A former history professor, Tom Miller
is a novelist and essayist. His most recent
novel is Full
Court Press (2000). His reviews
and essays have appeared in numerous books,
journals, and newspapers, including The
Encyclopedia of Southern History, American
History Illustrated, the Chicago
Tribune, and the Des Moines Register.
He also is a former Army officer and Vietnam
veteran.
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Look up peripatetic in the dictionary and there's a photograph of Robert Kaplan. Lots of people travel extensively, but Kaplan takes it to extremes -- having gone quite literally to The Ends of the Earth. Kaplan has been roaming the planet for three decades now watching, listening, and questioning. What makes him most interesting -- and important -- is that he doesn't stick to the high road. Travel with Kaplan and you're going to visit some of the least accessible and most dangerous spots anywhere: Colombia, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Sudan, Bosnia, and Tajikistan are just a few of the exotic locales where he's unrolled a sleeping bag.
Periodically, Kaplan surfaces to report on his travels -- in the Atlantic Monthly and a growing body of critically-acclaimed books. (You can profitably read any of them, but The Ends of the Earth is a good starting point.) For the past three years, Kaplan has been traveling and living with American troops at outposts around the world. In his new book, Imperial Grunts, he describes what he's seen and learned.
Back in the early 1990s following the fall of the Berlin Wall, many intellectuals foresaw a future of peace and stability stretching out as far as the horizon. Francis Fukuyama, an international affairs scholar, went so far as to proclaim "The End of History." Not to be anti-intellectual, but there's a limit to what one can learn in a Harvard seminar or a Beltway think tank. As Kaplan observes in a similar context in Imperial Grunts, "Diplomats and generals thought too often in abstractions; noncoms and middle-ranking officers saw truths [italics added] on the ground."
The truth on the ground is that the world remains a disorderly and dangerous place and is likely to get more so rather than less. Kaplan had been there, done that, and he recognizes the signs. In fact, his lifetime of travel has convinced him that Thomas Hobbes, the pessimistic seventeenth-century English philosopher, had been right about the nature of man and government. For Hobbes, life was nasty, brutish, and short, and government existed to mitigate those characteristics. It didn't matter so much that the government was authoritarian or democratic as that it provided a modicum of security. Today, that's called realism, and realists are skeptical about the practicality of utopian goals like universal peace and the spread of democracy.
While others were celebrating the "End of History" and preparing to spend the "peace dividend," Kaplan published a dissenting essay in the Atlantic Monthly jarringly entitled "The Coming Anarchy." Some listened. Most didn't. The Clinton Administration took an ax to the military budget -- paring the Army, for example, from eighteen active-duty divisions to ten -- and used the savings to pay down the national debt. And, the Army that survived wasn't the one that we needed for contemporary (and future) threats. Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, Colombia, Liberia, and 9/11 followed.
In the wake of 9/11, Kaplan packed his bag and set out to see what was happening where American troops had boots on the ground around the World. "I wanted to take a snapshot of what it was like for middle-level commissioned and noncommissioned American officers stationed at remote locations overseas at the beginning of the twenty-first century," he explains. "It was their stories I wanted to tell: from the ground up, at the point of contact." Imperial Grunts is filled with those stories, and it's clear that Kaplan was impressed by what he found. "[R]arely," he admits, "have I so thoroughly enjoyed the company of a group of people as much as I have Americans in uniform."
Starting in Yemen in 2002, Kaplan circumnavigates the globe, spending time with troops in Colombia, the Philippines, Mongolia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Horn of Africa. What he finds are the modern proconsuls of an informal American empire. Indeed, he concludes that "[w]hile policy specialists argued general principles like nation-building in Washington and New York seminars, these young middle-level officers were the true agents of the imperium." These young officers operating in small units beyond the bright glare of the media represent the template for managing an unruly world.
Despite his own background as a journalist, Kaplan is no friend of the elite media. He warns that today's media is hypercritical, hypocritical (demanding zero defects in others but refusing to acknowledge any of their own), and unaccountable. They tyrannize government and the military with their shrill demands for perfection and this leads inevitably to risk-averse leaders. (The troops are no fans of the press either. They particularly resent the media's efforts to make them victims of a failed policy. They don't agree that the policy has failed, and they are nobody's victims. "[T]he overall effect of the media," Kaplan concludes was to foster impatience on the home front.")
Kaplan also questions the media stories of low troop morale. Among the troops he visits from the mean streets of Fallujah to the tropical backwaters of Mindanao, he finds almost universally high morale. (If the media was interested in the truth, they'd take a look at reenlistment statistics. While recruiting is lagging, reenlistments are exceeding targets -- often by wide margins -- and are highest among deployed troops.) Everywhere, troops tell him that they willingly -- even eagerly -- chose what they're doing. After traveling days over rough roads, sleeping in icy frontier outposts, and subsisting on local cuisine, Army Col. Thomas Wilhelm, a Foreign Area Officer in Mongolia, announces simply, "I love my job."
The troops are also quick to admit that they are getting as much out of the service as they are giving. Again and again, they talk about the sense of direction, the self-discipline, and the maturity that the military has helped them develop. Generically working-class and disproportionately southern, they often feel a disconnect with civilians. In Iraq in 2004, Marine Cpl. Michael Pinckney explained his disillusionment with his countrymen who had "'lost the meaning of sacrifice. They expect things to be perfect and easy. They don't know that when things go wrong you persevere; you don't second-guess.'"
Kaplan does not say that the U.S. does not need conventional forces to deal with emerging threats -- e.g. an expansionistic China, a roguish North Korea, or a militant Iran. He says that in the War on Terror, which is more about controlling chaos than anything else, we need less Big Army and Big Air Force with their large headquarters, high technology weapons systems, and long logistical tails and more Economy of Force operations. By that, he means more Army Special Forces, Civil Affairs, Foreign Area Officers, and marines.
As an example, he introduces the reader to troops like Col. Wilhelm in Mongolia -- a solitary American soldier establishing a beachhead in a strategic place. Col. Wilhelm is fluent in Russian, versed in the local culture, and armed with boundless energy and contagious enthusiasm. While his Russian and Chinese counterparts remain hunkered down in Ulaanbaatar, the capital, Wilhelm travels the width and breadth of the barren, windswept country bouncing over rugged roads, sleeping in dusty outposts, and breaking bread with the locals. At one frontier stop, a Mongolian officer, Maj. Altankhuu, tells the author that "'Col. Wilhelm is a great man. He makes us like America so much.'"
In the Horn of Africa, the reader meets Maj. Trip Narrow who's just returned from a trip through eastern Ethiopia. "'Everywhere we went," he tells the author, "people wanted a bigger American presence ... One four-man CAT [civil affairs team] can accomplish more than a battalion of infantry.'" And, the story is the same in Yemen, Colombia, and the Philippines where small groups of specially-trained troops are working to hold the line, to tame the frontier.
They could use more help though. Despite all the rosy talk about transformation, too little is being done to address the need for more troops with linguistic and cultural expertise. "Two years into the War on Terror," Kaplan says, "the linguistic situation was a scandal." What he doesn't say is that turning three brigades into four (the centerpiece of transformation) will not solve that problem.
Kaplan is not especially sanguine about what's happening in Afghanistan and Iraq. In Afghanistan after a promising start (with a small contingent of Special Forces and Air Force combat controllers operating semi-independently), the Big Army has taken over. Sprawling bases (think Bagram) have sprouted along with layers of command and support personnel. The result is that decisions have to be filtered through so much bureaucracy that the bad guys often are gone before a decision is rendered. This bureaucracy, Kaplan notes, "is the greatest single impediment to America's ability to wage a successful worldwide counterinsurgency."
Not only does Kaplan think clearly but he writes clearly as well. His years as a travel writer of sorts (travel writer cum philosopher) taught him to paint vivid and descriptive word pictures that he sums up with terse summaries that linger in your mind: "Mongolia constituted a vast spectacular emptiness:" he concludes, "Mars except with oxygen to breathe." All of Imperial Grunts is like that: imaginative, provocative, and eloquent.
Robert Kaplan doesn't have a fancy Ph.D., academic sinecure, or high-level government post. What he does have is an acute knowledge of the world based on experience at ground level, an open mind, and a keen intellect. His is a voice to be listened to.
