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The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today, by Thomas E. Ricks
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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.
- Sales Rank: #159183 in Books
- Brand: Historical Books Penguin Publishing
- Published on: 2012-10-30
- Released on: 2012-10-30
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 2.10" h x 6.10" w x 9.40" l, 1.98 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 576 pages
- war, world, surrender, postwar, military, civil,
- leadership, generalship, secret service, spies
- espionage, treason, civil, betrayal, awol,
- games, barracks, radio, radio silence, pearl harbor,
- japanese, korea, vietnam, veteran,
From Booklist
When George Marshall headed the U.S. Army in WWII, generals were frequently fired. They haven’t much been since, writes Ricks, a phenomenon he connects to the strategically unsatisfactory conclusions to subsequent wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Ricks was a military-affairs journalist, and his criticism of the Iraq invasion (Fiasco, 2006) echoes in this survey of the army’s top echelons since WWII. He diagnoses the top brass’ problem as being good at organizing combat operations but terrible at converting tactical victories into war-winning success. He points to several causes of the situation. One has been the slowness of generals trained in set-piece battles to adapt to insurgency warfare. Another has been, Ricks argues, the sidelining of nonconformist officers, outliers in personal habits or in their unorthodox positions in the army’s internal debates about strategic doctrine. Individual cases, such as those of Maxwell Taylor and William Westmoreland, stoke his negative appraisal of the army’s leadership, which he unifies by urging as a remedy a revival of Marshall’s methods of promoting and dismissing generals. Ricks’ prominence plus the publisher’s promotion should equal a high-profile title. --Gilbert Taylor
Review
A Washington Post 2012 Notable Work of Nonfiction
"Ricks shines, blending an impressive level of research with expert storytelling."
—The Weekly Standard
"[A] savvy study of leadership. Combining lucid historical analysis, acid-etched portraits of generals from 'troublesome blowhard' Douglas MacArthur to 'two-time loser' Tommy Franks, and shrewd postmortems of military failures and pointless slaughters such as My Lai, the author demonstrates how everything from strategic doctrine to personnel policies create a mediocre, rigid, morally derelict army leadership... Ricks presents an incisive, hard-hitting corrective to unthinking veneration of American military prowess."
—Publisher's Weekly (Starred Review)
"Informed readers, especially military buffs, will appreciate this provocative, blistering critique of a system where accountability appears to have gone missing - like the author's 2006 bestseller, Fiasco, this book is bound to cause heartburn in the Pentagon."
—Kirkus
"Entertaining, provocative and important."
—The Wilson Quarterly
“This is a brilliant book—deeply researched, very well-written and outspoken. Ricks pulls no punches in naming names as he cites serious failures of leadership, even as we were winning World War II, and failures that led to serious problems in later wars.� And he calls for rethinking the concept of generalship in the Army of the future.”
—William J. Perry, 19th U.S. Secretary of Defense
“Thomas E. Ricks has written a definitive and comprehensive story of American generalship from the battlefields of World War II to the recent war in Iraq. The Generals candidly reveals their triumphs and failures, and offers a prognosis of what can be done to ensure success by our future leaders in the volatile world of the twenty-first century.”
—Carlo D’Este, author of Patton: A Genius for War
“Tom Ricks has written another provocative and superbly researched book that addresses a critical issue, generalship. After each period of conflict in our history, the quality and performance of our senior military leaders comes under serious scrutiny. The Generals will be a definitive and controversial work that will spark the debate, once again, regarding how we make and choose our top military leaders.”
—Anthony C. Zinni, General USMC (Ret.)
“The Generals is insightful, well written and thought-provoking. Using General George C. Marshall as the gold standard, it is replete with examples of good and bad generalship in the postwar years. Too often a bureaucratic culture in those years failed to connect performance with consequences. This gave rise to many mediocre and poor senior leaders. Seldom have any of them ever been held accountable for their failures. This book justifiably calls for a return to the strict, demanding and successful Marshall prescription for generalship. It is a reminder that the lives of soldiers are more important than the careers of officers—and that winning wars is more important than either.”
—Bernard E. Trainor, Lt. Gen. USMC (Ret.); author of The Generals’ War
“The Generals rips up the definition of professionalism in which the US Army has clothed itself. Tom Ricks shows that it has lost the habit of sacking those who cannot meet the challenge of war, leaving it to Presidents to do so. His devastating analysis explains much that is wrong in US civil-military relations. America’s allies, who have looked to emulate too slavishly the world’s pre-eminent military power, should also take heed.”
—Hew Strachan, Chichele Professor of the History of War, University of Oxford
About the Author
Thomas E. Ricks�is an adviser on national security at the�New America Foundation, where he participates in its “Future of War” project. He was previously a fellow at the Center for a New American Security and is a contributing editor of Foreign Policy magazine, for which he writes the prizewinning blog The Best Defense. Ricks covered the U.S. military for The Washington Post from 2000 through 2008. Until the end of 1999 he had the same beat at The Wall Street Journal, where he was a reporter for seventeen years. A member of two Pulitzer Prize-winning teams, he covered U.S. military activities in Somalia, Haiti, Korea, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Kuwait, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He is the author of several books, including�The Gamble, and the number one New York Times bestseller Fiasco, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Most helpful customer reviews
184 of 194 people found the following review helpful.
Present day military leadership - career before country; rank without accountability
By Nathan Webster
As Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2003 to 2005 showed, author Thomas Ricks has no problem offering harsh criticism of those in power - and here, he presents a variety of lacerating critiques, but also strong compliments, of a variety of military leaders.
The overall thesis for this book is, I think, an accurate one - that generals of today are often not relieved for their failures of leadership or actions, and instead allowed to finish their careers at the expense of the nation's objectives.
Granted, Afghanistan has seen several commanders relieved in mid-stream, so there has been a move toward quicker changes...but, those changes (McChrystal, McKeirnan, others) were driven by civilian leadership, and Ricks argues that top military leaders should be more willing to fire their own high-ranking subordinates.
Generals like George Marshall and Eisenhower receive the bulk of the praise, for managing personalities and strategic missions during World War II, and being willing to make changes when need be. Many division commanders were fired during WWII, but were later given a second chance at command. Unlike 2012, a 'firing' was not a career death sentence, but an admission that an officer was not right for a certain job at a specific time.
Now, a battlefield relief is the end of a career. Ricks mentions Col. Joe Dowdy, a Marine colonel relieved during the 2003 Iraq invasion. Basically thrown out of Iraq, Dowdy didn't exactly retire in disgrace, but he certainly was not offered a second chance to redeem himself.
Part of this is the corporate culture, born in the 1950s, of the military that Ricks describes. Like all corporations, it became the interests of the leaders to protect their peers. Sure, junior officers could be relieved with no issues, but once a general was in the club, it was easier to let them ride out a career - as Ricks writes, LTG Ricardo Sanchez thought about relieving Abu Ghraib's failed BG Janis Karpinski, but decided not to, since her rotation was almost up. That's a terrible reason to let a leader remain.
The book covers almost 75 years - comprehensive, but maybe a little too much time. Some sections, especially Iraq in 2003, seem a bit rushed (though his other books cover that ground, and should be read anyway). Other sections, especially a long and very detailed account of the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir, seem to be a little too specific and maybe off the subject. It's a dramatic battle account, and it deals with massive failures by Gen. Edward Almond, but the tactical focus sometimes doesn't fit with the rest of the book. But, this very specific battlefield example allows Ricks to make a necessary good-bad comparison between Almond and the successful Marine Gen. O.P. Smith who was fighting on the reservoir's other side.
And, like the rest of the book, the Chosin narrative is very readable and always interesting.
There are a few surprises (depending on how well read you are) - Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf and Gen. Colin Powell don't come across very well for their hesitant and insecure plans during the Gulf War (which was no surprise to me); George Patton, a successful battlefield commander, played his role very well - with Ricks giving a lot of credit to Eisenhower's calming influence.
This is a good introduction to this topic, though its scope makes it a little too broad for deep knowledge. If you followed up with Eisenhower in War and Peace, Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam, and The Commanders, among many others, I think you'd flesh out a lot of the specific stories that Ricks can only give so much info about in these pages.
Finally, Gen. Tommy Franks receives much of the harshest criticism - and it's all completely valid. He is held up as the kind of tactically-oriented general that Ricks has little use for - yes, he can manage a battlefield, but has no concept of the larger strategic goals that a general should be aware of. So forecasting any Iraqi insurgency simply wasn't his problem, and the Tora Bora hideout of Bin Laden was not a tactically important goal. Gen. David Petraeus, on the other hand, is complimented for seeing the big, strategic picture that will develop over many years.
An excellent book - not THE definitive resource, maybe, but with the history and personalities involved (I didn't even mention Westmoreland or MacArthur!) how can it be?
UPDATE: I'm just finishing The Liberator: One World War II Soldier's 500-Day Odyssey from the Beaches of Sicily to the Gates of Dachau, in which Gen. Mark Clark comes across very badly. Clark's failures are mentioned here, certainly, but not in that much depth - so The Liberator would be another good additional resource.
Full disclosure: I read a complimentary review copy (and am briefly cited and indexed in The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008 for my own Iraq reporting).
118 of 131 people found the following review helpful.
An important work, low on breadth
By Alex
I anxiously awaited this book. Reading critical analysis of the performance of General Officers is an interest of mine. There simply isn't enough of it going on. There are far too few journalists out there doing this well and Tom Ricks is one of those.
That being said, I think this book merely has but one or two fully developed arguments: We should fire Generals that don't perform and that the Army only wants one type of leader and the promotion system suppresses the outliers. We don't fire enough because of bureacracy and careerism, and the system is favored towards cookie cutter officers also because that's what is best for bureaucracy and careerism. This book focuses on the Army. Other services have had critical failures since World War II, but the mission of the Army is to fight and win the nation's wars, so it's completely fair that the Army bears the brunt of the scrutiny and the criticism.
This book left me wondering several things. Is it the fault of the Generals that they are given missions that they are poorly suited to accomplish? Even with some inventive, outside the box thinking, it's difficult to see a path to victory if victory means a stable and viable Iraq and Afghanistan.
For me, this work didn't get at the root cause of the author's main criticism. The truth is that wars since World War II have been largely elective. Careerism in the Officer Corps is nothing new. In order for true performance to trump careerism, the right conditions have to be in place. In military affairs, those conditions most often are a war in which the nation's fate rests in the outcome. That would explain why the political and military leadership were so eager to fire non performers during World War II and elevate the performers at an accelerated rate. Go back even further; Lincoln would seemingly fire Generals over breakfast, he had no compunction doing so because the fate of the Union far exceeded the careerism of the Officer Corps.
For me, that is the true lesson and one I wish Ricks hammered away at a little more. We should only expend blood and treasure when it is really worth it. The Generals almost never say no to a mission. When we are engaged in "elective" war, we should grade the General's performance as if the fate of the nation depended upon it. Lest we forget even when it doesn't, the fate of the people serving underneath him do.
84 of 99 people found the following review helpful.
Scrupulous
By whodunit
Tom Ricks is a scrupulously honest, brutally candid assessor of the American military and its civilian bosses in war and between wars. He has been for decades, and at the highest professional levels. Fiasco, his courageously entitled coverage of the Iraq War leadership, has made him a hero to those who see the absolute requirement to recalibrate the system of America's war following a decade of that aimless adventure.
In The Generals, Ricks has cast a wider, deeper net that allows readers to follow the ebb and flow of high-level U.S. Army leaders through several system resets from World War II to our most recent examples. It's as if he had asked himself, after writing Fiasco: What tradition carried this bunch to the head of the class?
Beginning with George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower--the exemplars of U.S. Army top-level commanders in living memory--Ricks bends to the task in proven Ricksian style: straight from the shoulder, with deeply drawn examples, in blunt form and no-nonsense prose. In case after case--from the celebrated to the concealed--Ricks fires away with bouquets for the righteous and body blows for the malfeasant. His chapter on the My Lai cover-up and investigation, for example, will be a classic in telling it like it is--as, indeed, is the entire text.
Above all, The Generals understands the stakes in pointing out perpetual human flaws; it more than balances negative examples by showcasing one heroic truth-teller after another. At heart, it is a serious and deep study of all the things the army and its generations of rising stars have learned over seventy years, as well as what they forgot, what they relearned, what they forgot again, and what they must and will relearn.
This book is high art. It sizzles.
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