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

A New York Times bestseller

An epic history of the decline of American military leadership--from the bestselling author of Fiasco and Churchill and Orwell.

While history has been kind to the American generals of World War II--Marshall, Eisenhower, Patton, and Bradley--it has been less kind to the generals of the wars that followed, such as Koster, Franks, Sanchez, and Petraeus. In The Generals, Thomas E. Ricks sets out to explain why that is. In chronicling the widening gulf between performance and accountability among the top brass of the U.S. military, Ricks tells the stories of 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.

Author: Thomas E. Ricks
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 10/29/2013
Pages: 592
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.05lbs
Size: 8.30h x 5.40w x 1.30d
ISBN13: 9780143124092
ISBN10: 0143124099
BISAC Categories:
- History | Military | United States
- Biography & Autobiography | Military
- History | Military | Strategy

About the Author
Thomas E. Ricks is an adviser on national security at the New America Foundation, where he participates in its Future of War project. He was previously a fellow at the Center for a New American Security and is a contributing editor of Foreign Policymagazine, for which he writes the prizewinning blog The Best Defense. A member of two Pulitzer Prize-winning teams, he covered U.S. military activities in Somalia, Haiti, Korea, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Kuwait, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He is the author of several books, including The Generals, The Gamble, and the number one New York Times bestseller Fiasco, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His newest book, Churchill and Orwell: The Fight For Freedom, is a New York Times bestseller.