After case studies of military and naval disasters from the preceding 120 years, mostly British, it offers in readable, not technical, style an analysis of the personality of the unsuccessful leader.

During the Second World War, he covers Percival's failure to defend Singapore and Montgomery's over-bold effort to seize Arnhem (though he sees this as a tragic blot on an otherwise laudable career).

After this catalogue of incompetence, he addresses how such large and costly enterprises as armed forces can be put in the hands of men of such dubious calibre.

Among characteristics of the British officer class in the period under examination are: a narrow social segment admitted, scorn of intellectual and artistic endeavour, subservience to tradition, and emphasis on virility.

He therefore ignores people and facts which do not conform to his world view, learns little from experience and clings to external rules, applying them even when the situation demands other approaches (for example Haig sacrificing hundreds of thousands of men he ordered to walk through mud into German machine gun fire).