Dudziak has written an extremely interesting book that engages with two very different groups of scholars who rarely communicate between one another: diplomatic historians and law professors specializing in constitutional theory. The issues she discusses are what Americans (and most of the scholars in these two groups) like to think are the discrete periods in which the United States went to war. Dudziak instead argues that wars are not as easy to define as we think. For example, World War II did not start in December of 1941 with Pearl Harbor and end in September of 1945 on the U.S.S. Missouri.

War, she argues, is not a rare exceptional period in United States history. The United States has been in an armed conflict in some form or another for the better part of a century. I would add that peoples such as the Delaware, Cherokee, and Lakota might argue that this time period is even longer than a century. Most Americans would say that the last war they fought in Europe was World War II, but Serbians would argue that the United States went to war with them in 1999. The importance of these factual disputes, as Dudziak points out, is that war is much more subjective than it might seem on first glance, and the execution of diplomacy does not come to a halt when the shooting starts, nor do other functions of the state.

There are a number of legal and political ways to define wartime, and these have enormous ramifications on the use and reach of state power. The United States government (all three branches) has often used supporting combat operations as an excuse for wandering away from the civil liberties enshrined in the United States Constitution. On the other hand, civil rights—which are different from civil liberties—have often grown with war mobilizations. For example, the Cold War—which Dudziak treats as a war—hurt civil liberties during the early phases of the United States–Soviet confrontation, but helped the cause of civil rights as racial segregation became an international political liability.

The last chapter of War Time concentrates on the open-ended nature of the “war on terrorism.” If the United States is at war as both the Bush and Obama administrations have claimed, then what ramifications will this approach have on society?

This book is thoughtful and thought provoking. The evidence is broad, ranging from the writings of Marcus Tullius Cicero, to contemporary news accounts. Dudziak notes that the veterans' organizations often have different definitions of combat service than do the armed forces and the military from their political masters. Dudziak is willing to be extremely candid; she shows, despite the claims of the Obama administration, that the United States Army is still treating Iraq as a war zone and awarding combat medals and pay to the 50,000 personnel who are still there serving as trainers.

War Time is short and written in easily accessible prose. As a result, it will be useful in classes in a number of fields at both the undergraduate and graduate levels be it in history, political science, or law.