Leadership and Command: The Anglo-American Military Experience since 1861 (review)

This is a paperback edition of a work originally released in 1997. It is an outgrowth of a series of conferences on leadership and command sponsored by the British Commission for Military History, an eclectic organization made up of both military historians and lay people with similar inclinations. The thematic focus, as indicated in the title, is two-fold: leadership and command. The former is deftly defined by Michael Howard as "the capacity to inspire and motivate: to persuade people willingly to endure hardships, usually prolonged, and incur dangers, usually acute, that if left to themselves they would do their utmost to avoid" (p. 117). The latter refers to two interrelated fields: the intellectual and moral abilities of a commander to size up a situation, determine a course of action, and see it through to mission accomplishment; and the institutional/communication structure that allows these activities to take place. The work consists of a stage-setting introduction by the editor and eleven essays that range chronologically from the American Civil War to the Gulf War. Thematically, they cover a wide gamut within the general focus previously mentioned, ranging from an hour-by-hour examination of the actions and orders of a British brigadier at Normandy to an over two-decade study of the development of the general staff system in the United States Army.

Overall, it is an uneven, but nevertheless very useful collection. Any anthology has its strong and weak points. What follows is one person's opinion of both in this collection. The high points are four quite different studies. Brian Holden Reid provides a masterful analysis of the complex relationship between Ulysses S. Grant and his Chief of Staff, John A. Rawlins. The gist of the story is that Rawlins's most important role was not as a military counselor to Grant in the mold of Gneisenau to Blücher or even as an efficient coordinator of details in the mold of Berthier to Napoleon. Nor was it in keeping Grant away from the bottle, though it might have been in discouraging others who would have exacerbated, rather than ameliorated, Grant's tendencies in this regard. According to Holden Reid, Rawlins's supreme role was in advancing Grant's cause within the Machiavellian world of the Union Army's political hierarchy. Michael Howard's appreciation of World War II British generals produces, in addition to the nicely formulated definition already cited, some wonderful flashes of intuition on the essential qualities of Montgomery, Alexander, and Slim. Julian Thompson provides a very nice analytical comparison of the campaign for the Falklands, in which he did participate, with the Anzio campaign, in which he did not. The juxtaposition of the two is made all the more intriguing by his critique of an unnamed senior minister's comparison of the Falklands operations with Anzio during the conduct of the former. Finally, Robert O'Neill delivers some very cogent assessments of the British, American, and ANZAC armies in Korea and Vietnam.

The rest of the collection, while quite competent and very well researched, does not seem to this reviewer to have that extra spark of inspiration that characterizes the four studies mentioned above. And the work fairly cries out for a synthetic essay that draws together the many important themes therein elucidated. Nevertheless, in an era when command and control technological capabilities are improving exponentially and jargon-filled claims such as "information dominance" are being tossed about loosely, it is helpful to be reminded that leadership and command are, essentially, human and organizational activities. We should therefore be grateful to the editor and all the contributors for bringing these issues to our attention. And a vote of thanks goes to the publisher as well for making the collection available in a reasonably priced format...