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Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts

by Robert D. Kaplan is a must read for people who think the GWOT is only being fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. Kaplan spends most of his time as an imbed with small units from all services.

Review:
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.

Pat P.

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