Military Readiness: Concepts, Choices, Consequences.

I would urge that anyone who is even remotely involved in decisions regarding American defense issues read this book. I would also recommend it to all others who take an interest in questions of how we decide what to spend on defense and of how, when, and why we decide to put men and women in uniform into harm's way. And it would also be a source of stimulation to those whose focus is on more theoretical issues of organizational process and historical analysis.

Could there be a more fundamentally important issue than that of whether the nation is ready to prevail against external threat? Yet as Betts points out, America's leadership has tended to focus on military readiness only intermittently and, on some of these occasions, with flawed and confused thinking. Betts helps clarify our thinking by sorting out different aspects of the construct - operational readiness, structural readiness, and mobilization readiness - and helps us to understand the relationships …