The Generals

Americans tend to remember the commanders of the Second World War warmly. Marshall, Eisenhower, Patton and Bradley are names that carry weight. The generals who led the wars that came afterward, among them Koster, Franks, Sanchez and Petraeus, have fared far worse in the historical record. Thomas E. Ricks asks why the verdict on American military leadership changed so sharply.

His answer centers on a growing distance between how senior officers perform and whether they are held to account for it. Ricks follows the careers of leaders who proved equal to their moment and of others who failed the soldiers under their command and, in the end, failed themselves. The portraits cover the high command across several generations of American conflict.

The book is more than a gallery of individual commanders. Through their stories, Ricks examines how values are passed down within the military, what it means to think strategically, and what separates an institution that learns from its mistakes from one that repeats them. It is a sweeping history of how the leadership of the U.S. armed forces declined, written by the author of Fiasco and Churchill and Orwell.