추가 적립 안내

"Engaging, informed . . . a highly entertaining book." -The Wall Street Journal

"A masterful and critical study of the art of generalship from World War II through Iraq and Afghanistan by one of the smartest military experts out there." -The New York Times

"[An important and timely book . . . trenchant, straightforward." -The Washington Post

"Impressive . . . Stark, fact-based, and strongly argued." -Chicago Tribune

"Ricks shines, blending an impressive level of research with expert storytelling." -The Weekly Standard

"[A] savvy study of leadership. Combining lucid historical analysis, acid-etched portraits of generals from 'troublesome blowhard' Douglas MacArthur to 'two-time loser' Tommy Franks, and shrewd postmortems of military failures and pointless slaughters such as My Lai, the author demonstrates how everything from strategic doctrine to personnel policies create a mediocre, rigid, morally derelict army leadership... Ricks presents an incisive, hard-hitting corrective to unthinking veneration of American military prowess." -Publisher's Weekly (Starred Review)

"Informed readers, especially military buffs, will appreciate this provocative, blistering critique of a system where accountability appears to have gone missing - like the author's 2006 bestseller, Fiasco, this book is bound to cause heartburn in the Pentagon." -Kirkus

"Entertaining, provocative and important." -The Wilson Quarterly

Prologue: Captain William DePuy and the 90th Division in Normandy, summer 1944 -- Part I. World War II -- 1. General George C. Marshall: The leader -- 2. Dwight Eisenhower: How the Marshall system worked -- 3. George Patton: The specialist -- 4. Mark Clark: The man in the middle -- 5. Terrible Terry Allen: Conflict between Marshall and his protEgEs -- 6. Eisenhower managers Montgomery -- 7. Douglas MacArthur: The general as presidential aspirant -- 8. William Simpson: The Marshall system and the new model American general -- Part II. The Korean War -- 9. William Dean and Douglas MacArthur: Two generals self-destruct -- 10. Army generals fail at Chosin -- 11. O.P. Smith succeeds at Chosin -- 12. Ridgway turns the war around -- 13. MacArthur's last stand -- 14. The organization man's Army -- Part III. The Vietnam War -- 15. Maxwell Taylor: Architect of defeat -- 16. William Westmoreland: The organization man in command -- 17. William DePuy: World War II-style generalship in Vietnam -- 18. The collapse of generalship in the 1960s -- a. At the top -- b. In the field -- c. In personnel policy -- 19. Tet '68: The end of Westmoreland and the turning point of the war -- 20. My Lai: General Koster's cover-up and General Peers's investigation -- 21. The end of a war, the end of an Army -- Part IV. Interwar -- 22. DePuy's great rebuilding -- 23. How to teach judgment -- Part V. Iraq and the Hidden Costs of Rebuilding -- 24. Colin Powell, Norman Schwarzkopf, and the empty triumph of the 1991 war -- 25. The ground war: Schwarzkopf vs. Frederick Franks -- 26. The post-Gulf War military -- 27. Tommy R. Franks: Two-time loser -- 28. Ricardo Sanchez: Over his head -- 29. George Casey: Trying but trading water -- 30. David Petraeus: An outlier moves in, then leaves -- Epilogue: Restoring American military leadership -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Index.

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.