Publishers Weekly Starred Review:

After 9/11, Atlantic Monthly correspondent and bestselling author Kaplan (Balkan Ghosts) spent five years living with US troops deployed across the globe. He first reported on his travels in 2005's Imperial Grunts, an incisive and valuable primer on the military's role in maintaining an informal American empire.

In this shrewd and often provocative sequel, Kaplan introduces readers to more of the soldiers, marines, sailors and airmen who staff the empire's forward outposts. Although the author's travels take him to Iraq, he spends most of his time with imperial maintenance units that are training indigenous troops, protecting sea lanes and providing humanitarian relief from Timbuktu to the Straits of Malacca.

Kaplan saves his harshest judgment for his fellow journalists, whose relentless criticism of anything less than perfection amounts to media tyranny, in his view.

Kaplan sees the war on terror and the re-emergence of China as the US's two abiding challenges in the 21st century and argues that, after Iraq, the military will seek a smaller, less noticeable footprint overseas. Kaplan combines the travel writer's keen eye for detail and the foreign correspondent's analytical skill to produce an account of America's military worthy of its subject.

More of Kaplan, from the MemeStreams archive:

When North Korea Collapses...

Sacrifice is not a word that voters in free and prosperous societies tend to like. If voters in Western-style democracies are good at anything, it’s rationalizing their own selfishness.

The Biology of Conflict cites Kaplan's The Coming Anarchy, from 1991.

The Media and Medievalism

"The most blatant tyranny is the one which asks the most blatant questions. All questioning is a forcible intrusion. The questioner knows what there is to find, but he wants actually to touch it and bring it to light."

But few politicians are consistently sly in reading accurately the crowd's daily and hourly shifts in passion, and those who are -- because of the fact of their slyness -- usually find it wiser to cave in to these shifts than to lead the crowd down the hard road elsewhere. Because even our best politicians are cowed by the electoral herd, we must look to another group for the true source of power in our age.

Inside the House of Cards, about a military brigade's restoring order to Iraq's second-largest city.

Force Increase Necessary for War on Terror, Leaders Say

Several years into the war on terrorism, one would think that Pashto would be commonly spoken, at least on a basic level, by American troops in these borderlands. It isn't. Nor are Farsi and Urdu—the languages of Iran and the tribal agencies of Pakistan, where US Special Operations forces are likely to be active, in one way or another, over the coming decade. Like Big Army's aversion to beards, the lack of linguistic preparedness demonstrates that the Pentagon bureaucracy pays too little attention to the most basic tool of counterinsurgency: adaptation to the cultural terrain. It is such adaptation—more than new weapons systems or an ideological commitment to Western democracy—that will deliver us from quagmires.

The Western Front, where Kaplan introduces us to lone American servicemen whose presence in obscure countries is largely unknown.

Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground