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Levine (senior fellow, Institute for Defense Analysis), a former Senate Armed Services Committee staff director and, subsequently, a senior Defense Department official, draws on his own practical experience to address why efforts aimed at improving efficiency and accountability in the Pentagon have been a struggle over the past 40 years. The author focuses on three main issues: civilian personnel reform, acquisition reform, and attempts to execute a financial audit of the department. Employing descriptive analysis rather than formal hypothesis testing, Levine distills lessons learned from these three cases into substantive political categories. He emphasizes prioritization, incrementalism, consultation with all interested parties, and sustained interest of senior leadership as common characteristics of more successful endeavors. Conversely broad efforts, demanded from above, at wholesale change have repeatedly failed. Even passage of binding legislation, if enacted in a partisan manner, is subject to obstruction by vested bureaucratic interests or politicization and subsequent repeal in future electoral cycles. Although categorized as a volume on security studies, the book will be more germane to those in the field of public administration. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals. --Clifton W. Sherrill, Troy University