Thomas E. Ricks is *The Washington Post*'s senior Pentagon correspondent, where he has covered the US military since 2000. Until the end of 1999, he held the same beat at *The Wall Street Journal*, where he was a reporter for seventeen years. A member of two Pulitzer Prize-winning teams for national reporting, he has reported on US military activities in Somalia, Haiti, Korea, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Kuwait, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He is the author of *Making the Corps* and *A Soldier's Duty*.