Pundita: America's amazing new military: getting it right all around the world:
"If you heard John Batchelor's Monday interview with Robert D. Kaplan, you'll get a good laugh from reading the skewed Eastern Establishment Amazon.com reviews of Kaplan's Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground.
If you didn't catch the interview, ignore the Washington Post and Publisher's Weekly reviews at Amazon and just buy the book -- then make sure to hide it from your kids if you don't want them running off to join the military.
Batchelor's interview with Kaplan reveals the silver lining to the terror masters' war on America: the State Department and the CIA and their paranoid Cold War scheming are no longer in charge of presenting America's face to the world. And neither is the Pentagon in charge. ('The Pentagon just moves the money around now,' explained Kaplan.)
So who's in charge? Small military units working under the direction of theater-level, unified combatant command units or 'Coms' built on the CENTCOM concept, which was originally conceived as a rapid deployment force.
The result? All over the world, branches of the US military are gathering intelligence and promoting American ideals in the best way possible: by first gaining confidence through the sane tactic of making themselves genuinely useful to the locals.
Today's grunt is 'more likely to be killed helping a civilian dig a well,' than during armed combat, Kaplan explains.
Of course, US soldiers are still trained to kill people and break things, but historically neither activity has been very successful at gathering actionable intelligence and inspiring cooperation. So the Coms favor specially trained units -- sometimes as small as 4 by typically 12 in number -- which are tasked with risking their lives to do an honest day's labor in places you never even heard of.
If this sounds like the Peace Corps with firepower, let's be cautious about carrying the analogy too far. But yes, the units reflect an integration of relief work with traditional military intelligence-gathering objectives."
"If you heard John Batchelor's Monday interview with Robert D. Kaplan, you'll get a good laugh from reading the skewed Eastern Establishment Amazon.com reviews of Kaplan's Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground.
If you didn't catch the interview, ignore the Washington Post and Publisher's Weekly reviews at Amazon and just buy the book -- then make sure to hide it from your kids if you don't want them running off to join the military.
Batchelor's interview with Kaplan reveals the silver lining to the terror masters' war on America: the State Department and the CIA and their paranoid Cold War scheming are no longer in charge of presenting America's face to the world. And neither is the Pentagon in charge. ('The Pentagon just moves the money around now,' explained Kaplan.)
So who's in charge? Small military units working under the direction of theater-level, unified combatant command units or 'Coms' built on the CENTCOM concept, which was originally conceived as a rapid deployment force.
The result? All over the world, branches of the US military are gathering intelligence and promoting American ideals in the best way possible: by first gaining confidence through the sane tactic of making themselves genuinely useful to the locals.
Today's grunt is 'more likely to be killed helping a civilian dig a well,' than during armed combat, Kaplan explains.
Of course, US soldiers are still trained to kill people and break things, but historically neither activity has been very successful at gathering actionable intelligence and inspiring cooperation. So the Coms favor specially trained units -- sometimes as small as 4 by typically 12 in number -- which are tasked with risking their lives to do an honest day's labor in places you never even heard of.
If this sounds like the Peace Corps with firepower, let's be cautious about carrying the analogy too far. But yes, the units reflect an integration of relief work with traditional military intelligence-gathering objectives."
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