There’s a new Robert Kaplan interview up at Radio Blogger about Imperial Grunts. Kaplan was interviewed on Hugh Hewitt’s show today. Read it now as he’s off to Korea and Thailand tomorrow to spend time with the Air Force. Special thanks to reader Gollios for the tip!

Robert Kaplan follows up on Bush administration comments on his book, Imperial Grunts.

HH: Everything going on, but in the middle of all that, there’s been one theme. I don’t know if you’ve listened to it very closely. I keep bringing up a book. It’s a book called Imperial Grunts. I’ve had its author on before, but now I’m rejoined by Robert Kaplan, because Robert, I want to talk to you a little bit about this. Welcome back. Thanks for making some time this afternoon.

RK: It’s my pleasure to be here, Hugh.

HH: Now Robert, I asked the Vice President and the Secretary of Defense, and neither of them yet had the chance to read your book. But I asked them specifically about the idea that Special Forces at the forward operating bases, which you described in meticulous detail in Afghanistan and other places, are being constrained by a big Army, as you put it, at Bagram and other places, and they deflected the question. And I didn’t have enough time to push them and go deep on this. They just were non-responsive. What do you think that indicates?

RK: Well, I think to be fair to them, it indicates how de-centralized the system is. I’ll tell you a story. I had a piece on U.S. Marines training in a country in sub-Saharan Africa, Niger. And it reached the office of the Secretary of Defense, and some people said wow, we had no idea we had people there. And that would have happened it Willian Cohen was Secretary of Defense, William Perry. It’s not a reflection on the Republicans. It’s a reflection of how de-centralized the system is. Unless there’s something uniquely controversial about the deployment, this is something that’s going to be decided at the level of European command and Schtutgard, if it’s Africa for instance. So let’s get back to the Special Forces bases. These are issues that are basically decided, in the case of an Army Special Forces, a forward operating base, or fire base as they call it, in Afghanistan, it would be decided at the level of the two star general at Bagram, in Afghanistan, and would not go up to the Secretary of Defense. The Secretary of Defense may have like an overarching order that I want as little bureaucracy as possible. I want our people unconstrained. But the problem is that those are all general commands, which can be interpreted in so many different ways as you go down the chain. And the Vice President being further above, probably knows even less about this.

HH: That’s remarkable. But it is a real problem. Is it getting remedied?

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