"Dan Maurer has broken new ground in this well-researched and well-written book. Maurer provides a framework for understanding and diagnosing the health of civil-military relations in our democracy. This is an important book because today's threats to national security demand strategic competence, and strategic competence requires healthy civil-military relations. Maurer's book is of particular value to civilian and military officials charged with protecting the nation." (H.R. McMaster, Lieutenant General, US Army, and author of "Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam") "This is an important and unique book. Dan Maurer brings a lawyer's logic and a soldier's experience to the important and contentious question of the proper relationship between senior civilian and military leaders in crafting grand strategy for the United States.

It is a tour de force and, quite simply, a must read." (David Johnson, Colonel (retired), PhD, Senior Fellow, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), author of "Fast Tanks and Heavy Bombers: Innovation in the U.S. Army, 1917-1945" and "Modern U.S. Civil-Military Relations: Wielding the Terrible Swift Sword") "How can the vitality of America's civil-military relations be objectively analyzed? In the disciplines that study these relations, there has never been a consensus. With his legal background, Dan Maurer complements moral and political arguments as he weaves the fiduciary duties of candor, loyalty, confidentiality, and scope of responsibility into a jurisprudential form of agency theory as a basis for such norms. His cases and analysis are impressive, and the field of modern civil-military relations is now analytically the richer for it.

" (Don M. Snider, Colonel (retired), PhD, Professor Emeritus, West Point, and retired Professor of Profession and Ethic, US Army War College).