Kaplan's "classic imperialism" is just "preparing the battlefield" by good SysAdmin work

Kaplan's better judgments are on display here ("Classic Imperialism," WSJ, 23 Sept, p. A16), though, in trying to push his new book he oversells the material here by saying small mil-to-mil training missions deep in the Gap are the real essence of imperialism, not the overextended nation-building of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Frankly, it's a wasted argument better used to sell books than impart understanding. Because Kaplan believes the Gap really can't be shrunk, just kept down by "imperial grunts" and the local warriorts they co-opt through training, walking in their combat boots, eating each other's food, etc., he contents himself by wallowing in the glow of this very admirable activity and then elevating it beyond all strategic reason.

All fine and good to celebrate, but all Kaplan captures here is the low-end SysAdmin work that prepares the battlefield for struggles ahead or--if we're lucky--secures them without later Leviathan efforts because the private-sector development kicks in and the connectivity comes via trade, not military aid.

But since Kaplan pretty much doesn't see any of that good stuff happening, he constantly paints this picture of neverending "imperialsm" that merely extends the "keep the fight over there" mentality that drove a lot of strategic rationales for crisis response activities in the early 1990s after the Sovs disappeared and the services needed to justify themselves as relevant to the seemingly "flatter" security environment (if I may be so bold to borrow Friedman's term). Here, "flatter" would mean no peaks formed by great powers bent on military adventurism, so only small stuff is left.

Between reading this op-ed, his Atlantic Monthly article (also basically an excerpt), and scanning his book at an airport bookstore recently), I continue to admire his reporting on the low-end SysAdmin work (now done overwhelmingly by Special Ops guys spread out way too thin, increasingly needing to be done more and more by Marines and regular Army--one of my many judgments that gets me called a "raving maniac" by some), but likewise find tiresome his mistake of extrapolating a universe from his very narrow reporting perspective.

Simply put, Kaplan's soda-straw view (which I find to be, quite frankly, much like Michael Moore's--just from another angle), no matter how many SOF guys he hangs with on how many continents, is still a guide to nothing beyond tactics. That his work passes for strategic thought speaks to the very sad state of affairs in national security circles.

I have said it before and I used to teach it at a War College in every brief I gave: when the defense crowd abdicates strategic thought to journalists, we are totally screwed and deserve what we get. We don't just need good descriptions of how we're going to manage the world as we find it. We need good narratives for how we're going to make this world better. You can manage the former arguing so narrowly from a military perspective and get away with it. But to argue the latter you need a perspective of war within the context of everything else, not one that merely elevates the military perspective to "imperial" universality. Please! Leave that nonsense where it belongs--in the past.

Kaplan delivers the former, avoid him on the latter. And do not take his inabillity to move beyond his tactical view as evidence that any grand strategy is doomed to fail.

If Kaplan just sold himself as a great journalist, I would agree with those who praise him to the hilt within the U.S. military, but his tendency to extrapolate to the strategic from his exceedingly myopic tactical view ruins his material for me. In the end, I see his work doing more harm than good, and so I do not advise people to read it.

Too bad, say I, but chalk it up to the need for all journalists to be celebrities nowadays.