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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (140623)	9/29/2005 9:51:41 PM
From: unclewest	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 794001

Bill may have recommended this to you but just in case he has not, you might enjoy Robert Kaplan's new book, Imperial Grunts. It's part of a larger body of work he is undertaking on the Special Forces. John, No thanks. I am surprised you liked it. uw Sfers and SpecOps folks have already critiqued his work. Here is one from your link... 19 of 46 people found the following review helpful: all wrong on special forces, September 26, 2005 Reviewer: Charlie Brinkman "Charlie" (Norfolk, VA USA) - See all my reviews This Kaplan guy is another wannabe who never served but has it all figured out because he slept out on the ground and ate the meals a couple times. This book has nothing useful to say about special forces. Its a book for armchair guys who dream about playing army man. I've heard most of what he has to say about special forces before. But I heard it 40 years ago. Those people I can respect because they didn't have the lessons to draw on that we do today. But Kaplan seems to have forgotten everything thats been learned at a very high cost over decades and wants to do it all over again. The biggest lesson is that special forces can't win wars on their own and they can't be scaled up in size without losing all of their value. The first thing he gets wrong is that special forces have limits and they depend on the rest of the military to support them. The reason why special forces are useful is because they are (mostly) a hand-picked elite. The bigger you expand these forces, the more you lose the quality that made them valuable in the first place. People also have to realize that a special forces guy with a radio isn't winning the war on his own. He is depending on a complex set of air force and navy (carrier-based) infrastructure to support him in the field. These ops may be one guy on the ground, but it takes a whole lot of guys behind the scenes to support him. Kaplan doesn't understand that. He ignores all of those people and the job they are doing. He seems to want to spend more time being one of the guys than understanding the real military. He gives a one-sided really confused history of special forces and what he thinks is the strength of the marines. His history of the special forces ignores all the hard lessons learned in places like Vietnam about what works and what doesn't. Reading Kaplan, you would think the whole evolution of these forces and the methods for using them never happened. Another thing about this book I really don't like is how Kaplan pretends like he understands soldiers or that he is having the same experience they are. He isn't. You are either in the military or you are not. He is a guest and a spectator, not a participant. He isn't even really brave as a reporter. The brave reporters in places like Iraq are not the ones who travel with the military, its the guys who go out on their own to cover the story of the country without being surrounded by soldiers. Some of the guys who have done that have died. Compared to a guy like Steve Vincent, Kaplan is a REMF. It gets worse because he starts to over-identify with soliders part way through the book. But the over-idenitification has more to do with his politics that the reality of military life. Kaplan starts spitting out hate. Hate for politicians, hate for officers, hate for the pentagon, hate for reporters, hate for elites. He leaves the impression that america would be better off if we destroyed washington and put a bunch of junior officers in charge of the country. Thats another problem. Kaplan, among other things, is immature. Military Officers are not superhumans and they have the same flaws as people that civilians in America do. Kaplan reduces the military to "fun and games" out on what he calls the frontier. But its not a game. The people who might have told Kaplan that are the people he either didn't listen to in this book or dismissed as cowards and fools. Junior Officers don't know everything and they make mistakes. They learn hard lessons on the job. Kaplan's political views are worse. He sees the entire Muslim world as enemy territory that the US needs to conquer and civilize as we did the old west. He wants the reader to see our bases in Iraq as a new generation of fort apaches and places like Iran and Syria as Indian Reservations. He sees special forces as the way to do this. Kaplan also supports in the book a new manifest destiny for an american empire, not based on security, but based on the moral mission of America to rule and civilize the world. He as much as says that 9/11 was a brilliant excuse for a whole other agenda of using the american military to build empire. He is almost proud of it! None of it will ever work. For anyone who wants to understand the military, don't read books like this. Read books from people who really served. Kaplan doesn't understand anything about the military. There are shelves of books and reports from the vietnam that will tell anyone all they would ever need to know about the strengths and limitations of the special forces.