Robert Kaplan: Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts

This and succeeding paragraphs of background information regarding the nature of the regime, the force structure on the Korea Peninsula, and likely responses to a meltdown of North Korea rely heavily on the writing and thinking of both Army Col. David S. Maxwell, a Special Forces officer and Korean area expert, and Stephen Bradner, a special advisor to the United Nations Command and USFK in Korea.

“Dear Leader Absolutism” was a term coined by Hwang Jang Yop, who defected from the North in 1997.

Whereas in 1980, 40 percent of North Korean combat forces were deployed south of Pyongyang along the demilitarized zone, by 2003 over 70 percent were.

See Imperial Grunts, Chapter 4, for a profile of Lopez.

Speech delivered April 23, 1910, see p. 299.

Possibly Sun-Tzu never existed at all. His book may represent the accumulated wisdom of many people.

Johnson was actually referring to a specific group of patriots.

Olivier Roy, The Failure of Political Islam, trans. Carol Volk (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 65–67, 157. Roy draws, in part, on the work of Jean-Paul Charnay, L’Islam et la guerre (Paris: Fayard, 1986).

The Weekly Standard, Feb. 20, 2006. The fact that The Weekly Standard published this and the Peters article is not surprising. Non-establishment journals with modest budgets often have been the venues for path-breaking ideas, and as neoconservatives take an especial interest in military matters, it follows that The Weekly Standard would be strong on this general subject—and open-minded. Peters, for example, is not a neoconservative.