Military Leadership

Based on frank discussions and interviews with American generals and their staffs, and detailed analytical study of official records and personal recollections, this book pinpoints how well each particular general responded to the demands of war.

In modern times, ten Americans rose to five-star rank: Pershing (who chose to wear only four stars), Leahy, Marshall, King, Arnold, MacArthur, Nimitz, Halsey, Eisenhower, and Bradley. In concert with the Roosevelts, Wilson, Truman, and Sir Winston Churchill, they were at the helm as the world transformed from the machinations of regional despots to an era of global war. With few exceptions, these men exercised their responsibilities with remarkable integrity and ability. The first part of this book reviews the biography and military highlights of each five-star; the second analyzes and compares the ten to identify common features of the elements of command and leadership. While studying the careers of these distinguished men, Hall also provides an insight into the analysis of war. He explains that war operates on five levels of perspective: heroism, tactics, operations, theaters, and national purpose. When these levels conflict, even the best leaders are fortunate to escape with their reputationsintact. This volume details how these commanders achieved success by understanding and properly maintaining these different perspectives almost unfailingly. Consequently, they reached the pinnacle of power in the military profession.

In an era of new military missions, repositioning and reduction of forces, and a heightened pace of deployments, the question arises whether today's Army combat leaders have had fewer opportunities to develop tactical skills.

Focusing on 45 military leaders from four continents and 13 countries, spread across four centuries, this study paints, for the first time, a collective, comparative portrait of high-ranking military officers. The authors develop an interactional theory of military leaders, stressing the interplay between sociodemographic variables, psychological dynamics, and situational factors. They examine age and birthplace, socioeconomic status, family life, ethnicity and religion, education and occupation, activities and experiences, and ideologies and attitudes. They find military leaders to be a remarkably coherent and homogeneous group of men propelled toward the military by a combination of nationalism, imperialism, relative deprivation, love deprivation, marginality, and vanity.

Gabriel expands upon the groundbreaking work of B. H. Lidell-Hart's Great Captains by offering detailed portraits of six great captains of the ancient world who met the challenges of their age and shaped the future of their societies, and civilization itself, through their actions.

This collection uses a series of case studies to assess the impact of heretical military leaders who developed policy and strategy during war and peace in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The issue for each contributor is not necessarily to show whether the endeavors of individuals and their unorthodoxy were successful or unsuccessful--though this important consideration is not ignored. Rather, each chapter offers differing points of view on accomplishments and failure because, as is so often the experience in historical study, the record is mixed; and this is especially so in terms of the application of military power in the period since the Napoleonic wars. Technological and scientific innovation, the rise of mass armies, the advent of total war, and the need to develop effective armed forces in a period of rapid change prompted new approaches in policy and strategy. In this period, it is clear that a dialectic in military thinking existed between those who followed what can be thought of as orthodox ideas, based generally on the lessons of preceding wars, and heretics who advocate new policies and strategies.

This study challenges both the accepted convention that the American Civil War was the first "modern war" and the myth that Civil War leaders were guided by foreign and American military thought in fighting their war. Wood's work takes an innovative approach by selecting three typical higher level commanders on each side, Union and Confederate, and then "pairing them off" in the campaigns and battles in which they actually confronted each other. While readers gain insight into the nature and character of a commander, they can, at the same time, observe how each put his art of command into practice. Civil War commanders at the operational level had to confront not only their opponents on campaign and in battle, they also had to develop--even create--their own method of command through their personal on-the-job training, while actually engaged in combat operations.

The military history of the Civil War has tended to focus on such issues as tactics, courage under fire, and which leader was capable of the bold stroke (Lee) and which one wasn't (McClellan). Overlooked in these important issues is the matter of command itself: mastery of the resources required for successful military action. In this work seven experts examine particular instances of command problems - such as supply, military discipline, and effective relations with subordinate commanders - and show how a general's handling of the problem illustrates an important feature of Civil War leadership.

This work is a study of military leadership and resulting effectiveness in battlefield victory focusing on the parliamentary and royalist regional commanders in the north of England and Scotland in the three civil wars between 1642 and 1651.