Choosing Your Battles: American Civil–Military Relations and the Use of Force. By Peter D. Feaver and Christopher Gelpi. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 268p. $22.95.

In their book, Peter Feaver and Christopher Gelpi have several agendas. They succeed at some better than others. Their first goal is to establish the fact of a civil–military opinion gap over the use of force. They find that civilian elites are more willing to expand U.S. foreign policy goals to include nontraditional missions related to human rights, whereas military elites are more supportive of a traditional Cold War foreign policy agenda (p. 42); and that nonveteran civilian elites are more willing to use force incrementally, whereas elite military officers support the decisive use of force enshrined in the Powell Doctrine. Both insights have been documented in the case study literature, but Feaver and Gelpi bring large-n analysis and original survey opinion data to bear on the topic.