Brass backwards: Thomas Ricks explains the declining competence of America's senior military commanders.

• Author: Heilbrunn, Jacob
• Position: The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today - Book review

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

by Thomas E. Ricks

Simon and Schuster, 528 pp.

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Tom Ricks, the former Washington Post military correspondent who covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for the better part of a decade, and currently edits the blog "The Best Defense" at ForeignPolicy.com, has become the go-to guy for understanding how the American military works. In 2006, Ricks published Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2003 to 2005, a blistering (and definitive) indictment of George W. Bush's Pentagon and its mishandling of the war in Iraq. Next, he wrote The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008, a probing history of the surge. And now he has written a book that tries to explain what makes a great American general--that is, a general whom soldiers can follow, and not just to their deaths.

The genesis for this most recent book was atop a Sicilian ridge, where, on leave from covering Iraq, Ricks heard the story of Major General Terry de la Mesa Allen, a hugely successful World War II general who was relieved of leadership of the 1st Infantry Division (for lax discipline of his troops) soon after helping to win the Sicily campaign in July 1943. It wasn't good enough just to be successful; the success had to come in the right way--otherwise, as the military leadership knew, disaster could loom later on. "I was stunned," writes Ricks. "How could this be? [My] mind was still focused on [the Iraq] war, where even the most abject failure did not get a general fired."

The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today is the history of this "remarkable group of men, the Army general officers of the past three-quarters of a century, and the wars they fought." For Ricks, the World II generation really was the greatest; his heroes are George C. Marshall and Dwight D. Eisenhower, two men who displayed both sound judgment and a strategic vision, qualities their successors did not always possess in abundance.

As Army chief of staff on the eve of World War II, Marshall--who would later become secretary of defense, secretary of state, and the architect of the Marshall Plan-inherited a force that was, by his own account, that of a "third-rate military power." It consisted of fewer than 200,000 soldiers, many relying on World War I arms and munitions. A scant five years later, under Marshall's command, the Army had grown to...