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.
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