I've just been listening to a podcast with Robert Kaplan, the American journalist who has a new book out about the U.S. military. It's called Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground. Let me add that I haven't read it yet - but why should that stop me from talking about it? Seriously, though, I can state in my defense that I've read a couple of his previous books and articles (including some of his pieces in The Atlantic Monthly that went into this new tome), so I have a pretty good idea of what he's on about. Plus I've just listened to him talking about it for an hour (which I highly recommend, by the way - you can do it here).

I've always been of two minds about Kaplan. On one hand he's a fairly passionate neo-conservative, which doesn't necessarily bother me in itself but which often ends up getting in the way of the story he's trying to tell. (I still can't forget this passage from the prologue of his previous book, Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground, where he's describing an officer in the Marine Corps: "His skin was the color of clay under his high-and-tight crew cut, with taut cheeks and a get-it-done expression: an ancient sculpture in digital camouflage, except for the point of light in his eyes. The Romans, by their rites of purification, accepted and justified the world as it was, with all its cruelty. The Americans,heir to the Christian tradition, seek what is not yet manifest: the higher ideal. Thus, he was without cynicism. Rather, his honesty made self-delusion impossible." Ahem.

This is silly stuff, to be sure. But we also have to cut Kaplan some slack - he's a good analyst and a brilliant reporter who knows how to tell a story. Plus he's found a great subject: the U.S. military in an age of American hegemony. He's certainly right to bemoan the growing gap between the military and America's civilian power elite (including, if you will, the media) - one of the less desirable effects of our all-volunteer armed forces. (It should be noted that this divergence is also a source of worry to many liberals - Kaplan's former colleague at the Atlantic, Cullen Murphy, comes to mind.) One of the regrettable side-effects of the fact that not many journalists have served in the military means that not many of them can explain it intelligently to a public that needs to know. I applaud Kaplan for doing his best to fill the gap.

What's neat about what he's done this time is that he's trying to write about all the things that are being lost to general view because of everyone's understandable focus on Iraq. In this book Kaplan is trying to write about everything else the U.S. military is doing in the world aside from the Iraq War, which means that he ends up flying on B2 bombers, sailing across the Pacific in a sub, and visiting Marines on training missions in places like Niger. (Didn't know we had troops there? Neither did Donald Rumsfeld.)

And where I really find myself agreeing with Kaplan is his broader conclusion: Forget about war with militant Islam. In the twenty-first century the real action is going to be in the Asia-Pacific region - not only because China is a rising military power, but because there are so many other countries, large and small, that are already using soldiers and sailors as instruments of statecraft. Remember, using your military to project power doesn't mean that you're killing people - it can also mean disaster relief, policing, messing up other people's computers or satellites, or asserting control over contested border areas. Just look at Australia, which over the past decade has been sending troops on a bewildering array of missions to places ranging from the Solomon Islands to Afghanistan.

So I share, for example, Kaplan's fascination with the U.S. military buildup now under way on the western Pacific island of Guam. He compares it and the surrounding area, I think rightly, with Germany during the Cold War - a new focus point in the rivalry between great powers. I don't agree with him that we're looking at a new Cold War with China, though - I think the Pacific Century will be far more complicated and messily multilateral than the U.S.-Soviet competition ever was. The economic interests in the Asia-Pacific region are just too powerful, and too dispersed, for it to be otherwise. But I also find myself disagreeing with the people who argue, essentially, that as long as we're all trading with each other (and buying each other's bonds), we'll never have reason to go to war. If it were only that simple, I'd rest easy. But it's not.