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Peter D. Feaver shows that the public's high confidence in the military is based partly on deservedness and partly based on an underlying partisan gap and social desirability bias: extremely high confidence levels among self-identified Republican respondents but much less among Democrats and still weaker confidence among Independents. Not only does Feaver helps us understand how and why the public has confidence in the military, but he also exposes problems that policymakers need to be aware of. Specifically, he elucidates how confidence or over-confidence in the institution shapes public attitudes on the use of force and may not support the best practices in democratic civil-military relations.

The central concern of civil–military relations theory is how to have a military institution simultaneously strong enough to protect society and the state from enemies while also properly sized and obedient enough not to pose a threat itself to that society and state. When scholars wrestle with this question, they must engage the seminal contributions from Samuel Huntington and Morris Janowitz, as I did in "The Civil-Military Problematique: Huntington, Janowitz, and the Question of Civilian Control." In hindsight, it is clear that I was right enough in theory but perhaps not in practice. Thirty years of American civil–military relations shows the importance of norms and the strain on military professionalism imposed by the principal norm for democracies: that civilians have the right to be wrong. Future scholars must emphasize the shoring up of norms that build the trust that lubricates day-to-day civil–military interactions.

Advocates of cultivating a resignation-in-protest ethic understate the costs and exaggerate the benefits. Military officers who believe that the policymaking process is heading in a bad direction already have ample recourse in the form of advising within the chain of command. If their advice is not heeded, it is exceedingly unlikely that the country would be better served by senior officers provoking a civil–military crisis to advertise their policy differences with civilian leaders.

President George W. Bush's Iraq surge decision in late 2006 is an interesting case for civil-military relations theory, in particular, the debate between professional supremacists and civilian supremacists over how much to defer to the military on decisions during war. The professional supremacists argue that the primary problem for civil-military relations during war is ensuring the military an adequate voice and keeping civilians from micromanaging and mismanaging matters. Civilian supremacists, in contrast, argue that the primary problem is ensuring that well-informed civilian strategic guidance is authoritatively directing key decisions, even when the military disagrees with that direction. A close reading of the available evidence—both in published accounts and in new, not-for-attribution interviews with the key players—shows that the surge decision vindicates neither camp. If President Bush had followed the professional supremacists, there would have been no surge because his key military commanders were recommending against that option. If Bush had followed the civilian supremacists to the letter, however, there might have been a revolt of the generals, causing the domestic political props under the surge to collapse. Instead, Bush's hybrid approach worked better than either ideal type would have.