The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today

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.

In 2006, Thomas Ricks published his Fiasco about the Iraqi War. This eponymous book singled out General Ray Ordierno for special criticism. To Ricks' mind, Ordierno wasn't fit to wear the uniform of a soldier, let alone the stars of a general. Unfortunately for Mr. Ricks, his book came out just as the surge was beginning. And the hero of the surge was. . . Ray Ordierno!

Lacking the grace to admit a mistake, but, unlike most journalists, having enough intelligence to recognize a game changer, Mr. Ricks, instead of rewriting history chose to rewrite General Ordierno. As Mr. Ricks would have it, the good General somehow acquired a set of brass balls and 100 points of IQ solely because his son had become a casualty in Iraq.

More about what this says about Mr. Ricks below, but it also illustrates the central problem of Mr. Ricks' new book which argues that the Army needs to fire more generals in order to perform better. A book on this subject should ask a number of questions and make an attempt at answering them:

What makes a bad general? If it is an initial loss, then most of the great generals in history would have been consigned to the ash heap long before they proved themselves.
How long should his superiors allow a new general to find himself before he is booted?
What is the effect of firing on troop morale?
When is the appropriate time to fire him?

Mr. Ricks doesn't bother to ask these or dozens of other questions. Instead he fills his book with 550 pages of potted history, making this work a thick heavy dull bumper sticker saying "Fire Bad Generals!" The text is neither well written nor well thought out. If you have read one book on modern American military history, you will find nothing new here. And I daresay that if you have read two books on modern American military history, you could write a much better book.

Mr. Ricks' problem, I think, is that he is a journalist in the US and not in the UK. UK journalists are entitled to take a stand in their writing, but the trick is that the good media outlets require them to accurately portray the view of the other side and to provide counter arguments. This is ideal training for an historian or policy maker which is why British journalists are often the most successful historians and politicians.

By contrast, the model for American journalists is objectivity, an attempt to find the "Truth" behind opposing viewpoints. At least since the days of Montaigne, objectivity has been recognized as a perilous goal, easily corrupted into hiding ones bias behind a pseudo-judicial mien. It is all too easy to write a polemic and pretend that it is balanced. That is why quality journalism in the UK is thriving while it is all but dead here in the United States.

Any professor teaching historical writing could very successfully assign his class to apply David Hackett Fischer's Historical Fallacies to what passes as "history" in Mr. Ricks' book. The text is full of examples of the misleading uses of historical fact the Prof. Fischer documents so well. To mention just a few items of his flawed account:

GEORGE MARSHALL:
It does not detract from General Marshall's accomplishments to point out his serious flaws. He is hardly the gold standard of personnel decisions as Mr. Ricks would have it. He did not choose "aggressive" generals, he tended to choose men he knew as good professors or good students at the Infantry school and was apparently oblivious to the fact that the skill set required for success in a classroom is hardly the skill set for success in a battlefield. Marshall men were honest, decent men, often dull and unable to adapt. For every Ridgeway (whom Marshall had slated for a staff position until Ridgeway raised a fuss), there were three or four generals like Clark or Hodges. And some of them, such as Stilwell, were absolute disasters. D. Clayton James' far superior A Time for Giants is a far better guide to the personnel choices of World War II than Mr. Ricks is.

And once you got to a senior command position, no amount of blundering would get Marshall to send you down to the minors. Lewis Brereton was in a command position for four of the most egregious failures of aerial operations during the war and after each blunder was just moved to another position of higher responsibility to commit a new disaster. Three times in the last year of the war, Marshall men allowed hundreds of thousands of Nazi troops to escape encirclement to fight another day. And Carlo d'Este's account of Bradley and Hodges at the beginning of the Battle of the Bulge would send shivers down the back of any parent who had committed their son to their command.

Meanwhile, many potentially great soldiers were restricted to lower ranks by Marshall's whims. James Van Fleet, for instance, a truly great general, remained a lieutenant colonel for most of the war because Marshall constantly rejected the recommendations of Van Fleet's superiors to raise him to high command (when his success in actual combat in the summer of 1944 made it impossible for him to be ignored, he began his meteoric rise, ending the war as a corps commander, before really making a name for himself in the postwar army).

Most of the firings which Marshall made were part of the purge of the National Guard and Reserves to make the Army run by professionals, a major shift from earlier US history in which politics played an important role in choosing generals. Mr. Ricks alludes to this without recognizing its significance. It is one thing to oust a class of generals in order to change the make-up of the military and another to punish poor performance across the board.

Nor did Marshall speak truth to power as Mr. Ricks suggests. Joel Davidson's far superior "The Unsinkable Fleet" shows how an agressive Admiral King and a Navy-centric FDR ran circles around the polite gentleman George Catlett Marshall which resulted in a military force which had only half the troops Marshall himself thought optimal and a Navy several multiples larger than it ever needed to be. This resulted in a longer war and wasted resources. Time is a crucial element in warfare - never more so than in World War II when half of all the Holocaust victims lost their lives in the last twelve months of the war - and that was never something that Marshall seemed to recognize.

CHOSIN RESERVOIR:
In what Mr. Ricks apparently believes is a ideal example of the Army's failures, he juxtaposes the destruction of an Army unit on the east side of the Chosin Reservoir with the heroic retreat of the Marines on the west side of the Reservoir, but by the eliding over inconvenient facts or ignoring them altogether, he just proves himself to be unreliable. The Marines had ten times as many troops as the Army did and at a crucial point in the battle, the Chinese redirected the main thrust of their forces against the Army forces, allowing the Marines to retreat. Finally, the Marine air support gave top priority to protecting the Marines instead of the Army. This last point was one of the main reasons that the Army fought for, and won, the right to its own internal air support role after the war. To this day, the Air Force is run by fighter jocks and bomber pilots and the tactical support mission assigned to it is consistently left behind. It is surprising that Mr. Ricks ignores this or, worse, is ignorant of it.

MACARTHUR:
It is therefore not surprising that Mr. Ricks misses the importance of MacArthur's relief altogether. Lord knows that Harry Truman had plenty of reasons to fire him, beginning with his age, but by choosing to fire him because he honestly answered a question from an important congressman has had repercussions on the military to this day. Truman's firing of MacArthur was hardly the triumph of civilian leadership over military leadership as many would have it (though, to be fair, not Mr. Ricks), but rather the triumph of the executive over the legislative branches of government. As H.R. MacMaster's far superior study of Vietnam era military leadership, Dereliction of Duty, demonstrated, by sending the message to the military that they are answerable only to the President, the Joint Staff allowed their views to be misrepresented by the Johnson Administration, sowing the seeds for at least part of the failure of the modern military.

I could go on, but it would require another book to challenge The Generals. Mr. Ricks' heart is in the right place as he tries to decide why all American military action since World War II has been so unsatisfactory, but The Generals only inadvertently provides an answer. Mr. Ricks knows more about the military than anyone else at The Washigton Post, more, I would venture than anyone else in the Washington Press Corps and maybe even anyone in Washington DC outside of the Pentagon. But it is not enough.

There appear to be gaps in his basic knowledge. He argues that senior generals need to be replaced by even more senior generals or the politicians will do it instead, and he cites theater commanders from MacArthur to Westmoreland who should have been relieved. But Mr. Ricks seems ignorant of the fact that, for much of the period he covers, the Joint Staff had no power to fire such senior generals, that theater commanders were appointed by the President and could only be relieved by the President. There were no senior generals to fire them.

Mr. Ricks also seems to think that generals with advanced university degrees are somehow distrusted by their colleagues, but the military puts great emphasis on higher education and the officer corps has a greater percentage of advanced degrees than most professions, so where is the source of this distrust?

And Mr. Ricks argues that generals who have underperformed should be rotated elsewhere and given a second chance. But where? Congress has provided specific slots for each general it authorizes. If you give a general a second chance, do you fire a performing general to make room for the underperforming general? And if Mr. Ricks would instead suggest that Congress provide a sort of cold storage for generals, does he seriously think that with serious and crippling budget cuts in the wind, the Army will really want to cut more bone and muscle to authorize the expenditures that would be needed?

There is also in this book a lack of empathy, probably the greatest failure of the form of intelligence promulgated by America's educational system. The key ingredient of true intelligence is not a memory to regurgitate facts. It is not the ability to twist those facts to suit your own political agenda. Mr. Ricks has those aspects of intellectual firepower at his fingertips. But to have something truly valuable to add, he needed ability to place himself in someone else's shoes and examine the world from a different viewpoint. This wouldn't require him to change his views, necessarily, but it would have grounded this book to reality, not the world as he would like it to be. Mr. Ricks is utterly incapable of this.

As noted by superior thinkers like Christopher Lasch, the elites of America have moved away from mainstream America and the idea of military service has become an alien concept to those who have the power to put American boys and girls into harm's way. Mr. Ricks, who comes from the ruling elite in America, seems to study the American military like a scientist would study bacilli under a microscope. He is ignorant, for instance, that his "rewrite" of General Odierno that I mentioned above, is a deeper, more unforgivable slander of a military man than a mere allegation of incompetence. To a soldier, it is a gross and unforgivable insult to suggest that he favors his own flesh and blood to those entrusted to him by others. To Mr. Ricks, it seemed to be a legitmate way to excuse his own initial blunder of General Odierno's abilities.

And Mr. Ricks also always has had an irrational fixation on a potential coup by American military leaders. He wrote a (not very good) novel about it ten years ago and here and there in The Generals is a hint that he has not let the idea go. Considering the emphasis the military places on allegiance to the Constitution, one wonders where Mr. Ricks would get such a bug in his ear, outside of Hollywood and similar ignoramuses who run popular culture these days. Like Mr. Ricks, I have never had the honor of serving in the American military, but, as the brother of a career Army officer who graduated from West Point and Harvard University and as someone who spent a great deal of time working with the military during my one year tour of duty in Afghanistan with the State Department, I have met my share of military officers and I doubt very much that they would be less open with me than they would to a newspaper reporter. The most political statement that a senior officer ever made to me was a Marine Major General back in the '90s who told me that he was just as wary of pro-military jingoists as he was of anti-military pacifists. That is hardly a rallying cry for a coup d'etat.

Lord knows that we have to maintain a superior roster of military leaders - it is the only profession, licit or illicit, where the best and most successful can end their day responsible for the deaths of thousands of their subordinates and it is one of the few professions where the incompetence of one person at the top can result in the end of civilization. But the signal failure of those at the top of the foodchain of American culture to participate in military issues, and the inability of journalists and others to provide an adequate bridge between those who guard us while we sleep and those of us who, well, ARE asleep, is the true failure of American society today. And the sole contribution of The Generals is to prove this point.

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.

Tom Ricks' book is a history of American generalship from George Marshall through today, and modern generals do not fare well in this unflinching military history. Where Marshall was willing to "speak truth to power", many generals today appear more interested in protecting their careers. The only post WWII generals who make it through Ricks' book unscathed are Matthew Ridgeway, David Petraeus and Ray Odierno.

Ricks also describes how modern civilian leadership, from John Kennedy forward, has been lacking. Too many political leaders prefer generals who will rubber stamp their plans over generals who are willing to speak plainly. The section where Ricks describes a 1965 meeting between a foul-mouth & abusive LBJ and his Joint Chiefs is amazing.

Central to Ricks' critique of our current military leaders is that while they are well trained in tactics, they have little strategic vision. They are not trained in critical thinking - they can win battles but not wars. Military leadership, in Ricks' view, has traded leadership skills for management expertise.

Ricks has written an honest, critical and comprehensive look at the history of military leadership over the past 70 years. Thoughtful and eminently readable, this is a book that should provoke a discussion about military leadership that our country needs to have.

This book has a lot of 5 Star ratings. Wonder if any of the raters know anything at all about the military or military history? I am no expert, but I know enough to know that this book is mis-titled. it should be titled, "Some of my opinions about good and bad Generals, mostly Army,..but I'll throw in two Marine that I like, and none from the Air Force. "Subtitled: " We need to fire more generals and I should be the guy who decides which General gets fired, by whom, and when". But that probably wouldn't become a best seller. This book can be summarized in a nutshell...Generals fired subordinate general officers a lot more in WWII that they do now...and we should go back to firing generals much more often. And we should fire the field grade officers more often, too. And why not the company grade officers as well?". This book purports to be a study of the effectiveness of Generals since WWI, a challenging topic made simpler by eliminating reference to all but two Marine Corp Generals, ALL Air Force generals, and by eliminating any reference at all to the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) or the generals who have led it. USSOCOM was established more than 30 years ago as a joint command to remedy many of the problems of combat ineffectiveness that are (very briefly) referred to in the book. Some of the very best Army Generals have commanded USSOCOM, including Generals Stiner, Brown, and Schoomaker and Air Force General Holland. Remarkably, USSOCOM and the Generals who who have led it or served in it are not mentioned anywhere. I recall that the term "special operations" was used once in the book, and only in passing...and not one SOCOM General was mentioned. Worse, while the author criticizes several Army Chiefs of Staff, and names many of them, he does not even mention the fact that a former SOCOM commander, General Pete Schoomaker, was called out of retirement to become Army COS to deal with many of the transformational issues that the author accuses the DOD and the Army of ignoring. Why not mention these things in a book with a title that clearly intends to bill itself as an authoritative review of the perfomance of General officers, and the system they have lived in, for the past 60 years? I'm sure that, as the author argues, there are in our armed services martinet officers, ineffective combat leaders, and "politics" affecting advancement to the General officer level. And I agree that the system of "ticket punching" to get to the next higher level of command may create a tendency to concentrate too much on "officer career development" and too little on the accomplishment of the mission to which the officer is assigned. And I agree that rapid and constant turnover within units can have deleterious effects on mission performance. This book isn't what it purports to be. It is not an unbiased study of the successes and failures of General officers during the past 60 years. It's one man's opinion, clearly affected by his politics, and not worthy of a place in my library.

Well, I've retired now from the military, but, not from reading. And I believe I could have summed up the romantic notions on the glorified and much storied greats of yore, as well as most, and I could have found more of their raw fire. The rest shows the author's truncated, wannabe Walter Cronkite nature. Not destined to be one of the greats, with this one.... The sweeping dismissive attitude about the true costs and true challenges and where the real buck stops and when, is a concept that I don't believe the author will ever be able to do more with than put petty words to paper. Perhaps never really gather the true meaning and sacrifice. The problem isn't the General, sir. It's the demands of dainty, wimpy, progressive, liberals like the author's class. The last 40 years of American Liberalism and the progressively Sensitive Society has demanded that only the least noticeable, most politically correct, politically pandering officers get promoted to the top-most command positions in today's military. Now this author wants to get smugly high-handed and critique the very generals he so meticulously created? It was elitists of his ilk who insisted on sending every Commissioned and Non-Commissioned officer through level after level of political correctness, Quality Assurance, social experiment, Sensitivity Training of every manner and sort. Yes, Tom, YOU wanted these types of men as generals, now you skewer them. Well Bravo. I've seen you in your interviews, you may think that Americans don't care at all about the loss of life of every American, in uniform or as contractors in every dangerous part of the world where they work, but, most of us do. What I don't care much about is your skills as an author, or should I say, as what amounts to a film critic, with the ability to cross reference anecdotes from wikipedia about the great American Commanders of our modern time. I'm sorry I wasted my money and time on this.

Ricks compares the generalship of WWII to our later wars. Not surprisingly, he finds recent examples lacking. While it is true that rampant careerism has likely weakened leadership in some respects, he ignores the far bigger issue.

America won WWII decisively because it was a TOTAL WAR where America displayed a willingness to do whatever it takes to win - including dropping the atomic bombs, raise a draft, ration goods, etc. WWII was also a conventional war where superiority in material strength was paramount. I'd imagine that our current leaders would have done quite well if facing a WWII style opponent - secure in the knowledge that a fully mobilized America was behind them.

Every single war since WWII was either a limited war, unconventional war, or both. So Ricks is comparing apples and oranges. WWII was a lot simpler than the wars we have today - kill enough men, shoot down enough planes, knock out enough tanks, sink enough ships and you win.

I don't even buy his basic premise that the WWII leadership was so great. Remember Pearl Harbor? Savo Island? Kasserine Pass? American forces performed in very poor fashion in the opening stages of WWII. While a general lack of preparedness was the main factor, our combat leadership wasn't so great either.

Just imagine the media frenzy if we had a Kasserine Pass today. In contrast - at a tactical level our forces perform superbly almost every time in the modern era. We have had many military failures in recent times, but political factors have much more to do with this than any leadership deficiency on the part of our senior officers.

Ricks had some good works (I loved Making the Corps), but he went WAY overboard with this one.

Tom Ricks was interviewed this morning on Fox News and I would say his objectivity is seriously in question. The interviewer was Jon Scott who graciously plugged Ricks latest book The Generals with kind words. Soon, however, Ricks was denouncing Fox as an arm of the Republican party for having given too much coverage to the Benghazi attack. Ricks explained that .... paraphrasing ... "this sort of thing happens all the time." Now, even I know that Al Qaeda affiliated militias don't attack consulates and kill ambassadors "all the time." I just don't know if I trust this guy's judgement enough to think he can second guess generals.

Thomas Ricks' latest work The Generals follows his previous works "Fiasco" and "The Gamble". Both prior publications set the stage for this current work. Ricks poses this central question - why do senior ranking Army officers never face relief for unsatisfactory performance? Ricks then starts a long and complex study of senior Army officers begining with the ascent of General George C. Marshall as Chief of Staff in 1939. Ricks is intimately familiar with today's military forces and possess a depth of institutional knowledge that very few current journalists possess. (Robert Kaplan is probably the sole exception.) Ricks, a journalist by training and not a professional historian, has superb writing and analytical skills. This 550+ page tome a fast read. I was able to blaze through all 550+ pages in three nights because of Ricks fast-paced and fluid writing style. Ricks is, without doubt, a proficient and interesting professional writer.

Ricks begins to answer his own rhetorical question by an in-depth study of the character and composition of the legendary George C. Marshall. The Generals then flows in a fast-paced manner from WWII to Korea where, he states, the seeds of the Army's near destruction in Vietnam were sown by an officer management system that modeled itself on 'corporate America.' Then Ricks turns to the mid-1950's 'Pentomic Division' and later to the 'flexible response' of the early Kennedy administration. From that point on, the institutional mis-management of the U.S. Army by the Johnson administration is fully exposed. (H.R. McMaster's "Dereliction of Duty" is frequently cited by Ricks as the best work on that subject, and I would tend to agree. However, after reading Sorley's biography of General Harold K. Johnson - "Honorable Warrior" - Johnson was the U.S. Army Chief of Staff 1964-1968 - it may be that McMaster's somewhat harsh criticism of General Johnson is misplaced. It might also be noted that McMaster wrote his well-known publication as a major; now he is a major general. His criticism of senior level staff officers in "Dereliction of Duty" may reflect the brash assessment of mid-grade officer not facing the stress and strain of senior command as was Harold Johnson in 1964-68.)

In Ricks assessment, no current or recent past general grade officer measures up to the person of George C. Marshall. That is frequent refrain throughout the book. Whether that assessment is accurate or not is debatable. I can speak with some small degree of authority as a product of the post-Vietnam Army that conformity and close-minded submission to the commander's higher intent was expected of all officers of that era. One "bad" officer efficiency report (being rated as "meets standards" was enough) was sufficient in itself to end one's career. Ricks is openly contemptuous of General Tommy Franks. Although I do not know General Franks, I expect that Franks was a product of the post-Vietnam era where conformity and leading the cheer for the current commander was the pathway to success.

Ricks is openly critical of the lack of honest, open thinking in mid to upper grade Army officers. The fact is that 'non-conformity' is generally a career killer. Let's posit that you are a mid-grade major approaching next year's promotion board. When in any promotion cycle only one out of three lieutenant colonels will be advanced to colonel and only one out of five colonels advance to brigadier general, then the mathematical chances of success - general officer rank - is only one in fifteen for the newly promoted lieutenant colonel. It makes one cautious about advocating a course of action that does not fit the current commander's scheme of operations. Ricks suggests toward the end of the book that a "probationary" work period be instituted for all command positions from platoon leader through four star level. If the commander proves unsatisfactory, then relieve that person for cause and find that individual a staff or installation position where his or her skills can be utilized. General George C. Marshall had the luxuary of doing just that because the training base requirements and the communications zone of WWII required a large number of non-combatant general grade officers; today's Army does not have that same TO&E. If anything, in the next go-around of force reductions, there will be fewer general rank positions open for any individual.

I found Thomas Ricks newest work The Generals to be a fascinating, well-written and well-researched book. It has a sort of cross-over effect between military history, operational art, institutional management, and geo-strategic analysis. A really excellent publication and a valuable addition to the library!

Ricks hammers away at a single point. It is good one but he overstates his case a bit. He is absolutely right about his admiration for George Marshall and his disdain for Mark Clark, Tommy Franks and Ricardo Sanchez. Not much new here. Ricks's greatest skill is hyperbole--but it gets rather tiresome. This book is likely to race to the top of the best seller list and then, rather soon, die a quiet death.