Thomas E. Ricks

Based on unprecedented real-time access to the military's entire chain of command, "The Gamble" is the definitive account of the insurgency within the US military that led to a radical shift in America's strategy in Iraq - and the bloody implementation of that strategy on the ground. In his international bestseller Fiasco, Thomas E. Ricks gave us the definitive reckoning with what went so wrong in Iraq. The story "The Gamble" tells is how, when the war was at its darkest hour, a group of dissident junior commanders and their civilian allies did an end run around their superiors in the military establishment and seized control of the war. The result was 'the Surge', one of the American military's boldest strategic gambles since the landings at Inchon. General David Petraeus gave military expert Thomas E. Ricks extraordinary privileged access to himself and his team during the past two years, and the result is a chronicle of astonishing vividness and analytical depth. It is the story of military leadership in the crucible of war, under excruciating political pressure at home. It is also the story of the soldiers who executed the strategy out in the field. Ricks concludes that the war likely will last for many years to come - and that it will not be remembered for the reasons we think.

Thomas E. Ricks uses hundreds of hours of exclusive interviews with top officers in Iraq and extraordinary on-the-ground reportage to document the inside story of the Iraq War since late 2005 as only he can, examining the events that took place as the military was forced to reckon with itself, the surge was launched, and a very different war began. Since early 2007 a new military order has directed American strategy. Some top U.S. officials now in Iraq actually opposed the 2003 invasion, and almost all are severely critical of how the war was fought from then through 2006. At the core of the story is General David Petraeus, a military intellectual who has gathered around him an unprecedented number of officers with both combat experience and Ph.D.s. Underscoring his new and unorthodox approach, three of his key advisers are quirky foreigners-an Australian infantryman-turned- anthropologist, an antimilitary British woman who is an expert in the Middle East, and a Mennonite-educated Palestinian pacifist. The Gamble offers news breaking information, revealing behind-the-scenes disagreements between top commanders. We learn that almost every single officer in the chain of command fought the surge. Many of Petraeus's closest advisers went to Iraq extremely pessimistic, doubting that the surge would have any effect, and his own boss was so skeptical that he dispatched an admiral to Baghdad in the summer of 2007 to come up with a strategy to replace Petraeus's. That same bosslater flew to Iraq to try to talk Petraeus out of his planned congressional testimony. The Gamble examines the congressional hearings through the eyes of Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, and their views of the questions posed by the 2008 presidential candidates. For Petraeus, prevailing in Iraq means extending the war. Thomas E. Ricks concludes that the war is likely to last another five to ten years-and that that outcome is a best case scenario. His stunning conclusion, stated in the last line of the book, is that "the events for which the Iraq war will be remembered by us and by the world have not yet happened."

Cutting through the headlines and spin, this is the first book to give us a true picture of the reality on the ground, through the words of the people there - from commanders to intelligence officers, army doctors to ordinary soldiers. Providing eye-witness accounts that contradict the official stories and figures, they give a chilling picture of the deceit, stupidity, wishful thinking, lack of forward planning and total intellectual failure of those behind the invasion. The result is an extraordinary new insight into the plight of ordinary soldiers doing nightmarish jobs, and the real nature of the fighting in Iraq.

Esta obra es una crítica profunda al liderazgo militar estadounidense desde la Segunda Guerra Mundial hasta los conflictos en Irak y Afganistán. Ricks examina cómo los generales de la era de Marshall (como Eisenhower, Patton y Bradley) eran evaluados y reemplazados si no cumplian con las expectativas, mientras que los lideres posteriores como Koster, Franks, Sanchez o Petraeus enfrentaron menos consecuencias por sus errores.El libro plantea preguntas clave sobre:- La responsabilidad y el rendimiento en la jerarquia militar- La transmision de valores estrategicos- La diferencia entre una organizacion que aprende y una que fracasa

Thomas E. Ricks, senior Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post, puts forth in Fiasco a masterful reckoning with the planning and execution of the American military invasion and occupation of Iraq, now with a preface on recent developments. Ricks draws on the exclusive cooperation of an extraordinary number of American personnelincluding more than one hundred senior officersand access to more than 30,000 pages of official documents, many of them never before made public. Tragically, it is an undeniable accountexplosive, shocking, and authoritativeof unsurpassed tactical success combined with unsurpassed strategic failure that indicts some of Americas most powerful and honored civilian and military leaders.

The bestselling, compelling insiders account of the Marine Corps from the lives of the men of Platoon 3086their training at Parris Island, their fierce camaraderie, and the unique code of honor that defines them.The United States Marine Corps, with its proud tradition of excellence in combat, its hallowed rituals, and its unbending code of honor, is part of the fabric of American myth. Making the Corps visits the front lines of boot camp in Parris Island, South Carolina. Here, old values are stripped away and new Marine Corps values are forged.Bestselling author Thomas E. Ricks follows these men from their hometowns, through boot camp, and into their first year as Marines. As three fierce drill instructors fight a battle for the hearts and minds of this unforgettable group of young men, a larger picture emerges, brilliantly painted, of the growing gulf that divides the military from the rest of America. Included in this edition is an all-new afterword from the author that examines the war in Iraq through the lens of the Marines from Platoon 3086, giving readers an on-the-ground view of the conflict from those who know it best.

An FBI agent finds himself in the insular world of a fishing village on the Maine coast where the rules are differentsometimes lethally so.After his wife and two children are killed in a car crash, Ryan Tapia starts a new life in Maine. But his first case there is a puzzling oddballthe corpse of a fisherman washes up on federal land, while the mans boat drifts into waters that are part of an Indian reservation. Ryan quickly learns the nuances of Maine life as he delves into two illicit coastal trades: hard drugs and rare fish. Many of the locals are happy to see that particular fisherman dead. Whats more, they are not shy about noting that Ryan must have screwed up pretty badly to be posted to such a remote location as Bangor, Maine. Undaunted, Ryan works to understand the unforgiving way of life on Liberty Island, where people live by an older, harsher code. Adrift on a sailboat one day, he encounters a man from the Malpense tribe, living as a hermit on a remote island, who witnessed something that fateful day. In his riveting crime debut, New York Times bestselling author Thomas E. Ricks turns his literary talents to land he knows deeply, from working in the Maine woods and trapping lobsters year-round. Everyone Knows But You is a rich and dynamic crime novel that brings a unique part of America to vivid, thrilling life.

Thomas E. Ricks, author of five New York Times bestsellers, combines his deep knowledge of Maine with his years of experience covering U.S. military operations to craft a powerful tale of politics and mayhem in this riveting crime novel.When a group of young Native Americans launches a series of protests against climate change and its effects on the waters and woods of Maine, veteran FBI agent Ryan Tapia, is assigned to monitor the movement. The protestors, who become determined to split away from American society, are led by Peeled Paul Soco, an Malpense hermit who played a key role in one of Tapias previous investigations. When the marchers begin making camps on the lawns of luxurious summer mansions along the Maine coast, they win national media attentionand the wrath of a reactionary president. Tapia soon finds himself torn. He wants to do right by Soco and the protestors, but his bosses at the Bureau are eager to please a president itching to crack down on them. Growing increasingly sympathetic to the protestors and their cause, he tells them about a possible refugea secret CIA base hidden away in the depths of the Maine woods on the Canadian border. Enraged by the protestors actions, the White House sends a U.S. Army unit to track down the protestors on their stealth march through the evergreen forests. Meanwhile, Tapias bosses, vexed and embarrassed, fire him and threaten arrest. Undaunted, Tapia snowmobiles through the wilderness on a wintry night to warn the Indian protestors of the impending attack. Building to a dizzying, wind-whipped climax, We Cant Save You establishes Ryan Tapia as one of the most compelling and nuanced investigators in crime fiction.

In this gripping and dynamic thriller, former FBI agent Ryan Tapia finds himself ensnared in the complex interplay of power, politics, environmental degradation, and resistance at a cobalt mine in Maine.While building his career as a private investigator in the Maine countryside, Ryan Tapia takes the case of Dr. Ed Healey, a local physician suffering from an acute case of cobalt poisoning. A mine has recently opened in Pushaw county, extracting the valuable minerals needed for batteries in electronic devices and electric cars. But a deadly Fan of poison is seeping out . . . But there are dark legacies in Pushaw that go back to the Salem witch trials and the community on nearby Witch Island, where the Thornfoot family is turning the tables and exploiting the vagaries of modern life for their own ends. On the cusp of finding his personal happiness once more, Tapia is caught in the middle of this vortex of manipulation and money, desperation and deceit. Neighbors turn on one another and the people of Pushaw risk becoming as deadly to one another as the industrial poison simmering beneath the surface. In Big Money, Small Town, Thomas Ricks has crafted a nuanced and enthralling novel that challenges our understandings of money and influence in every facet of modern life.

Cutting through the headlines and spin, this is the first book to give us a true picture of the reality on the ground, through the words of the people there - from commanders to intelligence officers, army doctors to ordinary soldiers. Providing eye-witness accounts that contradict the official stories and figures, they give a chilling picture of the deceit, stupidity, wishful thinking, lack of forward planning and total intellectual failure of those behind the invasion. The result is an extraordinary new insight into the plight of ordinary soldiers doing nightmarish jobs, and the real nature of the fighting in Iraq.

Based on unprecedented real-time access to the militarys entire chain of command, The Gamble is the definitive account of the insurgency within the US military that led to a radical shift in Americas strategy in Iraq - and the bloody implementation of that strategy on the ground.In his international bestseller Fiasco, Thomas E. Ricks gave us the definitive reckoning with what went so wrong in Iraq. The story The Gamble tells is how, when the war was at its darkest hour, a group of dissident junior commanders and their civilian allies did an end run around their superiors in the military establishment and seized control of the war. The result was "the Surge," one of the American militarys boldest strategic gambles since the landings at Inchon.General David Petraeus gave military expert Thomas E. Ricks extraordinary privileged access to himself and his team during the past two years, and the result is a chronicle of astonishing vividness and analytical depth. It is the story of military leadership in the crucible of war, under excruciating political pressure at home. It is also the story of the soldiers who executed the strategy out in the field. Ricks concludes that the war likely will last for many years to come - and that it will not be remembered for the reasons we think.

Majors Cindy Sherman and Bud Lewis are the best young combat officers the army has, and theyve both been tapped for plum positions as aides-de-camp for two of the Pentagons most senior generals. The Pentagon is a cauldron of careerist jockeying and factional squabbling in the best of times, though, and these are not the best of times. A president whom the officer class widely loathes sits in the White House, and grumblings that hes steering the military onto the rocks are growing louder. Some officers are openly asking: If you believe the president is betraying his country, where does your duty lie?Just as Sherman and Lewis ease into their jobs and into a deepening romance a secret pressure group of military officers called the Sons of Liberty begins to carry out covert protests, symbolic at first, against White House policy. It is with shock that Lewis comes to suspect the groups leader is his own boss and hero, General B.Z. Ames, and that the man in the center of Amess target is Shermans boss, General John Shillingworth. As the White House keeps the army grinding through a miserable third-world brushfire war, the Sons of Libertys activities grow more treasonous, and their efforts to avoid detection more ruthless, until Majors Sherman and Lewis find themselves in a vicious game with life-and-death stakes and the future of the American military hanging in the balance.

A New York Times bestseller! An epic history of the decline of American military leadershipfrom the bestselling author of Fiasco and Churchill and Orwell.While history has been kind to the American generals of World War IIMarshall, Eisenhower, Patton, and Bradleyit 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 Rickss 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.

A New York Times bestseller!A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2017A dual biography of Winston Churchill and George Orwell, who preserved democracy from the threats of authoritarianism, from the left and right alike.Both George Orwell and Winston Churchill came close to death in the mid-1930sOrwell shot in the neck in a trench line in the Spanish Civil War, and Churchill struck by a car in New York City. If theyd died then, history would scarcely remember them. At the time, Churchill was a politician on the outs, his loyalty to his class and party suspect. Orwell was a mildly successful novelist, to put it generously. No one would have predicted that by the end of the 20th century they would be considered two of the most important people in British history for having the vision and courage to campaign tirelessly, in words and in deeds, against the totalitarian threat from both the left and the right. In a crucial moment, they responded first by seeking the facts of the matter, seeing through the lies and obfuscations, and then they acted on their beliefs. Together, to an extent not sufficiently appreciated, they kept the Wests compass set toward freedom as its due north. Its not easy to recall now how lonely a position both men once occupied. By the late 1930s, democracy was discredited in many circles, and authoritarian rulers were everywhere in the ascent. There were some who decried the scourge of communism, but saw in Hitler and Mussolini "men we could do business with," if not in fact saviors. And there were others who saw the Nazi and fascist threat as malign, but tended to view communism as the path to salvation. Churchill and Orwell, on the other hand, had the foresight to see clearly that the issue was human freedomthat whatever its coloration, a government that denied its people basic freedoms was a totalitarian menace and had to be resisted. In the end, Churchill and Orwell proved their ages necessary men. The glorious climax of Churchill and Orwell is the work they both did in the decade of the 1940s to triumph over freedoms enemies. And though Churchill played the larger role in the defeat of Hitler and the Axis, Orwells reckoning with the menace of authoritarian rule in Animal Farm and 1984 would define the stakes of the Cold War for its 50-year course, and continues to give inspiration to fighters for freedom to this day. Taken together, in Thomas E. Rickss masterful hands, their lives are a beautiful testament to the power of moral conviction, and to the courage it can take to stay true to it, through thick and thin.Churchill and Orwell is a perfect gift for the holidays!

New York Times BestsellerEditors Choice New York Times Book Review"Ricks knocks it out of the park with this jewel of a book. On every page I learned something new. Read it every night if you want to restore your faith in our country." James Mattis, General, U.S. Marines (ret.) & 26th Secretary of Defense The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and #1 New York Times bestselling author offers a revelatory new work of intellectual history about the founding fathers, examining their educations and, in particular, their devotion to the ancient Greek and Roman classicsand how that influence would shape their ideals and the new American nation.On the morning after the 2016 presidential election, Thomas Ricks awoke with a few questions on his mind: What kind of nation did we now have? Is it what was designed or intended by the nations founders? Trying to get as close to the source as he could, Ricks decided to go back and read the works of political philosophy that shaped the founders thinking, and the letters they wrote to each other debating these crucial worksamong them the Iliad, Plutarchs Lives, and the works of Xenophon, Epicurus, Aristotle, Cato, and Cicero. For though much attention has been paid the influence of English political philosophers, like John Locke, closer to their own era, the founders were far more immersed in the literature of the ancient world.The first four American presidents came to their classical knowledge differently. Washington absorbed it mainly from the elite culture of his day; Adams from the laws and rhetoric of Rome; Jefferson immersed himself in classical philosophy, especially Epicureanism; and Madison, both a groundbreaking researcher and a deft politician, spent years studying the ancient world like a political scientist. Each of their experiences, and distinctive learning, played an essential role in the formation of the United States. In examining how and what they studied, looking at them in the unusual light of the classical world, Ricks is able to draw arresting and fresh portraits of men we thought we knew.First Principles follows these four members of the Revolutionary generation from their youths to their adult lives, as they grappled with questions of independence, and forming and keeping a new nation rooted in the classical ideal of virtue. In doing so, Ricks interprets not only the effect of the ancient world on each man, and how that shaped our constitution and government, but in this defining work of American history, offers startling new insights into these legendary leaders.How did the minds that shaped a nation first shape themselves?The Founders Classical Education: Explore the forgotten syllabus of the Revolutionary generation, discovering why they studied Cicero and Plutarch more than Locke, and how this classical knowledge provided the framework for a new republic. Four Presidents, Four Philosophies: Contrast Washingtons absorption of Roman values from elite culture, Adams devotion to Roman law, Jeffersons immersion in Greek philosophy, and Madisons methodical study of ancient republics. Greek vs. Roman Influence: Uncover why most founders favored the Roman model of public-mindedness and order, and how Jeffersons preference for Greek ideals of liberty and happiness shaped the Declaration of Independence. From First Principles to a New Nation: Follow the founding fathers from their early studies to the Constitutional Convention, seeing how their shared understanding of classical historyand its warnings about faction and tyrannyshaped American government and its founding documents.

Tanto George Orwell como Winston Churchill vieron peligrar su vida a mediados de la década de 1930: Orwell por un disparo en el cuello en la guerra civil española y Churchill en un accidente de coche en Nueva York. De haber muerto entonces, la historia apenas les recordaria. Churchill era un politico acabado, sospechoso para su clase y para su propio partido, y Orwell era un novelista del que como mucho se habria podido decir que tenia un exito moderado.Ambos mantenian una actitud antitotalitaria que no contaba con demasiados partidarios en aquella epoca. La democracia habia quedado desacreditada en muchos circulos y los dirigentes autoritarios, de uno y otro color, estaban, en cambio, al alza. Churchill y Orwell, cada uno por su lado, fueron capaces de ver que lo que se hallaba en peligro era la libertad del ser humano y que, ya fuera comunista o fascista, un Gobierno que negaba a la poblacion sus derechos constituia una amenaza contra la que habia que luchar.Los dos, uno en la arena politica y el otro en el campo de las letras, demostraron en los años siguientes estar a la altura de los tiempos. Y aunque Churchill jugo un papel mayor en la derrota de Hitler y el Eje, Orwell creo con Rebelion en la granja y 1984 dos metaforas inmortales sobre los peligros del totalitarismo cuya influencia llega hasta hoy. Sus vidas, las de ambos, fueron un canto al poder de las convicciones morales, y al valor que se requiere para mantenerse fiel a ellas, contra viento y marea.