| | Prologue: Captain William DePuy and the 90th Division in Normandy, summer 1944 | p. 1 |
| | World War II | |
| | "Terrible Terry" Allen: Conflict between Marshall and his protégés | p. 73 |
| | Army generals fail at Chosin | p. 135 |
| | Ridgway turns the war around | p. 176 |
| | Maxwell Taylor: Architect of defeat | p. 217 |
| | General George C. Marshall: The leader | p. 17 |
| | Dwight Eisenhower: How the Marshall system worked | p. 40 |
| | George Patton: The specialist | p. 59 |
| | Mark Clark: The man in the middle | p. 65 |
| | The Korean War | |
| | The organization man's Army | p. 203 |
| | The Vietnam War | |
| | Eisenhower managers Montgomery | p. 81 |
| | Douglas MacArthur: The general as presidential aspirant | p. 96 |
| | O.P. Smith succeeds at Chosin | p. 150 |
| | William Simpson: The Marshall system and the new model American general | p. 106 |
| | William Dean and Douglas MacArthur: Two generals self-destruct | p. 121 |
| | MacArthur's last stand | p. 192 |
| | William Westmoreland: The organization man in command | p. 231 |
| | William DePuy: World War II-style generalship in Vietnam | p. 241 |
| | The collapse of generalship in the 1960s | p. 252 |
| | At the top | p. 252 |
| | In the field | p. 259 |
| | In personnel policy | p. 274 |
| | Tet '68: The end of Westmoreland and the turning point of the war | p. 285 |
| | My Lai: General Koster's cover-up and General Peers's investigation | p. 293 |
| | The end of a war, the end of an Army | p. 315 |
| | Interwar | |
| | DePuy's great rebuilding | p. 335 |
| | "How to teach judgment" | p. 354 |
| | Iraq and the Hidden Costs of Rebuilding | |
| | Colin Powell, Norman Schwarzkopf, and the empty triumph of the 1991 war | p. 367 |
| | The ground war: Schwarzkopf vs. Frederick Franks | p. 379 |
| | The post-Gulf War military | p. 388 |
| | Tommy R. Franks: Two-time loser | p. 397 |
| | Ricardo Sanchez: Over his head | p. 410 |
| | George Casey: Trying but trading water | p. 426 |
| | David Petraeus: An outlier moves in, then leaves | p. 432 |
| | Epilogue: Restoring American military leadership | p. 447 |
| | Acknowledgments | p. 463 |
| | Notes | p. 467 |
| | Index | p. 533 |