The president’s penchant “to delegate blame when things go wrong” is the negative flip side of the Pentagon’s freedom, said Hal Brands, a defense official in the Obama administration and now a senior analyst at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. “In some ways, that leads to chaos,” Mr. Brands said. “I am sure that is creating frustration, and not just in DOD.” Policy planners inside the Pentagon are keeping a wary eye on their social media accounts for fear of being “undercut by the next tweet from the White House,” he said. In the end, the Defense Department “may ultimately not be happy with what they get from this administration,” he said. “When things go wrong, this is not a president who will say, ‘The buck stops here.’”
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