Bolten continues: “I told the president I thought his apparatus was not serving him as well as it should, because he wasn’t being given alternatives. I rarely intervened in national security meetings, but I viewed it as my job as chief of staff to be the one to say, ‘Why aren’t you giving the president better options? Why aren’t you letting him decide, other than having to go along with the military strategy as it’s presented to him? The president was elected to make these decisions.’ And the product of that work was the surge.”
