The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B009YQ5UM4 | Format: PDF
The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today Description
History has been kinder to the American generals of World War II-Marshall, Eisenhower, Patton, and Bradley-than to the generals of the wars that followed. Is this merely nostalgia? Here,?Thomas E. Ricks answers the question definitively: No, it is not, in no small part because of a widening gulf between performance and accountability.
During World War II, scores of American generals were relieved of command simply for not being good enough.
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, but no single figure is more inspiring than Marine General O. P. Smith, whose fighting retreat from the Chinese onslaught into Korea in 1950 snatched a kind of victory from the jaws of annihilation. But Smith's courage and genius in the face of one of the grimmest scenarios the marines have ever faced only cast the shortcomings of the people who put him there in sharper relief.
If Korea showed the first signs of a culture that neither punished mediocrity nor particularly rewarded daring, the Vietnam War saw American military leadership bottom out. In the wake of Vietnam, a battle for the soul of the US 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.
Ricks has made a close study of America's military leaders for three decades, and in his hands this story resounds with larger meaning: the transmission of values, strategic thinking, the difference between an organization that learns and one that fails. Military history of the highest quality,?The Generals?is also essential reading for anyone with an interest in the difference between...
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 15 hours and 51 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.
- Audible.com Release Date: October 30, 2012
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B009YQ5UM4
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.
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.
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