The Generals
American Military Command from World War II to Today
Thomas E. Ricks - Author
ISBN 9781101595930 | 576 pages | 30 Oct 2012 | The Penguin Press
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An epic history of the decline of American military leadership—from the #1 bestselling author of Fiasco Thomas E. Ricks has made a close study of America’s military leaders for three decades, and in The Generals, he chronicles the widening gulf between performance and accountability among the top brass of the U.S. military. While history has been kind to the American generals of World War II—Marshall, Eisenhower, Patton, and Bradley—it has been less kind to others, such as Koster, Franks, Sanchez, and Petraeus. Ricks sets out to explain why that is. We meet great leaders and suspect ones, generals who rose to the occasion and generals who failed themselves and their soldiers. In Ricks’s 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. CONTENTS PROLOGUE: Captain William DePuy and the 90th Division in Normandy, summer 1944 PART I 1. General George C. Marshall: The leader 2. Dwight Eisenhower: How the Marshall system worked 3. George Patton: The specialist 4. Mark Clark: The man in the middle 5. “Terrible Terry” Allen: Conflict between Marshall and his protégés 6. Eisenhower manages Montgomery 7. Douglas MacArthur: The general as presidential aspirant 8. William Simpson: The Marshall system and the new model American general PART II 9. William Dean and Douglas MacArthur: Two generals self- destruct 10. Army generals fail at Chosin 11. O. P. Smith succeeds at Chosin 12. Ridgway turns the war around 13. MacArthur’s last stand 14. The organization man’s Army PART III 15. Maxwell Taylor: Architect of defeat 16. William Westmoreland: The organization man in command 17. William DePuy: World War II– style generalship in Vietnam 18. The collapse of generalship in the 1960s
19. Tet ’68: The end of Westmoreland and the turning point of the war 20. My Lai: General Koster’s cover-up and General Peers’s investigation 21. The end of a war, the end of an Army PART IV 22. DePuy’s great rebuilding 23. “How to teach judgment” PART V IRAQ AND THE HIDDEN COSTS OF REBUILDING 24. Colin Powell, Norman Schwarzkopf, and the empty triumph of the 1991 war 25. The ground war: Schwarzkopf vs. Frederick Franks 26. The post– Gulf War military 27. Tommy R. Franks: Two- time loser 28. Ricardo Sanchez: Over his head 29. George Casey: Trying but treading water 30. David Petraeus: An outlier moves in, then leaves EPILOGUE: Restoring American military leadership ACKNOWLEDGMENTS NOTES INDEX 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 |
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