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wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the HBR Ideacast. I'm Julia Kirby and I have the pleasure of hosting Tom Ricks today.

For those of you who don't know his work, Tom is a journalist whose beep for a long time

has been the US military. He covered it for the Washington Post from

2000 to 2008 and before that for the Wall Street Journal. These days he's at the Center

for a New American Security and serves as a contributing editor at Foreign Policy magazine.

He's also written several books and his new one is called The Generals, American Military Command from World War II to today.

Welcome Tom. Thank you very much. It's great to be here. Now HBR often looks to the military for lessons in management, whether it's in supply chain

management or technology or leadership, and your article in our October issue focuses on that last topic, but it's called

Whatever Happened to Accountability and it's describing a sort of pathology that you see in the leadership ranks of the US Army, which you

absolutely don't think others should emulate. So why did you start looking

into the Army's leadership ranks and the practices that shape them.

Well it's odd because the end of the book is kind of the where I began.

The book covers from 1939 to the present, looking at the generals of World War II Korea Vietnam Iraq Afghanistan

But for me the genesis of the book came from being in Baghdad and watching very good soldiers, tactically excellent units, led

by poor generals, generals who didn't understand their jobs, who didn't think strategically,

really in many ways I could like jumped up

battalion commanders.

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