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American Military Command from World War II to Today
Penguin Press
November 2012
On Sale: October 30, 2012
576 pages
ISBN: 1594204047
EAN: 9781594204043
Kindle: B007V65TAM
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
From the #1 bestselling author of Fiasco and
The Gamble, an epic history of the decline of
American military leadership from World War II to
Iraq
History has been kind to the American
generals of World War II—Marshall, Eisenhower, Patton, and
Bradley—and less kind to the generals of the wars that
followed. In The Generals, Thomas E. Ricks sets out
to explain why that is. In part it is the story of a
widening gulf between performance and accountability. During
the Second World War, scores of American generals were
relieved of command simply for not being good enough. Today,
as one American colonel said bitterly during the Iraq War,
“As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers
far greater consequences than a general who loses a
war.” In The Generals we meet great leaders and
suspect ones, generals who rose to the occasion and those
who failed themselves and their soldiers. Marshall and
Eisenhower cast long shadows over this story, as does the
less familiar Marine General O. P. Smith, whose fighting
retreat from the Chinese onslaught into Korea in the winter
of 1950 snatched a kind of victory from the jaws of
annihilation.
But Korea also showed the first signs
of an army leadership culture that neither punished
mediocrity nor particularly rewarded daring. In the Vietnam
War, the problem grew worse until, finally, American
military leadership bottomed out. The My Lai massacre, Ricks
shows us, is the emblematic event of this dark chapter of
our history. In the wake of Vietnam a battle for the soul of
the U.S. Army was waged with impressive success. It became a
transformed institution, reinvigorated from the bottom up.
But if the body was highly toned, its head still suffered
from familiar problems, resulting in tactically savvy but
strategically obtuse leadership that would win battles but
end wars badly from the first Iraq War of 1990 through to
the present.
Ricks has made a close study of
America’s military leaders for three decades, and in his
hands this story resounds with larger meaning: about the
transmission of values, about strategic thinking, and about
the difference between an organization that learns and one
that fails.
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