Armed Servants: Agency, Oversight, and Civil–Military Relations. By Peter D. Feaver. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. 400p. $49.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.

Most scholars work within established paradigms. Few have the temerity to challenge them—and fewer still succeed in causing fundamental reconsideration. Peter Feaver has accomplished the latter task. He has taken on the dominant long-standing theoretical framework for American civil–military relations and, in the process, provided a more accurate view of them in the early twenty-first century.