The lieutenants and captains of the Mexican War (1846-48) became the colonels and generals of the Civil War; the captains and majors of World War I became the generals of World War II; so it was that the junior officers of the Vietnam War became the generals of the Gulf War. In Prodigal Soldiers, Kitfield wants to create a group biography of these officers, and tell the story of how they learned the lessons of failure in Vietnam and remade the American military in order to ensure that the failure wouldn't be repeated. Mostly, he succeeds.

Kitfield follows the stories of a dozen or so major characters across all four services, intertwining them as they serve with, fight with, and collide with one another. A few of the names -- Barry McCaffrey, Chuck Horner, Walt Boomer -- will be familiar to readers who followed the Gulf War in the papers, but most readers will be meeting most of them for the first time. Kitfield tells their stories engagingly, but because there are so many characters, depth is invariably compromised as a result. You don't feel, when you put the book down, like you know any of the twelve as well as you know John McCain, John Poindexter, Oliver North, and Richard McFarlane at the end of The Nightingale's Song or John Paul Vann at the end of A Bright Shining Lie.

Kitfield sketches the characters well enough, however, that you understand who they are as people and as officers, and how they fit into the larger story he wants to tell: Their transformation of the U. S. armed forces into the lean, flexible, high-tech, tightly integrated machine that drove the Iraqis from Kuwait in 1991. His recounting of how change took place, and of the tension between the military's inherent conservatism and its realization that it had to innovate if it was going to avoid a worse defeat than it had suffered in Vietnam, is sure-footed and engrossing. He's sometimes sloppy about writerly details -- repeating phrases or even anecdotes, randomly spelling General Donn Starry's first name with and without the second "n" -- but he's mastered his material and presents it well.

There's some battle narrative here, and the story is bookended by two wars, but it's not ultimately a book about war but about what happens to military organizations between wars. As such, it's well worth the time of anyone -- uniformed or not -- with a serious interest in military affairs. ( )