Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Park Grove Library (Cottage Grove) | 355.00973 KAP | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
In this extraordinary book, Robert D. Kaplan lets readers experience up close the American military worldwide in the air, at sea, and on the ground: flying in a B-2 bomber, living on a nuclear submarine, and traveling with a Stryker brigade on missions around the world. Provided unprecedented access, Kaplan moves from destroyers off the coast of Indonesia to submarines in the central Pacific, from simulated Iraqi training grounds in Alaska to technology bases in Las Vegas, from army and marine land forces in the heart of the Sahara Desert, to air bases in Guam and Thailand and beyond. Hog Pilots, Blue Water Gruntsprovides not only a riveting ground-level portrait of the Global War on Terrorism on several continents, but also a gritty firsthand account of how U.S. soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen are protecting sea-lanes, providing disaster relief, contending with the military rise of China, fighting the war in Iraq, and crafting contingency plans for war with North Korea and Iran. Expanding on Kaplan's acclaimed Imperial Grunts, the first volume of his exploration of the American military, which "offers the reader an enlightened way to understand what is happening in the world" (San Francisco Chronicle),Hog Pilots, Blue Water Gruntsshifts focus to the Pacific, where emerging Asian powers present vexing diplomatic and strategic challenges to U.S. influence. In this volume, Kaplan completes his analysis of army Special Forces and the marines, while also taking readers into the heart of the myriad tribal cultures of the air force, surface and subsurface navies, and the regular army's Stryker brigades. Kaplan goes deep into their highly technical and exotic worlds, and he tells this story through the words and perspectives of the enlisted personnel and junior officers themselves--men and women who, as he writes, have "had their national identities as Americans engraved in sharp bas-relief." This provocative and illuminating book, likeImperial Gruntsbefore it, not only conveys the vast scope of America's military commitments, which rarely make it into the news, but also shows us astonishing and vital operations right as they unfold--from the point of view of the troops themselves. From the Hardcover edition.
Author Notes
Journalist Robert D. Kaplan is a contributing editor The Atlantic Monthly.
He has traveled extensively, and his journeys through Yugoslavia and America have produced, respectively, Balkan Ghosts (which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize) and An Empire Wilderness.
Kapan is also the author of Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Random House, 2010) and The Revenge of Geography (Random House, 2012)
Kaplan has lectured at the FBI, the National Security Agency, the Pentagon's Joint Staff, major universities, the CIA, and business forums.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
After 9/11, Atlantic Monthly correspondent and bestselling author Kaplan (Balkan Ghosts) spent five years living with U.S. troops deployed across the globe. He first reported on his travels in 2005's Imperial Grunts, an incisive and valuable primer on the military's role in maintaining an informal American empire. In this shrewd and often provocative sequel, Kaplan introduces readers to more of the soldiers, marines, sailors and airmen who staff the empire's forward outposts. Although the author's travels take him to Iraq, he spends most of his time with "imperial maintenance" units that are training indigenous troops, protecting sea lanes and providing humanitarian relief from Timbuktu to the Straits of Malacca. Kaplan clearly admires the American troops he meets, though he sometimes questions their civilian masters. He saves his harshest judgment for his fellow journalists, whose relentless criticism of anything less than perfection amounts to media tyranny, in his view. Kaplan sees the war on terror and "the re-emergence of China" as the U.S.'s two abiding challenges in the 21st century and argues that, after Iraq, the military will seek a smaller, less noticeable footprint overseas. Kaplan combines the travel writer's keen eye for detail and the foreign correspondent's analytical skill to produce an account of America's military worthy of its subject. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Kaplan is a national correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly, and for the past few years he has been visiting and reporting on various U.S. military installations and the men and women who staff them in far-flung places. Here he describes visits to bases outside the more publicized areas in the Middle East and Central Asia. In some cases, naval and marine units engage in nonmilitary activities, including infrastructure building and even humanitarian efforts. Kaplan's encounters with the soldiers who serve far from home are both surprising and reassuring. As one would expect, they are dedicated, but they also seem to be ordinary young men and women, not at all isolated from the broader society.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Robert D. Kaplan tags along with soldiers, sailors and bomber pilots as they serve their tours of duty. BY PHILLIP CARTER IT'S hard not to like soldiers. The young men and women who make up our armed forces represent virtues we'd like to see more of in society: integrity, selfless service and loyalty to comrades and country, among others. Spend enough time with them, particularly those serving in harm's way, and you will inevitably come home admiring them, and maybe envying them as well. In his first book on the American military, "Imperial Grunts," Robert D. Kaplan focused on Army Special Forces teams and Marine units engaged in unconventional wars around the world, from Fallujah to the Philippines. His reporting conveyed an awe for the men and women he accompanied, with Kaplan suggesting that they could function as both diplomats and fighters, the vanguard of the American empire. Kaplan continues this love affair with his new book, "Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground" - colorful dispatches from the lesser publicized parts of the global war on terrorism. Kaplan sails across the Pacific on a Navy destroyer, flies to Thailand with an Air Force bomber unit for a joint exercise and sweats in the mountains of Central Asia with a team training a battalion of Nepalese Army Rangers. Kaplan consciously strives to emulate famed war correspondents like Ernie Pyle and Richard Tregaskis, men who wrote with the pronouns "we" and "our" to signify their emotional bond with the troops they covered. Kaplan likes to give short portraits (like that for Capt. David Boone, "an intense, dark-haired and boyish-looking naval officer"), in the style of an old-fashioned combat correspondent. He also peppers his stories with brief asides about military details, like the fact that the U.S.S. Benfold, on which he sails, was named for the Navy medic Edward Benfold of Audubon, N.J., killed during the Korean War and posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. But Kaplan doesn't just admire the troops, he also praises their missions. Through their exploits, he forms a vision of how the American empire might preserve itself: as an international network of military power tied together by small foreign bases, global air and sea capabilities, personal relationships with foreign governments and American warriors willing to fight. Take, for instance, the "cooperative security location" used by the American military in Utapao, Thailand. Kaplan finds a United States base there that is not a United States base, but rather a small airfield run by Dan Generette, a private contractor and the chief operating officer of Delta Golf Global. A retired Air Force master sergeant, Generette acts as logistical manager, diplomat and local fixer for the American units that pass though, facilitating every aspect of their stay. "Look, this place ain't Kansas. When a crew of young American airmen arrive, they don't know anything," Generette tells Kaplan, adding that the Thais would "rather deal with me than with some loud and upset ugly American running around their base complaining. I know the culture, the language. I'm kind and pleasant." Arrangements like Generette's in Utapao, and another on the small island of Mactan in the Philippines, Kaplan writes, enable the American military to operate abroad with a low profile, without formal alliances or status-of-forces agreements and with little friction. In these, Kaplan sees how the American empire might look in the 21st century - featuring a light American footprint, and military forces that take pains to avoid offending local sensibilities while still contributing to their security. This model carries some promise but also considerable risk, for it neglects the traditional diplomacy and international institutions that framed America's superpower status during the 20th century. "Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts" also offers an intimate glimpse inside many kinds of American military units, each with its own culture. Kaplan spends enough time with these men (most of the units he writes about are elite ones that remain closed to women) to pick up the subtle implications of their actions, like the way an Army Special Forces team intentionally lives in one overcrowded tent instead of several smaller ones as a way of maintaining its cohesion. The marines he accompanies in sub-Saharan Africa represent the most conventional of the units he travels with: young, testosterone-filled men who love their country and have no compunction about fighting for it. "A marine," one sergeant tells Kaplan, "is only happy when he's fighting, humping with his backpack or on liberty - spending time with his girlfriend or working under his car." At the other extreme, he writes of the anal-retentive "geeks with tattoos" who serve in the Navy's submarine service, junior sailors and officers with advanced technical degrees in nuclear engineering living for weeks at a time under the ocean's surface. WHAT unites all these troops is a common faith, Kaplan writes - a belief in their unit, their cause and the moral justness of their mission. Paradoxically, that faith is mirrored in some of America's enemies, like the Maoist guerrillas in Nepal who are fortified by their own "mystic dimension of service and the sanctity of an oath," and quite willing to die for their cause. In many places Kaplan finds this fighting faith deeply rooted in the martial spirit of the military, an ethos of the American South inextricably intertwined with Christianity - though he rightly points out that America's military faith is more secular and conservative than evangelical. Still, he notes the absence of this faith among, the country's elites, particularly its intellectual elites, and argues that this undermines our ability to persevere in places like Iraq and Afghanistan: "No matter how much the combat arms community of the American military with its warrior ethos believed in its worldwide mission, the American governing class, unlike that of 19th- and early-20th-century Europe, had less stomach for it." Marines in Najaf, Iraq, 2004. Kaplan's picture contains a great deal of truth. Fewer than 1 percent of Americans serve in uniform today. The military's officer and senior enlisted ranks make up a self-selecting, self-reproducing warrior caste that increasingly is socially, geographically and politically insulated from the nation it serves. Occasionally, Kaplan's reporting lapses into unabashed cheerleading, obscuring the problems with the military's missions or strategies. Nonetheless, his book offers a valuable bridge across the country's widening civil-military divide. It is an important contribution to our understanding of how this military works in the 21st century. Phillip Carter, an Iraq veteran and lawyer, is writing a book about America's relationship with its military.
Kirkus Review
Absorbing continuation of Imperial Grunts (2005), with journalist Kaplan visiting American military forces in another dozen nations as they work to spread the influence of the world's leading imperial power--a phrase that he insists describes us just as it once did Britain and Rome. A long chapter follows regular army units patrolling relatively pacified areas in Iraq during 2005. These soldiers embrace "winning hearts and minds" without cynicism, but Kaplan makes it clear they have a crushing task. Surprisingly sophisticated mid-level officers explain that, despite their superior's proclamations, poor people yearn for security (honest police, a minimum of criminals) more than free elections; then they want work. Most Iraqi insurgents are not religious fanatics but unemployed young men. Fixing this requires patience and money--more of both, Kaplan concludes sadly, than Americans will tolerate. While Imperial Grunts featured army and marine units, this book adds our Air Force and Navy, dazzling high-tech services but run by the same down-to-earth men and women with the same goals: assisting friendly governments, training military forces, providing humanitarian relief and fighting terrorism (a broad term that may include less-friendly political opposition, breakaway insurgents and uncooperative tribes). The chapters on sailors and airmen are less successful; these fighters rarely interact with other nationals, and their consequently simpler views of America's virtues will make some readers squirm. Sensibly, Kaplan writes mostly on the minutiae of operating extraordinarily complex war machines: nuclear submarines, guided missile destroyers, spy planes. His subjects seem overwhelmingly right-wing and Republican, but units working on foreign soil show a gratifying tolerance as well as a commonsense view of what these nations need that contradicts our leaders' platitudes about spreading democracy. A relentlessly admiring portrait of our armed services, but without the traditional overlay of patriotic homilies. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Wherever Kaplan travels (in this case, to all three branches of the U.S. military), he always brings back gold. With a nine-city tour. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
America's African Rifles With a Marine Platoon African Sahel, Summer 2004 In the early summer of 2004, just as the United States was dismantling the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, sending home its effective proconsul, L. Paul Bremer III, U.S. Marines and Army Special Forces were in various stages of deploying to the southern fringe of the Sahara Desert, the Sahel, one of the few battlegrounds left in the Global War on Terror for the U.S. military to enter, as it was already deployed in so many other parts of the world. Local alliances and the training of indigenous troops have been a traditional means of projecting power at minimum risk and fanfare. This was true of Rome even in regard to adjacent North Africa, to say nothing of its Near Eastern borderlands; and it was particularly true of France and Britain, two-thirds of whose expeditions were composed of troops recruited in the colonies.* As Tacitus writes, "We Romans value real power but disdain its vanities."1 Taking Tacitus to heart, I went to * See Sallust's The Jugurthine War, composed between 44 and 40 b.c., and Douglas Porch's introduction to the Bison edition of Col. C. E. Callwell's Small Wars: Their Principles & Practice (1896; Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1996). These are but two examples of a vast military literature about how imperial powers used their influence. the Niger River region of the African Sahel, or "coast," a belt of savannah and scrub on the Sahara's southern edge, to witness a version of America's reach that was radically different from Iraq, certainly more modest, and hopefully more successful. Among the great rivers of Africa, after the Nile and the Congo there is the Niger, which medieval Arab geographers such as Ibn Battuta called "the Nile of the Negroes." The Niger rises within 492 feet of the Atlantic Ocean in the jungly, mountainous borderland of Guinea and Sierra Leone and flows northeast into Mali, past the desert caravan centers of Timbuktu and Gao. Then, arcing southeast through Niger and along the Benin border, it drops down into Nigeria, breaking up into an immense delta amid the malarial swamps of the Bight of Biafra. The curvilinear journey of 2,600 miles from the sea deep into the desert, and back to the sea again, seems almost contrary to the laws of nature. Herodotus, in the course of his travels in the fifth century b.c., heard mention of the river. In the vicinity of eastern Libya he was told about a group of young and adventurous Nasamonians, who lived in nearby Syrtis along the Mediterranean coast. These Nasamonians had packed a good supply of food and water and set off into the interior of Libya. After traveling for many days southwestward through the desert they came upon a region of sparse vegetation where they were attacked by black men "of less than middle height," speaking an unintelligible language. These "dwarfs" carried the Nasamonians through a marshy country whereupon they sighted a "great river with crocodiles" that "flowed from west to east."2 The Niger was no less remote to twenty-first-century Americans than it had been to the ancient Greeks. It passed through some of the poorest and most unstable countries in the world. The Sahara Desert had effectively cut West Africa off from the traffic of peoples, ideas, and technology that moved between the Mediterranean and Eurasia from the classical age onward. Islam itself was weakened in the course of its arduous journey south. The Tuaregs, for example, a Berber people who began moving south from the central Sahara to the Niger River about a.d. 1000, were only nominally Muslim. They built few mosques; few of them made the haj to Mecca. Tuareg men wore veils; not Tuareg women. The word "Tuareg" itself is Arabic for "the abandoned of God." The flowing robes and headdresses of Tuareg warriors recalled not Muslims but medieval Christian knights.3 A Tuareg empire grew up around the caravan city of Agadez, only to be conquered by the empire of Songhai. The empires of Songhai and Mali later overlapped near the middle part of the Niger River, the part with which Ibn Battuta was familiar, and where U.S. Marines had recently ensconced themselves. These medieval imperiums had raised impressive armies and bureaucracies, with their names enduring through the ethnic identities of the inhabitants. Yet given the sleepy underdevelopment that now defined the region, such mighty kingdoms might as well have been ghosts. By 1900, the French had conquered much of the Sahara and adjacent Sahel. But as other imperial powers had learned and were still to learn, conquest came easily; remolding a difficult terrain in one's image was another matter. The Tuaregs, as though precursors of modern-day Islamic terrorists, faded into the landscape and waited out the occupiers.4 A century later it would be the region's political and social failure that raised its stature in the eyes of the American military. Throughout the Sahel were the ingredients that bred terrorists and their sympathizers: large populations of unemployed young men, growing political disaffection, and increasing Islamic orthodoxy.5 At each end of the Niger were bustling ports with questionable security, coastlines teeming with pirates, and Arab émigré communities with links to international diamond smugglers and terrorist outfits. Sahelian Africa had the two requirements essential for penetration by al-Qaeda and its offshoots: collapsing institutions and cultural access afforded by an Islamic setting. The Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, which boasted links to al-Qaeda, had amassed weapons and vehicles in Mali for use in Algeria. With the help of U.S. Navy surveillance aircraft, it was pushed out of Mali into Niger and Chad, where U.S. Army Special Forces helped Chadian troops kill and capture over forty insurgents.6 Still, the Salafists were arguably the most dynamic Islamic force in the northern half of Africa. In Algeria they had eclipsed the Armed Islamic Group as the leading threat to the government. Too, they were active along the Libyan-Chadian border. Though founded in 1998 in Algeria, the Salafists traced their ideological roots to the reform movements in nineteenth-century Egypt that had raised the level of political consciousness among Muslims, then mired in antique and decaying colonial systems.7 This venerable Salafist legacy lent cachet to al-Qaeda extremism. Big Oil also lured the United States to the region. In 2004 the U.S. was importing 15 percent of its oil from West Africa, a figure expected to rise to 25 percent within a decade.8 There was, too, the rising specter of the Chinese, who were investing significantly in the Sahel and whose influence the Americans wanted to limit. Given such circumstances, the U.S. military had dispatched Army Special Forces to Mali and Mauritania, and marines to Chad and Niger. Senegal and other countries would soon be added to the pan-Sahel initiative, designed as a preventive, economy-of-force measure to avert the need for a massive deployment against terrorists as in Afghanistan. I planned to meet up with U.S. marines in Niger, the second poorest country in the world after Sierra Leone. Yet my first impression of Niger was one of august, primordial beauty. The great river did not disappoint: a vast, smoky engraving so wide that it seemed less an actual river than a still life of the sea itself. In the middle, majestically parting the waters, stood long sandbars topped by rich green grass at the beginning of the rainy season. Thickets of coconut palms, neem, and eucalyptus lined the banks, beyond which stretched panels of cultivation that culminated in a series of low mesas. Camels plodded back from the fields at dusk, approaching the bronzed water where gurgling hippos bathed and men in shallow-draft boats fished for perch. The capital city of Niamey, which unrolled along the river's northern bank, was little more than a sprawling village: absent of tension compared to the teeming African slum cities by the Atlantic Ocean to the south, such as Lagos and Abidjan. Parallel to the river were tranquil streets with stoplights that actually worked, and one-story government buildings with few guards at the entrances. The loose laterite gave the entire townscape a rich orange tint, as though a camera filter had been placed before one's eyes. There were mud-walled houses and tulip-shaped wattle roofs. Boys stricken with polio went by on makeshift bicycles that they operated with hand pedals. Women in loud robes, buckets atop their heads, appeared almost to float by. There was an affecting, sensual intimacy to these dusty orange lanes. I thought of how the cities of coastal West Africa must have looked decades ago, before massive urban migration had shredded kinship patterns, ignited ethnic strife, and substituted the pageant of earthen colors for the prison hues of iron and concrete. Yet despite a spate of violent crime in parts of town and periodic anti-Christian riots near the Nigerian border, Niger's relatively slow pattern of development had caused it to lack an explosive edge. The traditional class structure of nobles, artisans, and former slaves still survived, leading to unspoken understandings that braced the social mortar. But Niamey worked better as a city than it did as the administrative center of a country so vast and empty that the Libyan border to the northeast was farther away from the Nigerien capital than the Great Lakes were from the Gulf of Mexico. Seventy-five percent of Niger's twelve million people lived on just a sliver of territory stretching from Niamey eastward, along the Benin and Nigerian borders. Alas, Niger was little more than a demographic spillover of Nigeria, even as Niger's governing class, composed mainly of ethnic Hausas and Songhai- Djermas, had to control a hostile desert extending to Mali, Algeria, Libya, and Chad--a desert where Tuareg bandits were providing sanctuary and logistical support to Islamic terrorists. Niamey was pleasant, even as it was a vacuum surrounded by unstable regional forces. The U.S. military had the same impossible task here as it had in so many other places where it was deployed: against considerable odds, help make a country that existed only on the map into something real. I stress the military because in weak democracies such as Niger's, politicians came and went, but soldiers and security men remained as silent, behind-the-scenes props--if they hadn't metamorphosed into politicians themselves. Niger's civilian head of state, Tandja Mamadou, was a former army lieutenant colonel. The fact that the State Department constituted the front for security assistance missions like that of the Marines did not mask European Command's importance to Niger. The Pentagon's humanitarian assistance projects, administered at the time by European Command (EUCOM) through a defense attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Niamey, accounted for almost all of the charity relief that the American people provided to the troubled north of Niger. Northern Niger was too insecure for either the Peace Corps or nongovernmental organizations to penetrate. You couldn't establish yourself in the north without the help of the Nigerien military, with whom civilian aid workers had cultivated few, if any, contacts. Beyond Niamey, as I traveled north along the river, dark green scrub and tall millet fields competed with eroding layers of bright orange clay and dust. Niger was losing 7,800 square miles a year to desertification, though for the moment it wasn't apparent because of the seasonal rains. I was inside a white Toyota pickup driven by Maj. Paul Baker of Drummond, Oklahoma, the commanding officer of a platoon-sized Marine training team, which consisted of twenty-four men, including three Navy corpsmen, drawn from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and EUCOM's Stuttgart headquarters. At forty years old, Maj. Baker, with wire-rimmed glasses, a graying-blond high-and-tight, and a frank, uncomplicated expression stamped on his face, was a bit long in the tooth for his rank. But so were some of his lieutenants, he told me, who had started out as enlisted men and later gone to Officer Candidate School at Quantico, Virginia. It would turn out to be a good platoon: the officers had been grunts (noncommissioned combat infantrymen) themselves. Baker's father had served twenty-eight years in the Army and the National Guard. His oldest brother had joined the Air Force, his middle brother the Navy. "So the only option for me was the Marines," he said in a flat prairie accent. It wasn't so simple. After graduating from Northwestern Oklahoma State University, Baker had tried farming. Then, in the slow burn of a job search during the Texas-Oklahoma oil bust of the 1980s, he called the local Marine recruiter. Months of back-and-forth brought news that he was unqualified to be an officer. So the next day he enlisted and was dispatched to Marine boot camp outside San Diego. Baker rose to lance corporal and was eventually accepted at Officer Candidate School. This came after serving aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln off Kuwait during the 1991 Gulf War, and evacuating refugees from the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines soon afterward. Through a friend in the Navy he met "the wife," a Vietnamese American whose father was a Vietnam veteran and a "Brown & Root type"--a private military contractor, that is. Baker was married at Camp Lejeune five days after returning from a deployment in Norway; his son would be born seventeen hours before he left for Okinawa on another deployment. He had no complaints. "I've been lucky in the Corps, and this," he went on, looking out the truck window at the thorny African scrub, "is a great opportunity for a log officer." For a logistics officer who had not made it to Afghanistan or Iraq, commanding a training mission in two African countries where the U.S. Marines had never been constituted the high point of Maj. Paul Baker's career. Excerpted from Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground by Robert D. Kaplan All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
