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    Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground
    Unavailable
    Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground
    Unavailable
    Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground
    Audiobook (abridged)8 hours

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

    Written by Robert D. Kaplan

    Narrated by Don Leslie

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    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 Grunts provides 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 Grunts shifts 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, like Imperial Grunts before 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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateSep 4, 2007
    ISBN9780739323434
    Unavailable
    Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground
    Author

    Robert D. Kaplan

    Robert D. Kaplan is the bestselling author of nineteen books on foreign affairs and travel translated into many languages, including The Good American, The Revenege of Geography, Asia’s Cauldron, Monsoon, The Coming Anarchy, and Balkan Ghosts. He holds the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. For three decades he reported on foreign affairs for The Atlantic. He was a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board and the U.S. Navy’s Executive Panel. Foreign Policy magazine twice named him one of the world’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers.”

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    Reviews for Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts

    3.5/5

    37 ratings4 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Kaplan presents an interesting and thoughtful perspective on the US military in the 21st century. He embedded with a number of units in the Army, Marines, Navy and Air Force over a several year period. His approach is to show how the diverse missions of these units fit within an evolving US global strategy in the post cold war and post 9/11 time. There are two overarching themes of his analysis: positioning the nation to deal with the rising power of China in the Pacific rim and the world and how the military can be used to develop the capacities and cooperation of emerging democracies throughout the third world. Regarding China, Kaplan shows that our relations with Pacific rim countries like Thailand, Singapore, the Philippines and Nepal have evolved far away from the "big base" large magnitude show of force strategy of the post WWII era. Small units are engaging with joint operations and training programs with these nations aimed in part at cementing their affiliations with the US. This approach is mirrored in other countries like Algeria, Niger, Mali and Georgia. Another key feature of this new approach is how humanitarian efforts of the military can bring the American presence in positive ways on small (e.g. villages in Algeria) or large (e.g. tsunami relief) scales.Two other aspects of the military's engagement are notable. The logistics that support the military have changed in scale and approach. Rather than a large footprint for positioning ourselves in countries, we are relying on low key arrangements, often secured and run by civilian "embeds" who know the customs and language of the countries of interest. The second feature highlighted by Kaplan is the depth of competence shown by today's military, particulary the junior officers and NCO's. This beneficial result of the volunteer professional military deserves the attention Kaplan gives it.On Iraq (his travels cover 2004-2006) there's only one chapter. Kaplan describes the nation-building efforts of Army units around Mosul. Here again, the civil affairs work of the units are admired, although Kaplan is critical of the mistakes of policy makers in wrong-headed decisions and failure to provide sufficient resources for the civil activities of units at the ground level.There is some deep analysis of the Koreas, the last vestige of the cold war. Kaplan poses some interesting ideas about the interests of the region's countries (China and Japan mainly) in the bellicosity of North Korea and the possible outcomes of events in or by North Korea.Although now a few years old, this book presents a very different perspective on military strategy than is seen in superficial media coverage. It is pro-military but not in the sentimental ethos of popular media, but rather in the sense of how very competent and committed professionals are working in smart ways to help secure our nation's interests.
    • 3/5
      A book set in the 1990s covers those individuals who were at the center of the fight in Iraq. I thought it an interesting, yet dated, read. The book gives the reader an idea of what it's like to fight a modern war from the soldier's perspective.
    • 4/5
      I liked this book, even though I am not a great fan of the military. For the first time I realized how the military does more than just fight in Iraq. Kaplan has a way with flushing out a story with his boots on the ground reporting.
    • 4/5
      Though Kaplan has fallen in love with the good ol' boy segments of special forces there are still some good well written aspects of Kaplanesque insights about regional history and its relation to current events. Except for a couple of paragraphs the less attractive aspects of military life are not touched upon.