COLONEL PAT PROCTOR'S critique of the U.S. Army's preparation and foresight in the post-Cold War era focuses on a national security issue that continues to vex in the twenty-first century: Has the Army lost its ability to win strategically by focusing on fighting conventional battles against peer enemies? Or can it adapt to deal with the greater complexity of counterinsurgency and low-intensity conflict?

In this blunt appraisal of the senior leadership of the U.S.. Army, Proctor contends that after the fall of the Soviet Union, the US Army stubbornly refused to reshape itself in response to the new strategic reality, a decision that saw it struggle through one low-intensity conflict after another—all inconclusive, some tragic—in the 1990s, and leaving it chronically unprepared when it found itself engaged in seeming forever-wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The first book-length study to connect the Army's failure to adapt in the 1990s to America's disastrous performance in the war on terror, Proctor's work is a stark warning to contemporary Army leaders to halt their headlong march toward the same disastrous mistake.