Tom Clancy has died
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
On the games front, I am a huge fan of Splinter Cell series. Both the gamer, and the voracious reader in me would miss him.
All the other books clearly are written with (movie/video game) in the back of his mind, but that one was just straight prose.
Can't agree with you more, folks should definitely read it if they haven't. Then watch the movie again with a much greater appreciation for the story.
His next four books were written before The Hunt for Red October came out in film form.
> Foreshadowing a number of conspiracy theories which would arise in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, the plot of the March 4, 2001 episode depicts a secret faction within the US government plotting to hijack a Boeing 727 and fly it into the World Trade Center by remote control. The stated motive was to increase the military defense budget by blaming the attack on foreign interests.
There was also a lot of talking up the amazing organizational skills of the hijackers. Meanwhile I'm thinking, um, let me get this straight... the amazing skill some stuffed suit is referring to is ... buying airline tickets?
All part of the big lie security theater.
So, while I agree that security theater is everywhere, in the case of the hijackers, they actually planned and developed their process very carefully.
I never soloed but got close and I've got friends with their ATP ticket working for minors and I assure you that 99% of flight training is "this is how not to get killed".
If they trained to do an instruments approach to the towers during a thunderstorm with a partial panel and an engine out, I'd be impressed. What they actually did, from a piloting perspective, eh. What minimal training they did, eh.
So if the pilot is out of the cockpit and its just you, and engine #2 experiences fuel starvation, and the lights are out (who cares why) the exact switches you need to flip to cross feed fuel and the exact gauges you need to look at with your flashlight to determine if its an engine problem or a fuel problem are ... and the exact procedures you follow depending on which it is are ... and you need to answer this instantly or fail your flight check. Or you're on an IFR approach in thunderstorms with one engine out and the primary VOR out now what do you do it doesn't handle the same and you're "uncomfortable" with alternate instruments. Also they test the pilots to destruction basically with distractions, in a simulator you lose cabin pressure and cabin lighting and engine 1 and the controls are feeling weird and there's a fire warning light and hydraulic caution so now what. Fire warning on APU #1 now what? OK now electric bus B just tripped off.
Its much more a damage control job than like being a perfect precise ballerina. Although if your flight maneuvers aren't as smooth as reasonably possible they're going to be pissed after you land, unless your a hijacker so you don't care...
What's hard are takeoffs, landings (especially landings), flying in bad weather, emergency conditions, etc.
There are many cases of people with no flight training whatsoever being able to successfully take off and fly, but are unable to land.
I would agree with that and this strikes me as the kind of thing that isn't resolved by anecdotes but via someones first five minutes with a PC flight simulator. Anything beyond arcade level.
Some of the more outlandish claims I've read about flying pretty obviously come from people who's shadow has never darkened a keyboard of a PC running MS FS or X-Plane, or even talked to someone who has flown a plane or even played a PC flight sim. I did a ton of PC sim work to wrap my brain around navigation concepts (like the to/from VOR flag, and how approaches "feel" at speed while under cognitive load) and PC flight sims help a lot with nav, but latency combined with lack of feedback and weird controls made it not so useful to replace actual flight time.
As for straight and level that depends on having been properly trimmed, but its really not all that much harder than driving. I don't think an aircraft can be FAA certified if its not stable in at least some axes. I know several exotic research x-planes were not stable in some axes at some parts of the flight envelope and some .mil planes were (are?) not. If a plane is stable, hands off it'll more or less smoothly point to some velocity vector and nose direction (first noob pilot discovery is those two need not be pointed the same way, and almost never are... planes are in an eternal skid, sorta, unlike a car). That 3-d velocity vector might not be where you want, not at all, but it'll smoothly stabilize there unless you adjust the trim tabs.
Incidentally, do they teach that you should crab into a crosswind for your entire final approach nowadays?
I donno about crabbing all the way into the ground now a days but if you're crabbing when you hit the ground I suspect thats very hard on non-castering gear and/or its ground loop time.
There were other books before his that used commandeered airplanes as weapons. Clancy was just a much more adept and educated thriller writer than most in the field.
I'm surprised actual terrorist plots similar to Rainbow Six have not happened yet. I was drawn to the book by the game, and while the latter is a landmark in tactical shooters, it's a mess in terms of delivering the actual story.
Rainbow Six is one of my top-ten favorite books.
The first book by Clancy I read was "Red Storm Rising", I picked it up at 6pm and read until 3am. Some of the titles of chapters would have made great band names such as "Frisbees in Dreamland".
I wish they had actually made a movie of one of his books instead of just using the title.
What has fundamentally changed WRT the situation on the ground and the plot in the book?
Doesn't Russia and former USSR still burn oil? Doesn't the middle east still have oil? Wouldn't you need to distract the western powers somehow if they planned to sieze a country in the middle east, Imperial American style?
The main plot hole I see is invading the west is not going to help much with natgas exports which is a good source of incoming money. So they'd have some interesting economic issues. Then again eventually you'll be exporting natgas to "someone" in the long run and you need oil now, so no problemo.
Another plot issue would be it would be harder to frame the Germans precisely as described in the book. Well, adapt and overcome, something could be thought up pretty similar with the same outcome.
It is true, politicans now make smiley faces at each other, but when the rubber meets the road, and they need oil, and someone else has oil, and they've got the power to take it and believe theres no alternative, you do the math...
The other problem is the "newer generations" not appreciating something from the past, unless its a sequel of a sequel of a FPS WWII game, in which case they love it.
I don't think its a problem.
I'm not sure how the plot would work given the ultimate goal of the USSR in the book was to capture a chunk of the Persian Gulf oil.
Probably the biggest plot hole would be since the book was written both sides learned from Afghanistan (and the US from Iraq) that simply rolling tanks in works WRT militarily controlling the territory the tanks sit on, but not at controlling the rest of the territory or the economy or pretty much anything else. In the very long run, a tank is pretty good at controlling the sand shaded underneath it, not much beyond.
You'd need a new strategy for controlling the oil. Probably indirect WRT govt coup / support in the M.E. Maybe use conventional WWIII in europe to lure as many US forces as possible out of the middle east then coup time and install puppets in charge of Saudi Arabia and Iraq and maybe some others.
If I were playing a cardboard or silicon wargame as the USSR in a RSR scenario, that's pretty much how I'd play it. I think I'd have reasonably good chance as long as it stays conventional. In the long run I'd worry about natgas exports in the future, the west is not going to be amused at buying gas from their recent enemies, so how are you going to fix your massive trade imbalance? Maybe sell the excess natgas to China for A.N. fertilizer production, they always want more food... Yeah, I could win it, I think. The USA/NATO player would be fighting a logistics war to keep the M.E. and .eu under control at the same time. Leading to unrestrained submarine warfare by .ru? Crazier things have happened.
While the focus of the book was Moscow's panic in the face of geopolitical decline, the Warsaw Pact was still on approximate equal footing with NATO in the early 1980s. So, in addition to the two having military forces and training built up over decades, they had similar sized populations and economies to credibly support an all out war effort beyond the first engagements.
To get something similar today would need a military conflict between the US and the EU, except in an alternate reality where the EU was as politically unified as the USSR was, and where military spending took up as much of the EU economy as it now does of the US economy.
Here is some rough context of the current (or recent past) geopolitical landscape taken from some Wikipedia & CIA World Factbook stats:
GDP | Pop | Country | Mil% | Mil$
---------------------------------------
16.3T | 507.9M | EU | 1.1%?| 179B
15.7T | 316.8M | US | 4.6% | 722B
12.4T | 1.35 B | China | 2.6% | 322B
4.71T | 1.21 B | India | 1.8% | 85B
4.78T | 126.7M | Japan | 1.0% | 48B
3.38T | 143.5M | Russia | 3.9% | 132B
2.36T | 201.0M | Brazil | 1.3% | 31B
1.76T | 118.4M | Mexico | 0.5% | 9B
Even if you conceptualize terrorism into a broad movement rather than a basket of tactics and behaviors, "it" still isn't a monolith and hasn't enough political unity to control a single nation, much less one that with a manufacturing base to speak of or any technological sophistication.
Red Storm Rising requires, at the least, a foe that is politically monolithic (China not the EU), that has a technologically advanced military (maybe Russia), and a sophisticated enough economy that it could sustain a war effort beyond the first couple weeks of engagement (EU not China).
Panic in the face of a specific petroleum shortage where all alternatives were politically unacceptable, or maybe rephrased war was the least unacceptable. I suppose some kind of wheat harvest disaster would have been a good precursor although it would have screwed up the outcome of the book.
Your analysis is good other than the US economy being very far away from the possible scene of activity and a major subplot was closing the Atlantic to the USSR. Until that happened the US was in a severe logistics crunch. That was a major theme of the book... the USSR didn't give up until they lost the logistics war supplying the front lines with fuel due to a cruise missile strike and the US closed the Atlantic to USSR subs which opened the US logistics. That made the USSR side really panic, come up with some dumb last ditch ideas, and finally disappear in a coup.
The political solutions being unacceptable was somewhat covered in the book, toward the end there was a bit of a WTF were they thinking moment in the conversation at the end. Irrational fear or political outlook can lead to decisions that are not rational. Maybe that's the moral of the book. Most wars seem to have an irrational component to them on one side if not both sides...
From a wargamer perspective its all about the logistics... the US position is not good at all in some limited scenarios. And its still fun to play the American South in the civil war even if you know in the long run they're gonna lose. I tentatively agree with your apparent conclusion that the .ru would be doomed in a RSR-2013 scenario, but it would still make a heck of a book / hex based wargame / whatever.
However, I don't think there's a way to create an interesting war simulation that is based on current geopolitical reality. Even without the US as a counterbalance, could today's Russia pose a threat to western (or eastern) Europe, or conquer and control oil production in a significant part of the Middle East? With the US involved, there isn't the prospect of achieving anything, even as part of a wild gamble.
I think Daniel Drezner described the context pretty well here:
https://www.google.com/search?q=russia+is+not+america's+geop...
Clancy also credited Bond's warfare sim, "Harpoon", for helping in the writing of "The Hunt for Red October". I still have the original Harpoon for DOS and Harpoon II for Windows. Both are amazing games.
I especially liked his "Red dawn rising" which is one of the only WWIII books that doesn't go to a nuclear holocaust right away - if you a like to watch politics and have a military interest I recommend you check it out.
I really loved the whole scenario. It's the only time I've read a book with a ton of characters, outside of LOTR, that I wasn't incredibly confused.
I chose Tom Clancy. My English teacher said I was crazy and "would never find anything in those books writing about".
Somehow I pulled it off and got an A on that project.
So basically, I got to read Clancy books for school. :)
Even though his later novels devolved into ghost-written, right-wing political soapboxes, still sad to see him go.
(RIP)
It was Larry Bond, who was an uncredited (I think) co-author on the early Clancy books. Bond and Clancy used Harpoon to help visualize the naval battles in the first few books.
A side note... I was chosen as the developer to port Harpoon to OS/2 in the early '90s but the company I worked for backed out. It pissed me off enough that I changed jobs. Anyway, I still have a few unopened boxes of the Harpoon software floating around here, which were handed to me by Gordon Walton himself.
They'd nevertheless invoked a great deal of meaningful machinery, though - certainly compared to the sheer suppository of machismatic agency that was Chavez-verse (credit probably required yet again, though: he was probably first to tread within the grounds of "contemporary tacticool".)
It's also sad to see a talented writer die at such a young age. Goodbye Tom, thanks for the great books.
[1] I am specifically referring to "The Bear and the Dragon" in this example.
(I know that he has had ghostwriters for the last x books but the characters and stories are now finite)
A real "Tom Clancy" style book would be take an exciting game of, say, Steel Wolves or Hornet Commander and remove all the dice rolling and turn it into fan fiction by adding a little imagination to the characters and tons of background for people outside .mil and outside the wargaming hobby.
Unfortunately what we'll get is a ghostwriter who will probably steal the plot of an ancient WWII era submarine movie and make it Clancy-style by adding a dude who wants to defect to visit Montana and the main character would be named Ryan and the tech details and "wargaming" would be completely butchered into laugh ability by anyone actually in the .mil or into wargaming.
My favourite remains Without Remorse. I miss a film adaption; Jim Caviezel would be perfect as Kelly.
Thanks, Tom.