Choosing Your Battles: American Civil-Military Relations and the Use of Force.

• Author: Bacevich, Andrew J.
• Position: Book Review

Choosing Your Battles: American Civil-Military Relations and the Use of Force

By Peter D. Fearer and Christopher Gelpi Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004. Pp. 236 pages. $37.50.

Choosing Your Battles is an important but not completely persuasive book. Peter Feaver and Christopher Gelpi, political scientists who teach at Duke University, have produced an empirically grounded, rigorously argued, generally nuanced, and occasionally repetitive monograph in which they examine "how civil-military relations affect decisions on the use of force" (p. 12). More specifically, they fix their sights on two issues that loomed large during the first decade after the Cold War in discussions of U.S. civil-military relations. First, they explore the ostensible differences in civilian and military attitudes with regard to when and how the United States should intervene. Second, they set out to demolish the notion of casualty phobia--the allegation that ever since the Vietnam War the mere glimpse of a body bag causes the American public to go limp.

For evidence, the authors draw in large part, although not exclusively, on survey data that the Triangle Institute for Security, Studies collected during 1998-99. In essence, the present study is a by-product of the Triangle Institute's watershed project on post-Cold War U.S. civil-military relations and stands as further testimony to that project's remarkable importance--it just keeps on giving. Let the reader beware: Choosing Your Battles, with its bewildering array of charts, tables, and variables of many stripes and colors, is not for the statistically challenged.

The authors' key findings, stated here without the penumbra of caveats and qualifications found in the text, are three in number.

First, civilians without military experience are more willing than soldiers to favor the use of force. Furthermore, this gap between civilian and military willingness to intervene becomes especially stark when the issue at hand does not relate directly to vital national interests. In this regard, the authors find that the typecasting of "promiscuous civilians and reluctant warriors" (p. 3) has considerable merit. Moreover, hawkish civilians, having made the decision to intervene, are more willing than military officers to impose limits on the actual use of force. When actually called on to fight, otherwise dovish soldiers prefer going all-out to win as quickly as possible.

Second, "veteran opinion corresponds...