During the early 1990s, the Department of Defense (DoD) began to change its focus from the Cold War to pursue more diverse missions. Questions arose about how future changes in military missions, organizations, and technology would affect the nature of military work and the characteristics of the military and civilian members of the DoD workforce. To address these questions, RAND undertook an occupational-level analysis of the effects of the future environment on the characteristics of DoD work and workers.

What is the potential for a divergence in views among civilian and military elites (sometimes referred to as the civil-military gap) to undermine military effectiveness? Although a variety of differences were found among the views of military and civilian survey respondents, these differences mostly disappeared when the authors focused on the attitudes that are pertinent to civilian control of the military and military effectiveness.

"This book examines the complex phenomenon of leadership in distributed work settings, or leadership at a distance. The study of leadership at a distance is complex because of the ubiquitous roles that leaders play, the scale of work leaders find themselves, and the range of technologies available to them."--[book cover].