Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!att!cbnews!military
From: marsh@linus.UUCP (Ralph Marshall)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: Tom Clancy
Message-ID: <12211@cbnews.ATT.COM>
Date: 12 Dec 89 04:53:07 GMT
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From: marsh@linus.UUCP (Ralph Marshall)
In article <12095@cbnews.ATT.COM> willner@cfa203.harvard.edu (Steve Willner) writes:
>
>
>From: willner@cfa203.harvard.edu (Steve Willner)
>Fans of Tom Clancy should read the article by Scott Shuger in the
>November issue of the _Washington Monthly_.  Mr. Shuger's main point is
>that Clancy writes about how weapons are _supposed_ to work and how
>they are _intended_ to be used, but that these bear very little
>relation to the reality of actual combat.

[stuff deleted]

>The characters were stereotypical.  And Mr.
>Shuger's criticism is valid; weapons - especially US weapons - almost
>always work as intended, and intelligence (on the US side, anyway) is
>far too accurate to be convincing.  I guess what I'm saying is that I
>had a lot of trouble "suspending my disbelief."

Tom Clancy is a pretty blatant "Go U.S." writer, to the point that I'm
not going to rush out to get whatever his next novel turns out to be.
In "A clear and present danger" he condones a number of unethical
actions on the ground that the means justifies the ends, and besides,
these people are only Third World target practice anyway.
>
>If you want to see this sort of thing done right, read _The Third World
>War_; it's by a retired general and is much more convincing.  (My copy
>has somehow disappeared, so I can't give author's name or publisher,
>and there is some chance the title is slightly wrong.  It was published
>in the early 1980's, I think.)

However, I can't agree with this either.  I read the book (and also
forgot the author), and found the whole thing highly improbable.  The
plot was a bit simplistic, and the ending was a bit "low impact."
While I don't want to get into the political realm here, I found 
"Red Storm Rising" to be a much better _motivated_ World War III
novel because it explained the desperation on the Soviet side.

I'm in the process of reading "The Guns of August" by Barbara Tuchman.
Around August 20th, 1914, the German general staff was telling the
generals in the Ardennes that the British Expeditionary Force wasn't
going to arrive in France for several more weeks while simultaneously
telling the generals near Brussels that the BEF was probably landing
near Dunkirk that very day.  This sort of screw-up is independent of
technology and era.  I don't think that Tom captures this sort of
problem very accurately.

Ralph Marshall
marsh@linus.mitre.org