Joseph Soeters is Professor of Organization Studies at the Netherlands Defence Academy and Tilburg University, the Netherlands. He has published extensively in international academic journals and authored and (co-)edited several books.

Patricia M. Shields is Professor of Political Science at Texas State University, USA. She has been the editor-in-chief of Armed Forces & Society, the leading journal in military studies, since 2001. She has published extensively on the military.

Sebastiaan Rietjens is Associate Professor at the Netherlands Defence Academy, and a reserve major in the Netherlands army. He has done extensive fieldwork in military operations and has published in journals and books.

Part I - Getting started and seeing the context 1. Introduction: what makes the military special? Editors 2. Getting access to the field: insider/outsider perspectives, Eyal Ben-Ari and Yagil Levy 3. Getting on the Same Net: How the Theory-driven Academic can Better Communicate with the Pragmatic Military Client, Nicholas Jans 4. Chapter 4: Reflexivity: Potentially "Dangerous Liaisons", Eyal Ben-Ari 5. Doing military research in conflict environments, Björn Müller-Wille . Studying Host-Nationals in Operational Areas: The Challenge of Afghanistan, William Maley Part II - Qualitative Methods 7. Historical research in the military domain, Floribert Baudet and Eric Sibul 8. Retrieving what's already there: archival data for research in defense acquisition, Rene Rendon and Keith Snider 9. Process tracing in case studies, Pascal Vennesson and Ina Wiesner 10. Being One of the Guys or the Fly on the Wall? Participant Observation of Veteran Bikers, Rene Moelker [...]-depth interviewing, Brenda Moore 12. Qualitative data-analysis: seeing the patterns in the fog of Civil-Military Interaction, Sebastiaan Rietjens 13. Visual Communication Research and War, Michael Griffin 14. Researching 'The most dangerous of all sources': Egodocuments, Esmeralda Kleinreesink 15. Scrutinizing the Internet in search of "homegrown" terrorism, Risa Brooks Part III - Quantitative Studies 16. Survey Research in Military Settings, James Griffith 17. Longitudinal Design in Using Surveys in Military Research: Common Challenges and Techniques, Jing Han and Manon Andres 18. Multilevel Analysis: The Examination of Hierarchical Data in Military Research, Irina Goldenberg and Joseph Soeters 19. Cross national research in the military: comparing operational styles, Chiara Ruffa and Joseph Soeters 20. Experimental Methods in Military and Veteran Studies, Jeremy Teigen 21. The empirical analysis of conflicts, using databases, Min Ye and Uk Heo 22. Computational modeling to study conflicts and terrorism, Joseph Young and Michael Findley 23. Evaluating Peace Operations: Challenges and Dimensions, Daniel Druckman and Paul Diehl 24. Business Analytics Research in Military Organizations, Jan-Bert Maas, Paul C. van Fenema and Jan-Kees Schakel Part IV - The end 25. A New Approach to Doing Military Ethics, Celestino Perez 26. Theory Building in Research on the Military, Eyal Ben-Ari 27. Doing Practical Research and Publishing in Military Studies, Patricia Shields and Travis Whetsell