World Affairs Board - View Single Post - Red Storm Rising

**TopHatter** · 09-24-2006, 20:44 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by STIG

I was wondering if some one could crtique the novel and lay out a realistic scenario of a war between the NATO -WARSAW Pact countries.

Quite a good novel IMHO, very prescient.

From Wikipedia's entry:

Quote:

Clancy plausibly suggests that munitions expenditures would be far higher than projected; that combat helicopters like the AH-64 Apache and the Mi-24 HIND are not nearly as survivable as projected; that the mobility granted by modern armor means that the Soviet doctrine of a massed thrust achieving a breakthrough of the enemy lines is a fiction—the enemy can withdraw and reform its lines too easily to break; also, modern air power can only dominate a battlefield in the absence of an opposing modern air force.

Clancy also correctly guessed that the United States operated a small number of stealth aircraft, whose existence was highly classified at the time the novel was written. However, the stealth fighters which appear in the novel are F-19s, not the F-117 Nighthawk of our world.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq (although far more of a mismatch than a mid-1980s NATO-Warsaw Pact conflict would have been) did provide some evidence for Clancy's hypothesis. The US Army’s Apaches proved more vulnerable to ground fire than had been predicted beforehand, and by the war’s end the majority of close air support was being delivered by heavily armored A-10 Thunderbolt II ground attack aircraft. Fittingly, Clancy identifies the A-10 as being a key weapon in his Red Storm Rising scenario. His predictions on the high rate of munitions expenditure also appears to have been borne out—even though the initial attack on Iraq was short, it drained U. S. arsenals to an alarming extent, forcing the Pentagon to undertake a crash program to rebuild stocks of smart bombs.

Red Storm Rising is basic literature at many military academies inside and outside the United States, as are several other books by Tom Clancy. It is also frequently referred to by military scientists and is widely regarded as being one of the most realistic scenarios of an East-West war.