|
||||||||||||||||
Best Value
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground by Robert D. Kaplan  (82)
$6.99
|
The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson  (82)
$23.10
|
World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism by Norman Podhoretz  (64)
$16.47
|
The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War by David Halberstam (120)
$23.10
|
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner (120)
$11.53
|
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.
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Reviewed by Sean D. Naylor
Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts is the second book from Robert D. Kaplan documenting his ongoing odyssey crisscrossing the globe with the U.S. military. Over the course of the two years covered in its pages, Kaplan embeds with more than a dozen units drawn from all four services, including a Marine platoon training local troops in Niger, a Special Forces A-team working with its Algerian counterparts and a nuclear attack submarine crossing the Pacific.
As the far-flung locales suggest, this book continues the theme of its predecessor, Imperial Grunts, which is that "small footprint" forces, such as Special Forces A-teams and Marine training teams, offer an economical way of building and retaining allies, gaining intelligence and avoiding nasty surprises. The military has always undervalued its foreign area officers and Special Forces teams, whose successes come more slowly and are harder to quantify than those of conventional units conducting bombing raids or infantry-on-infantry battles. But by investing in small, culturally sensitive and linguistically skilled teams to send to the farthest reaches of America's de facto empire, the United States can minimize the number of times it is forced to send much larger forces into combat, according to Kaplan.
It is a strong argument, and he makes it well, lacing his narrative with keen observations. Describing a typically austere mission by a handful of Special Forces soldiers to Araouane, a sand-blown spot on the edge of the Sahara, Kaplan notes that "you could cover most of Africa with A-teams in places like Araouane for the price of only one F-22 fighter jet, for which it was easier to get funding." Events in the Philippines offer the most dramatic example of what can be achieved with the low-key approach Kaplan advocates. There a U.S. advisory effort built around a small special operations task force has helped the Philippine military make major gains against Islamist guerrillas. Kaplan is one of the few writers to have identified the U.S. role there for what it represents. "The Philippines, perhaps more than any other place in the world since 9/11, was a success for the American military," he writes. The importance of this success cannot be understated. Not only does it let the world know that Islamist insurgencies can be beaten back with U.S. help, but it speaks to the value of Special Forces as advisers, rather than as the direct-action killing machines into which they are in danger of morphing.
Kaplan is at his best when he highlights the vital yet unsung role of troops like these. But some chapters, particularly those describing his sojourns with the Navy and the Air Force, come across as little more than paeans to the awesomeness of the U.S. military and its magnificent flying and sailing machines, with a brief overview of the theater in which they are deployed.
Unlike Imperial Grunts, in which Kaplan was not shy about expressing prescriptive views, this work is almost devoid of critical analysis. In Kaplan's world, it seems, almost every part of the military in which he's embedded automatically becomes an "elite." The attack sub crewmen are "a true elite" and "the most driven men I have ever known," the Marine Corps is "a small elite organization," the Navy officer corps is "the Ivy League with uniforms and a strong NASCAR following," the Air Force's A-10 pilots represent "a Special Forces culture fitted to the air," and so on.
Some of this hyperbole is forgivable. It is hard to spend much time with U.S. troops without feeling that the average soldier, sailor, airman or Marine is a smarter, braver, fitter, friendlier, more honest and generally more decent person than the average civilian. But Kaplan's tone veers dangerously close to cheerleading. There is nary a word of criticism for anyone in uniform. No flag officers are called to account for dubious decisions. Every weapons system Kaplan is exposed to, from the Predator unmanned aerial vehicle to the B-2 bomber to the nuclear attack sub, is described in press-release terms. ("No instrument of warfare was as integral to espionage as the submarine," Kaplan writes.)
In the 1990s, the peripatetic Kaplan wrote the richly detailed travel narratives that American soldiers read to educate themselves about the exotic locations to which they might deploy. His Balkan Ghosts was all-but-required for every Army officer headed for Bosnia. But a few years ago, he changed tack and decided to write about the troops themselves. Both are worthwhile pursuits, but on the basis of this offering, the former represented a greater value to the nation.
Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
See all Editorial Reviews
Product Details
|