Between War and Peace: How America Ends Its Wars
Edited by Colonel Matthew Moten. New York: Free Press, 2011. 384 pp. Intro. Maps. Notes. Index. $27.99.
Reviewed by Colonel Robert Killebrew, U.S. Army (Retired)
Between War and Peace is an excellent collection of essays that investigates how America ends its wars. Ending wars has been the subject of scholarly and policy inquiry at least since the publication of Fred Iklé’s Every War Must End in 1971 (Columbia University Press), and attempts to capture war termination in military planning have led to planning for an “end state” and other lamentable bureaucratic quagmires. In fact, and as Between War and Peace shows, key decisions about postwar policies are almost never military ones, since, in the American system, civilian policymakers reserve those decisions for themselves. The armed services then execute postwar decisions to occupy, administer, police, or demobilize.
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