“What does it take to make a great general or a great leader in any field? . . . An excellent contribution to the study of leadership among those who make life-and-death decisions in the most challenging situations—one that could well serve as required reading in both military and business schools.”—Kirkus Reviews Throughout his life, Edgar F. “Beau” Puryear has studied America’s top military leaders. In his research for this book, he has sought to discover what allowed them to rise above their contemporaries; what prepared them for the terrible responsibilities they bore as the commanders of our armed forces during World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf, and on to today; how they are different from you and me. Ultimately, first and foremost, Dr. Puryear discovered that character is the single most important and the most distinctive element shared by these individuals: that character is everything! “Beau Puryear again reaches into his gold mine of research and comes forward with the essence of great generalship. . . . Well-done and a worthy read.”—General Colin L. Powell “We can always learn more about the importance of character to successful leadership. With this book, we do just that.”—General H. Norman Schwarzkopf

“What does it take to make a great general or a great leader in any field? . . . An excellent contribution to the study of leadership among those who make life-and-death decisions in the most challenging situations—one that could well serve as required reading in both military and business schools.”—Kirkus Reviews Throughout his life, Edgar F. “Beau” Puryear has studied America’s top military leaders. In his research for this book, he has sought to discover what allowed them to rise above their contemporaries; what prepared them for the terrible responsibilities they bore as the commanders of our armed forces during World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf, and on to today; how they are different from you and me. Ultimately, first and foremost, Dr. Puryear discovered that character is the single most important and the most distinctive element shared by these individuals: that character is everything! “Beau Puryear again reaches into his gold mine of research and comes forward with the essence of great generalship. . . . Well-done and a worthy read.”—General Colin L. Powell “We can always learn more about the importance of character to successful leadership. With this book, we do just that.”—General H. Norman Schwarzkopf

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.

In the first full biography of Lieutenant General John McAllister Schofield (1831-1906), Donald B. Connelly examines the career of one of the leading commanders in the western theater during the Civil War. In doing so, Connelly illuminates the role of politics in the formulation of military policy, during both war and peace, in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Connelly relates how Schofield, as a department commander during the war, had to cope with contending political factions that sought to shape military and civil policies. Following the war, Schofield occupied every senior position in the army--including secretary of war and commanding general of the army--and became a leading champion of army reform and professionalism. He was the first senior officer to recognize that professionalism would come not from the separation of politics and the military but from the army's accommodation of politics and the often contentious American constitutional system. Seen through the lens of Schofield's extensive military career, the history of American civil-military relations has seldom involved conflict between the military and civil authority, Connelly argues. The central question has never been whether to have civilian control but rather which civilians have a say in the formulation and execution of policy.

At the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1775, the colonies faced the daunting task of creating the first American army, and its requisite leadership, capable of combating a global superpower whose standing army and general ship were among the finest in the world. Built largely from state and local militias, the colonial army performed surprisingly well and produced a number of fine generals. Some were experienced before the war, like George Washington of the Virginia Militia and the British-born Horatio Gates, while others were as green as the soldiers they led. This book presents basic biographical information about America's first generals in the Revolutionary War. Included are all generals of the Continental Army, along with those commissioned in the colonies' militias. Drawn from primary sources, including death and census records, records of the Continental Congress, and contemporary writings, each biographical sketch provides date and place of birth, prewar education and occupation, wartime service, date and place of death, and place of burial. Portraits of each general are included where available, and appendices display important statistics, including comparative ages; occupations; officers lost by death, resignation, murder or changing loyalty; and states or countries of origin.