The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today
Riigikaitse raamatukogu
by Thomas E. Ricks
Why You'll Love This
A private who loses a rifle faces harsher consequences than a general who loses a war — Ricks spent 576 pages proving that's not an accident.
- Great if you want: a serious reckoning with how military leadership went wrong
- The experience: methodical and slow-building — rewards patience with mounting outrage
- The writing: Ricks cross-cuts history and biography to build an unanswerable argument
- Skip if: you want narrative drive over institutional analysis
About This Book
What happens to a military when it stops holding its leaders accountable? Thomas E. Ricks builds his sweeping examination of American generalship around that uncomfortable question, tracing a long arc from World War II—when underperforming commanders were routinely relieved without stigma—to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where failure seemed to carry almost no professional consequence at all. The result is a portrait of institutional decline told through the careers of the men who shaped it, revealing how the culture of command itself eroded over decades of conflict.
Ricks writes with the authority of a seasoned defense correspondent and the instincts of a storyteller, moving fluidly between biography, organizational history, and strategic analysis without losing the human thread. The book's structure is one of its great strengths—each era illuminates the next, so readers feel the weight of accumulated decisions rather than a disconnected series of profiles. His prose is precise and unsparing, asking hard questions about leadership, courage, and institutional self-protection that extend well beyond the military. This is the kind of history that changes how you read the news.