Customer Reviews

Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

"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.

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.

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.

I was excited to receive this book and pleasantly surprised to read about his ride aboard my old submarine; the USS Houston. But after the first few chapters, I noticed a nagging feeling that something wasn't quite right. Then it hit me: it is very much written in the vein of "Oh, daddy! Look at the funny man!"

The respect Robert Kaplan has for the military is readily apparent; however, this book is not targeted for those in the service. It is written for those who have not served and don't quite get those who do. That said, it tends to repeat and reinforce the negative stereotypes that those who haven't served may hold towards those who have.

The chapter in which Kaplan recounts his passage aboard the USS Benfold has a disturbing dichotomy: in one paragraph a sailor who attempted suicide is held in contempt by the crew, while in the next sailors are anticipating the low HIV rate rumored to exist in the bars and whorehouses in the ship's next port of call. Unfeeling military automatons who only fight and f***, anyone?

In neither episode does Kaplan truly explore the context of the situation. To actually try suicide, a sailor has to ignore many levels of assistance from the command structure and more personal levels of help from shipmates. An attempt is a betrayal and anger is a normal reaction in any population, not just the military.

And if sailors looking to have sex in port after a period of enforced abstinence are considered outside the norm, than Kaplan has not spent time on a college campus lately. Sailors, in my experience, are more careful in the opportunities which present themselves than those in a typical college weekend hook-up. Kaplan gives the impression that all sailors are engaged in such activities when in reality many go through great lengths to not betray marriage vows, girlfriends back home, or personal beliefs.

Putting these two events together does a disservice to those in the service, and unfortunately, there are several of these seedy types of voyeuristic events in this book.

This book underscores the bravery and dedication of those in the Armed Services. In the end, though, it serves to set members of the military as outside the mainstream of American society and so it fails me on this level.

In his latest book, Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts, Robert D. Kaplan picks up where he left off with his last book, Imperial Grunts: On the Ground with the American Military. This book is a travel log of sorts, taking the reader along on a nearly two-year journey that Kaplan experienced before things began to get better for the American military in Iraq-and worse in Afghanistan.

I was amazed at how much we actually do not know about our country's military deployments and how widespread the front lines in the Global War on terrorism actually are.

Kaplan leads off this exploit with a deployment in Niger with a Marine unit that is in this poor African country to help in any simple way they can. Medical supplies, basic training, and American moral support all add up to a short vignette starring a small group of regular guys in a poverty-stricken country doing everything they can to make life just a little bit better for their hosts.

From Niger, the odyssey continues through a variety of locales that range from the jungles of Thailand to the frozen tundra of Alaska and on to the thin air of Nepal. Kaplan visits Mosul, Iraq, where the situation has improved so dramatically that he barely recognizes the city he left a little over a year before. He spends time on a U.S. Navy destroyer in the Pacific, preparing for the future challenges our Navy will face with the growing expeditionary navy of Communist China.

Kaplan is a journalist, being such, the writing is excellent and his observations are striking. U.S. military might is deployed all across the globe today as you read this, trying to make a difference as only a volunteer force of a democratic country can do.

This is an excellent book. Each stop on Kaplan's tour is its own chapter. This allows the reader to stop often and reflect on the experience the writer has just described. Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts is eye-opening in so many regards that it is actually hard to get into words everything that is included

Armchair Interviews says: Read this book to understand our country's commitments to bettering the world and seeing to it that our shores stay safe.

Compared to his earlier book, The Imperial Grunts, this one is not as good but it enhanced my view of the US Military much more than the "Imperial Grunts" since that book was mostly written about the ground forces deployed around the world. This one is about the naval, air forces and ground forces altogether but its emphasis is more on Air Force and Navy. It's a very informative book on the status of the US military and its future. Robert D. Kaplan is an able author with tons of knowledge about the past and he wonderfully mixes the past with present and then predicts the future to the best of his ability. I recommend his books to the military and political enthusiasts.

The book which preceded Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts (Imperial Grunts) was an informative and touching collection of snapshots of service men and women stationed on the edges of America's military map. As of this writing, I haven't finished Hog Pilots, but it's clearly cut from the same cloth. I'm profoundly grateful for the specific individuals mentioned in these books as well as their un-named brothers and sisters - all of whom faithfully serve us with ingenuity and determination. I'm also grateful that Robert Kaplan is willing to drag his 50-something bones out to these remote and dangerous places to bring these stories back to us.

Mr Kaplan does another fine job of writing about the modern US military in the "War on Terror". His writing is not limited to just covering Marines and Soldiers in Iraq, like "Imperial Grunts". That's a shame because the stories could have been written to some overall meaning. "Grunts" is a five star book that has just as much meaning for today's reader as it did in 2003 when the stories were first being collected for "The Atlantic Monthly".

Kaplan writes as a pure observer, a good journalist. His eye for detail is never ending. His talk with A-10 pilots is honest. His observations of the interaction between enlisted and officers in the US Army, Marines, USAF, and USN are quite good.

But all the stories are stand alone stories. As individual snap shots of the military they are great. However, these individual stories are not part of a greater overall picture. "Imperial Grunts" was just better at this than "Blue Water". All of the stories in "Grunts" gave a picture of the military's overall war on terror or it's post 9-11 operations. The stand alone stories in "Blue Water" are good. However, it just does not have the impact of "Grunts". Honestly, the day to day cleaning story of removing the grime on a Navy attack submarine just isn't the same as hearing about the ammo supply problems a squad of Marines have in the streets of Iraq. In "Grunts" you're part of the action and the issue is in doubt. In "Blue Water" you're part of the crew and it's just work. The impact isn't the same.

But I liked this book. It gets a "C" grade. Why? Largely it's a sequel of "Imperial Grunts" and if the book had been more original then it would have received a much higher grade.

Still, any fan of Kaplan will like his book. The trouble is there are so many books to read it had a hard time cutting ahead of "Stalingrad" or so many of my other books. "Blue Water" was not a great book and I expect great from Kaplan. "Blue Water" is good and for Kaplan that's only a "C" grade.

Three stars.

Robert Kaplan's sequel to his in-depth study of American troops stationed in varied Third World nations, "Imperial Grunts" has just been published.

"Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts" details the lives of Navy and Air Force noncoms in the same clear, detailed, engaging way. I've just begun reading it, and am enjoying it enormously.

His description of the "rendezvous" of a tanker and supply ship with the USS Benfold, a guided-missile destroyer, is worth the price of the book. The precision of the action is emphasized by Kaplan when he points out that few other navies can pull off an "Un-Rep" (an underway replenishment) under full steam. He compared it to a docking in space. And the tale takes only a few pages near the front. I read with gratification how Marines are training troops in Niger to oppose encroaching Islamofascist terrorists, and how highly (it was obvious) the Nigerans regarded their American trainers in the chapter, "America's African Rifles.".

If, like me, you've never been in the military, you'll learn things about the military here you could never learn elsewhere. If you've been in the military, Kaplan will introduce you to branches of the service even you know nothing about. There is simply no other way to learn so much about our world-girdling American imperial grunts than by accompanying a talented, inquisitive writer on his world-hopping tour of the our military via his books.

Warmly recommended.

Kaplan travels all over the world but essentially covers the same ground as in his previous (and better) work, Imperial Grunts. In fact, if you're a regular reader of the Atlantic, you've probably already read several of the better chapters of Hog Pilots, as the magazine has published some excerpts. Kaplan's travelogues like Balkan Ghosts and Eastward to Tartary are far superior. Hog Pilots will hopefully provide one useful service, which is to acquaint civilians with a military culture of which most are completely ignorant, which is not a healthy thing in a democracy.