The Decline of American Military Leadership

A professional soldier is rarely a professional strategist.
—B.H. Liddell Hart, Thoughts on War (1944)

The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today
by Thomas E. Ricks
Penguin, 2012, 576 pages, $39.99

In June 2007, I attended a conference on civil–military relations at the Military Academy at West Point, the spiritual home of the American profession of arms. A pervasive atmosphere of suppressed anger was evident in the alma mater of Grant and Lee, Pershing and MacArthur and Patton and Eisenhower. The American military, the most powerful force on earth, seemed to be losing the Iraq War, and many conferees blamed their politicians and generals for a lack of strategy. In particular, a group of young colonels in attendance proved to be sharp critics of every aspect of the conduct of the war—from officials in the Pentagon to generals in Baghdad. Nearly all of these colonels were battle-hardened from Iraq and some were still recovering from wounds in the field. They were impatient and quick to dismiss any address that demonstrated signs of politically correct cant. After all, soldiers they had recently commanded were still fighting and dying while the conference proceeded. Words without meaning seemed worthless to these veterans.

When General Eric Shinseki, the former Army Chief of Staff—who had incurred the wrath of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for questioning the planning for the invasion of Iraq in 2003—spoke at the conference dinner he received a standing ovation. The graceful Shinseki spoke that night of a renewed dedication to West Point’s code of Duty, Honour and Country. Many present clearly saw him as the noble victim of an arrogant Rumsfeld Pentagon that had dismissed professional military advice in the build-up to the invasion of Iraq resulting in a quagmire of insurgency.

The West Point conference of 2007 remains a powerful reminder for me that war is the merciless auditor of military institutions. Today, the United States military has been under audit for over a decade, the longest period of continuous warfare in its history—and one in which strategic success seems at best ambiguous and at worst elusive.

Not surprisingly, the strategic skill and battlefield effectiveness of the American military have been a subject of great public interest in recent years. Thomas E. Ricks’s mammoth new study, The Generals, is the latest instalment in a plethora of works examining America’s military performance in the modern era. These books include The Fourth Star: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army (2009) by David Cloud and Greg Jaffe; Stephen R. Taaffe’s nostalgic study of an earlier era of success, Marshall and His Generals: US Army Commanders in World War II (2011); Lewis Sorley’s scathing biography of professional military failure, Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam (2011); and Jean Edward Smith’s fine new study, Eisenhower in War and Peace (2012).

Now Ricks, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post, author of two previous books on the Iraq War and a Fellow of the Washington think-tank the Centre for New American Security, has written the most ambitious and most controversial study of American generalship in the post-9/11 era. Ricks argues that strategic decision in war has come to elude the American profession of arms largely because the twin maladies of institutional conformity and intellectual failure have been permitted to erode principles of martial excellence. Ricks’s thesis is a controversial one and, in many ways, it is a reflection of the zeitgeist of malaise that has gripped American elites since the global financial crash of 2008. Indeed, it is surprising that the national melancholy over the efficacy of America’s political and financial institutions should have taken so long to spread to its revered military—an institution which Ricks believes has failed to achieve strategic decision in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Today, although America has disengaged from Iraq, the military’s hard-won stability remains deeply fragile and subject to Shia–Sunni sectarian hostility. Any sense of military achievement in Iraq is also overshadowed by the unwanted strategic consequence that American intervention in the Persian Gulf seems only to have facilitated the emergence of a stronger Iran that seeks nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, military operations in Afghanistan increasingly resemble an expensive foray into the quicksands of futility and are seen by many strategic analysts as a major distraction from the economically vital Indo-Pacific theatre in which China and India are emerging as regional superpowers.

Although Ricks’s study seeks to present a sweeping historical overview of American generals from George C. Marshall in the 1940s to David Petraeus in the 2000s, his real purpose is to use military history as Carl von Clausewitz teaches it should be used—as kritik, a method of critical analysis. Ricks’s aim is to demonstrate how American generalship has declined in both quality and effectiveness since the halcyon days of the Second World War and to recommend what can be done to reform what he sees as a dysfunctional twenty-first-century military system. He cites Paul Yingling, a maverick US Army colonel and caustic critic of American generalship, to the effect that a private soldier who loses his rifle now suffers worse punishment than a general who loses his part of a war.

Despite a decade of war, Ricks believes the US Army has abandoned its once strict quality control over the art of generalship. The traditional demand for the highest standards of performance reinforced by the sanction of swift relief of non-performers has been allowed to wither away. America’s general officer corps has gradually become a uniformed freemasonry, a near sheltered workshop in which conformity and mediocrity rather than creativity and excellence prevail.

Ricks’s central argument is that the principles of successful modern American generalship were laid down by the great Army Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall. What Ricks styles the “Marshall system” was a brilliant device and one which has largely been lost. The hallmarks of the Marshall system were close professional control of senior Army appointments; rigorous internal policing of the profession of arms for competence; strict accountability for high decision-making; and swift and unsentimental relief of non-performers. Moreover, American generals were expected to aim at intellectual military excellence, to thoroughly understand the theoretical basis of the profession of arms and to be familiar with the intricacies of the strategic level of war. Ricks notes that Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Allied Supreme Commander in Europe, read Carl von Clausewitz’s On War from cover to cover three times in the 1920s in order to prepare himself for the waging of war and the practice of strategy. Finally, Marshall expected his generals to combine a studied distance from politics with an educated understanding of its dynamics. They were to be of, but certainly not in, politics. For the wise Marshall, the lure of politics was always the temptress Eve in the soldier’s Garden of Eden.

Marshall’s system helped to produce a generation of outstanding generals such as Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, George S. Patton, Matthew Ridgway, Robert Eichelberger and many other younger star-ranked officers whose talents collectively won the Second World War. The Marshall system, however, tended to dominate largely in Europe, and Ricks contrasts it with General Douglas MacArthur’s quasi-independent Far East “military court”, which often operated as much through patronage and loyalty as by merit. In his magisterial biography of MacArthur, American Caesar, William Manchester sums up the differences between the Marshall and MacArthur philosophies of generalship. Marshall looked across the Atlantic, MacArthur the Pacific; the first counselled prudence, the second daring; Marshall believed America’s national interest lay in coalition warfare, MacArthur thought that reliance on allies was ultimately dangerous.

MacArthur’s supreme egotism ensured that able generals in the Pacific such as Eichelberger were always lesser-known figures. For all of his personal military brilliance, MacArthur was a strangely insecure personality who would tolerate no rival stars in his firmament. From the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941 until his relief in Korea in 1951, MacArthur constantly played the temperamental Napoleon to Marshall’s composed Moltke. It is impossible to imagine the cool and phlegmatic Marshall issuing the kind of flamboyant operation order that MacArthur gave to Lieutenant-General Robert Eichelberger in November 1942 at Buna:

Bob, I’m putting you in command at Buna. Relieve Harding. I am sending you in, Bob, and I want you to remove all officers who won’t fight. Relieve Regimental and Battalion commanders; if necessary put Sergeants in charge of Battalions and Corporals in charge of companies—anyone who will fight. Time is of the essence; the Japs may land reinforcements any night … I want you to take Buna, or not come back alive.

Eichelberger succeeded at Buna but his achievement always existed in the shadow of MacArthur, the grand seigneur. Yet, if MacArthur’s personalised and idiosyncratic system of command proved to be effective in the Pacific War, it would a few years later crumble to pieces in the very different conditions of the Korean War. MacArthur’s fatal miscalculation over Chinese military intervention and his defiance of Washington culminated in his 1951 disgrace and relief at the hands of President Harry Truman. MacArthur’s mistakes over North Korea and China ensured that, beyond a toehold in South Korea, there would be no significant American strategic architecture on the continental mainland of Asia. In contrast, the Marshall system—with Eisenhower as Marshall’s spiritual heir—helped produce a stable strategic architecture in Western Europe through the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, a system that lasts to this day.

Ricks believes the Marshall system of selecting generals began to decline in the Cold War era. Increasingly, generals were appointed according to the principles of a new “organisation man’s Army”. Much of the tone was set in the 1950s and 1960s, when American generalship gradually came to resemble a closed guild of chosen men, “akin to winning a tenured professorship, liable to be removed not for professional failure but only for embarrassing one’s institution with moral lapses”. In particular, the indecision of the 1950–53 Korean War—the first nuclear-age limited conflict—saw many corporate practices from modern management practice injected into the military profession with associated statistical measurements of performance and micromanagement of personnel. It was a transformation captured by General Maxwell D. Taylor’s 1955 quip that future American officers would “carry a field marshal’s baton in their briefcases rather than their knapsacks”.

This infusion of a managerial culture into the military led to a growing failure to police the higher echelons of the profession of arms in order to relieve non-performers and under-achievers. This development, in turn, gradually allowed control of high command in the field to slip away from military hands and led to the practice of imposed relief by politicians, a practice that continues unabated today. For Ricks, a straight line in the political relief of top generals runs from Douglas MacArthur in Korea, Paul Harkins and William C. Westmoreland in Vietnam through to George Casey in Iraq and David McKiernan and Stanley McChrystal in Afghanistan.

The 1960s saw America’s “organisation army” falter in the Vietnam War. Ricks holds a bleak view of the dominant generals of that decade—Maxwell D. Taylor, Earle Wheeler and William C. Westmoreland. All three failed to understand the cultural and political dynamics of the Vietnam War and relied on the awesome technological power of American military might for success. Taylor, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is singled out for his advocacy of “brush fire wars” in Asia and his willingness to become politically close to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson in the early 1960s. Taylor, his protégé Westmoreland, and the latter’s Chief of Operations, Lieutenant-General William DePuy, became the main architects in Vietnam of firepower attrition and a search-and-destroy strategy based on arithmetical body count and waged by draftees.

By 1967, Westmoreland believed that the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army had suffered so many casualties from American firepower that they were becoming militarily ineffective. This assumption was exploded by the Viet Cong’s Tet Offensive of January 1968, which although a tactical failure for the communists became a strategic success, in that it utterly destroyed the credibility of Westmoreland’s mode of attrition warfare. Westmoreland was recalled by Johnson but his successor, General Creighton Abrams, could only supervise a belated transition to “Vietnamisation” as the USA decided to withdraw from the war. For many observers, the “strategy of tactics” pursued in Vietnam was emblematic of professional military failure. As Edward Luttwak pronounced in his 1985 book The Pentagon and the Art of War:

The gross overuse of firepower [in Vietnam] was thus merely the most visible symptom of the inability of the American military institution to formulate a coherent strategy that would focus and control the means of war. No failure of military competence could be more complete.

Not surprisingly the post-Vietnam US Army was an institution much given to an introspective pondering of the reasons for its defeat. From the mid-1970s and throughout much of the 1980s, reform was initiated under Generals William DePuy and Donn A. Starry. These reformers undertook the three tasks of rebuilding Army morale, re-inventing the institution from a draftee Army towards a professional all-volunteer force, and reorienting training towards a focus on conventional warfare to meet a new era of precision weapons. The October 1973 Yom Kippur War in the Middle East demonstrated to the American military establishment that it was now possible to wage conventional warfare below the nuclear threshold. The Israeli and Egyptian armies had engaged in the largest armoured battles since Kursk in 1943 with a huge expenditure of precision guided missiles. The battlefield that emerged was one that, with microprocessors, precision munitions and guided missiles, was rapidly transforming into a complex “electronic battlespace”—a phenomenon that called for highly trained soldiers and clarity of doctrinal thought.

A number of American generals took careful note of the revolution in conventional precision munitions, notably DePuy and Starry. In organisational terms, after Marshall, it is arguable that DePuy was the most influential American soldier of the twentieth century. Ironically, DePuy, a dour master of tactics and training, had been the architect of Westmoreland’s search-and-destroy strategy in Vietnam, an approach that proved unsuitable in the jungles of South-East Asia. However, in the different conditions of the conventional electronic battlefield, DePuy came into his own as a military sage. He became the towering figure in the Army’s post-Vietnam recovery, and under his guidance, the Army underwent a rigorous training-and-doctrine revolution symbolised by the creation of a new Training and Doctrine Command.

DePuy developed a doctrine-based vision of future warfare based on mastery of tactics, operations and training. His determined advocacy defeated alternative and more intellectual notions of military reform based on developing better strategic leadership within the Army, sponsored by rivals such as General John Cushman. For Ricks, the “DePuy Army” that emerged during the late 1970s and which evolved throughout the 1980s was an institution based on an effective but exceedingly narrow view of tactical-operational excellence, symbolised by the doctrine of AirLand Battle. This doctrine was based on mastering force for swift success by “winning the first battle”, so avoiding protracted struggle. This was an approach that was sorely needed after Vietnam but one, as time would demonstrate, that contained within it military neglect of higher level strategy.

The intellectual shortcomings of the DePuy Army were exposed during the two Gulf Wars of 1990-91 and 2003 and again in Afghanistan in 2001-02. In Operation Desert Storm, the spectacular 100-hour ground offensive waged by General Norman Schwarzkopf to humble the Iraqi army, the elite Republican Guard largely escaped destruction and led to Saddam Hussein’s survival as dictator. In the wake of 9/11, Ricks believes that the failure in Afghanistan in late 2001 to capture or kill Osama bin Laden was a result of flawed generalship by General Tommy Franks. In 2003, the three-week blitzkrieg on Baghdad, again devised by Tommy Franks, was devoid of any scheme to manage a post-Saddam Iraq and the vacuum created led to the outbreak of a sectarian insurgency that engulfed the occupying Americans. For Ricks these failures in Afghanistan and Iraq are indicative of a serious decline in American generalship. The critique is a simple one: the post-Vietnam US Army fashioned by DePuy had by the early twenty-first century become a force capable of winning battles but incapable of completing wars successfully. In short, the Army was master of the operational art but not, alas, of the strategic art.

Ricks sees the post-Desert Storm, post-Cold War US Army of the 1990s as an incubator of a deadly professional complacency: the American military of the 1990s “may or may not have been the best the nation ever fielded, but it certainly was among the most self-satisfied”. He vividly portrays the 1990s as an era of intellectual bankruptcy dominated by a fascination with multiple managerial-style fads associated with digitisation and information technology at the expense of rigorous strategic thought. The shallow 1990s thus groomed a new breed of “non-strategic” generals who would lead the Army in the campaigns following the attacks of 9/11.

Ricks writes with scarcely concealed contempt that “the representative general of the post-9/11 era was Tommy R. Franks … the apotheosis of the hubristic post-Gulf War force”. Ricks’s judgment on Franks is brutal and unequivocal. The laconic Texan is “a two-time loser”, a general of limited intelligence, dependent on staff officers whose command decisions fatally botched the initial campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq between 2001 and 2003. In an echo of Alan Clark’s well-known polemic on First World War generals as “donkeys leading lions”, Ricks writes:

Historically, thinking about war and then arriving at conclusions that can be implemented has been the core task of generals. Yet in a bizarre mutation of military thought, [Tommy] Franks seemed to believe—and to have been taught by the Army—that thinking was something others did for generals. In his autobiography he referred to his military planners with a whiff of good ol’ boy contempt as “the fifty pound brains”.

Alluding to the near fiasco in Iraq between 2003 and 2004, Ricks goes on to pose a damning question: “Why did Franks appear to be strategically illiterate and why was he allowed to guide the initial stages of two wars, each time with large strategic costs?” He answers his own question by arguing that the US Army of the 1990s and 2000s was, and remains, inhabited by a generation of technical specialists, narrow organisational experts and “tactical generals”, many of them strategically unschooled.

Thus, Ricks finds the much admired General Colin Powell to be a military bureaucrat, “an Eisenhower without a Marshall—that is, a master implementer lacking a real strategy to implement”. Norman Schwarzkopf, the field commander in the 1991 Gulf War, is yet another embodiment of the a-strategic DePuy Army, a general who “realized DePuy’s dream of winning the first battle of a war—almost for the first time in American history—but called off the fighting prematurely”. As a result, Schwarzkopf produced the empty victory of the 1991 Gulf War—a “tactical triumph but a strategic draw at best”. Its inconclusive finale led to a twenty-year American entanglement with Saddam’s Iraq marked by air strikes, followed by full-scale invasion and then culminating in vicious sectarian insurgency that caused the deaths of thousands of American service personnel.

Examining Tommy Franks’s successors in Iraq after 2003, Generals Ricardo Sanchez and George Casey, Ricks weighs up both soldiers and finds them strategically wanting. He views Sanchez as “a mediocre officer” possessing “smallness of mind and inflexibility” who failed to recognise and adapt to insurgency warfare until it engulfed American forces and raged through them like an untreated cancer. Ricks quotes a senior officer’s lament that listening to Sanchez pontificate on the war in Iraq was “like listening to George Custer lecture on Indian affairs”. As for Casey, he was a decent officer who had the misfortune to inherit a quagmire. Casey was “a trier”, successfully staving off immediate defeat in Iraq, but clearly out of his depth in his strategic appreciation of the insurgency crisis. As a result he was relieved by George W. Bush and “promoted upstairs” to be Army Chief of Staff.

One of the most controversial insights in Ricks’s book is his view that unrefined tactical excellence by troops in the field actually operates to inhibit strategic competence by generals. This is because ongoing tactical successes allow military leaders valuable time to avoid making higher-level operational-strategic decisions. This situation, when combined with a short command tour, helps American generals to fudge individual strategic accountability. In turn, short command tours and the rotation of generals simply create a culture of risk-aversion. The notion that strategic success is increasingly defined by cautious and risk-averse tactical generals who seek not to lose rather to win, is at the centre of the dysfunction that Ricks identifies in the American military system.

Significantly, the choice of General David Petraeus as an American military champion in Iraq in 2007 was not attributable to the wisdom of the Army Staff in Washington. Rather, it was the work of influential outsiders with a direct connection to the George W. Bush White House. This group included such figures as General Jack Keane, a former Army Vice-Chief of Staff, and Professor Eliot Cohen, a leading scholar of war, and later a State Department Counsellor. In 2006, the Keane–Cohen group circumvented the conservative Army establishment to find senior officers of creative skill to fight the Iraqi insurgency. Ricks quotes Keane’s despondent view that the military crisis in Iraq was attributable to the stasis of the 1990s. “The thing that killed us,” Keane notes, “was the 1991 Gulf War. Intellectually, it bankrupted us for the rest of the decade.” It is a view of the US military shared by figures such as Philip Zelikow, Eliot Cohen’s predecessor as Counsellor in the State Department. In 2003, surveying the intellectual rigidity of the US Army in Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, Zelikow observed:

The problems are primarily with the [US] military. It is like the pre-1914 French Army. The military is venerated. It is the inheritor of Napoleon. The general is decorated in gold braid—but there’s no “there” there. There is an aversion to deep thinking.

Given that David Petraeus was never the choice of the Army establishment to command American forces in Iraq, Ricks views the general as a military aberration. Petraeus, he writes, was “a thrice-cursed outlier”. First, he was a military intellectual, a Princeton PhD whose dissertation had been on the defeat of the French in Vietnam; second, he was modern in the sense that he was comfortable interacting with politicians and the media; and finally, his professional understanding of counter-insurgency warfare had seen him perform well in Mosul as the commander of the 101st Airborne Division. According to Ricks, all three of these skill-sets were frowned upon by a conformist Army Staff. Not surprisingly, the role of Petraeus in devising and implementing the 2007 Iraqi counter-insurgency “surge” to defeat Al Qaeda and Sunni insurgents has become a subject of controversy in the United States. It remains unclear whether the decisive element in the success of the surge was the “Anbar Awakening”—when many Sunni insurgents switched their allegiance to the Americans—or Petraeus’s astute generalship. Indeed, the only aspect of the Iraqi surge that remains uncontroversial is that it has proven to be a phenomenon that is not transferable to the very different conditions in Afghanistan. As a result, the “counter-insurgency revolution” so enthusiastically proclaimed by Petraeus and his Young Turk allies in the December 2006 US Army and Marine Corps manual, FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency, has long since dissipated in the harsh mountains and valleys of Afghanistan.

Ricks does not believe there will be a “Petraeus generation” in the future US Army. Indeed, he argues that the military has already decided that Petraeus’s “population-centric approach to counter-insurgency” (involving protection of the people from guerrillas) is too protracted and costly to implement; it is “a failed experiment” that must be abandoned as soon as practical. Significantly, in 2011, Petraeus became neither Chief of the Army Staff nor Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. His colleagues, Generals Raymond Odierno and Martin Dempsey, assumed these positions respectively. In contrast, ever the outsider, Petraeus became Director of the CIA and has since had his stellar career ruined by evidence of marital infidelity with his biographer, Paula Broadwell. In assessing the career of David Petraeus, the most famous American general since Eisenhower, we will have to await the more dispassionate verdict of future historians.

The US Army that will withdraw from Afghanistan by 2014 remains in a state of organisational flux and faces an unclear future mission. As American attention refocuses on the maritime environment of the Asia-Pacific, it is air and sea forces that are likely to be emphasised by the Pentagon. In some ways, the looming post-Afghanistan situation is similar to the unsure 1950s after Korea and to the dispiriting 1970s after Vietnam, when the US Army faced a populace weary of inconclusive ground wars and was forced to reform itself as a national institution. The situation today is further complicated by the reality that the Army faces a period of unprecedented austerity as defence cuts reduce both its size and capabilities. While the Army remains a potent global force without a peer rival, ten years of relentless combat have strained its organisation as an all-volunteer force to its limits.

Multiple tours of duty, exhausted troops with high stress levels and the large financial costs involved in retaining highly-trained volunteer professionals, mean that indecisive counter-insurgency operations of the kind confronted in Iraq and Afghanistan are unlikely to be favoured by a cash-strapped Pentagon. Such protracted operations do not play to the American military’s inherent strengths—its massive conventional capability based on combined arms warfare and its mastery of high-technology systems—that allow it to seek quick and decisive victory against any massed opponent. Already, in its new 2012 doctrine, Unified Land Operations, the US military has re-emphasised its “full-spectrum” capacity from low to high-level combat based on delivering lethal force through firepower and manoeuvre. In the years ahead, unless vital interests are threatened, counter-insurgency is likely to become the domain of America’s Special Operations Forces rather than the prime mission of the line Army.

One of the major themes that emerges, albeit somewhat incidentally, throughout Ricks’s book, is that the United States—along with the armed forces of other liberal democracies—simply does not prepare well in peacetime for conflict. Butter always triumphs over guns. Thus, in 1950, despite its success in the Second World War, the Army in Korea—a mere five years on—was “swatted aside by the Korean People’s Army, which threatened to drive it into the sea”. In the 1960s, the Army was materially powerful, equipped with new air-mobile cavalry (combat helicopters) and swollen by draftees. Yet its effectiveness was hampered by a senior leadership which, despite being seasoned by the Second World War and Korea, had become complacent and corporate in professional outlook. For Ricks, generals such Taylor, Wheeler and Westmoreland were masters of the art of style over substance, which became something of a trademark of many Vietnam-era generals.

Ricks’s judgment of America’s generals since 1945 is, however, frequently subjective. He is harsh towards MacArthur, Taylor, Westmoreland, Wheeler, Powell, Schwarzkopf, Franks and Sanchez. He is generous towards DePuy, Cushman, Starry, Petraeus and Odierno. There are some paradoxes in these selections. For example, while MacArthur may have possessed a Ludendorffian view of “total war” and blundered with China in Korea, he was unquestionably a great soldier, as proven by his daring victory at Inchon and the success of the South-West Pacific campaign of the Second World War. Similarly, DePuy served as Westmoreland’s Chief of Operations in Vietnam and devised the now infamous “search and destroy” strategy. He was as much responsible for the debacle in the rice paddies as Westmoreland. Yet he escaped serious censure, partly because the ambitious Westmoreland was in command and partly because—unlike the vain but politically naive “Westy”—DePuy shunned publicity. As a result, DePuy’s reputation was never tainted by failure and he went on to become the most important American general of the post-Vietnam era. Napoleon’s famous question to Marshal Berthier when appointing generals springs immediately to mind: “Is he lucky?” DePuy was lucky in Vietnam; MacArthur was unlucky in Korea; Westmoreland was lucky in Korea but unlucky in Vietnam; Petraeus was lucky in Iraq; and McChrystal was unlucky in Afghanistan. Fate is not just the hunter, but often the killer, of military careers.

Given the many shortcomings he identifies in American generalship since 1945, Ricks is not shy in recommending a program of reform. He suggests that, while generals must by necessity interact with civilians, they must always keep their social distance. His beau sabreur is Marshall, determined, aloof, candid, and a model of integrity and moral purpose. Generals must be unflinching in giving professional military advice to politicians but they must beware of becoming “tame”—that is, politically co-opted into the “club”—in the manner of Maxwell Taylor with Kennedy and Johnson. Weekends with the president at Camp David might be pleasant but they carry the risk of too close an identification with political incumbents.

Ricks believes that the US Army must create a strategically adaptive and flexible leadership that goes beyond the production of tacticians and operational specialists. Lifelong professional military education is a key element in preparing senior commanders and is particularly vital in helping generals to manage the vital realm of civil–military relations. In what Eliot Cohen, in his 2003 book Supreme Command, defines as the “unequal dialogue” between democratic politician and military professional, the military must insist that their expertise be taken into account, that they are at least part of an “equal debate” on what military force can, or cannot, accomplish for the ends of policy.

Ricks strongly believes that the US Army must change its higher personnel promotion and relief practices from within its own ranks or else lose control of the profession of arms to civilians. The Army must demand internal accountability from its senior leaders and swiftly relieve those who do not meet a high performance standard. The Army must not tolerate contemporary versions of the flamboyant but incompetent Major General Beaumont Bonaparte Buck, who was relieved by Pershing on the Western Front in 1918, for planning a divisional bayonet charge against German machine guns. Moreover, for today’s generals, short command tours that inhibit accumulating vital in-theatre knowledge and hinder combat effectiveness must be discontinued. Swift rotation is merely a form of castration. Accordingly, much more time is required for fostering rigorous military education; Ricks suggests special “sabbaticals for reflection” and the preparation of junior generals through new and intellectually dynamic courses. In this process “outliers and innovators” need to be preserved, because when wars go badly heretics often become heroes. Finally, Ricks proposes that the Army’s maxim must always be: “abide by the belief that the lives of soldiers are more important than the careers of officers—and that winning wars is more important than either”.

Any study of this length cannot be without flaws and, in the end, for all of his marshalling of history and his elegant arguments, Ricks’s critique of American generalship is not entirely convincing. The book fails to take into proper account two factors that are critical to any understanding of the evolution of higher military command in the United States military: first, the nuclear weapons revolution and second, civil–military relations. The nuclear weapons revolution was the seminal event for the American profession of arms in the twentieth century. The great casualty of this technological revolution was the very pre-nuclear age Marshall system of generalship which Ricks so deeply admires. As Russell F. Weigley observed in his 1973 book The American Way of War, “the atomic explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended Clausewitz’s ‘the use of combats’ as a viable inclusive definition of strategy”.

As nuclear arsenals evolved from crude atomic bombs into intercontinental ballistic missiles with megaton warheads capable of destroying human civilisation in thirty minutes, so too did a new and urgent form of strategic reasoning emerge—a reasoning that was designed to uphold nuclear deterrence, foster arms control and to introduce the concept of limited war. Within a few years, the centuries-old monopoly of generals on the use of armed force was eroded by a new breed of nuclear-age civilian defence specialists, the so-called “whizz kids” or “Wizards of Armageddon” who became the architects of deterrence and limited war theory. They included such figures as Henry Kissinger, Robert Osgood, Thomas Schelling and Albert Wohlstetter, and their influence has been deep and lasting. In the 1950s and 1960s, the development of limited war theory by Osgood and Schelling—in which the diplomatic art of signalling one’s resolve to the enemy below a nuclear threshold—came to dominate strategic thinking about land warfare. Limited war was an uncomfortable doctrine for the US Army to accept because it denied the traditional concept of battlefield victory, demanded the carefully calibrated use of force against adversaries, and required that “soldiers die without winning”. It was for opposing these emerging ideas that MacArthur was relieved in Korea in 1951.

While the US Air Force and Navy adapted to the nuclear age through the creation of the Strategic Air Command and the ballistic missile submarine fleet respectively, the Army faced an existential challenge to its identity as the nation’s traditional guardian. For many of the new civilian defence experts it seemed as if land warfare, the oldest form of human statecraft, had been rendered irrelevant by the swift march of destructive military technology. The prevailing attitude was summed up in the McNamara Pentagon of the 1960s by the Assistant Secretary of Defense, Alain C. Entoven, who—when confronted by an irate general who complained that civilian specialists were unqualified to give strategic advice because of their lack of military experience—famously replied: “General, I have fought just as many nuclear wars as you have.” Entoven’s view that American generals lacked strategic sophistication was shared by President Kennedy, who wrote in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, “the first advice I’m going to give my successor is to watch the generals and to avoid the feeling that just because they are military men their opinion on military matters is worth a damn”. This was Kennedy’s variation on Frederick the Great’s celebrated story of the mule that had been on ten campaigns with Prince Eugene, gaining much experience of limb but never any wisdom of mind.

Marginalised by nuclear weapons and civilian strategists between Korea and Vietnam, the US Army was quick to seize on the precision munitions revolution of the late 1970s which re-invented conventional warfare. In order to master the precision revolution, the Army adopted the intermediate domain of operational art (the linking of battle tactics through operations to strategy) from its Cold War adversary, the Soviet military. By 1991, operational art with its associated doctrine of AirLand Battle had restored the Army’s battered martial pride through success in the First Gulf War. Yet institutional restoration came only at the cost of the American profession of arms neglecting the study of strategic art and of paying only passing attention to Clausewitz’s central notion that war can never be autonomous but must always exist as an extension of politics. One of the major weaknesses in Ricks’s book is his failure to sufficiently highlight how the nexus between the nuclear weapons revolution, the arrival of conventional precision munitions and the rise of operational art, contributed to the further decline of the US Army in matters of higher strategy. 

The second factor that Ricks underestimates is the impact of modern civil–military relations on generalship in a liberal democracy. No American general now can be an independent proconsul like MacArthur in 1950. Although Ricks is highly critical of the strategic abilities of many American generals, he tends to underplay the reality that the formulation of strategy in the United States is primarily a political, not a military, responsibility. It is impossible to consider American generalship in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan without reference to the policy actions of such political figures as Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, George H. and George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Since the time of George C. Marshall in the 1940s, an American general’s capacity for independent action in the field has gradually been diminished by the imperatives of a civil–military relationship that must take into account a world defined by a combination of nuclear weapons, instant electronic communications and the rapid impact of media images.

For better or worse, then, strategy in a democracy like the United States is largely a product of compromise and expediency determined by democratic politicians. Politicians exist in electoral cycles in which “end-dates” are as important as “end-states” in considering the use of military force. What Army generals may think is good militarily may not be good politically and vice versa, and rules of engagement are always conditioned by domestic considerations. Such realities mean that contemporary American generals can never be Caesars, but are akin to caged eagles that are denied by their political masters the natural freedom to swoop and kill their prey at will. The treatment of Shinseki by Rumsfeld in 2002–03; the tensions between the Army Staff and the White House over strategy in Iraq in 2006–07; and the political dismissal of Afghanistan commander General Stanley McChrystal by President Obama in 2011 all demonstrate that, despite a veneer of consensus, American civil–military relations always carry swirling undercurrents of tension. Indeed, in the two decades from the end of the Korean War to the termination of hostilities in Vietnam, the US military was simply not trusted by American politicians. The memory of Douglas MacArthur’s insubordination in Korea cast a long and dark shadow to the extent that even fifteen years after the event, in early 1966, a suspicious Lyndon Johnson felt it necessary to remind William Westmoreland, his field commander in Vietnam: “General, I have a lot riding on you … don’t pull a MacArthur on me.”

Such civil–military complexities clearly affect the practice of generalship in the field and they do not receive adequate attention in Ricks’s book. One of the pillars of George C. Marshall’s thinking as the “organiser of victory” from 1941 to 1945—and by implication of the entire Marshall system of generalship—was his firm belief that “no democracy can fight a Seven Years War”. For Marshall, the inherent unpredictability of democratic politics meant that both statecraft and generalship must act in unison to win wars as soon as possible. Marshall knew that any war, irrespective of how noble its cause, would lose electoral support if sacrifice was not balanced by success. Vietnam and, more recently Iraq and Afghanistan, are monuments to Marshall’s strategic insight. Using today’s terms, if an American military endeavour is not perceived as a “war of necessity” (the removal of the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001) but is rather a “war of choice” (the toppling of Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003), it must be completed as soon as is practicable.

It is no exaggeration to suggest that American civil–military relations currently operate under a kind of political version of the well-known Hollywood film on marital relations, The Seven Year Itch. Like a marriage, modern strategy must unite in agreement two very different human personalities—in this case, politicians and generals. As Charles de Gaulle, that astute soldier-statesman, once observed, strategic success in war requires a consensus on objectives between politicians and the military. The ensuing political–military dialogue must be honest and must involve mutual trust for “if one of them [politician or soldier] misses his cue, then disaster overwhelms them both”. If, as Ricks believes, American generalship has declined badly since 1945, then the intertwined character of modern America’s democratic civil–military relations in determining strategy has surely been a major contributing factor. This is a vital area of discussion that Ricks does not fully examine.

Despite these flaws and omissions, The Generals—well-written and researched, engaging and often controversial and pungent in tone—is certain to become a touchstone for future discussions on American generalship. This will occur not just in America, but also in allied nations such as Australia and Britain, whose armed forces frequently operate in American-led coalitions. If there is one major lesson that we can draw from Ricks’s book it is that generals in liberal democracies must endeavour to become improved students of the art of strategy if they are to be professionally effective in the hothouse atmosphere of modern civil–military relations. Yet in conceding this important requirement, we should all still be grateful that elected politicians and not un-elected generals continue to dominate the formulation of US strategy. President Dwight Eisenhower’s famous 1961 warning against “the acquisition of unwanted influence, whether sought or unsought, of the military-industrial complex” remains as cautionary as ever for the health of liberal democracy. In a turbulent global age of proliferating weapons of mass destruction, religious fanaticism and much regional instability, war is more than ever, as Clemenceau reminds us, far too dangerous to be left to the generals. It is well, then, that America keeps its eagles caged.