Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!dptg!ulysses!andante!princeton!njin!rutgers!att!cbnews!military
From: budden@manta (Rex A. Buddenberg)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: The Novels of Thomas Clancy
Message-ID: <8795@cbnews.ATT.COM>
Date: 4 Aug 89 13:06:10 GMT
Sender: military@cbnews.ATT.COM
Organization: Naval Ocean Systems Center, San Diego
Lines: 35
Approved: military@att.att.com



From: budden@manta (Rex A. Buddenberg)
I read Red October while at Naval Postgraduate School in a
communications curriculum.  Clancy was quite accurate about
his descriptioins of SSIXS and ELF to a point.  But every
time I ran into something that didn't wash, I had to stop
and think...'O yeah, that answer is classified.'

The one inaccuracy in Red October is that Commanders in the
Pentagon do NOT get listened to like that!

I've also read Red Storm and Patriot Games.  The technical depth is
less and he doesn't do quite as well in that area.  The
unfortunate part of Red Storm is that he didn't get as good a fix on
the Maritime Strategy as he should have...

Couple years ago, heard Clancy at a luncheon.  His best anecdote
was about his technical beckgrounding.  Keeps pretty thorough files
of unclas literature so he has traceability -- for both classification
and accuracy reasons.  And he sends the manuscripts to the
Navy before they publish.  One manuscript (can't say which) brought
a Navy captain down to visit him with the message that he had some
classified information in the manuscript.  After a defense of
his traceability, Clancy relented, agreed to be a good citizen and
said 'tell me what is classified and it's gone from the book'.
The captain replied that he couldn't -- it was classified!
Roomful of Coasties loved that line.

Concluding, Clancy is a good read and he does pretty fair research
as novelists go.  But I'd never use him as an exclusive
reference -- he needs some leavening in the technical areas
due to the reasons noted above.

Rex Buddenberg