Review by Choice Review
Ricks (Center for a New American Security) begins his story contemplating WW II battlefields in Sicily. Given how many commanders were relieved during that war, Ricks ponders, "Why do we treat our generals differently today, and what does that mean for the conduct of our wars?" His book is the answer to these questions. The author deftly weaves a well-researched history of Army command from WW II through Korea and Vietnam to the most recent conflicts in the Middle East. Ricks delivers a well-supported argument that the modern Army fails to hold its leaders accountable and this has been costly to the US. The fundamental flaw in the book is that Ricks's gold standard is a total war with millions of Americans in arms and the nation's popular and political will united. In the postnuclear age of limited wars, the objectives, limitations, and politics are greater in strategic complexity if not in scale than those faced by Eisenhower and Marshall. Still, Ricks's style makes for a good read, and his evidence is convincing. Today's generals would do well to study the generals of the past. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. J. Tucci School of Advanced Air and Space Studies
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
GEN. George C. Marshall, the United States Army's steely chief of staff during World War II, was ruthless in relieving subordinates who didn't measure up to his exacting standards. Between the time he assumed office in September 1939 and America's entry into the war on Dec. 8, 1941, he cashiered at least 600 officers - and he wasn't done yet Numerous others, including generals, would lose their jobs when they didn't perform well enough in the caldron of combat. As the veteran military correspondent Thomas E. Ricks notes in his new book, "The Generals," "Sixteen Army division commanders were relieved for cause, out of a total of 155 officers who commanded Army divisions in combat during the war. At least five corps commanders also were relieved for cause." In the place of the duds that he cleared out, Marshall promoted promising young men like Dwight Eisenhower, a colonel until September 1941, who the following year would be named a three-star general and commander in chief of Allied forces in North Africa. That's not the way the system works today. Generals still get relieved - the fate suffered by, among others, the commander of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the surgeon general of the Army after a scandal was uncovered in 2007 - but usually only when their political masters intervene. Seldom are Army officers cashiered anymore by their military superiors and especially not for mere failure to perform at the highest level in wartime. Normally it takes a sexual or other scandal to bring down a senior officer. "As matters stand now," Paul Yingling, then a lieutenant colonel, wrote in a celebrated 2007 article, "a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war." The flip side of the current system is that promotion even for the most successful combat leaders occurs at a glacial pace: Just as there is scant penalty for failure, there is also little short-term promise of reward for outstanding leadership. No one rockets to the top the way Eisenhower did. How did the Army change so dramatically in the past 60-plus years and what are the consequences for the future of American military power? Those are the questions that Ricks sets out to answer. Readers of his 2006 best seller on the Iraq war, "Fiasco," and of his blog, The Best Defense, know that he has strong opinions he does not try to hide. He also has a deep wellspring of knowledge about both military policy and military history. That combination of conviction and erudition allows him to deliver an entertaining and enlightening jeremiadthat should - but, alas, most likely wont - cause a rethinking of existing personnel policies. Ricks spends much of his book tracing the evolution of prevailing attitudes toward the promotion and relief of generals from the 1940s to the present day. Along the way he delivers a good institutional history of the post-World War II Army, concentrating not only on failed leaders like Maxwell Taylor, one of the architects of defeat in Vietnam, and Tommy Franks, one of the architects of near defeat in Iraq, but also on generals who were more successful, like William DePuy, who helped rebuild the Army after Vietnam. One of Ricks's strengths is that his judgments are nuanced - he recognizes that while DePuy was an overly conventional and rigid division commander in Vietnam, he was a brilliant innovator in the 1970s as the first head of the Army's Training and Doctrine Command. Likewise, while crediting DePuy with helping to create the tactically proficient army that liberated Kuwait in 1991, Ricks criticizes him and his acolytes for neglecting counterinsurgency doctrine and broader issues of strategy. That second failure, he argues, helps account for the Army's inability to translate tactical success in Iraq, in both 1991 and 2003, into a lasting strategic victory. One of the lesser-known aspects of the World War II system - one that I was not familiar with until reading "The Generals" - is that while Marshall was tough on underperformers, he was also willing to give them a second chance. Ricks notes that "at least five Army generals of World War II - Orlando Ward, Terry Allen, Leroy Watson, Albert Brown and, in the South Pacific, Frederick Irving - were removed from combat command and later given another division to lead in combat." Others were reassigned to training commands or other responsibilities. Marshall saw no disgrace in reassignment; some men simply couldn't hack it in combat, at least not at first, but that did not mean they could not be valuable in the future. Today, by contrast, while relief is rare, it is usually final. Generals who lose their jobs for cause almost always retire. (Gen. George Casey, who, like William Westmoreland, became the Army chief of staff after presiding over a losing war effort, is a rare exception.) This points to a subtle but important change in military attitudes over the years. "While in World War II," Ricks writes, "the firing of a general was seen as a sign that the system was working as planned, now, in the rare instances when it does occur, it tends to be seen, especially inside the Army, as a sign that the system somehow has failed." Thus, rather than admit institutional failure, the Army hierarchy usually prefers to keep a manifestly mediocre or even incompetent commander in his or her post on the theory that the officer will rotate out anyway before long. (Command tours are normally two years, with no more than a year typically spent in combat.) One of the more notorious recent examples, oddly not cited by Ricks, is Col. Harry D. Tunnell IV, who for a while was allowed to remain in command of a Stryker brigade in southern Afghanistan despite his ostentatious rejection of standard counterinsurgency doctrine, which emphasizes winning the trust of the population, in favor of a more brutal, and less effective, search-and-destroy "antiguerrilla" approach. Rogue soldiers from his brigade were later convicted of having formed a "kill team" that murdered unarmed civilians and collected their body parts as trophies. RICKS ends with some suggested reforms that could help to deal with problematic commanders in the future - first and foremost to reinstate Marshall's "policy of swift relief, with the option of forgiveness." Unfortunately, while personnel policies are among the most important decisions made by the Pentagon, it remains notoriously resistant to change, especially change pushed by outsiders. To effect the kind of transformation Ricks would like to see would probably require a chief of staff with the stature and certitude of a George C. Marshall. Even that may not be enough. It may take a profound crisis like a world war to shake the military bureaucracy out of its torpor; smaller wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan have not been pressing enough to transform ossified promotion and demotion practices. Needless to say, the toll exacted by any conflict, much less a major one, far outweighs any beneficial impact it might have on personnel policies. Gen. George C. Marshall, seated at center, with members of his general staff, November 1941. Max Boot is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow in national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of the forthcoming "Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare From Ancient Times to the Present."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 9, 2012]
Review by Booklist Review
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.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Generations of inept, thoughtless, and unaccountable generals have authored disaster, according to this savvy study of leadership in the U. S. Army. Veteran defense journalist and bestselling author Ricks (Fiasco) contrasts the army of WWII, in which unsuccessful generals were often relieved of command, with later eras, in which officers were untouchable despite epic failures (few generals were relieved during the Iraq War, he notes). Nowadays, Ricks contends, citing an officer in Iraq, a private who loses his rifle, is punished more than a general who lost his part of a war." 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's preoccupation is America's difficulty coping with guerilla wars from Vietnam to Iraq, and the flip side of his critique of bad leadership is a belief that good officers with innovative, politically adroit counter-insurgency tactics might have won those conflicts. His faith in the ability of great generalship to redeem any misadventure can sometimes seem naive. Still, Ricks presents an incisive, hard-hitting corrective to unthinking veneration of American military prowess. Agent: Andrew Wylie. (Oct. 30) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Foreign Policy contributing editor Ricks (The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 20062008, 2009, etc.) assesses the state of generalship in the U.S. Army and finds it wanting. During World War II, Gen. George Marshall designed a template for identifying leaders and selecting generals, rapidly promoting those who met the standard and readily relieving underperformers. For Marshall, firing a general was part of the natural order, a necessary tool of personnel management in the notoriously difficult business of battlefield success. How is it, asks the author, that we've fallen away from this strict standard over the past 75 years? After acknowledging the occasional flaw in the Marshall system and identifying the grand exception, Douglas MacArthur, Ricks turns to the Korean War, where only O.P. Smith and Matthew Ridgeway met the Marshall standard and prevented disaster. Post-Korea, senior officers acted "less like stewards of their profession, answerable to the public, and more like keepers of a closed guild, answerable mainly to each other." In Vietnam, the system collapsed entirely, with rotation, ticket-punching and micromanagement the norms. Relieving a general came to be seen as a system failure. From this low point--Ricks recites the manifold sins of Maxwell Taylor, Paul Harkins and William Westmoreland--the Army retooled, improving training, doctrine and weaponry, but leaving its concept of generalship untouched. As the author turns to our recent wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan, none of Colin Powell, Norman Schwarzkopf, Tommy Franks, Ricardo Sanchez, or George Casey will much appreciate what Ricks has to say about continuing deficiencies in military leadership. Only David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno emerge unscathed. 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.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
