Military professionals used to run away from, not to, the sounds of political warfare. Today, Diane Mazur argues, things are different. Drawing from her own observations as well as a large literature on the civil-military “gap” in the United States, she suggests that the officer corps has essentially bought into the Republican Party vision of a culture war, in which the military must defend its prerogatives against a not-truly-proud-to-be-American Democratic Party that thinks that combat is a tea party and that the military is the right place to try out radical social experiments. As if this were not alarming enough, even enlisted personnel in the American armed forces have come to regard themselves as morally superior to the rest of America. Mazur agrees with prior critics of the gap that these attitudes have negative consequences not only for the quality of civil-military relations, but for military effectiveness and professionalism as well.

Mazur's strongest claim is that she has identified the origin of the civil-military divide in the “opinions of a single justice of the Supreme Court” (40). Through William Rehnquist's decisions in a trilogy of cases, Parker v. Levy (1974), Rostker v. Goldberg (1981), and Goldman v. Weinberger (1986), “we have experienced a complete reversal in our understanding of civil-military relations, one that eroded our military's constitutional strength, diminished our civilian control of the military, interfered with necessary public debate, and even discouraged citizens from military service” (41). In Parker, Justice Rehnquist went above and beyond what was necessary to uphold the conviction by court martial of an outspokenly antiwar Army captain to postulate that the Court had “long recognized” (59) that the military is a “a society apart” from the civilian realm, and that judicial deference was appropriate so as to uphold its separation. Service members live by rules of their own, Rehnquist asserted, and those rules need not square with those of the Constitution.

Ten years later, in Rostker, “the most important case of the twentieth century in the constitutional relationship between the military and civilian society” (61), Rehnquist upheld the Military Service Act which requires only men to register for the draft. In doing so, Rehnquist held that because of the military context of the case, the government need not meet the usual standard in sex discrimination cases. Ostensibly because of the uniquely opaque nature of military judgments, the Court must defer to Congress. Among the oddities in this line of reasoning, Mazur points out, is that in declining to register women for the draft, Congress had itself chosen not to defer to the advice of all four military services. Congress's decision was made on other grounds—defense of traditional gender roles—which the Court had invalidated as unconstitutional in any other setting. In the last of the three cases, an Air Force captain was disciplined for wearing a yarmulke. Again, this time in a case involving freedom of religious expression, Rehnquist held that standard rules of review which would have required the government to explain its decision did not apply in a military setting.

Mazur goes on to show that the Rostker case, in particular, was indicative of a pattern whereby the presumed defenders of “military values” go at times against the interests and even the better judgment of the very people to whom they claim to be deferring. The most egregious instance of such misuse of the military, Mazur argues, was the George W. Bush administration's decision to use the armed forces to evade both settled law and military doctrine in the treatment of “enemy combatants.” In the use of interrogation techniques formerly deemed out of bounds, the officer corps cooperated in placing “the military at the center of a system designed to avoid the law, not respect the law” (113). They did so despite the concern held by many commanders that the military detention system was putting American service members at increased risk. Why?

Mazur is less than convincing in her answer, which is that a generation within the military has been “indoctrinated” by Court rulings to believe that the armed forces have “a standing exception to compliance with law” (126). As Mazur would have it, Justice Rehnquist has a lot to answer for. The gap, she repeats several times, is the natural result of the Court's teaching. To demonstrate such a claim, Mazur would need to do more than show the complementarity between the gap and judicial doctrine. She would also need to consider the possibility that the Court's rulings are as much an effect as a cause, and then seek to unravel the contribution to the civil-military divide made by broad historical forces. Mazur is deft at weaving into her analysis vignettes from popular culture, including the television drama 24, in which the fictional character Jack Bauer heroically tortures his way to the truth in virtually every episode. It is unclear why she does not then consider the possibility, explored for instance by Andrew Bacevich in a number of books, that a romanticized militarism has infected all aspects of public life in America, presumably the courts as well as entertainment.

Mazur is on firm ground, however, in showing how conservative members of Congress as well as the military's senior leadership make use of the very idea of the military's separate and better-than-us status to maintain the divide. She brings up to date—as of August 2010—the story of the status of gays and lesbians in the armed forces, and of the continued discomfort exhibited by some congressional and military leaders not merely at the fact that American women are serving in combat but that they are serving at all. Those who push to maintain the status quo are confident that the courts will not ask them to defend their actions, and that they can bully non-likeminded civilians into Court-like deference. As an example of such bullying, Mazur points to the brazen manipulation of absentee balloting in the historic Florida recount in 2000, a manipulation in which she argues at least certain members of the military chose knowingly to help “their” party fraudulently inflate their vote tally. As remarkable as the fraud itself was the unwillingness of the losing side to pursue the story.

Mazur may not be convincing that judicial deference opened the civil-military gap in the first place, but she makes an important contribution in reminding us not to neglect the courts when seeking to understand the complex interplay of institutions that maintain the “gap.” Mazur is, moreover, surely correct to argue that if the Court were to apply even modestly stricter standards of scrutiny to decisions taken in a military context, it would force into the open the sometimes unspoken rationale behind controversial military policies and invite civilian America back into the conversation about what sort of military it wants to have.