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.