As an Army Colonel in 2005, McMaster led a highly-praised campaign which cleared the Tal Afar area of insurgents and succeeded in winning the local population’s support. Earlier in his career, as a Major, McMaster wrote this acclaimed book as his doctoral thesis. The book covers the relationship of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the President and the decisions that led up to the Vietnam War. The essential premise is that the Joint Chiefs had a moral obligation to inform the President that the war in Vietnam was un-winnable with the amount of troops he was willing to send. None of the Chiefs said so when they testified before Congress, and none resigned in protest. The few members of the cabinet who dared to disagree with President Johnson were quickly fired as an example to the rest.

What is most distressing about this book are the parallels that are there to be drawn. When interviewed in the fall of 2005, Colonel McMaster was asked to draw parallels between Vietnam and the current war in Iraq and said that he wouldn't even go there. I however will:

Like the current Bush administration, loyalty was the virtue Johnson prized above all others. The President would put forth an idea and then ask the Joint Chiefs if it could be done. Once they told him how many troops he would require for that to be successful, he would then authorize a fraction of that number. Whoever objected would be fired. (see also: Eric Shinseki.) The Chiefs, distracted by inter-service rivalry, did not take the moral high road and resign in protest- instead they went along with the President. Appointed by Congress to provide advice and oversight to the President, The Chiefs are military experts. If they were being ignored, and they went along with it, they failed in their duty to the American people, not to mention the 58,000 Americans who were killed in Vietnam.

There is a quote from Paul Fussell (author of The Great War and Modern Memory) on the front of the book that says "The word noble would not be going too far." It is not going too far. The junior officer corps who has served in Iraq is reading this book now, and you should too.