Tom Ricks on President Obama: “The most important line in President Obama’s speech was, ‘The hard truth is we have not seen the end of American sacrifice in Iraq.’ But he should have explored that more, because I don’t think Americans understand how much longer we will be involved there. On the upside, at least he didn’t deliver this ‘mission accomplished’ speech on an aircraft carrier.”
The Annals, by the Roman historian Tacitus
Thomas E. Ricks is a Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). Concurrently with his duties at CNAS, Ricks writes an online blog for ForeignPolicy.com called, “The Best Defense” for which he won the 2010 National Magazine Award as the best blog of the year, and serves as a contributing editor for Foreign Policy.
Prior to becoming a Senior Fellow, Ricks was affiliated with CNAS as a Senior Writer in Residence, at which time he completed his new book, The Gamble: General Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-08, published on February 10, 2009 by The Penguin Press.
Ricks covered the U.S. military for The Washington Post from 2000 through 2008. Until the end of 1999 he had the same beat at the Wall Street Journal, where he was a reporter for 17 years. He has reported on U.S. military activities in Somalia, Haiti, Korea, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Kuwait, Turkey, Afghanistan and Iraq. He was part of a Wall Street Journal team that won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 2000 for a series of articles on how the U.S. military might change to meet the new demands of the 21st century. Ricks also was part of a Washington Post team that won the 2002 Pulitzer prize for reporting about the beginning of the U.S. counteroffensive against terrorism. His book FIASCO: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, published by Penguin Press in July 2006, became a national best seller and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2007.
Born in Massachusetts in 1955, he grew up in New York and Afghanistan and graduated from Yale in 1977. He is a member of the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society, the Society for Military History, and the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
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In a New York Times June 24 2010 op-ed, Lose a General Win a War, Tom Ricks places the dismissal of Gen. Stanley McChrystal within the context of the military’s long tradition of firing insubordinate generals, arguing that President Obama’s actions constitute the beginning of a necessary re-balancing of discipline in a military where, according to Paul Yingling, “a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.”
