The new head of the National Security Council will be a familiar face in Colorado Springs.

President Donald Trump on Monday named Army. Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster to the job. When McMaster was a colonel, he led a Fort Carson unit of more than 5,000 soldiers through one of the post’s successful deployments to Iraq.

Trump announced the pick Monday at his Palm Beach club and said McMaster is “a man of tremendous talent and tremendous experience,” the Associated Press reported.

McMaster has long been considered one of the Army’s top tacticians and now serves as a top deputy at Training and Doctrine Command where he works for another Fort Carson alumnus, Gen. David Perkins.

The new National Security Council boss rocketed to fame during the 1991 Persian Gulf War where he served as a captain in the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment. McMaster’s company-sized unit found itself amid a massive formation of Iraqi Republican Guard forces during the battle of 73 Easting.

But McMaster’s outnumbered soldiers out-matched their opponents – at the end of the battle, the Iraqis had lost 350 tanks and armored personnel carriers against two American vehicles damaged or destoyed. After the battle, McMaster appeared on a number of television programs and his role was memorialized in a Tom Clancy book.

A the time, McMaster was favorably compared to World War II legend Gen. George Patton. But it was more than a decade later in Colorado Springs where McMaster truly earned his status as a master of war.

He took over Fort Carson’s 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in 2004 and immediately began training its troops for a new kind of fight. Using tactics that would later be made famous during the 2007 surge in Baghdad, the Colorado Springs regiment learned how to clear Iraqi towns of insurgents, hold neighborhoods and build new local governments and police forces.

The training was put to the test in 2005 in the Iraqi city of Tal Afar, where the regiment’s troops spent months pacifying a hotbed of insurgents.

McMaster’s tactics were later applied all over Iraq as America dealt crippling blows to the insurgency in Baghdad, Ramadi and Fallujah.

After leaving command of the Colorado Springs regiment, he’s become one of the Army’s gurus for tactics and doctrine.

In a 2013 Colorado Springs visit, McMaster said that the military’s experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan are likely to be repeated by future enemies who watched American troops struggle against shadow insurgent groups.

“There are two ways to fight the U.S. military – asymmetrically or stupid,” he said. “Our enemies will interact with us in ways to evade our strength and attack what they see as our vulnerabilities.” Over the past year, he’s worked to review the Army’s training and equipment to better prepare the force for future fights.

Under his leadership, the Army is undergoing a major shift in how it plans to fight.

McMaster’s boss Gen. David Perkins praised new security council head in a Colorado Springs visit this month, saying McMaster is a driving force behind changes that will make soldiers more nimble and deadly on the battlefield.

His new job may be his toughest task to date.

McMaster replaced retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who lasted less than a month on the Security Council before his tenure was torpedoed by intrigue involving conversations with a Russian diplomat.

Trump fired Flynn, but has consistently blamed the Security Council shake-up on leakers who tipped the press to Flynn’s Russian dealings, reporters who covered the story, and his Democratic opponents.

“This Russian connection non-sense is merely an attempt to cover-up the many mistakes made in Hillary Clinton’s losing campaign,” Trump said on Twitter.

Trump brought four candidates for the position to Mar-a-Lago over the weekend for in-person interviews, McMaster among them.

McMaster called the appointment a “privilege.”

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The Associated Press contributed to this report