A Culture of Mediocrity Among the Army’s Top Brass

On Friday, former Army General David Petraeus resigned as director of the CIA, citing his own bad judgment for an extramarital affair. California's Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was surprised that the FBI never notified her about the investigation. Petraeus resigned after the FBI told him it had uncovered his affair with Paula Broadwell, author of All In, an admiring account of Petraeus’s Army career. Former Washington Post military correspondent Thomas Ricks, author of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated Fiasco, a critique of the war in Iraq, has written a scathing history of top leadership in the Army since the end of World War II. The Generals attributes military failures in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan to a lost culture of accountability.