"The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today" by Thomas E. Ricks
History has been kind to the
American generals of
World War II -
Marshall,
Eisenhower,
Patton, and
Bradley - and less kind to the generals of the wars that followed. In part it is the story 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.
Today, as one American colonel said bitterly during the
Iraq War, "As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war."
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, as does the less familiar
Marine General O. P.
Smith, whose fighting retreat from the
Chinese onslaught into
Korea in the winter of
1950 snatched a kind of victory from the jaws of annihilation. But Korea also showed the first signs of an army leadership culture that neither punished mediocrity nor particularly rewarded daring
. In the Vietnam War, the problem grew worse until, finally,
American military leadership bottomed out. The
My Lai massacre, Ricks shows us, is the emblematic event of this dark chapter of our history. In the wake of
Vietnam a battle for the soul of the
U.S. 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 from the first Iraq War of
1990 through to the present.
Tom Ricks has made a close study of
America's military leaders for three decades, and in his 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.
Length:
75 Minutes
Lecture
Date: March 13,
2013