Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground (Vintage Departures) [Paperback]

Robert D. Kaplan (Author)

Book Description

Series: Vintage Departures | Publication Date: September 9, 2008

In Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts, acclaimed journalist Robert D. Kaplan continues his exploration of the American military's challenging and varied commitments around the world. From protecting sea lanes, to providing disaster relief, to preparing for potential military confrontation with North Korea and Iran, Kaplan describes the astonishing, vital, and often unacknowledged operations regularly performed by American military personnel in the air, at sea, and on the ground. Vivid and illuminating, this book takes us deep into the highly technical and exotic cultures of the armed forces, telling soldiers' stories from the perspective of the troops on the ground.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred 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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Bookmarks Magazine

Robert D. Kaplan turns away from the more incendiary front line of the war on terror in this follow-up to Imperial Grunts. He spent over two years embedded with a diverse group of soldiers, and his admiration for their work comes through on every page. That same high esteem opens up the major vein of criticism, as some reviewers fault Kaplan for veering "dangerously close to cheerleading" (Washington Post). Well-researched and sympathetically drawn, these portraits of the modern military are essential reading for those interested in the day-to-day lives of our men and women overseas.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; Reprint edition (September 9, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400034582
• ISBN-13: 978-1400034581
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.9 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #221,983 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #39 in Books > Travel > Specialty Travel > Air Travel

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Best Read as a Colorful Military Travelogue, September 8, 2007

By 

Marco Antonio Abarca (Colorado) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground (Hardcover)

"Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts" is the second book in Robert Kaplan's series on the American military. Kaplan's purpose in writing these books is to inform the general reading public about the current state of the United States military. What distinguishes this book from "Imperial Grunts" is that Kaplan leaves his usual reporting beat with the Marines and Army Special Forces and spends time with Naval and Air Force units.

Robert Kaplan is a magazine writer who has spent many decades living and working in the Third World. Since September 11th, he has spent many months embedded with small, elite military units. His travels have sent him to such off the beaten track places as Colombia, Mali, Niger, Guam and the Phillipines. Kaplan genuinely likes and respects the service people he spends time with. In his affection for the common soldier, he reminds me a lot of the great journalist Ernie Pyle of the Second World War. This book is at its very best in describing training missions that Marines and Special Forces carry out in the far fringes of the devloping world. Kaplan goes places and reports things that ordinary journalists never experience.

As with "Imperial Grunts", Kaplan dances around with this idea that the United States is an Imperial power and that our military is an Imperial force. I am not sure that I agree with his thesis but I wish Kaplan would be more forthright in stating his argument and backing it up with hard evidence. It seems that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are the perfect laboratory for analyzing his thesis. Did we invade these countries as acts of self defense as President Bush and most of the United States military would argue? Or are these "Imperial" wars as President Bush's most vocal critics would argue? It surprised me that in this book, Kaplan is silent on this question.

In this book, Robert Kaplan makes a convincing argument that the United States military is the best trained, best lead and most motivated military this country has ever fielded. Kaplan has spent the last five years doing a lot of travelling and asking a lot of hard questions. Yet, I feel as though he has not asked some of the very big questions. Why has it taken nearly five years to finally mount a coherent counter-insurgency in Iraq? Why haven't our much vaunted Special Forces been able to kill or capture Osama Bin Laden? It is easy to blame the politicians and liberal media for these failures but there are also problems in the way the United States wages war.

Robert Kaplan has probably the most access to the United States military of any journalist working. I hope that in his next book, he spends time with the regular, non-elite units doing the fighting and dying in Iraq and Afghanistan. He would be doing this country a service by digging deeper into what has been working and what has been failing at the sharp end of the stick.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Sequel to Imperial Grunts, September 16, 2008

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Michael T Kennedy (Lake Arrowhead, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground (Vintage Departures) (Paperback)

As pointed out by several other reviewers, this book is a sequel to the earlier and better Imperial Grunts. Kaplan revisits some of the locales of the earlier book and reports tremendous progress in places like Columbia and the Philippines. He spends time on a nuclear carrier, a destroyer and a nuclear fast attack submarine. Those were the best parts of the book. He spends time with A 10 pilots on deployment to Thailand and provides well-deserved credit to these blue collar fighter pilots who fly the unloved but tremendously valuable attack aircraft. It was so unloved by the fighter mafia that runs the US Air Force that they were going to retire the plane. The Army, which depends on air support, and has no air wing of its own like the Marine Corp, offered to take over the plane and add it to its own air arm. The Air Force quickly restored the A 10 units to full flying status and no more was heard for a while about retiring them.

Kaplan does travel a lot and the depth of his interviews in the earlier book isn't here but it is still a good source of information about the far flung US military as it fights the savage wars of peace.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Hog Pilots: Not as good as Imperial Grunts, but better than most anything else out there, November 30, 2007

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Robert V. Lamb - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground (Hardcover)

This book is not as good as Imperial Grunts; however, few books are. In my opinion, Imperial Grunts was a masterpiece, a perfect book, so expecting Hog Pilots to be just as good, probably is a little unfair to Kaplan. There is a lot of valuable, interesting and fascinating information in this book, but it seems like it was written in a hurry. I've read numerous books by Kaplan and this one by far is the most choppy and disconnected of them all. That said, there is much to learn in this book and it's probably better than 90% of the books out there today that relate to current affairs/US military. Kaplan's books are consitently great, consistently at the top, this one unfortunately falls a little short.