Robert Kaplan - Imperial Grunts

Just as this book was going to press, Gunner Bednarcik—back in Iraq for the third time in the spring of 2005—was badly wounded and recovering at Bethesda Naval Hospital.

The size of the state indicated the size of the various cement barricades, Jersey being the smallest and Alaska the largest.

Senator Barry Goldwater, Republican, of Arizona; Representative Bill Nichols, Democrat, of Alabama.

The situation was more complicated than that, however. Saddam, by drafting significant numbers of people into the military and hiring many on public works projects, weakened the traditional sheikhs even as he co-opted them. See Patrick Graham’s “Beyond Fallujah: A Year with the Iraqi Resistance,” Harpers, June 2004.

Apparently, the term “Ali Baba” was coined by American soldiers who preceded the Marines here, and was picked up on by local kids. See Graham’s “Beyond Fallujah.”

Several weeks later, after assaulting parts of Al-Fallujah, Bravo Company and other elements of 1/5 returned to Al-Karmah. They lived in the community, patrolled regularly, talked to people, collected information, and made some progress toward reclaiming the town.

Army Special Forces called night vision goggles “NODs” (night optical devices).

The One Shop was Administration, the Two Shop Intelligence, the Four Shop Logistics, and so forth. All were headed by first lieutenants, except for the Three, which was headed by a major, reflecting the preeminence of Operations.

Pronounced New- ark, to distinguish it from Newark, New Jersey.

Actually, one of the finest expositions of the chieftain phenomenon can be found in Bing West’s 1972 classic about Vietnam, The Village (New York: Pocket Books), pp. 328–29: “In Dai Loc district… one night in early November the VC had laid waste several villages with the thoroughness and savagery of Apache raiders, despite the nearby presence of a Marine battalion. As a consequence of the fear thus instilled, the people afterward refused even American medcaps for their wounds. One general thought that the disruption proved his point that the people went with the winner—the incident at Dai Loc had happened because the people had not been provided security. ‘Give them security,’ he said, ‘and they’ll give you information and cooperation.’”

Preliminary intelligence given the Marines at the time indicated that there may have been a few individuals inside Al-Fallujah who had fought in the places Byrne mentioned.

Belleau Wood was where the Germans gave the Marines their notorious nickname, Teufel-Hunden (devil dogs).

This was in addition to the dozens of soldiers killed and more than 500 wounded.

The coverage of My Lai did not appear until revelations began to surface in late 1969.

The AC-130 in particular is a magnificent asset, an attack cargo plane designed to fly for hours at a time above the battlefield, carrying tens of thousands of pounds of ammunition for its 25mm and 40mm guns. Because it can hover for hours, its crew gets to understand the battle space, talk to the ground-based forward air controllers, and be intimately involved in the fight. The Big Air Force is no fan of this rather antiquated plane. But old-fashioned counterinsurgency is part of the U.S. military’s future. Thus, the AC-130 could continue to prove more useful than some of the high-tech jets and other gizmos in the Air Force’s arsenal.

C. E. Callwell, Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice (1896; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), pp. 52–54. The fact that the U.S. military needed to adapt to such frustrations of counterinsurgency was somewhat ironic, given that unconventional guerrilla warfare had been part of the American military tradition since the French and Indian War of the mid-eighteenth century. On the western slopes of the Appalachians, English settlers mustered light infantry, ranger, and reconnaisance units, often small and nimble, working with Indian auxiliaries against the French and their Indian allies. And that tradition did not die, for the American Revolution itself, not to mention the many small wars that followed, saw the U.S. military fight both as insurgents and as counterinsurgents. It was only the two world wars, with their emphasis on mass infantry movements, that finally obscured this vitally useful legacy, forcing it to be painfully relearned in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. See Fred Anderson’s Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (New York: Knopf, 2000), p. 411.

See James Fallows’s 1975 essay in The Washington Monthly “What Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy?” He describes a busload of Harvard draftees at the Boston Navy Yard armed with carefully manipulated medical records to show their lack of fitness for duty, while another busload of working-class kids from Chelsea went smoothly through the induction process. See, too, Peter Beinart’s “Two Countries,” The New Republic Online, May 5, 2004. There is also Swarthmore professor James Kurth’s “The Late American Nation” ( The National Interest, Fall 2004). He explains that the global economy began producing business and cultural elites in the early twentieth century, but was stopped in its tracks by World War I, a worldwide economic depression, and World War II. By the 1960s, however, this globalization process resumed, with the rebirth of transnational identities. The sixties’ youth revolt was a partial consequence of that.