Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts

Zusatztext “A valuable bridge across the country's widening civil-military divide. It is an important contribution to our understanding of how this military works in the 21st century.”— The New York Times “No one understands better the burdens carried by today's men and women in uniform. If you aren't reading Kaplan! you aren't fully informed.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune "Again and again in this book! we see how military service! even in peacetime! provides the catalyst that allows common men to perform uncommon deeds." — The Wall Street Journal “Recommended reading for anyone seeking to understand the full reach of America's global military power! or trying to comprehend the incredibly complicated! but increasingly important! soft-power demands being placed on today's military.” — The Boston Globe Informationen zum Autor Robert D. Kaplan  is the bestselling author of twenty books on foreign affairs and travel translated into many languages, including  Adriatic,   The Good American ,  The Revenge 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.” Klappentext In Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts, acclaimed journalist Robert D. Kaplan continues his exploration of the American military's challenging and varied commitments around the world. From protecting sea lanes, to providing disaster relief, to preparing for potential military confrontation with North Korea and Iran, Kaplan describes the astonishing, vital, and often unacknowledged operations regularly performed by American military personnel in the air, at sea, and on the ground. Vivid and illuminating, this book takes us deep into the highly technical and exotic cultures of the armed forces, telling soldiers' stories from the perspective of the troops on the ground.America’s African Rifles With a Marine Platoon African Sahel, Summer 2004 In the early summer of 2004, just as the United States was dismantling the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, sending home its effective proconsul, L. Paul Bremer III, U.S. Marines and Army Special Forces were in various stages of deploying to the southern fringe of the Sahara Desert, the Sahel, one of the few battlegrounds left in the Global War on Terror for the U.S. military to enter, as it was already deployed in so many other parts of the world. Local alliances and the training of indigenous troops have been a traditional means of projecting power at minimum risk and fanfare. This was true of Rome even in regard to adjacent North Africa, to say nothing of its Near Eastern borderlands; and it was particularly true of France and Britain, two-thirds of whose expeditions were composed of troops recruited in the colonies.* As Tacitus writes, “We Romans value real power but disdain its vanities.”1 Taking Tacitus to heart, I went to * See Sallust’s The Jugurthine War, composed between 44 and 40 b.c., and Douglas Porch’s introduction to the Bison edition of Col. C. E. Callwell’s Small Wars: Their Principles & Practice (1896; Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1996). These are but two examples of a vast military literature about how imperial powers used their influence. the Niger River region of the African Sahel, or “coast,” a belt of savannah and scrub on the Sahara’s southern edge, to witness a version of America’s reach that was radically different from Iraq, certainly more modest, and hopefully more successful. Among the great rivers of Africa, after the Nile and the Congo there is the Niger, which medieval Arab geographers s...

Dettagli sul prodotto

• Autori: Robert D. Kaplan
• Editore: Vintage USA
• Lingue: Inglese
• Formato: Tascabile
• Pubblicazione: 09.09.2008
• EAN: 9781400034581
• ISBN: 978-1-4000-3458-1
• Pagine: 448
• Dimensioni: 135 mm x 205 mm x 25 mm
• Serie: Vintage Departures; Vintage Departures
• Categoria: Saggistica