Is a grand strategy for America even possible? Three of our finest flag officers attempt to offer unifying visions for the United States, but run aground on the same political polarization that flummoxes everything else.

• Author: Hurlburt, Heather
• Position: Don't Wait for the Next War: A Strategy for American Growth and Global Leadership; The Accidental Admiral: A Sailor Takes Command at NATO; Before the First Shots are Fired: How American Can Win or Lose Off the Battlefield - Book review

Don't Wait for the Next War: A Strategy for American Growth and Global Leadership

by Wesley K. Clark

PublicAffairs, 272 pp.

The Accidental Admiral: A Sailor Takes Command at NATO

by James Stavridis

Naval Institute Press, 288 pp.

Before the First Shots Are Fired: How American Can Win or Lose Off the Battlefield

by Tony Zinni and Tony Koltz

Palgrave Macmillan Trace, 256 pp.

Fall 2014 produced a bumper crop of books from retired four-star flag officers: James Stavridis's The Accidental Admiral, Wesley Clark's Don't Wait for the Next War, and Tony Zinni's Before the First Shots Are Fired. (Zinni shares authorial credit with Tony Koltz, coauthor of previous works with Zinni, Colin Powell, and the late Tom Clancy.) Midway through his own tour of security policy, Stavridis sums up the role of the U.S. military leadership in policymaking: "[I]n a sense we were car mechanics evaluating a vehicle for the owner ... and then unemotionally executing the direction from the car's owner, in this case the United States."

Stavridis, Clark, and Zinni were the "lead mechanics" for U.S. military interventions in Libya and Kosovo, and played key roles in the first Gulf War, Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. They counseled and watched half a dozen presidents and uncounted congressional committee chairs, seeing those leaders perhaps as closely as anyone outside their inner circles is ever allowed. The three men are soldier-statesmen, perhaps as close as our time comes to "Renaissance men": classics-quoting, economics-teaching, tweeting, Daily Show-appearing warriors. They hold degrees from Annapolis, West Point, Harvard, Oxford, and other elite institutions, most acquired at taxpayer expense. The operations of the last two decades forced them to get to know, and partner with, social workers and rape counselors, engineers and social media gurus, management consultants and diplomats. Together they gave their country more than a century of service--and at least two of their children followed them into uniform.

And they have a message for our country. Though their three 2014 books cover strategy, autobiography, history, and politics, they can be summed up in one urgent sentence: The "car" of U.S. national strategy needs a new GPS.

Each man points to the 2003 invasion of Iraq as a catastrophic failure, for which they indict the leadership of the Bush administration explicitly. Zinni calls the failure to plan "a clear disaster" and refers to "the stupidity of believing their own bumper stickers." Implicitly or explicitly, though, all three point the finger more broadly: at our broken politics, weak connections between civilian and military leaders, problematic construct of leadership, outdated civilian institutions, and, above all, a disregard for strategic planning.

If the three books share a villain, they also share a hero: President, also General, Dwight D. Eisenhower. "Modern American strategy really begins with Eisenhower," Clark writes, and then explains what he means: "Ike created a politically supported, unified national strategy using the Cold War--not a hot war--as the motivating force. This strategy was not just about actions abroad, it was also about building strength at home.... [H]e used the leverage of profound challenges abroad to gain domestic political cooperation between the parties."

The three...