[Adm.Lee]

Originally Posted by Raellus

I'd have to look it up to give you an exact figure, but I think it was for a couple of days, at least- long enough, in any case, to require a reevaluation of objectives and unit mission taskings.

Yeah, that seems a bit much, then. I'd have believed "stopped them for part of a day", or even overnight, if it happened close enough to sunset.

One additional nitpick is that the American ASW frigate captain goes from a major POV character to a supporting character with the introduction of the Vietnam vet ASW helicopter pilot, a little over halfway through the book.

Oh, yeah, I remember him now. He was useful to give his experience to the captain, but taking over the spotlight might be much.

You're right. I'd forgotten that bit about the weatherman's backstory. Makes sense that he'd take out his rage on the Soviet para rapist. But he only executes the main offender. One of the Marines kills the other two EPWs by stabbing them through the neck. It seemed over-the-top to me.

Another example of cringey dialogue from the final few pages of the book. A marine general says to the pregnant rape victim, "They told me you were beautiful. I have a daughter about your age." Creepy.

Either of those sentences sound like something one might say to a victim, but together... nah. I guess the other Marine was following the LT's lead? Over the top, yes.

He didn't really provide much of a timeline, though. So the reader kind of has to pick up on context clues and then deduce how long has passed since the last episode involved a particular character. It's still not terribly clear by the end of the book how long the war lasted. 4 weeks, six weeks, two months? Longer?

That could be a plus, since that way Clancy & Bond aren't tied too tightly to a given timeline. As the English teachers might say, the reader is allowed to infer their own timeline.

Yeah, I don't think we've seen a true modern, high intensity, conventional war between 1st world military powers in real life, so it's really difficult to play out how it would all go down. We can look at the closest thing, but I think we often draw the wrong conclusions. For example, I think a lot of people assume NATO air forces would roll over the Soviets' air defenses because of how easily the Iraqi's air-defenses were destroyed during Desert Storm.

That said, Clancy pretty much omits mention of conventional, non-radar-guided AAA in the book. All the NATO aircraft fly nap of the earth to avoid SAMs. Any Soviet radar not turned off is zapped by ARMs. IRL, over Iraq, Coalition strike pilots learned the hard way that "dumb" AAA was a much greater threat to their aircraft than radar-guided SAMs and consequently, once the Iraqi SAM networks were sufficiently degraded, very few missions were flown below 5000 feet. Clancy didn't know about that when he wrote the book, but the Israelis had learned the same thing in their various wars against their Arab neighbors, so it seems strange that this hard-earned lesson was ignored in the book.

This could all be one of those times I can hear him say, "Well, I'm the author, and I had to decide on what worked and what didn't, and what would advance the story. Go write your own, if you don't like it."

To me, yeah, low-level AAA is a greater threat than he had included, especially in such a force-dense region as central Germany. I will chalk a lot up to Clancy & Bond having studied more of the naval and naval-air elements than ground and ground/air parts of the War That Never Happened.

Still a good read, even if we knock off half a star for that.