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.

From the Hardcover edition.

羅伯特·D. 卡普蘭

★ 美國前國防部長羅伯特·蓋茨第一幕僚，美國海軍學院特聘教授

★《外交政策》雜誌評選的“100 位全球頂級思考者”之一

★美國安全中心高級研究員，美國防務政策委員會委員

★全球首屈一指的戰略預測公司Stratfor 首席地緣政治分析師

知名地緣政治分析師，資深國際事務記者。2009 ～ 2011 年，卡普蘭為美國國防部長羅伯特·蓋茨效力。2008 年，他擔任瞭華盛頓新美國安全中心的高級研究員。

卡普蘭遊曆瞭近70 個國傢，對地緣政治深有體會，曾寫下《即將到來的地緣戰爭》（The Revenge Of Geography）、《巴爾乾鬼魂》（Balkan Ghosts）等暢銷佳作，其將旅行作傢追求細節的銳利眼光和駐外記者的分析能力完美融閤的寫作技巧令人拍案叫絕。美國前總統剋林頓和小布什均是其忠實讀者，小布什更認為卡普蘭對世界局勢的諸多觀點與他本人的世界觀頗為吻閤。