in Iraq,he had not spent as much time contemplating Afghanistan despite a campaign promise to send more troops. When he took office,he found an urgent request to reinforce the flagging effort. Warned by the generals that he could not wait to study the issue,he overruled Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and sent 21,000 more troops.

Reliant on Gates,Obama has made limited efforts to know his service chiefs or top commanders,and has visited the Pentagon only once,not counting a September 11 commemoration. He ended Bushs practice of weekly videoconferences with commanders,preferring to work through the chain of command and wary,aides said,of being drawn into managing the wars.

Last December,the president gave the military 30,000 more troops,but also a ticking clock. He would start pulling troops out in July,on the grounds that if there was not visible progress by then,it would mean the strategy was not working. Some saw that as a sop to his antiwar base. Others considered it his way of reasserting control over a military that knows how to outmanoeuver the White House.

Hungry for Information

Obama has made a point of seeking his own information,scribbling questions in memo margins and scouring the Internet. At one meeting,he surprised the generals by citing a study of post-traumatic stress disorder among soldiers serving repeat tours. He studies issues before he comes to the table, said General James Jones,the national security adviser.

Obama also confronts the consequences of the direct combat he has ordered. Last year,he flew to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to greet soldiers coffins. During a later meeting with advisers,Obama expressed irritation at doubters of his commitment. If I didnt think this was something worth doing, he said,one trip to Dover would be enough to cause me to bring every soldier home. OK?

In March,during his only trip to Afghanistan in office,he met a wounded soldier,maybe 19,who had lost three limbs. The moment stuck with him. Three months later,after ousting General McChrystal,Obama marched into the Situation Room and cited the teenage triple amputee as he reprimanded advisers for the infighting that had led to the generals forced resignation. We have a lot of kids on the ground acting like adults and we have a lot of adults in this room acting like kids, he lectured.