Military Review English Edition March-April 2015 | Page 139

BOOK REVIEWS

Inexplicably, the yardstick he uses to reach this
conclusion is exactly the same one he condemns for
having led to groupthink among the generals, i.e.,
that Eikenberry had deviated from the strictly delineated assignment template for infantry officers. In
Bolger’s view, Eikenberry was suspect precisely because he was an academically trained China expert
who “never commanded above the battalion level”
and therefore lacked the credibility to command
those who had. Arguably, however, Eikenberry’s
approach to Hamid Karzai’s mental instability and
lack of legitimacy will prove to have been better-informed and more in U.S. interests than conciliation
and coddling. In any event, Bolger should have
devoted much more effort explaining the true cost of
generals who could not properly identify the enemy.
Doing so would have made the Sassaman story and
similar vignettes much more meaningful to readers
outside the Army.
Despite all the above, Bolger nevertheless accomplishes something important with Why We Lost.
In some respects, Bolger seeks to inherit the mantle
of Andrew Krepinevich (author of The Army and
Vietnam) who posited the same argument about
generalship that Bolger uses in Why We Lost. More
so than Krepinevich, however, by willingly and very
publicly claiming responsibility as a general officer for
the unsatisfying way our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
have played out, Bolger may have greater success in
attracting official support. This might facilitate some
desperately needed soul-searching inside the ranks of
both the uniformed leadership of all the services and
among those who craft our national strategies.
Certainly, the amount of interest and attention
generated by Bolger’s book inside the Army reaches
levels not seen since Col. Doug McGregor’s Breaking
the Phalanx. The Army leadership should leverage
that interest and attention in support of genuine organizational renewal. Institutional change must occur
from the top down, aided and abetted by a cohort of
sympathizers at lower levels. The latter exists; it is
up to the former to envision and communicate the
proper message to them so that together we can better
prepare the Army to serve U.S. interests and the
American people.
Col. Thomas E. Hanson, U.S. Army, Fort
Leavenworth, Kan.
MILITARY REVIEW  March-April 2015

FORTRESS RABAUL: The Battle for the Southwest
Pacific, January 1942–April 1943
Bruce Gamble, Zenith Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota,
2013, 416 pages

L

ying thousands of miles from the more famous
battles of the central Pacific, the predominately
aerial Battle for Rabaul has often been overlooked
by war historians. However, the strategic importance of
this former German colonial town, located on the northern end of New Britain in modern Papua New Guinea
(PNG), was