Choosing Your Battles: American Civil–Military Relations and the Use of Force. By Peter D. Feaver and Christopher Gelpi. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 236p. $37.50.

The book addresses two practical and timely research concerns: the existence and significance of differences between civilian and military opinions on the commitment and nature of military force. Quantitative (mostly survey data from the Triangle Institute for Security Studies) and qualitative (case studies) data are used to systematically measure opinions about military operations among the civilian and military elites and the public, and to correlate these with national security decisions from 1819 to 1992. The authors anticipate most questions that could be raised about their methods and identify caveats and research questions yet to be addressed. Choosing Your Battles makes both scholarly contributions and intuitive sense.