Robert Kaplan: Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts

See, among other articles, Pankaj Mishra, “A Nation Out of Time,” The New York Times, June 10, 2001; and Stanley A. Weiss, “China and India Face Off in Nepal,” International Herald Tribune, July 21, 2001. Among the best studies of the Maoist revolt is Robert Gersony, “Sowing the Wind: History and Dynamics of the Maoist Revolt in Nepal’s Rapti Hills,” submitted to Mercy Corps International in 2003.

Experts also assumed that the Maoists were receiving aid from the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka.

The Gurkhas of the British Army have had nothing whatsoever to do with either the current Royal Nepalese Army or the Maoists.

Gorkha was also the place from where the current monarchy set out to conquer the country and establish the Nepalese state. Because it was the kings of Gorkha whom the British initially fought, they referred to Nepalese soldiers as Gurkhas.

Dharamsala, an Indian town near Nepal, was now the home-in-exile of the Dalai Lama of Tibet.

I had interviewed Fermor three years earlier. See the last chapter of Mediterranean Winter: The Pleasures of History and Landscape in Tunisia, Sicily, Dalmatia, and Greece York: Random House, 2004).

See Chapter 8 of Imperial Grunts. The Second Battle of Fallujah occurred in the autumn of 2004.

Nestorians are a sect that originated in the fifth century, based on the teachings of Nestorius, who emphasized the difference between the divine and human qualities of Christ.

Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History (Oxford, Eng: Oxford University Press, 1939, 1946). Toynbee’s source is Xenophon’s Anabasis. I write more on Assyria’s collapse in Eastward to Tartary (New York: Random House, 2000).

“The Coming Anarchy,” The Atlantic Monthly, February 1994. The article was completed in autumn 1993.

FBCB2: Force Battle Command for Brigade and Battalion.

A telling complaint about the new uniforms was that they were too dark for the desert and too light for the jungle. The Marines still had it right: tan camouflage uniforms for the desert and greenish ones for the jungle.

The A-10 was more properly called an “attack” jet, but the word “fighter” was applied liberally to it.

The military analyst Ralph Peters goes so far as to suggest that the Air Force be eliminated and broken up into these two new-old components. See New Glory: Expanding America’s Global Supremacy (New York: Sentinel, 2005), p. 269.

For example, there were three line companies, a weapons company, and a headquarters and support company.

Navy lieutenants (the equivalent of captains) clustered only in the wardroom, otherwise at sea you usually found them among their petty officers and chief petty officers. Major was the go-to rank in the Pentagon and in staff headquarters at battalion level and above. But in the Army and Marines, outside the base perimeter, majors were much less in evidence.

The measurement began with Army field artillery. In the air the circle is vertical rather than horizontal.

Air Force tradition demanded naming bases after deceased fliers. To wit, Army Air Corps Lt.Col. Frederick I. Eglin was killed in 1937 when his plane crashed. Lt. Frank B. Tyndall, a Florida native and World War I ace, was killed on active duty in 1930. First Lt. Donald Wilson Hurlburt was killed in an air crash in 1943 in northwestern Florida. Second Lt. William C. Maxwell of Atmore, Alabama, died on August 12, 1920, in the Philippines when his DH-4 aircraft hit a flagpole after he had turned to avoid striking a group of children. Lt. Col. Leon Robert Vance, Jr., a native Oklahoman, was a World War II hero and Medal of Honor recipient. First Lt. William Harrell Nellis of Las Vegas, a P-47 pilot, died in action during the Battle of the Bulge.

The big exceptions to this rule were the naval bases in San Diego and near Seattle.

George E. Day, Duty, Honor, Country (Fort Walton Beach, Fla.: American Hero Press, 2002). It is an updated and expanded version of Return with Honor (Mesa, Ariz.: Champlin Museum Press, 1989).

The A-10 pilots who participated in Cope Tiger 2006 not otherwise mentioned in the text were Maj. Brian “Milli” Gross of Phoenix; Capt. Michael “FAAC” Bullard of Crofton, Maryland; Capt. Ryan “APE” Hayde of Massapequa, New York; and 1st Lt. Michael “Beaker” Kump of Flint, Michigan. The flight surgeon was Capt. Martin “Tails” Harssema of Houston.

Delivered at the Sorbonne in Paris on April 23, 1910.

The Air Force’s principal large force exercise held at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada.

The Internet lacked the bandwidth for reasonably fast transmission of such high-quality mapping.

In Imperial Grunts, I argue for the introduction of women into Special Forces precisely for missions like this one. See Chapter 6.

For an account of my previous visit, see the chapters on Georgia in Eastward to Tartary:Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus (New York: Random House, 2000).

See Chapter 4 of Imperial Grunts for a full account of Army Special Forces operations in Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago, and a historical-cultural overview of the region.

Though Mattis once came to the media’s attention when he mentioned that marines like to kill people, ironically, the fact was that he was among the most well-read, intellectual, and civil affairs–oriented generals in the military.

Though smaller in size than Basilan, Jolo had a population of 620,000 as opposed to Basilan’s 380,000. Whereas Basilan’s population was over 60 percent Muslim, Jolo’s was over 90 percent.

Despite guidelines from SOCOM, I had found that there was no hard and fast rule regarding the use of real names and faces in SF. You could reveal more in print than on television.Some Green Berets were comfortable being quoted by name; others not. Whatever they were comfortable with, I respected.

As of June 2006 when I flew on the B-2, the number of people who had been in space was 447.

James L. Stokesbury, A Short History of the Korean War (New York: Morrow, 1988), p. 15. Much of the basic background about the Korean War comes from this book.

South Korea paid 40 percent of the stationing costs for American military personnel here, less than Germany and Japan paid for U.S. troops in their countries. If these troops were to come home as part of a withdrawal, the American taxpayer would have to pick up the tab for some of their living costs, unless the Army itself was downsized.

In functional terms, the relationship between the four-star general in Baghdad and the one at CENTCOM headquarters in Tampa was somewhat comparable with that of the four-star commander in Seoul and the one at PACOM in Honolulu. Of course, Korea had further levels of complexity: the American four-star was also the head of the U.N. command, and of the combined command that comprised the forces of the United States and South Korea. This was all a legacy of the Korean War, in which the U.S. and its allies fought officially as a U.N. force.