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.

The authors' second goal is to link the civil–military opinion gap to foreign policy behavior, and it is one of the major theoretical contributions of the book. They demonstrate that systematic differences in the ways civilian and military elites view the use of force have had a profound effect on the propensity of the United States to initiate conflict between 1816 and 1992: “As the percentage of veterans serving in the executive branch and the legislature increases, the probability that the United States will initiate militarized interstate disputes [MIDs] declines by nearly 90 percent,” and “once an MID has been initiated, the higher the proportion of veterans in the government, the greater the level of force the United States will use in the dispute” (p. 7). There is an extensive body of literature that argues how other variables—including distance, military capabilities, polity type, system polarity, and alliance ties—affect the propensity to initiate international conflict. Controlling for these alternative explanations, Feaver and Gelpi demonstrate a strong correlation between the civil–military opinion gap and initiation of the use of force. The impact of elite military experience often outweighed the impact of these other variables. The authors have introduced an explanatory variable that must be accommodated by the larger literature on conflict initiation and behavior.

The third goal of the book is to connect civil–military preferences over the use of force to the willingness to accept casualties. Feaver and Gelpi argue that the view of a casualty-phobic American public is a myth; “the public is defeat phobic, not casualty phobic” (p. 97). Members of the mass public are more willing to tolerate casualties than are elites, and this is consistent across mission types. Military officers show high support for realpolitik missions, and higher tolerance for casualties in those missions as well. The mass public shows markedly higher tolerance for casualties in those missions than the conventional wisdom would lead one to expect. On interventionist missions, civilian elites and the public are more willing to tolerate U.S. casualties than are military officers. Their data show that the gap in casualty tolerance is civilian versus military, rather than mass public versus elite.

The authors argue that civilian elites are tying their own hands by assuming that the public is reflexively casualty phobic. The public does not demand cost-free military operations, just successful ones. This is one of the book's more provocative claims. It flies in the face of a vast literature, including some of the classics on public opinion and war, which assert that public support declines as casualties rise, as well as a more recent study that found the public to be more concerned with casualties than defeat in cases where the U.S. stakes were judged to be relatively unimportant. (Eric V. Larson and Bogdan Ssavych, American Public Support for U.S. Military Operations from Mogadishu to Baghdad, 2005).

This is also one of the least satisfying assertions of Choosing Your Battles. What does it mean to say that the public supports missions that are successful? Perceived success could be “if the mission is successful, or there is a reasonable expectation of success, or at least the political elite make a plausible case to the public that success is within reach” (pp. 156–57), or “when victory is in sight” (p. 197). But these are decidedly different. Feaver and Gelpi even concede that “[m]uch depends on our coding of successful and unsuccessful military operations” (p. 144). Their formulation begs the question of how the public knows a mission is succeeding when they are in the midst of it. In questioning respondents about their willingness to tolerate casualties, the authors asked them to assume that the mission would be a success (p. 107). We can assume that the public is rational, and can make cost-benefit analyses. The question is what information the public is using to gauge operational and strategic success.

Feaver and Gelpi would have us believe that it is mostly a question of presidential messaging, of a president mobilizing public support by framing casualties as a necessary price for victory (which Bill Clinton failed to do in Somalia). This belief underlies the current Bush administration's National Security Council document Our National Strategy for Victory in Iraq, a largely public relations document designed to mobilize public support by demonstrating that the administration has a strategy to win. (Incidentally, it is also a document widely attributed to Peter Feaver, who joined the Bush NSC as a special advisor in June 2005.) Absent effective presidential framing, casualties will signal that the operation is failing.

The problems with this formulation are several. First, it depends on what expectations the president creates, how he defines success, and whether the administration's definition of success shifts over time. Second, it begs the question of where the public is getting its information and how those other sources frame casualties. The public does not take cues only from political leaders. The media are a crucial source of information, and at least with respect to the current war in Iraq, have been accused of overreporting bad news, underreporting progress that is being made, and reporting facts but not putting them into context.

This argument is not the crude version of the CNN effect—the public responding viscerally to gruesome pictures—which Feaver and Gelpi reject (p. 152). Rather, it hinges on the reporting of facts without context, or exaggerations and misinformation that are often the hallmark of chaotic situations. Yet these reports are likely to be seen by the public as less biased because they come from nongovernmental sources. Finally, it is just not clear how well the public can judge the importance of various military engagements or arrests, nor how they can judge progress in a global war on terrorism that is waged largely in the shadows with only occasional evidence of success.

So what it means when the authors say that the public will tolerate casualties if the mission is a success remains ambiguous. This may be why they published “Success Matters: Casualty Sensitivity in the War in Iraq” (International Security 30 [Winter 2005/6]), where they present evidence on the public's understanding of success in Iraq. But there is still a difference between the public's beliefs about what success is and their beliefs about whether we are succeeding. That depends on the information they are using to judge success.

Feaver and Gelpi end up being quite cautious in their claims, noting many caveats in what they can extract from the data. The crux of their argument on casualties and public support is that “the baseline of support is higher than elites believe—even civilian elites who themselves express a high support for casualties” (p. 146). It consists largely of 15%–40% of the pubic that are “defeat phobic.” This is the group that the president must reach when he lays out his strategy for victory. However, the criteria for success must be clear, and more importantly, verifiable by nongovernmental sources.