Choosing Your Battles

Peter D. Feaver is Alexander F. Hehmeyer Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Duke University. He is the author of "Armed Servants" and "Guarding the Guardians" as well as coeditor of "Soldiers and Civilians". Christopher Gelpi is Associate Professor of Political Science at Duke University. He is the author of "The Power of Legitimacy" (Princeton).

"[A] highly statistical but thankfully lucid study... [The authors] find that non-veteran civilian elites are more likely to advocate the use of force than either military elites or civilian leaders with military experience... The pattern holds historically. The authors consider a total of 111 instances from 1816 to 1992."--Chronicle of Higher Education "Feaver and Gelpi offer important insights into the character of civil-military relations in the U.S. and into its effects on the nature of U.S. foreign policy... [A]n important work whose findings have wide-ranging policy implications."--Spencer D. Bakich, Virginia Quarterly Review "Feaver and Gelpi's intriguing and well-executed study provides a welcome contribution to scholarship in this area. In it, the authors address a subset of provocative issues within the broader study of American civil-military relations."--Risa A. Brooks, Review of Politics

• LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES vii PREFACE xi CHAPTER ONE Introduction 1 CHAPTER TWO The Civil-Military Opinion Gap over the Use of Force 21 CHAPTER THREE The Impact of Elite Veterans on American Decisions to Use Force 64 CHAPTER FOUR Casualty Sensitivity and Civil-Military Relations 95 CHAPTER FIVE Exploring the Determinants of Casualty Sensitivity 149 CHAPTER SIX Conclusion 184 REFERENCES 215 NAME INDEX 229 SUBJECT INDEX 233