The parts with artillery raining hell on armor columns, manpads raping air power, and the russians getting fricked hard from aforementioned weapons were true.
>tfw she goes from "ok but PROMISE me you'll pull out," to "oh god don't stop don't pull out"
4 months ago
Anonymous
>be me joking to my wife about uwu girls >she jokingly does an uwu girl voice during sex >"uwu breed me sempai" >I nut >this was 7 months ago >our daughter is due in about 8 weeks
4 months ago
Anonymous
Disgusting normalgay.
4 months ago
Anonymous
4 months ago
Anonymous
This made me laugh way harder than it should have.
>be me joking to my wife about uwu girls >she jokingly does an uwu girl voice during sex >"uwu breed me sempai" >I nut >this was 7 months ago >our daughter is due in about 8 weeks
oh damn, i've seen this publisher story being pushed so often i just took it for real lol.
but yeah, based tom. i wish he lived long enough to witness the ukrainian war...
I've never seen this before but holy shit people have called me crazy for pointing this out. At first when I read PG I thought Clancy was just making some sort of point, using the pregnancy stuff as a foil to the violent terrorists killing people. By the end of the RSR it was obviously just another case of "the authors poorly disguised fetish."
>"the authors poorly disguised fetish."
Disguised? Why do you think he was trying to disguise it? >Jack getting turned on by his pregnant wife baby-oiling her belly
He wasn't trying to disguise it.
I mean you could disguise a hero having to fight female enemies in a story to a greater or lesser extent, that would be plausible.
It would be harder to disguise say- >Hero must titfrick a woman to save the day
4 months ago
Anonymous
Tbh I think once he starts taking off their clothes and spanking them people would start to question it. Maybe I could disguise it as torture/interrogation on a female terrorist to get vital information
4 months ago
Anonymous
You could make it just a little blatant and make it an inside joke for avid readers.
The Jack Ryan books are so absurd that their practically alt history .
I think it was kind of dumb that he tried to cram all of these into one shared universe because each one of them would probably lead to a vastly different world after. Like in the Sum of All Fears a Muslim terrorist attack 200 times worse than 9/11 happens and everything is just back to normal 90s America after that.
>Hunt
there are 2 references; Jack talks about how he got his son (fricking Cathy in a hotel), and the Navy analyst who discovered the tunnel drive talks about having 5 kids and another on the way
>and the Navy analyst who discovered the tunnel drive talks about having 5 kids and another on the way
Holy shit, everyone has always thought that Jack Ryan is Tom's self-insert, and that John Clark is Tom's "dark side," but what we never fricking realized is that he really identifies with Skip Tyler who basically keeps his wife pregnant any time she's not already carrying or birthing.
>Skip Tyler
you remember this one-shot side character's name; I like you anon
nah, I think Clancy is just unable to write romance and family life. so when he has to round out some domestic shit about the family he puts in some stuff about having children and buying them stuff and then moves on to the Serious Business of ze Russians and ze caterpillar drives
surprisingly, Mary Pat's domestic scene in Red Rabbit shows he does have an idea of family stuff, although again he writes Mary Pat like a man writing a woman, but that can't be helped
4 months ago
Anonymous
>Mary Pat's domestic scene in Red Rabbit shows he does have an idea of family stuff
Man I have not read Red Rabbit in a very long time. Might have to correct that, it was probably the last of his really solid works.
4 months ago
Anonymous
>Skip Tyler
you remember this one-shot side character's name; I like you anon
nah, I think Clancy is just unable to write romance and family life. so when he has to round out some domestic shit about the family he puts in some stuff about having children and buying them stuff and then moves on to the Serious Business of ze Russians and ze caterpillar drives
surprisingly, Mary Pat's domestic scene in Red Rabbit shows he does have an idea of family stuff, although again he writes Mary Pat like a man writing a woman, but that can't be helped
>nah, I think Clancy is just unable to write romance and family life. so when he has to round out some domestic shit about the family he puts in some stuff about having children and buying them stuff and then moves on to the Serious Business of ze Russians and ze caterpillar drives
And yeah you're right, it was probably his first wife nagging him to put something in it to make her want to read it
4 months ago
Anonymous
Executive Orders isn't too bad
Cardinal Of The Kremlin is excellent spy stuff, I personally find it far more engaging than John le Carre's Smiley trilogy
Hunt For Red October is my personal favourite
[...] >nah, I think Clancy is just unable to write romance and family life. so when he has to round out some domestic shit about the family he puts in some stuff about having children and buying them stuff and then moves on to the Serious Business of ze Russians and ze caterpillar drives
And yeah you're right, it was probably his first wife nagging him to put something in it to make her want to read it
Frankly I don't see how any woman at all would want to read his stuff, even army brats or serving women
4 months ago
Anonymous
I like Executive Orders, it still turns pages after frick knows how many readings. Cardinal is fricking excellent, I kind of wish he'd done another couple of espionage-centric books before going onto Clear and Present Danger. Hunt for Red October is still a classic but my personal #1 has always been Red Storm Rising, and the bizarre list of parallels to the present day it can be drawn to has only lifted it in my esteem.
4 months ago
Anonymous
>it still turns pages after frick knows how many readings
yes, plotwise it's excellent and very relevant >unprecedented pandemic >GWOT >Middle East chimpout >geopolitical posturing just shy of actual war
>Clear and Present Danger
the parts without the very very forced relationship drama are okay
and the nuke should never have gone off
>Red Storm Rising
it's really only the buildup and the godawful Iceland rape arc that is bad
everything else from the Dance Of The Vampires onwards is good
if you haven't already you should read Frederick Forsyth's Fist Of God, it's a somewhat overlooked book that IMHO is the king of techno-thrillers
also, either Freddie had insider info or the Iranians actually read it and decided to implement it
4 months ago
Anonymous
I've got a much battered copy of Fist of God that I've had for years, I think it's Fred's best work and I think it's criminally underrated - cool to see another anon has enjoyed it.
>Clear and Present Danger
That's Ding slotting druggies in Colombia and Clark guiding LGBs into their houses. The nuke was Sum of All Fears.
4 months ago
Anonymous
>Fred's best work
it's certainly a contender and shines a lampshade on all Clancy's worst foibles
the question of "best" comes down to whether you prefer the Clancy-esque grand techno-thriller plot, or the detective cat-and-mouse game of Day Of The Jackal, or the revolution-101 of Dogs Of War
>The nuke was Sum of All Fears
right my bad
I don't think much of Clear And Present Danger, I just feel Sum could have been better executed
I've gone through all of clancy's ryanverse stuff. How does forsyth compare to him? Want to get into his work sometime, heard he's like a more realistic and serious clancy
>he's like a more realistic and serious clancy
he absolutely is
if you want a book that is what every Clancy novel could've and should've been, read The Fist Of God. it weaves a story into Desert Storm that feels so incredibly real, it could easily have really happened. and it has all the classic Clancyisms, multiple intricate plots building up simultaneously, spycraft, Cold War battles, etc
Day Of The Jackal is a detective chase story rather than a techno-thriller, and it's one of the best of the detective genre, very 60s and almost noirlike. Dogs Of War is a meticulously-detailed step-by-step /k/ fantasy of "how my mates and I can overthrow an African mini-country".
IMHO my view of Frederick Forsyth's writing compared to Tom Clancy is that he's just better, he writes more compactly and emotionally, but with no less satisfying a plotline than any Clancy.
4 months ago
Anonymous
>it could easily have really happened. and it has all the classic Clancyisms, multiple intricate plots building up simultaneously, spycraft, Cold War battles, etc
ok, i'm sold
4 months ago
Anonymous
Day of The Jackal also got an excellent movie adaptation.
Dogs of War.... somewhat less so
4 months ago
Anonymous
I've gone through all of clancy's ryanverse stuff. How does forsyth compare to him? Want to get into his work sometime, heard he's like a more realistic and serious clancy
I remember reading Patriot Games as a teen and thinking "damn, this guy really likes them pregnant ladies, huh", but somehow it didn't register for his other novels. Bet he considered it his magnum opus in that regard.
>Dude, we have to have a /k/ movie night to watch Sum of All Fears with the Clancy commentary. It's hilarious.
Ok, I have never, ever watched Sum of All Fears because it was so far removed from the book that I just had zero fricking interest but because of this post I did exactly that and holy fricking shit you forget what a funny motherfricker he was.
Two minutes in kek >“I’m Tom Clancy, I wrote the book that they ignored.”
>Is this supposed to be a bomb or a torpedo? >A bomb >You got the proportions wrong >Actually I meant torpedo >You got the proportions wrong
But then to cap it all of, Tom himself proves this anon [...] absolutely, hilariously, irrevocably correct - thirty seconds into a scene at CIA where one of the analysts is pregnant >So is she really pregnant? >No that's a prosthesis >Really? It looks very lifelike
then seconds later >Wow you really got that prosthetic late term pregnant belly really right
The man simply cannot be stopped from wanting to bone preggo chicks, kek
Wasn’t he catholic? Maybe he only got any if it was the safe time of the month or she was already preggers?
>was it realistic?
Understand that when people meme on Tom Clancy as having overhyped the Soviets these days, Ralph Peters was fellated as having produced a more sober, ""realistic"" portrayal of Soviet military prowess and efficiency with Red Army.
Why?
Because - albeit set in the broader catastrophe that was a 1980s NATO-Soviet War in Europe and the North Atlantic - it featured many of the elements that have actually fricked the Russian Army in a major high intensity mechanized war in its backyard hampering the Soviets...in a major mechanized war in their backyard.
This is what people say was Clancy "overhyping the Soviets." Not the King Autist being right. Again.
>Because - albeit set in the broader catastrophe that was a 1980s NATO-Soviet War in Europe and the North Atlantic - it featured many of the elements that have actually fricked the Russian Army in a major high intensity mechanized war in its backyard hampering the Soviets...in a major mechanized war in their backyard.
This is describing Red Storm Rising, by the way. I'm moronic so that wasn't clear in my original post.
>was it realistic?
Understand that when people meme on Tom Clancy as having overhyped the Soviets these days, Ralph Peters was fellated as having produced a more sober, ""realistic"" portrayal of Soviet military prowess and efficiency with Red Army.
Why?
Because - albeit set in the broader catastrophe that was a 1980s NATO-Soviet War in Europe and the North Atlantic - it featured many of the elements that have actually fricked the Russian Army in a major high intensity mechanized war in its backyard hampering the Soviets...in a major mechanized war in their backyard.
This is what people say was Clancy "overhyping the Soviets." Not the King Autist being right. Again.
RsR is extremely entertaining to read but IMO Chieftains is the superior WW3 book
>I'd also reccomend Team Yankee
Based Team Yankee enjoyer. >there were several scenes in the book that could have been copied straight out of the initial Ukraine invasion.
I seem to remember that they had some trouble getting across some rivers...
This is a common thing across many WWIII novels (and most military thriller novels) in general: The writers get totally autistic about the buildup and tension across like 2/3 of the book, and then fall apart towards the ending. Like the last 5-10 pages are what happens in the aftermath of the final battles, with little to no actual closure, no tying up loose ends, or whatever. Then there's no sequel telling you what happened because the novel either sold too poorly or the writer got distracted with something else.
Fricking bleak as it was, I found the ending of Chieftains to be pretty damn fitting into the whole theme of war never going the way you planned that's present throughout. And it very much evades most of the things you critizised by just abruptly killing the main protag because the Soviets got mad about their push being stopped outright and dropped a tactical nuke.
This is a common thing across many WWIII novels (and most military thriller novels) in general: The writers get totally autistic about the buildup and tension across like 2/3 of the book, and then fall apart towards the ending. Like the last 5-10 pages are what happens in the aftermath of the final battles, with little to no actual closure, no tying up loose ends, or whatever. Then there's no sequel telling you what happened because the novel either sold too poorly or the writer got distracted with something else.
Giant unimaginative wienerblock.
points out, being an issue with ww3 literature Chieftains ends with implied nuclear annihilation in a great way as opposed to just the two sides going "truce?" And everything going back to status quo ante bellum like RSR for example(which is a general Clancy problem)
Fricking bleak as it was, I found the ending of Chieftains to be pretty damn fitting into the whole theme of war never going the way you planned that's present throughout. And it very much evades most of the things you critizised by just abruptly killing the main protag because the Soviets got mad about their push being stopped outright and dropped a tactical nuke.
What I want is a modern military thriller novel that puts more than a few tbhltory pages at the end into tying up loose ends/finishing out the plot. The last few "Clancy" ghostwrites just kinda fricking ENDED with semi-cliffhangers that were just complete WTF. I can see why the authors of those particular ones got their contracts pulled, those were just awful.
>it featured many of the elements that have actually fricked the Russian Army
IIRC in the book the Soviet army only got about 100 miles into Germany before getting bogged down, there were several scenes in the book that could have been copied straight out of the initial Ukraine invasion. The main unrealistic plot element that I recall is the soviet antiship missiles actually hitting something as small as a ship, but I don't think anybody actually expected that soviet missiles would manage to be less accurate than WW2 german stuff.
>The main unrealistic plot element that I recall is the soviet antiship missiles actually hitting something as small as a ship
IIRC out of 100+ missiles only a couple landed hits on the carrier, and two more hit a Marine landing ship and blew the magazine
Saratoga took one and survived, Nimitz took two and frag from one the CIWS got, Foch took a couple and sank, Saipan took two and exploded, I think one of the AEGIS cruisers took one in the forward superstructure
Clancy didn't over hype them, he didn't want to paint them as incompetent mouth breathing morons in an "unrealistic" manner that made it into a one sided beat down scenario. Man's gotta sell his books he based off of his tabletop wargaming experiences.
>Ralph Peters was fellated as having produced a more sober, ""realistic"" portrayal of Soviet military prowess and efficiency with Red Army.
It's funny that he was often brought up as the realistic alternative to RSR when his plot line pretty much ended with 'And then the Soviet Union raised its eyebrow and the Wect understood everything'.
The books was interesting because it kinda fellated the Red army but at the same time acknowledges that if the Americans actually entered the war the Soviets would have been curb stomped, the only reason they didn't being that the west German government pussied out and sued for peace and the burgers literally had to turn away from the border at the last second.
I have a quote somewhere. >Chibisov realized, as did only a few of the privileged, how close the battlefield outcome had been. The American counterattack, really the centerpiece of a counteroffensive, had nearly broken them. Perhaps the follow-on forces would have contained them, but the Americans and the surprisingly resilient forces of the Northern Army Group had hit hard. Not even Dudorov had correctly estimated how much fight the battered NATO corps had left in them. The counterblow had stormed to within a dozen kilometers of the Weser crossing site at Bad Oeynhausen when the German plea for a cease-fire halted them.
It was hilarious seeing some twitter friends I have that usually shit on Tom Clancy's "analysis" of Soviet Geopolitics seeing Preghozin rushing for Moscow, I was like "HE FRICKING CALLED IT, LOL!" and they had no response cuz it was so insane.
>I was like "HE FRICKING CALLED IT, LOL!" and they had no response cuz it was so insane.
Once this war is done I'm going to write a paper drawing all the parallels I can between RSR and the Ukraine war but even to this point it's kind of fricking ridiculous
>It was hilarious seeing some twitter friends I have that usually shit on Tom Clancy's "analysis" of Soviet Geopolitics seeing Preghozin rushing for Moscow, I was like "HE FRICKING CALLED IT, LOL!" and they had no response cuz it was so insane.
Dude, we have to have a /k/ movie night to watch Sum of All Fears with the Clancy commentary. It's hilarious.
Clancy had some dumb scenarios about who the next baddies would be in some of his novels that really came out of ideology (but like a talk radio / Mark Levin sort of thing) and extrapolations on "current events," like, Reagan voters being mad about Japanese auto imports, but that breed of Cold War conservatives had a certain ability to be prophets about something ludicrous or embarrassing that America's enemy of the time would do.
I'm not sure why. But they're like a certain cohort of these guys -- like Anglo-American types with ties to the security establishment -- who are also nerds so they get to call plays and nail it from time to time. I was reading a guy named Paul Goble at the Jamestown Foundation who is one of those types and had the Russians down.
Ralph Peters was a hard core Russiaboo. One of his books was about America sending troops to defend THE SOVIET UNION from a resurgent Imperial Japan.
It's just off the map levels of inanity and the contortions he has to make to make this seem at all possible are wild.
>Ralph Peters was a hard core Russiaboo. One of his books was about America sending troops to defend THE SOVIET UNION from a resurgent Imperial Japan.
Clancy had a post-Soviet book where the same thing happens but it's China instead of Japan. It's one of his worst books but American conservatives with military careers or an interest in the subject had a closeted admiration for Russians even then -- look at the submarine captain in The Hunt for Red October. The character was basically a good man in a bad system. Masculine men who are all stoic and eat meat and like to fight a lot. That's sort of the image. He might have literally tried to get Russia in NATO by creating a hypothetical scenario where a friendly Russia and the U.S. aligned against the Chinese, plant the seed in policymakers' heads.
>It was hilarious seeing some twitter friends I have that usually shit on Tom Clancy's "analysis" of Soviet Geopolitics seeing Preghozin rushing for Moscow, I was like "HE FRICKING CALLED IT, LOL!" and they had no response cuz it was so insane.
Dude, we have to have a /k/ movie night to watch Sum of All Fears with the Clancy commentary. It's hilarious.
Clancy had some dumb scenarios about who the next baddies would be in some of his novels that really came out of ideology (but like a talk radio / Mark Levin sort of thing) and extrapolations on "current events," like, Reagan voters being mad about Japanese auto imports, but that breed of Cold War conservatives had a certain ability to be prophets about something ludicrous or embarrassing that America's enemy of the time would do.
I'm not sure why. But they're like a certain cohort of these guys -- like Anglo-American types with ties to the security establishment -- who are also nerds so they get to call plays and nail it from time to time. I was reading a guy named Paul Goble at the Jamestown Foundation who is one of those types and had the Russians down.
[...] >Ralph Peters was a hard core Russiaboo. One of his books was about America sending troops to defend THE SOVIET UNION from a resurgent Imperial Japan.
Clancy had a post-Soviet book where the same thing happens but it's China instead of Japan. It's one of his worst books but American conservatives with military careers or an interest in the subject had a closeted admiration for Russians even then -- look at the submarine captain in The Hunt for Red October. The character was basically a good man in a bad system. Masculine men who are all stoic and eat meat and like to fight a lot. That's sort of the image. He might have literally tried to get Russia in NATO by creating a hypothetical scenario where a friendly Russia and the U.S. aligned against the Chinese, plant the seed in policymakers' heads.
>some boomer writer in the 1980's writing a Lithuanian character that doesn't follow anon's 2020's-era Russian stereotypes totally exposes the secret russophilia of all conservatives.
Goddamn but you're an even greater fricking moron than I thought you were before.
I'm right and you can read The Bear and the Dragon if you really want to hotbox Clancy's attraction to (post-communist) Russians as real tough bastards, hard and proud who "loved the very smell of Russian soil, the birch forests, the vodka and the borscht" (this is an actual description of one of the characters). There are so many mentions of vodka in that book but it's really a victory lap for U.S. values in Russia and a congratulations to the Russians for (however imperfectly) joining the Winning Team.
History didn't actually work out that way, but even during the Cold War they were still Just West Enough to count as the Vegeta to our Goku, rather than a real villain like, I dunno, ISIS or (especially Maoist) Chinese.
4 months ago
Anonymous
>doubling down on stupid
4 months ago
Anonymous
What weirds me out is that after 9/11 the Jack Ryan Jr. arc books basically forget everything geopolitical before them happened. Like it forgets Russia is in NATO after Bear and the Dragon, that Japan fought a hot war with America, that the JAL airliner hit the House, that Denver got nuked, the Iranian ebola attack, all of Rainbow Six, etc. They act like the "real world" geopolitics happened and not the wacky alt-history Clancy diverged into post-USSR collapse. It's like everything after Clear and Present Danger didn't happen. It's crazy.
I wish he'd stayed in that crazy alt-history. It'd have been much more interesting than the OMG A NEW TERRORIST THREAT EVERY TWO BOOKS THAT WE NEVER SEE AGAIN EXCEPT IN SCHIZO FORM shit we got.
4 months ago
Anonymous
I mean the trouble is a little bit of the ghost written Not By Tom series, which are uniformly shit, and the other side of it, the ones that he did write at that point, how do you try and meld a world together between what should have been an incredibly unlikely situation - a JAL captain 9/11ing a joint sitting of Congress - into a reality where it happened and utterly kicked the shit out of the world you developed. It's a hard ask either way you go.
4 months ago
Anonymous
Yeah, especially since at that point I'm sure he was in it solely for the money. You want to write to the masses who want the literary equivalent of a popcorn flick and get bored after the final battle, since these sort of readers generally drive initial sales. I honestly believe that Cussler and his cohorts generally write better techno-thriller than late Clancy, and most definitely are far better writers than the Tom Clancy's(tm) franchises contracted ghostwriters.
4 months ago
Anonymous
I believe the premise over the breakdown with Japan starts after a badly galvanized Japanese steel gas tank blew up a family during a car accident in the Great Smoky Mountains and then a representative based on Barney Frank (nippes protruding, disgusting) does the tariff.
On the ghost written works, one of them the 90s, Games of State (Tom Clancy's Op-Center, Book 3), has neo-Nazis radicalizing the youth with CD-ROM distributed computer games which the deputy director of the op center realizes when he goes to visit a little boy who's dad is a dead op center guy. The plan is hatched by a French millionaire software developer who wanted to make France the most powerful country by having hate groups around the world fight each other and then destabilize Europe and cause turmoil throughout the United States. He basically predicted /misc/
4 months ago
Anonymous
> 260 KB PNG
I mean the trouble is a little bit of the ghost written Not By Tom series, which are uniformly shit, and the other side of it, the ones that he did write at that point, how do you try and meld a world together between what should have been an incredibly unlikely situation - a JAL captain 9/11ing a joint sitting of Congress - into a reality where it happened and utterly kicked the shit out of the world you developed. It's a hard ask either way you go.
#
I believe the premise over the breakdown with Japan starts after a badly galvanized Japanese steel gas tank blew up a family during a car accident in the Great Smoky Mountains and then a representative based on Barney Frank (nippes protruding, disgusting) does the tariff.
Based Trent voter
4 months ago
Anonymous
> 260 KB PNG
[...] #
I believe the premise over the breakdown with Japan starts after a badly galvanized Japanese steel gas tank blew up a family during a car accident in the Great Smoky Mountains and then a representative based on Barney Frank (nippes protruding, disgusting) does the tariff.
Based Trent voter
I have a feeling Tom had more input to the ghostwriters pre-9/11, there were little touches and plot shaping that seemed to be him telling the ghostwriters who was still in charge. After 9/11 he seemed to be in a state of literary shock, like an old man with dementia allowing their kids (co-authors, ghostwriters, editors, etc) to lead him around an unfamiliar place he couldn't navigate or even comprehend, which post-9/11's increasingly bizarre geopolitical landscape must've seemed to an old Cold War boomer like him. Seeing his entire worldview get vaporized with the twin towers must've wrecked his confidence and storytelling focus pretty badly, he never really recovered as an author.
4 months ago
Anonymous
>Seeing his entire worldview get vaporized with the twin towers must've wrecked his confidence and storytelling focus pretty badly, he never really recovered as an author.
On 9/11 he was there. He was our guide.
?si=ZISBnlD3JKnZX8Vb&t=1756
4 months ago
Anonymous
He seemed like he was trying to find a logical explanation and telling people not to jump to conclusions. It was absolute chaos, he seemed to be trying to tell people to calm down and wait for more information.
4 months ago
Anonymous
You have a really off take on Clancy versus everyone who was alive in his heyday.
Like
https://i.imgur.com/bWD7e5Q.jpg
>Seeing his entire worldview get vaporized with the twin towers must've wrecked his confidence and storytelling focus pretty badly, he never really recovered as an author.
On 9/11 he was there. He was our guide.
?si=ZISBnlD3JKnZX8Vb&t=1756
said, Clancy was actually a rather calm, measured voice on and following 9/11, and his insight into the chaos of the world that followed was hardly stunted or foggy.
Clancy wasn't *just* a Cold War boomer, he was an asininely talented autist that knew how to recognize patterns and make smart inferences.
That latter part was what was responsible for his Cold War boomerness, not the other way around, and it still stayed with him post-9/11.
The worst thing about zoomers is how they unironically, specifically suck at estimating people who were alive before them and the times they lived in.
4 months ago
Anonymous
You have a really off take on Clancy versus everyone who was alive in his heyday.
Like [...] said, Clancy was actually a rather calm, measured voice on and following 9/11, and his insight into the chaos of the world that followed was hardly stunted or foggy.
Clancy wasn't *just* a Cold War boomer, he was an asininely talented autist that knew how to recognize patterns and make smart inferences.
That latter part was what was responsible for his Cold War boomerness, not the other way around, and it still stayed with him post-9/11.
The worst thing about zoomers is how they unironically, specifically suck at estimating people who were alive before them and the times they lived in.
Details never came out but he went through a messy divorce and got all his stuff taken, including stuff like rights to various characters, then smoked and drank himself into an early grave while not giving a shit about further quality. Can't blame him.
4 months ago
Anonymous
The best post-tBatD Clancy story was In With a Bang.
4 months ago
Anonymous
Doesn't pop up on Google. Is it one of the short stories in the ghostwritten compilations?
4 months ago
Anonymous
There was a real hope post USSR that Russia might unfrick itself and stop being the nation state equivalent of a Black person, but alas.
>some boomer writer in the 1980's writing a russian character that doesn't follow anon's 2020's-era russian stereotypes totally exposes the secret russophilia of all conservatives.
Goddamn but you're a fricking moron.
> had a closeted admiration for Russians even then
You're a zoomer, aren't you.
It wasn't a "closeted admiration" (you talk about seeds being planted in policymakers' heads, but it really does seem like you unironically internalize media narratives, completely credulously), it was a respect for (that frequently verged on/came out of genuine fear/concern of) an opponent widely perceived to be a serious opposing force, and with a motivation and will for their cause that could match their own.
Turns out after 1991 it wasn't so.
That's not a "closeted admiration" any more than Yamamoto having a more sane estimation of US warmaking ability than his colleagues and bosses meant he secretly wanted to be a white American from Iowa.
>Yamamoto having a more sane estimation of US warmaking ability than his colleagues and bosses meant he secretly wanted to be a white American from Iowa.
But he did.
So does Xi in fact. It's not widely known but when Xi was a student he studied agriculture in the US and stayed with a family in Iowa. Every time he visits the US he meets that family for dinner. The man fell in love with wholesome midwest values, but can't ever be what he desires the most. Sad really.
In fact I think pretty much everyone would love to be a prosperous midwest farmer if they could. I know I would.
>Clancy had a post-Soviet book where the same thing happens but it's China instead of Japan. It's one of his worst books
That's an understatement. It's the only book I have spared for the sole purpose of dunking it in water and seeing how it handles solid copper .308 when I get around to it
>Dude, we have to have a /k/ movie night to watch Sum of All Fears with the Clancy commentary. It's hilarious.
Ok, I have never, ever watched Sum of All Fears because it was so far removed from the book that I just had zero fricking interest but because of this post I did exactly that and holy fricking shit you forget what a funny motherfricker he was.
Two minutes in kek >“I’m Tom Clancy, I wrote the book that they ignored.”
>Is this supposed to be a bomb or a torpedo? >A bomb >You got the proportions wrong >Actually I meant torpedo >You got the proportions wrong
But then to cap it all of, Tom himself proves this anon
https://i.imgur.com/GjTk5Z8.png
>publisher forcing
Nope, that was all Tom
absolutely, hilariously, irrevocably correct - thirty seconds into a scene at CIA where one of the analysts is pregnant >So is she really pregnant? >No that's a prosthesis >Really? It looks very lifelike
then seconds later >Wow you really got that prosthetic late term pregnant belly really right
The man simply cannot be stopped from wanting to bone preggo chicks, kek
Not this guy but >Raised by boomer dad and his Tom Clancy collection >4 kids and wife is swollen with 5 >Absolutely lose it when she asks to put another baby in her
Damn it Tom
Wait, hold on. If you can implant a pregnancy fetish in people could this be the solution to low fertility? Exclusively publish/promote media with pregnant women in it?
Ralph Peters was a hard core Russiaboo. One of his books was about America sending troops to defend THE SOVIET UNION from a resurgent Imperial Japan.
It's just off the map levels of inanity and the contortions he has to make to make this seem at all possible are wild.
>""realistic""
Peters is more realistic, though. >but t-t-the Soviets stomp!
Yes, because he's writing a best case scenario for them. If you actually read the book you'll realize that he described the problems of Soviet (and now, in a heavily degraded form, Russian) military institutions much more astutely than Clancy and his KGB officers executing generals like it's 1938. Which makes sense, give that studying the Soviet army was literally his job.
Peters is also simply the better writer. He doesn't bog down the reader with technical details that are as often incorrect as accurate (for example, anything to do with the Alfa-class in Red October) because he understands what actually makes a good war story. Plinnikov's death still sticks with me all these years later. Meanwhile I can barely remember the fates of the point of view characters in RSR.
>Yes, because he's writing a best case scenario for them.
So Clancy's shit because he wrote about the very types of issues facing the Soviet war machine that would come to reflect reality as the issues currently hampering the Russian war machine. But Peters' is better because he artificially inflated the capabilities of the Soviets beyond what they would likely actually demonstrate. That's Peters being "more realistic" to you. >If you actually read the book you'll realize that he described the problems of Soviet (and now, in a heavily degraded form, Russian) military institutions much more astutely than Clancy and his KGB officers executing generals like it's 1938.
Oh wait, he simply did it more astutely, because he didn't have KGB being frickweasels regarding ongoing military operations. Because that's totally a made up issue that wasn't made note of by many, many former Soviet military personnel since the end of the Cold War. I mean it's practically as unrealistic as meat assaults and barrier troops. >Peters is also simply the better writer.
This'll be good. >He doesn't bog down the reader with technical details
So he doesn't write techno-thrillers. That's like saying Robert Frost is a better writer than Larry Bond, because Frost keeps his "text shorter, more rhymey, but more abstract." I've read Red Army, the writing is fine for what it is. Being more interested in the technical shit, I found myself filling in blanks with what I personally knew of Soviet hardware where Peters neglected to fill in those details.
RSR had no such issues. Therefore that makes Clancy the better writer...for the genre he practically created. Red Army isn't a technothriller any more than Enemy at the Gates is a documentary. >Meanwhile I can barely remember the fates of the point of view characters in RSR.
Because you were reading a book you weren't interested in. Why is this Clancy's fault?
You want normalgay melodrama that's less technical. Peters delivers well at that.
>he artificially inflated the capabilities
The capabilities of the Soviets in Red Army are inflated in the same way those of the Wehrmacht were in May of 1940. Best case scenarios are not inherently unrealistic. >Because that's totally a made up issue
The KGB trying to muscle in so heavily on military affairs in the 1980s USSR would be tantamount to inviting civil war. It's just another one of Clancy's fever dreams based on half-remembered stereotypes, like the Alfa meltdown in Red October being caused by a zampolit as if they had any actual command authority. >meat assaults and barrier troops
lmfao >So he doesn't write techno-thrillers
Correct. And that's a good thing. Techno-thrillers by their very nature of allowing the author to substitute sperg-pleasing infodumps for actual prose tend to attract the worst kind of writers. The main reason Clancy manages to stand out in the genre is because so many of its other writers are literal garbage. >Being more interested in the technical shit
Here's the kicker: Peters does get technical, just in the places where it actually matters. Wars are won and lost on the operational and strategic levels, not in the differences between an M1A1 and a T-80U. This is true for Ukraine too, btw. Red Army goes to great lengths to explain where the Soviets are attacking, why they have chosen that area to advance, and how they expect to accomplish it. By contrast, most of RSR's strategy outside of the Atlantic comes across as frankly amateurish. >Because you were reading a book you weren't interested in
No, because Red Army is populated by actual people. Every main PoV character in RSR is a generic American goodboy, with the only one coming close to having any depth being the frigate captain, but even he's just "oh no my ship sunk now PTSD." Meanwhile I can actually get invested in Red Army's characters, from Malinsky fulfilling what he feels has been his family's duty for centuries to a private just trying to survive.
>Techno-thrillers by their very nature of allowing the author to substitute sperg-pleasing infodumps for actual prose tend to attract the worst kind of writers.
NAYRT but I both agree and disagree with this
yes, they attract bad writers and forgive bad writing; no, the genre can be better and deserves better
https://i.imgur.com/J8FNNrV.jpg
>Tom Clancy was extremely autistic. He genuinely did not understand how human beings interact with each other. The shit in Greenland with the pregnant lady is proof. >was married twice and had four children
>married at 22 years old >had four children >divorced at 49 at height of career
yes, sounds pretty autistic
also, Sum Of All Fears came out AFTER the divorce? that explains so fricking much >this is what it could've been IF YOU'D ONLY UNDERSTOOD, WANDA!!
Kind of. Clancy correctly predicted the mechanisms by which the soviets were defeated(superior NATO tactics and air power).
IIRC Even his hyper competent Soviet union didn't make more than ~50km from their starting line.
>was it realistic?
of course it was, it's well known fact that russian generals and high rank officers were using NATO nomenclature when talking about russian weapons and doctrine
A friend of mine described it as unrealistic because it gives the soviets way too much credit in the retrospect of the current russian fiasco in Ukraine.
That's one of the details it got right, in Red Storm Rising the Soviets got less than 100km in before bogging down. The biggest worry for NATO was running out of shells, tank rounds, and ATGMs that were needed to stop the soviet tank spam, which was the importance of the whole convoy plotline, iirc towards the end one of the NATO generals mentions they were within a day or two of running out of shells.
Yes, it was a reasonable assessment for the time it was written.
The Soviet Union in the mid 80s is not modern Russia. It was lagging behind the west even then but over the last 40 years it has fallen off a cliff almost every metric.
France was able to hold off Germany over six years in World war One. Didn't go that way in World war 2. Things change.
> anon you make well put, reasonable points but then you say WW1 lasted six years
Yeah I muddled up my words. It still was longered then six weeks lol.
Any way time has not been kind to the Russian Empire since Red Storm Rising was written. Which is saying something since it came out the same year as Chernobyl.
We can only speculate war between the rushkis at their peak would look like but they've lost almost every single geographical economical technological demographical advantage over NATO since then (which wasn't that great to begin with) and it's pretty clear 2 years in special military operation they're not going to get it back anytime soon. The problems that the Red army had have just gonna worse and it strengths have just diminished.
They made a big thing about the Soviets having an over reliance on officers for command and control. Hunter/killer ATGM teams would take out the tanks with additional antennas and the rest of the armor would just flounder around without orders and get picked off one by one.
Russians never had much of a NCO cadre. Rather, NCOs are more like corporals in the West. Junior-grade officers are used to do all of the things that NCOs normally do. The decision-making and initiative that junior officers in the West are expected to perform are instead done by senior officers, and even then, they're tied pretty closely to battle plans drawn up by generals. It can make for a rather efficient process on paper, with little time wasted in decision-making, but it tends to struggle or even fall apart whenever something occurs to make the initial plan non-viable. Not like that kind of thing ever happens in a war, you know.
>Hunter/killer ATGM teams would take out the tanks with additional antennas and the rest of the armor would just flounder around without orders and get picked off one by one.
This is basically what happens to the UIR armored divisions at the end of Executive Orders
Clancy was really more of a Navy expert so the Army and Air Force scenes are a bit more far fetched. He under-predicted the performance of the F-14, but accurately pointed out the elephant in the room, that even if AEGIS was as good as everyone hoped, it would eventually run out of missiles. This will continue to be a concern until reliable DEW are available en-masse.
RsR would have been even more realistic if Clancy had added the Swedish angle. To get to the air bases in Norway (to open up the route from Murmansk) the Soviets, at the time, could easily have taken most of Sweden. The Swedish defence forces were not up to par for anything at that time.
There is a trilogy written about a possible Soviet attack on Sweden in the 80s called Operation Garbo, written by some military officers under pseudonyms. Mix that with RsR and you have a complete scenario of what a Soviet attack on Europe during the cold war would have happened.
When was this? And was it in a Ikea store in Sweden? I hope he brought his own booze since the only food you can get there is cheap meatballs.
Anyways, I did my military service in the 90s, paratrooper. Did my OCS in artillery, lots of exercises and every scenario was the reds taking parts of Stockholm after spetznaz attacks and assaults on ports on the east coast, and then they would move west on Oslo on the highway E18.
The Swedish doctrine at the time, 80s and 90s, was to delay the reds until NATO would intervene.
Arty is fun btw, spent some time as a forward observer.
The Ikea stores in the US have these little food kiosks near the exit with hot dogs, cinnamon buns, and pizza. Their vegan dogs look absolutely horrific.
>The Swedish doctrine at the time, 80s and 90s, was to delay the reds until NATO would intervene.
It was rather to hope Finland would bleed them enough that they couldn't penetrate the Swedish defences.
what's with cold war gone hot books and weird fetishes
i was reading the chieftains which was pretty good and then he just randomly goes into the mind of a commander who is cucking his subordinate and it's this super weird tonal whiplash for about ten pages before he gets back to the killing
>"Greenskins!" >Russian army mobilizing C-list benchwarmers after their elite units all exploded >Taman Guards getting their shit pushed in >Russian coup attempt >Russian army running short on fuel >Generals making "two week" predictions >Russian leaders trying to throw a nuclear tantrum
Clancy was a witch, I tell you.
Western air power rapes the Soviets
ATGMs rape the Soviet armor
Stealth makes the difference but isn’t still takes casualties
Soviets throw massive amounts of armor and people into mobnik grinder
Soviets spaz out and threaten nukes
Americans target the thing that fricked their carrier and effectively neutralize it with no real Soviet response
American subs rape the Soviet coast land with cruise missiles
Soviets get one real strategic victory in Iceland then don’t really do anything else significant
>Team Yankee
Worst book I ever read
You're reading a synopsis not an actual novel
>The major gave Bannon his instructions on when he was to link up with the 1st of the 4th, where, and route of march. Bannon coordinated with the battalion S-4 for rearming and refueling before the Team departed that evening. He talked to the Team Bravo commander and told him where the 1 st Tank Platoon was to go when it was released back to the Team. Then, with no further business in Langen and much to tend to, he returned to the Team. News of their return to I st of the 4th was universally hailed by the Team with the exception of Sergeant Polgar. He said it really didn’t matter to him where his platoon went so long as it stayed with Team Yankee. When Bannon thanked him for his vote of confidence he replied that confidence had nothing to do with it. The chow in Team Yankee had always been good, and good food meant he had fewer complaints to listen to from his men.
This is not a fricking novel. These are notes pretending to be a novel. It's an insult to literature to call this a novel.
Tom Clancy was a cross dimensional remote viewing-type psychic who profited off of his visions. Many parts of his books read like notes because they are, and he couldn’t be assed to make it sound better because he was often writing fresh from his memory.
Tom Clancy was a cross dimensional remote viewing-type psychic who profited off of his visions. Many parts of his books read like notes because they are, and he couldn’t be assed to make it sound better because he was often writing fresh from his memory.
[...]
I think it was kind of dumb that he tried to cram all of these into one shared universe because each one of them would probably lead to a vastly different world after. Like in the Sum of All Fears a Muslim terrorist attack 200 times worse than 9/11 happens and everything is just back to normal 90s America after that.
Tom Clancy was a cross dimensional remote viewing-type psychic who profited off of his visions. Many parts of his books read like notes because they are, and he couldn’t be assed to make it sound better because he was often writing fresh from his memory.
It applies to both. Let's be honest they're not really stories they're just theoretical war games scenarios with some basic attempts at plot and character. There's a reason this is on /k/ and not PrepHole.
There's no character development there's no will building but there is some very detailed descriptions on Russia armour tactics or lack thereof
Well in the case of RsR and team Yankee it literally was a wargame scenario since both have battles based on tabletop wargames, team Yankee has one and the parts where Clancy isn't using only one hand to write out his Icelandic preggo fantasies were written by Larry Bond who invented a naval warfare wargame, and played out a Dance of the Vampires scenario.
Also Bond's own book on the second Korean war is excellent and imo better than RsR
>Well in the case of RsR and team Yankee it literally was a wargame scenario since have battles based on tabletop wargames
Oh I always thought it was intended to be a serious blow by blow thought exercise in what a conventional world war with the soviets would look like... But I see now it's a lot closer to /tg/ 40K style fanfiction.
Tom Clancy writes quite well even if he's still writing military pulp. Frederick Forsyth beats him, but I haven't read anything by the likes of Koontz or Bond et al to match Clancy
Coyle is by far the worst military pulp writer I've ever read. NOBODY else would publish a paragraph like the one I posted above. And that's like half the novel.
Well in the case of RsR and team Yankee it literally was a wargame scenario since both have battles based on tabletop wargames, team Yankee has one and the parts where Clancy isn't using only one hand to write out his Icelandic preggo fantasies were written by Larry Bond who invented a naval warfare wargame, and played out a Dance of the Vampires scenario.
Also Bond's own book on the second Korean war is excellent and imo better than RsR
If you compare Red Storm Rising, Red October and Red Phoenix you can tell that Clancy writes better dialogue than Bond.
Yes
Let me detail it for you. It reads in third person, as if by a detached narrator, tells you what happened instead of showing you the dialogue, with the result that you don't feel immersed inside the character's head, which you're supposed to be doing in the typical close perspective of a novel.
I particularly like this passage:
>Pat was told that the Air Force personnel running the evacuation were better and more helpful than the Army community personnel but were having difficulties dealing with all the incoming families that were being dumped at Rhein-Main. One Air Force officer had told them that the people in the gym probably wouldn’t leave until the morning. This depressed Pat. She, like the other wives and mothers, was ready to go. They had finally geared themselves up for the final leap. Now, they had to spend a night in an open gym with hundreds of other dejected and anxious people. It seemed that every new move only added more stress and pressure. The situation, however deplorable, had to be endured. Pat decided that she could hold out a little longer. She had to. A little group was beginning to depend on her. And it was growing. Jane Ortelli, the wife of Sean’s tank driver, joined them. She was nineteen years old and had never been out of the state of New Jersey until she came over to Germany. Jane stood at the side before boarding the bus, clutching her four-month-old baby as she would a teddy bear, for security and comfort. Pat went over to her and insisted that she join them since they were all going on the same bus. Jane was thankful and relieved.
And it goes on and on and on in the same vein. Top notch writing people. Hemingway would cry.
Tom Clancy was extremely autistic. He genuinely did not understand how human beings interact with each other. The shit in Greenland with the pregnant lady is proof.
Tom Clancy is at his best when hes a kid in the sandbox making his army men fight each other. I dont remember a single characters name or why they were important bc it truly didnt matter to the story.
>Tom Clancy was extremely autistic. He genuinely did not understand how human beings interact with each other. The shit in Greenland with the pregnant lady is proof. >was married twice and had four children
I remember quite a number. Jack Ryan, John Clark, Ding Chavez. He wrote men very well. He had a problem writing women, in that he seemed to be very overly effectionate and moody with them...But perhaps that is how they are best characterized, I'm not sure.
I can't think of a really major female character in the Clancy except Mary Foley, the CIA spook. Cathy was mainly a supporting character.
There was that female Hispanic turncoat in Clear & Present Danger.
I'm not sure why. May have had difficulty writing them, or it may just be he was writing military/spy thrillers in the 80's and 90's, when there was little female representation in those fields, either in fiction or real life.
Here's a pic of Mary Pat...and she's preggo.
LOL!!!!
>Here's a pic of Mary Pat...and she's preggo.
Check this lmao
>Dude, we have to have a /k/ movie night to watch Sum of All Fears with the Clancy commentary. It's hilarious.
Ok, I have never, ever watched Sum of All Fears because it was so far removed from the book that I just had zero fricking interest but because of this post I did exactly that and holy fricking shit you forget what a funny motherfricker he was.
Two minutes in kek >“I’m Tom Clancy, I wrote the book that they ignored.”
>Is this supposed to be a bomb or a torpedo? >A bomb >You got the proportions wrong >Actually I meant torpedo >You got the proportions wrong
But then to cap it all of, Tom himself proves this anon [...] absolutely, hilariously, irrevocably correct - thirty seconds into a scene at CIA where one of the analysts is pregnant >So is she really pregnant? >No that's a prosthesis >Really? It looks very lifelike
then seconds later >Wow you really got that prosthetic late term pregnant belly really right
The man simply cannot be stopped from wanting to bone preggo chicks, kek
I can't think of a really major female character in the Clancy except Mary Foley, the CIA spook. Cathy was mainly a supporting character.
There was that female Hispanic turncoat in Clear & Present Danger.
I'm not sure why. May have had difficulty writing them, or it may just be he was writing military/spy thrillers in the 80's and 90's, when there was little female representation in those fields, either in fiction or real life.
Here's a pic of Mary Pat...and she's preggo.
LOL!!!!
>except Mary Foley, the CIA spook. Cathy was mainly a supporting character.
and not only does he write them like a man would write them, they're very mannish in character
Nah, the Dems want a robust welfare state. Repubs want blacks to accept being whipped to death as a retirement plan.
>the Dems want a robust welfare state
but which involves >the rich people staying rich (and becoming richer) while the poor are made even poorer
welfare states keep you poor anon
>Yes, just look at Scandinavia
mini-nations with disproportionate wealth who are literally the 5%ers of Europe
look instead France, UK, Italy, Spain - think the US should trade places with them?
we don't know for sure
on the one hand, the morons did plan to take fricking COPENHAGEN
on the other, it's said now that the Soviets simply planned to turn this into Fortress Barents and rain ICBMs on NATO from there
the problem of trying to come up with a Cold-War-Gone-Hot-But-Not-With-Nukes scenario is that we don't know what they would have done in that position, the Soviets planned on using tac nukes from day one in the belief that NATO would not escalate to a strategic exchange
>I haven't read it yet, what does taking iceland mean to the soviets?
Cuts off the Icelandic airbases as air cover for the convoys, gives Soviet Naval Aviation a safe and clear corridor down to the Atlantic to launch on those convoys, cuts the SOSUS nexus in the middle of the GIUK gap, limits the endurance of land based air cover over the convoys, puts pressure on fighter bases in Scotland and Norway
No idea, but I'd assume turning the flank of the GIUK gap to allow their subs/planes through undetected.
>turning the flank
destroying the centre position and turning its airfields against NATO, actually
>Dude, we have to have a /k/ movie night to watch Sum of All Fears with the Clancy commentary. It's hilarious.
Ok, I have never, ever watched Sum of All Fears because it was so far removed from the book that I just had zero fricking interest but because of this post I did exactly that and holy fricking shit you forget what a funny motherfricker he was.
Two minutes in kek >“I’m Tom Clancy, I wrote the book that they ignored.”
>Is this supposed to be a bomb or a torpedo? >A bomb >You got the proportions wrong >Actually I meant torpedo >You got the proportions wrong
But then to cap it all of, Tom himself proves this anon [...] absolutely, hilariously, irrevocably correct - thirty seconds into a scene at CIA where one of the analysts is pregnant >So is she really pregnant? >No that's a prosthesis >Really? It looks very lifelike
then seconds later >Wow you really got that prosthetic late term pregnant belly really right
The man simply cannot be stopped from wanting to bone preggo chicks, kek
based Tom
https://i.imgur.com/8ig45EZ.jpg
>Well in the case of RsR and team Yankee it literally was a wargame scenario since have battles based on tabletop wargames
Oh I always thought it was intended to be a serious blow by blow thought exercise in what a conventional world war with the soviets would look like... But I see now it's a lot closer to /tg/ 40K style fanfiction.
when anon said "based on tabletop wargames", he meant "the authors used the equivalent of Wikipedia stats of the time to inform their writing, and they took the stats from a tabletop game" >/tg/ 40K style
even that 40K stole from Battletech
>when anon said "based on tabletop wargames", he meant "the authors used the equivalent of Wikipedia stats of the time to inform their writing, and they took the stats from a tabletop game"
No, the Dance of the Vampires chapter in RSR is literally a /tg/ writeup of a game of Harpoon that Tom played and the rest of the book is written around it.
bit underselling it
Clancy wanted to write a Cold War gone hot novel, found that Harpoon had ripped off all the Jane's stats (basically military wikipedia of the time) and got into Harpoon because of that
That is such a good address that anons should watch.
4 months ago
Anonymous
That was fun to listen to. Clancy was a good speaker. I hadn't thought of it before but he really took off like a lightning bolt with these military and intelligence people. Part of the story I think is they were using him to improve their image after Vietnam and the scandals in the 70s. But he was a genuinely popular figure who breathed life into what they were doing and also helped popularize it so his contribution has been considerable -- and he was actually an "outsider" to it.
In that video, he pokes a little fun at the audience and the service branches, and he has some self-deprecating humor. He makes it very clear he's on "their team" as well. But the military / natsec community had probably been such sticks in the mud that he was exactly what they needed and what they wanted.
I almost want to see him as an outcome of the 1960s culture eventually working its way into and metabolizing in the military community and helping refresh it. I don't know if he would've seen in that way, but some of the images kind of make him look like Hunter S. Thompson. One interesting thing too is that he didn't see the U.S. as flawless (Clear and Present Danger is critical of the war on drugs and came out around the same time as Iran-Contra and had similar themes), but that ultimately America is a force for good and hope in the world. I think that combination is a more effective conservative ethic than the nihilism on the right nowadays.
Also this movie was pretty good:
4 months ago
Anonymous
>I think that combination is a more effective conservative ethic than the nihilism on the right nowadays.
Fricking this. I grew up in the 90s and my conservative values are basically a product of Tom Clancy and WE John's Biggles
4 months ago
Anonymous
>nihilism on the right
it's not nihilism; it's desperate contrarianism, because the GOP is hollow and suffers not from lack of direction, but lack of any substance whatsoever
4 months ago
Anonymous
>the GOP is hollow and suffers not from lack of direction, but lack of any substance whatsoever
Well of course, the only real value conservatives have is preserving the status quo: the rich people staying rich (and becoming richer) while the poor are made even poorer until we're back to chattel slavery (but with extra steps). Everything else is just theatrics to draw the dumb masses to vote for them.
4 months ago
Anonymous
>the only real value conservatives have is preserving the status quo: the rich people staying rich (and becoming richer) while the poor are made even poorer
That's literally the democrats you stupid frick.
4 months ago
Anonymous
Nah, the Dems want a robust welfare state. Repubs want blacks to accept being whipped to death as a retirement plan.
we don't know for sure
on the one hand, the morons did plan to take fricking COPENHAGEN
on the other, it's said now that the Soviets simply planned to turn this into Fortress Barents and rain ICBMs on NATO from there
the problem of trying to come up with a Cold-War-Gone-Hot-But-Not-With-Nukes scenario is that we don't know what they would have done in that position, the Soviets planned on using tac nukes from day one in the belief that NATO would not escalate to a strategic exchange
Are there any books that explore what the world would look like after WW3 ends in a tenuous peace? I've been always been kind of fascinated by the concept, I think the scenario that seems the most interesting is the absolutely insane bullshit that happens in Modern Warfare 3. What could the world possibly look like after Russians gas Paris and invade Washington DC and then LOSE?
He actually thought the Russians believed in their communist paradise after the first few years (and purges) and were doing the best they can, instead of pretending and getting drunk and collecting free money
He basically was a military fiction writer who knew nuts about real life
>He basically was a military fiction writer who knew nuts about real life
Tom Clancy wrote Red Storm Rising deep in the Cold War when the exposure to Soviet citizens by your average American was very, very low, so he worked with what he had.
>He actually believed their specs
Soviet tanks and aircraft get an absolutely appalling ratio in the combat in RSR - when I read it as a child I thought he was taking the MURRICA thing a bit too far. Two decades later, I owe him an apology.
Not really, the Tu-22s absolutely wrecked 2 carrier fleets and all their equipment worked on the dot and commanders were smart and motivated, instead of being blind, lacking completely C4ISR, and led by fricking idiot hominids who were stealing all the food and equipment and sent men on meat wave attacks
That was a plot device crucial to the story and he and Larry Bond and a number of serving naval officers played an autistic amount of Harpoon scenarios to nut out a way that it could conceivably be done. The same carriers participate in another air battle with the same Backfires with a smarter commander and Soviet Naval Aviation gets wrecked.
bullshit.
Bond said this. >He noticed that the speed of an AS-5 Kelt [an old Soviet air-to-surface missile carried by bombers] very closely matched the cruise speed of a Backfire bomber. Tom was the one who asked, what if the Russian fired these missiles as drones — the Russians had converted many of them into target drones — so on radar they look like a Backfire formation coming at a carrier? I was the one who told him how you could tell the two apart. But the Russians could hang a radar reflector on them so the itty-bitty missile would look like a big bomber. So we worked it out. It wasn’t part of Soviet doctrine, so the U.S. wasn’t ready for it. It’s a viable tactic, even if you can only use it once.
so one carrier group always gets wrecked until tactics get adapted.
>the Tu-22s absolutely wrecked 2 carrier fleets
They could have, IRL
it wasn't a clear win
in fact if anything, Clancy overestimated the effectiveness of Aegis and Phalanx, but that's compensated by him being shit at tactics and overestimating the effectiveness of Russian antiship missiles
>the GOP is hollow and suffers not from lack of direction, but lack of any substance whatsoever
Well of course, the only real value conservatives have is preserving the status quo: the rich people staying rich (and becoming richer) while the poor are made even poorer until we're back to chattel slavery (but with extra steps). Everything else is just theatrics to draw the dumb masses to vote for them.
really?
what makes you think so?
tell us what you think a 1985 scenario would play out like, in detail
what's the orbat on both sides, what weapons will be used, how would they interact, what are the casualties?
4 months ago
Anonymous
missing the point completely.
in cmano, russia also conquers ukraine in three days without any problem.
in 1985 your supersonic booze carrier would be useless because everyone is either too drunk or corrupt and sold the booze.
4 months ago
Anonymous
hubris
Russia today is not what it used to be, and it hasn't universally fricked up across the board
otherwise why are they still able to hold off the AFU?
4 months ago
Anonymous
it's not hubris when specs in cmano don't match reality and execution leaves a lot to be desired.
kitchen can't even hit non-moving targets in ukraine. it's not going to hit a moving carrier.
4 months ago
Anonymous
>kitchen can't even hit non-moving targets in ukraine. it's not going to hit a moving carrier.
that's very true, and I said the same in my own breakdown of the
the problem is you, air defence officer, will not be able to tell which one of that fifty missile swarm is going to hit your carrier and which one will miss half a mile away so you're still forced to attempt to intercept them all so your air defence is saturated all the same
what this DOES mean is that leakers may or may not hit you, there is far less certainty than with NATO guided weapons, but throw enough shit and stick
>He actually thought the Russians believed in their communist paradise after the first few years (and purges)
One of the paradoxes is that some of the old dissidents' initial problem with communism was that they believed in it too much, and so their romantic/fanatical approach to communism meeting the cynicism of the regime eventually pushed them towards the democratic movement and often equally romantic/fanatic anti-communism and Russophobia. Then the ones who didn't really believe in it but comprised the security and military layer of the regime turned into unhinged anti-Western nationalists ranting about launching pinpoint nuclear strikes like Red Alert 2 villains or the rogue generals in Operation Flashpoint while trying to coup the government after Gorby came up with the novel idea of... the Soviet Union... but which didn't kill any of its own citizens... and had Pizza Hut... which lasted about all of five years.
Here's a fun fact for anyone who ever thought it would have been neat to have a conversation with Clancy about Red Storm Rising but never had the opportunity. Larry Bond is a good dude and will reply to an email, and is quite amenable to questions and comments about his own work, and working with Tom.
He would be an unironic Mitt Romney kind of guy, and unfortunately, I think he probably would've sided with the idea that Trump started an "insurrection", because he was naive about the aspirations and goals of the CIA and unaware or unwilling to accept the ideas behind the concept of the deep state.
He was the archetypical Reaganite, but wasn't a fan of Bush going into Iraq. I can see him reluctantly coming around to supporting Trump in 2016 but likely abandoning him after 2020.
The parts with artillery raining hell on armor columns, manpads raping air power, and the russians getting fricked hard from aforementioned weapons were true.
Dudes really will cuck to pregnant femoids with zero chance of getting any.
iirc it was the publisher forcing them to add some sort of romantic subplot involving females.
this is why we can't have nice things
>publisher forcing
Nope, that was all Tom
Based pregancy-fetishist Tom
It’s the ultimate fetish. Everyone congratulates you for busting inside.
Patrician-tier post
>tfw she goes from "ok but PROMISE me you'll pull out," to "oh god don't stop don't pull out"
>be me joking to my wife about uwu girls
>she jokingly does an uwu girl voice during sex
>"uwu breed me sempai"
>I nut
>this was 7 months ago
>our daughter is due in about 8 weeks
Disgusting normalgay.
This made me laugh way harder than it should have.
Congratulations.
oh damn, i've seen this publisher story being pushed so often i just took it for real lol.
but yeah, based tom. i wish he lived long enough to witness the ukrainian war...
If he did he would have died from all of his blood going to his dick
>missing out on the sub being in labor and pushing out a torpedo
Clancy had one job.
I've never seen this before but holy shit people have called me crazy for pointing this out. At first when I read PG I thought Clancy was just making some sort of point, using the pregnancy stuff as a foil to the violent terrorists killing people. By the end of the RSR it was obviously just another case of "the authors poorly disguised fetish."
>"the authors poorly disguised fetish."
Disguised? Why do you think he was trying to disguise it?
>Jack getting turned on by his pregnant wife baby-oiling her belly
He wasn't trying to disguise it.
>straight married sex is a deeply buried fetish goys!
Is this what no pussy does?
God it would be pretty fricking hilarious if I started doing that in my writing
>hero must beat a woman to save the day
Would get even funnier each time I did it
I mean you could disguise a hero having to fight female enemies in a story to a greater or lesser extent, that would be plausible.
It would be harder to disguise say-
>Hero must titfrick a woman to save the day
Tbh I think once he starts taking off their clothes and spanking them people would start to question it. Maybe I could disguise it as torture/interrogation on a female terrorist to get vital information
You could make it just a little blatant and make it an inside joke for avid readers.
He foresaw the fertility rate crisis.
Uhhhh…based department?
Was Chavez his self-insert or something.
Wasn't it Jack Ryan more likely?
My favorite author could not be more based
Ole’ Tom would have approved, wouldn’t he?
Clancy wasn't into Alt-History though
The Jack Ryan books are so absurd that their practically alt history .
They were of another time, they made sense within that time.
I think it was kind of dumb that he tried to cram all of these into one shared universe because each one of them would probably lead to a vastly different world after. Like in the Sum of All Fears a Muslim terrorist attack 200 times worse than 9/11 happens and everything is just back to normal 90s America after that.
How would one even explain this image to him? Or would he be able to figure out its meaning by himself?
>Hunt
there are 2 references; Jack talks about how he got his son (fricking Cathy in a hotel), and the Navy analyst who discovered the tunnel drive talks about having 5 kids and another on the way
>and the Navy analyst who discovered the tunnel drive talks about having 5 kids and another on the way
Holy shit, everyone has always thought that Jack Ryan is Tom's self-insert, and that John Clark is Tom's "dark side," but what we never fricking realized is that he really identifies with Skip Tyler who basically keeps his wife pregnant any time she's not already carrying or birthing.
He was too based for this world
>Skip Tyler
you remember this one-shot side character's name; I like you anon
nah, I think Clancy is just unable to write romance and family life. so when he has to round out some domestic shit about the family he puts in some stuff about having children and buying them stuff and then moves on to the Serious Business of ze Russians and ze caterpillar drives
surprisingly, Mary Pat's domestic scene in Red Rabbit shows he does have an idea of family stuff, although again he writes Mary Pat like a man writing a woman, but that can't be helped
>Mary Pat's domestic scene in Red Rabbit shows he does have an idea of family stuff
Man I have not read Red Rabbit in a very long time. Might have to correct that, it was probably the last of his really solid works.
>nah, I think Clancy is just unable to write romance and family life. so when he has to round out some domestic shit about the family he puts in some stuff about having children and buying them stuff and then moves on to the Serious Business of ze Russians and ze caterpillar drives
And yeah you're right, it was probably his first wife nagging him to put something in it to make her want to read it
Executive Orders isn't too bad
Cardinal Of The Kremlin is excellent spy stuff, I personally find it far more engaging than John le Carre's Smiley trilogy
Hunt For Red October is my personal favourite
Frankly I don't see how any woman at all would want to read his stuff, even army brats or serving women
I like Executive Orders, it still turns pages after frick knows how many readings. Cardinal is fricking excellent, I kind of wish he'd done another couple of espionage-centric books before going onto Clear and Present Danger. Hunt for Red October is still a classic but my personal #1 has always been Red Storm Rising, and the bizarre list of parallels to the present day it can be drawn to has only lifted it in my esteem.
>it still turns pages after frick knows how many readings
yes, plotwise it's excellent and very relevant
>unprecedented pandemic
>GWOT
>Middle East chimpout
>geopolitical posturing just shy of actual war
>Clear and Present Danger
the parts without the very very forced relationship drama are okay
and the nuke should never have gone off
>Red Storm Rising
it's really only the buildup and the godawful Iceland rape arc that is bad
everything else from the Dance Of The Vampires onwards is good
if you haven't already you should read Frederick Forsyth's Fist Of God, it's a somewhat overlooked book that IMHO is the king of techno-thrillers
also, either Freddie had insider info or the Iranians actually read it and decided to implement it
I've got a much battered copy of Fist of God that I've had for years, I think it's Fred's best work and I think it's criminally underrated - cool to see another anon has enjoyed it.
>Clear and Present Danger
That's Ding slotting druggies in Colombia and Clark guiding LGBs into their houses. The nuke was Sum of All Fears.
>Fred's best work
it's certainly a contender and shines a lampshade on all Clancy's worst foibles
the question of "best" comes down to whether you prefer the Clancy-esque grand techno-thriller plot, or the detective cat-and-mouse game of Day Of The Jackal, or the revolution-101 of Dogs Of War
>The nuke was Sum of All Fears
right my bad
I don't think much of Clear And Present Danger, I just feel Sum could have been better executed
>he's like a more realistic and serious clancy
he absolutely is
if you want a book that is what every Clancy novel could've and should've been, read The Fist Of God. it weaves a story into Desert Storm that feels so incredibly real, it could easily have really happened. and it has all the classic Clancyisms, multiple intricate plots building up simultaneously, spycraft, Cold War battles, etc
Day Of The Jackal is a detective chase story rather than a techno-thriller, and it's one of the best of the detective genre, very 60s and almost noirlike. Dogs Of War is a meticulously-detailed step-by-step /k/ fantasy of "how my mates and I can overthrow an African mini-country".
IMHO my view of Frederick Forsyth's writing compared to Tom Clancy is that he's just better, he writes more compactly and emotionally, but with no less satisfying a plotline than any Clancy.
>it could easily have really happened. and it has all the classic Clancyisms, multiple intricate plots building up simultaneously, spycraft, Cold War battles, etc
ok, i'm sold
Day of The Jackal also got an excellent movie adaptation.
Dogs of War.... somewhat less so
I've gone through all of clancy's ryanverse stuff. How does forsyth compare to him? Want to get into his work sometime, heard he's like a more realistic and serious clancy
I remember reading Patriot Games as a teen and thinking "damn, this guy really likes them pregnant ladies, huh", but somehow it didn't register for his other novels. Bet he considered it his magnum opus in that regard.
Wasn’t he catholic? Maybe he only got any if it was the safe time of the month or she was already preggers?
maybe he's a feeder
The man is relentless
Red October chads keep winning.
His last line in the book mentions how he's going to breed the b***h the second she pops out the one that's in there
I will now read your book.
>this is defeating your pidoras
How embarrassing.
Anon went and posted this thinking /k/ as a whole doesn’t have a pregnancy fetish just like Tom
The bit about the movie about the teutonic knights attacking across the frozen lake was true.
It's a good movie
I like Prokofiev's music
>was it realistic?
Understand that when people meme on Tom Clancy as having overhyped the Soviets these days, Ralph Peters was fellated as having produced a more sober, ""realistic"" portrayal of Soviet military prowess and efficiency with Red Army.
Why?
Because - albeit set in the broader catastrophe that was a 1980s NATO-Soviet War in Europe and the North Atlantic - it featured many of the elements that have actually fricked the Russian Army in a major high intensity mechanized war in its backyard hampering the Soviets...in a major mechanized war in their backyard.
This is what people say was Clancy "overhyping the Soviets." Not the King Autist being right. Again.
>Because - albeit set in the broader catastrophe that was a 1980s NATO-Soviet War in Europe and the North Atlantic - it featured many of the elements that have actually fricked the Russian Army in a major high intensity mechanized war in its backyard hampering the Soviets...in a major mechanized war in their backyard.
This is describing Red Storm Rising, by the way. I'm moronic so that wasn't clear in my original post.
RsR is extremely entertaining to read but IMO Chieftains is the superior WW3 book
I'd also reccomend Team Yankee
>I'd also reccomend Team Yankee
Based Team Yankee enjoyer.
>there were several scenes in the book that could have been copied straight out of the initial Ukraine invasion.
I seem to remember that they had some trouble getting across some rivers...
>I seem to remember that they had some trouble getting across some rivers
Yes. Also problems with artillery and fuel depots getting smookered.
>Chieftains
Brilliant up until the abrupt ending. It needed a proper epilogue.
This is a common thing across many WWIII novels (and most military thriller novels) in general: The writers get totally autistic about the buildup and tension across like 2/3 of the book, and then fall apart towards the ending. Like the last 5-10 pages are what happens in the aftermath of the final battles, with little to no actual closure, no tying up loose ends, or whatever. Then there's no sequel telling you what happened because the novel either sold too poorly or the writer got distracted with something else.
Giant unimaginative wienerblock.
Fricking bleak as it was, I found the ending of Chieftains to be pretty damn fitting into the whole theme of war never going the way you planned that's present throughout. And it very much evades most of the things you critizised by just abruptly killing the main protag because the Soviets got mad about their push being stopped outright and dropped a tactical nuke.
Nah man, the ending is great IMO.
Even though it is similar to what
points out, being an issue with ww3 literature Chieftains ends with implied nuclear annihilation in a great way as opposed to just the two sides going "truce?" And everything going back to status quo ante bellum like RSR for example(which is a general Clancy problem)
What I want is a modern military thriller novel that puts more than a few tbhltory pages at the end into tying up loose ends/finishing out the plot. The last few "Clancy" ghostwrites just kinda fricking ENDED with semi-cliffhangers that were just complete WTF. I can see why the authors of those particular ones got their contracts pulled, those were just awful.
team yankee is so good
>ywn be a dragon gunner hiding in the tall grass
>it featured many of the elements that have actually fricked the Russian Army
IIRC in the book the Soviet army only got about 100 miles into Germany before getting bogged down, there were several scenes in the book that could have been copied straight out of the initial Ukraine invasion. The main unrealistic plot element that I recall is the soviet antiship missiles actually hitting something as small as a ship, but I don't think anybody actually expected that soviet missiles would manage to be less accurate than WW2 german stuff.
>The main unrealistic plot element that I recall is the soviet antiship missiles actually hitting something as small as a ship
IIRC out of 100+ missiles only a couple landed hits on the carrier, and two more hit a Marine landing ship and blew the magazine
Saratoga took one and survived, Nimitz took two and frag from one the CIWS got, Foch took a couple and sank, Saipan took two and exploded, I think one of the AEGIS cruisers took one in the forward superstructure
>Foch took a couple and sank
I completely forgot the French were in that book lmao
the Crusaders avenged their carrier
Clancy didn't over hype them, he didn't want to paint them as incompetent mouth breathing morons in an "unrealistic" manner that made it into a one sided beat down scenario. Man's gotta sell his books he based off of his tabletop wargaming experiences.
>Ralph Peters was fellated as having produced a more sober, ""realistic"" portrayal of Soviet military prowess and efficiency with Red Army.
It's funny that he was often brought up as the realistic alternative to RSR when his plot line pretty much ended with 'And then the Soviet Union raised its eyebrow and the Wect understood everything'.
The books was interesting because it kinda fellated the Red army but at the same time acknowledges that if the Americans actually entered the war the Soviets would have been curb stomped, the only reason they didn't being that the west German government pussied out and sued for peace and the burgers literally had to turn away from the border at the last second.
I have a quote somewhere.
>Chibisov realized, as did only a few of the privileged, how close the battlefield outcome had been. The American counterattack, really the centerpiece of a counteroffensive, had nearly broken them. Perhaps the follow-on forces would have contained them, but the Americans and the surprisingly resilient forces of the Northern Army Group had hit hard. Not even Dudorov had correctly estimated how much fight the battered NATO corps had left in them. The counterblow had stormed to within a dozen kilometers of the Weser crossing site at Bad Oeynhausen when the German plea for a cease-fire halted them.
It was hilarious seeing some twitter friends I have that usually shit on Tom Clancy's "analysis" of Soviet Geopolitics seeing Preghozin rushing for Moscow, I was like "HE FRICKING CALLED IT, LOL!" and they had no response cuz it was so insane.
>I was like "HE FRICKING CALLED IT, LOL!" and they had no response cuz it was so insane.
Once this war is done I'm going to write a paper drawing all the parallels I can between RSR and the Ukraine war but even to this point it's kind of fricking ridiculous
Please do. It's a great idea.
>It was hilarious seeing some twitter friends I have that usually shit on Tom Clancy's "analysis" of Soviet Geopolitics seeing Preghozin rushing for Moscow, I was like "HE FRICKING CALLED IT, LOL!" and they had no response cuz it was so insane.
Dude, we have to have a /k/ movie night to watch Sum of All Fears with the Clancy commentary. It's hilarious.
Clancy had some dumb scenarios about who the next baddies would be in some of his novels that really came out of ideology (but like a talk radio / Mark Levin sort of thing) and extrapolations on "current events," like, Reagan voters being mad about Japanese auto imports, but that breed of Cold War conservatives had a certain ability to be prophets about something ludicrous or embarrassing that America's enemy of the time would do.
I'm not sure why. But they're like a certain cohort of these guys -- like Anglo-American types with ties to the security establishment -- who are also nerds so they get to call plays and nail it from time to time. I was reading a guy named Paul Goble at the Jamestown Foundation who is one of those types and had the Russians down.
>Ralph Peters was a hard core Russiaboo. One of his books was about America sending troops to defend THE SOVIET UNION from a resurgent Imperial Japan.
Clancy had a post-Soviet book where the same thing happens but it's China instead of Japan. It's one of his worst books but American conservatives with military careers or an interest in the subject had a closeted admiration for Russians even then -- look at the submarine captain in The Hunt for Red October. The character was basically a good man in a bad system. Masculine men who are all stoic and eat meat and like to fight a lot. That's sort of the image. He might have literally tried to get Russia in NATO by creating a hypothetical scenario where a friendly Russia and the U.S. aligned against the Chinese, plant the seed in policymakers' heads.
>look at the submarine captain in The Hunt for Red October. The character was basically a good man in a bad system.
He was also explicitly Lithuanian.
>Lithuanian
Kek I forgot about that detail
>some boomer writer in the 1980's writing a Lithuanian character that doesn't follow anon's 2020's-era Russian stereotypes totally exposes the secret russophilia of all conservatives.
Goddamn but you're an even greater fricking moron than I thought you were before.
I'm right and you can read The Bear and the Dragon if you really want to hotbox Clancy's attraction to (post-communist) Russians as real tough bastards, hard and proud who "loved the very smell of Russian soil, the birch forests, the vodka and the borscht" (this is an actual description of one of the characters). There are so many mentions of vodka in that book but it's really a victory lap for U.S. values in Russia and a congratulations to the Russians for (however imperfectly) joining the Winning Team.
History didn't actually work out that way, but even during the Cold War they were still Just West Enough to count as the Vegeta to our Goku, rather than a real villain like, I dunno, ISIS or (especially Maoist) Chinese.
>doubling down on stupid
What weirds me out is that after 9/11 the Jack Ryan Jr. arc books basically forget everything geopolitical before them happened. Like it forgets Russia is in NATO after Bear and the Dragon, that Japan fought a hot war with America, that the JAL airliner hit the House, that Denver got nuked, the Iranian ebola attack, all of Rainbow Six, etc. They act like the "real world" geopolitics happened and not the wacky alt-history Clancy diverged into post-USSR collapse. It's like everything after Clear and Present Danger didn't happen. It's crazy.
I wish he'd stayed in that crazy alt-history. It'd have been much more interesting than the OMG A NEW TERRORIST THREAT EVERY TWO BOOKS THAT WE NEVER SEE AGAIN EXCEPT IN SCHIZO FORM shit we got.
I mean the trouble is a little bit of the ghost written Not By Tom series, which are uniformly shit, and the other side of it, the ones that he did write at that point, how do you try and meld a world together between what should have been an incredibly unlikely situation - a JAL captain 9/11ing a joint sitting of Congress - into a reality where it happened and utterly kicked the shit out of the world you developed. It's a hard ask either way you go.
Yeah, especially since at that point I'm sure he was in it solely for the money. You want to write to the masses who want the literary equivalent of a popcorn flick and get bored after the final battle, since these sort of readers generally drive initial sales. I honestly believe that Cussler and his cohorts generally write better techno-thriller than late Clancy, and most definitely are far better writers than the Tom Clancy's(tm) franchises contracted ghostwriters.
I believe the premise over the breakdown with Japan starts after a badly galvanized Japanese steel gas tank blew up a family during a car accident in the Great Smoky Mountains and then a representative based on Barney Frank (nippes protruding, disgusting) does the tariff.
On the ghost written works, one of them the 90s, Games of State (Tom Clancy's Op-Center, Book 3), has neo-Nazis radicalizing the youth with CD-ROM distributed computer games which the deputy director of the op center realizes when he goes to visit a little boy who's dad is a dead op center guy. The plan is hatched by a French millionaire software developer who wanted to make France the most powerful country by having hate groups around the world fight each other and then destabilize Europe and cause turmoil throughout the United States. He basically predicted /misc/
> 260 KB PNG
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I believe the premise over the breakdown with Japan starts after a badly galvanized Japanese steel gas tank blew up a family during a car accident in the Great Smoky Mountains and then a representative based on Barney Frank (nippes protruding, disgusting) does the tariff.
Based Trent voter
I have a feeling Tom had more input to the ghostwriters pre-9/11, there were little touches and plot shaping that seemed to be him telling the ghostwriters who was still in charge. After 9/11 he seemed to be in a state of literary shock, like an old man with dementia allowing their kids (co-authors, ghostwriters, editors, etc) to lead him around an unfamiliar place he couldn't navigate or even comprehend, which post-9/11's increasingly bizarre geopolitical landscape must've seemed to an old Cold War boomer like him. Seeing his entire worldview get vaporized with the twin towers must've wrecked his confidence and storytelling focus pretty badly, he never really recovered as an author.
>Seeing his entire worldview get vaporized with the twin towers must've wrecked his confidence and storytelling focus pretty badly, he never really recovered as an author.
On 9/11 he was there. He was our guide.
?si=ZISBnlD3JKnZX8Vb&t=1756
He seemed like he was trying to find a logical explanation and telling people not to jump to conclusions. It was absolute chaos, he seemed to be trying to tell people to calm down and wait for more information.
You have a really off take on Clancy versus everyone who was alive in his heyday.
Like
said, Clancy was actually a rather calm, measured voice on and following 9/11, and his insight into the chaos of the world that followed was hardly stunted or foggy.
Clancy wasn't *just* a Cold War boomer, he was an asininely talented autist that knew how to recognize patterns and make smart inferences.
That latter part was what was responsible for his Cold War boomerness, not the other way around, and it still stayed with him post-9/11.
The worst thing about zoomers is how they unironically, specifically suck at estimating people who were alive before them and the times they lived in.
Details never came out but he went through a messy divorce and got all his stuff taken, including stuff like rights to various characters, then smoked and drank himself into an early grave while not giving a shit about further quality. Can't blame him.
The best post-tBatD Clancy story was In With a Bang.
Doesn't pop up on Google. Is it one of the short stories in the ghostwritten compilations?
There was a real hope post USSR that Russia might unfrick itself and stop being the nation state equivalent of a Black person, but alas.
Maybe after the next revolution
>some boomer writer in the 1980's writing a russian character that doesn't follow anon's 2020's-era russian stereotypes totally exposes the secret russophilia of all conservatives.
Goddamn but you're a fricking moron.
You got very defensive all of a sudden.
> had a closeted admiration for Russians even then
You're a zoomer, aren't you.
It wasn't a "closeted admiration" (you talk about seeds being planted in policymakers' heads, but it really does seem like you unironically internalize media narratives, completely credulously), it was a respect for (that frequently verged on/came out of genuine fear/concern of) an opponent widely perceived to be a serious opposing force, and with a motivation and will for their cause that could match their own.
Turns out after 1991 it wasn't so.
That's not a "closeted admiration" any more than Yamamoto having a more sane estimation of US warmaking ability than his colleagues and bosses meant he secretly wanted to be a white American from Iowa.
>Yamamoto having a more sane estimation of US warmaking ability than his colleagues and bosses meant he secretly wanted to be a white American from Iowa.
But he did.
So does Xi in fact. It's not widely known but when Xi was a student he studied agriculture in the US and stayed with a family in Iowa. Every time he visits the US he meets that family for dinner. The man fell in love with wholesome midwest values, but can't ever be what he desires the most. Sad really.
In fact I think pretty much everyone would love to be a prosperous midwest farmer if they could. I know I would.
He kinda wrote himself into a corner when he had the US and Russia both agree to destroy all of their nuclear missiles, mostly offscreen.
>Clancy had a post-Soviet book where the same thing happens but it's China instead of Japan. It's one of his worst books
That's an understatement. It's the only book I have spared for the sole purpose of dunking it in water and seeing how it handles solid copper .308 when I get around to it
>Dude, we have to have a /k/ movie night to watch Sum of All Fears with the Clancy commentary. It's hilarious.
Ok, I have never, ever watched Sum of All Fears because it was so far removed from the book that I just had zero fricking interest but because of this post I did exactly that and holy fricking shit you forget what a funny motherfricker he was.
Two minutes in kek
>“I’m Tom Clancy, I wrote the book that they ignored.”
>Is this supposed to be a bomb or a torpedo?
>A bomb
>You got the proportions wrong
>Actually I meant torpedo
>You got the proportions wrong
But then to cap it all of, Tom himself proves this anon
absolutely, hilariously, irrevocably correct - thirty seconds into a scene at CIA where one of the analysts is pregnant
>So is she really pregnant?
>No that's a prosthesis
>Really? It looks very lifelike
then seconds later
>Wow you really got that prosthetic late term pregnant belly really right
The man simply cannot be stopped from wanting to bone preggo chicks, kek
So it’s Tom’s fault I have 5 kids
I can't rule it out, anon
Not this guy but
>Raised by boomer dad and his Tom Clancy collection
>4 kids and wife is swollen with 5
>Absolutely lose it when she asks to put another baby in her
Damn it Tom
Some clips:
https://nitter.cz/maxfolkmax/status/1046841322789732352#m
Wait, hold on. If you can implant a pregnancy fetish in people could this be the solution to low fertility? Exclusively publish/promote media with pregnant women in it?
Abe kept trying but it just didn't work.
He did?
> Exclusively publish/promote media with pregnant women in it?
I'm okay with this
>four preggo porn tabs open
Harold Coyle relealstic
Ralph Peters was a hard core Russiaboo. One of his books was about America sending troops to defend THE SOVIET UNION from a resurgent Imperial Japan.
It's just off the map levels of inanity and the contortions he has to make to make this seem at all possible are wild.
>""realistic""
Peters is more realistic, though.
>but t-t-the Soviets stomp!
Yes, because he's writing a best case scenario for them. If you actually read the book you'll realize that he described the problems of Soviet (and now, in a heavily degraded form, Russian) military institutions much more astutely than Clancy and his KGB officers executing generals like it's 1938. Which makes sense, give that studying the Soviet army was literally his job.
Peters is also simply the better writer. He doesn't bog down the reader with technical details that are as often incorrect as accurate (for example, anything to do with the Alfa-class in Red October) because he understands what actually makes a good war story. Plinnikov's death still sticks with me all these years later. Meanwhile I can barely remember the fates of the point of view characters in RSR.
>Yes, because he's writing a best case scenario for them.
So Clancy's shit because he wrote about the very types of issues facing the Soviet war machine that would come to reflect reality as the issues currently hampering the Russian war machine. But Peters' is better because he artificially inflated the capabilities of the Soviets beyond what they would likely actually demonstrate. That's Peters being "more realistic" to you.
>If you actually read the book you'll realize that he described the problems of Soviet (and now, in a heavily degraded form, Russian) military institutions much more astutely than Clancy and his KGB officers executing generals like it's 1938.
Oh wait, he simply did it more astutely, because he didn't have KGB being frickweasels regarding ongoing military operations. Because that's totally a made up issue that wasn't made note of by many, many former Soviet military personnel since the end of the Cold War. I mean it's practically as unrealistic as meat assaults and barrier troops.
>Peters is also simply the better writer.
This'll be good.
>He doesn't bog down the reader with technical details
So he doesn't write techno-thrillers. That's like saying Robert Frost is a better writer than Larry Bond, because Frost keeps his "text shorter, more rhymey, but more abstract." I've read Red Army, the writing is fine for what it is. Being more interested in the technical shit, I found myself filling in blanks with what I personally knew of Soviet hardware where Peters neglected to fill in those details.
RSR had no such issues. Therefore that makes Clancy the better writer...for the genre he practically created. Red Army isn't a technothriller any more than Enemy at the Gates is a documentary.
>Meanwhile I can barely remember the fates of the point of view characters in RSR.
Because you were reading a book you weren't interested in. Why is this Clancy's fault?
You want normalgay melodrama that's less technical. Peters delivers well at that.
>he artificially inflated the capabilities
The capabilities of the Soviets in Red Army are inflated in the same way those of the Wehrmacht were in May of 1940. Best case scenarios are not inherently unrealistic.
>Because that's totally a made up issue
The KGB trying to muscle in so heavily on military affairs in the 1980s USSR would be tantamount to inviting civil war. It's just another one of Clancy's fever dreams based on half-remembered stereotypes, like the Alfa meltdown in Red October being caused by a zampolit as if they had any actual command authority.
>meat assaults and barrier troops
lmfao
>So he doesn't write techno-thrillers
Correct. And that's a good thing. Techno-thrillers by their very nature of allowing the author to substitute sperg-pleasing infodumps for actual prose tend to attract the worst kind of writers. The main reason Clancy manages to stand out in the genre is because so many of its other writers are literal garbage.
>Being more interested in the technical shit
Here's the kicker: Peters does get technical, just in the places where it actually matters. Wars are won and lost on the operational and strategic levels, not in the differences between an M1A1 and a T-80U. This is true for Ukraine too, btw. Red Army goes to great lengths to explain where the Soviets are attacking, why they have chosen that area to advance, and how they expect to accomplish it. By contrast, most of RSR's strategy outside of the Atlantic comes across as frankly amateurish.
>Because you were reading a book you weren't interested in
No, because Red Army is populated by actual people. Every main PoV character in RSR is a generic American goodboy, with the only one coming close to having any depth being the frigate captain, but even he's just "oh no my ship sunk now PTSD." Meanwhile I can actually get invested in Red Army's characters, from Malinsky fulfilling what he feels has been his family's duty for centuries to a private just trying to survive.
>Techno-thrillers by their very nature of allowing the author to substitute sperg-pleasing infodumps for actual prose tend to attract the worst kind of writers.
NAYRT but I both agree and disagree with this
yes, they attract bad writers and forgive bad writing; no, the genre can be better and deserves better
>married at 22 years old
>had four children
>divorced at 49 at height of career
yes, sounds pretty autistic
also, Sum Of All Fears came out AFTER the divorce? that explains so fricking much
>this is what it could've been IF YOU'D ONLY UNDERSTOOD, WANDA!!
Gonna have to side with this anon. As a book, Red Army has stuck with me way more than RsR.
>Russians being rapists
>ATGM's and manpads being hyper deadly
>T72's dying like flies
Yeah.
I read this in the 90s thinking it was American propaganda garbage. But yeh nah it was spot on
it somewhat overestimated Russians capabilities.
Kind of. Clancy correctly predicted the mechanisms by which the soviets were defeated(superior NATO tactics and air power).
IIRC Even his hyper competent Soviet union didn't make more than ~50km from their starting line.
>was it realistic?
of course it was, it's well known fact that russian generals and high rank officers were using NATO nomenclature when talking about russian weapons and doctrine
A friend of mine described it as unrealistic because it gives the soviets way too much credit in the retrospect of the current russian fiasco in Ukraine.
That's one of the details it got right, in Red Storm Rising the Soviets got less than 100km in before bogging down. The biggest worry for NATO was running out of shells, tank rounds, and ATGMs that were needed to stop the soviet tank spam, which was the importance of the whole convoy plotline, iirc towards the end one of the NATO generals mentions they were within a day or two of running out of shells.
believe it or not, the USSR was actually somewhat competent compared to their Vatnik son Russia
Even the fricking WW2 era Red Army could defeat the current day Russian army.
nope, Soviet Union had enough oil and doesn't need to invade the Middle East
Yes, it was a reasonable assessment for the time it was written.
The Soviet Union in the mid 80s is not modern Russia. It was lagging behind the west even then but over the last 40 years it has fallen off a cliff almost every metric.
France was able to hold off Germany over six years in World war One. Didn't go that way in World war 2. Things change.
Oh anon you make well put, reasonable points but then you say WW1 lasted six years
> anon you make well put, reasonable points but then you say WW1 lasted six years
Yeah I muddled up my words. It still was longered then six weeks lol.
Any way time has not been kind to the Russian Empire since Red Storm Rising was written. Which is saying something since it came out the same year as Chernobyl.
We can only speculate war between the rushkis at their peak would look like but they've lost almost every single geographical economical technological demographical advantage over NATO since then (which wasn't that great to begin with) and it's pretty clear 2 years in special military operation they're not going to get it back anytime soon. The problems that the Red army had have just gonna worse and it strengths have just diminished.
Shame really. Well at least we still have China.
They made a big thing about the Soviets having an over reliance on officers for command and control. Hunter/killer ATGM teams would take out the tanks with additional antennas and the rest of the armor would just flounder around without orders and get picked off one by one.
Russians never had much of a NCO cadre. Rather, NCOs are more like corporals in the West. Junior-grade officers are used to do all of the things that NCOs normally do. The decision-making and initiative that junior officers in the West are expected to perform are instead done by senior officers, and even then, they're tied pretty closely to battle plans drawn up by generals. It can make for a rather efficient process on paper, with little time wasted in decision-making, but it tends to struggle or even fall apart whenever something occurs to make the initial plan non-viable. Not like that kind of thing ever happens in a war, you know.
>Hunter/killer ATGM teams would take out the tanks with additional antennas and the rest of the armor would just flounder around without orders and get picked off one by one.
This is basically what happens to the UIR armored divisions at the end of Executive Orders
HATO murder tactics
Clancy was really more of a Navy expert so the Army and Air Force scenes are a bit more far fetched. He under-predicted the performance of the F-14, but accurately pointed out the elephant in the room, that even if AEGIS was as good as everyone hoped, it would eventually run out of missiles. This will continue to be a concern until reliable DEW are available en-masse.
Prighozin was supposed to arrest Putler.
RsR would have been even more realistic if Clancy had added the Swedish angle. To get to the air bases in Norway (to open up the route from Murmansk) the Soviets, at the time, could easily have taken most of Sweden. The Swedish defence forces were not up to par for anything at that time.
There is a trilogy written about a possible Soviet attack on Sweden in the 80s called Operation Garbo, written by some military officers under pseudonyms. Mix that with RsR and you have a complete scenario of what a Soviet attack on Europe during the cold war would have happened.
My uncle got drunk in an Ikea once and the entire nation of sweden surrendered to him so this seems plausible.
When was this? And was it in a Ikea store in Sweden? I hope he brought his own booze since the only food you can get there is cheap meatballs.
Anyways, I did my military service in the 90s, paratrooper. Did my OCS in artillery, lots of exercises and every scenario was the reds taking parts of Stockholm after spetznaz attacks and assaults on ports on the east coast, and then they would move west on Oslo on the highway E18.
The Swedish doctrine at the time, 80s and 90s, was to delay the reds until NATO would intervene.
Arty is fun btw, spent some time as a forward observer.
The Ikea stores in the US have these little food kiosks near the exit with hot dogs, cinnamon buns, and pizza. Their vegan dogs look absolutely horrific.
It's the same in every country, in every store.
No booze though, I bet the Ikea stock would go through the roof if they had cold beer in those stores.
And 5.56 and 7.62 ammo.
>The Swedish doctrine at the time, 80s and 90s, was to delay the reds until NATO would intervene.
It was rather to hope Finland would bleed them enough that they couldn't penetrate the Swedish defences.
We need a ship named USS Tom Clancy. Posting pics of Tom Clancy.
what's with cold war gone hot books and weird fetishes
i was reading the chieftains which was pretty good and then he just randomly goes into the mind of a commander who is cucking his subordinate and it's this super weird tonal whiplash for about ten pages before he gets back to the killing
>"Greenskins!"
>Russian army mobilizing C-list benchwarmers after their elite units all exploded
>Taman Guards getting their shit pushed in
>Russian coup attempt
>Russian army running short on fuel
>Generals making "two week" predictions
>Russian leaders trying to throw a nuclear tantrum
Clancy was a witch, I tell you.
>Clancy was a witch, I tell you.
It's why he was killed
Western air power rapes the Soviets
ATGMs rape the Soviet armor
Stealth makes the difference but isn’t still takes casualties
Soviets throw massive amounts of armor and people into mobnik grinder
Soviets spaz out and threaten nukes
Americans target the thing that fricked their carrier and effectively neutralize it with no real Soviet response
American subs rape the Soviet coast land with cruise missiles
Soviets get one real strategic victory in Iceland then don’t really do anything else significant
It’s amazing how accurate this book truly was.
>Team Yankee
Worst book I ever read
You're reading a synopsis not an actual novel
>The major gave Bannon his instructions on when he was to link up with the 1st of the 4th, where, and route of march. Bannon coordinated with the battalion S-4 for rearming and refueling before the Team departed that evening. He talked to the Team Bravo commander and told him where the 1 st Tank Platoon was to go when it was released back to the Team. Then, with no further business in Langen and much to tend to, he returned to the Team. News of their return to I st of the 4th was universally hailed by the Team with the exception of Sergeant Polgar. He said it really didn’t matter to him where his platoon went so long as it stayed with Team Yankee. When Bannon thanked him for his vote of confidence he replied that confidence had nothing to do with it. The chow in Team Yankee had always been good, and good food meant he had fewer complaints to listen to from his men.
This is not a fricking novel. These are notes pretending to be a novel. It's an insult to literature to call this a novel.
Tom Clancy was a cross dimensional remote viewing-type psychic who profited off of his visions. Many parts of his books read like notes because they are, and he couldn’t be assed to make it sound better because he was often writing fresh from his memory.
>Tom Clancy
>Team Yankee
Team Yankee was Harold Coyle, anon.
It applies to both. Let's be honest they're not really stories they're just theoretical war games scenarios with some basic attempts at plot and character. There's a reason this is on /k/ and not PrepHole.
There's no character development there's no will building but there is some very detailed descriptions on Russia armour tactics or lack thereof
Well in the case of RsR and team Yankee it literally was a wargame scenario since both have battles based on tabletop wargames, team Yankee has one and the parts where Clancy isn't using only one hand to write out his Icelandic preggo fantasies were written by Larry Bond who invented a naval warfare wargame, and played out a Dance of the Vampires scenario.
Also Bond's own book on the second Korean war is excellent and imo better than RsR
>Well in the case of RsR and team Yankee it literally was a wargame scenario since have battles based on tabletop wargames
Oh I always thought it was intended to be a serious blow by blow thought exercise in what a conventional world war with the soviets would look like... But I see now it's a lot closer to /tg/ 40K style fanfiction.
>It applies to both
Not at all
Tom Clancy writes quite well even if he's still writing military pulp. Frederick Forsyth beats him, but I haven't read anything by the likes of Koontz or Bond et al to match Clancy
Coyle is by far the worst military pulp writer I've ever read. NOBODY else would publish a paragraph like the one I posted above. And that's like half the novel.
If you compare Red Storm Rising, Red October and Red Phoenix you can tell that Clancy writes better dialogue than Bond.
reads like a history book tbqh.
Yes
Let me detail it for you. It reads in third person, as if by a detached narrator, tells you what happened instead of showing you the dialogue, with the result that you don't feel immersed inside the character's head, which you're supposed to be doing in the typical close perspective of a novel.
I particularly like this passage:
>Pat was told that the Air Force personnel running the evacuation were better and more helpful than the Army community personnel but were having difficulties dealing with all the incoming families that were being dumped at Rhein-Main. One Air Force officer had told them that the people in the gym probably wouldn’t leave until the morning. This depressed Pat. She, like the other wives and mothers, was ready to go. They had finally geared themselves up for the final leap. Now, they had to spend a night in an open gym with hundreds of other dejected and anxious people. It seemed that every new move only added more stress and pressure. The situation, however deplorable, had to be endured. Pat decided that she could hold out a little longer. She had to. A little group was beginning to depend on her. And it was growing. Jane Ortelli, the wife of Sean’s tank driver, joined them. She was nineteen years old and had never been out of the state of New Jersey until she came over to Germany. Jane stood at the side before boarding the bus, clutching her four-month-old baby as she would a teddy bear, for security and comfort. Pat went over to her and insisted that she join them since they were all going on the same bus. Jane was thankful and relieved.
And it goes on and on and on in the same vein. Top notch writing people. Hemingway would cry.
i like it.
>i like it
you're allowed to, but strictly speaking, it's very bad writing.
not if you like history books.
unfortunately, this is (ostensibly) a novel, not a history book.
You do not sound thankful or relieved, much less and.
for me it's pic related
Tom Clancy was extremely autistic. He genuinely did not understand how human beings interact with each other. The shit in Greenland with the pregnant lady is proof.
Tom Clancy is at his best when hes a kid in the sandbox making his army men fight each other. I dont remember a single characters name or why they were important bc it truly didnt matter to the story.
>Tom Clancy was extremely autistic. He genuinely did not understand how human beings interact with each other. The shit in Greenland with the pregnant lady is proof.
>was married twice and had four children
Getting married was insanely easy for boomers. They took it for granted.
I remember quite a number. Jack Ryan, John Clark, Ding Chavez. He wrote men very well. He had a problem writing women, in that he seemed to be very overly effectionate and moody with them...But perhaps that is how they are best characterized, I'm not sure.
I can't think of a really major female character in the Clancy except Mary Foley, the CIA spook. Cathy was mainly a supporting character.
There was that female Hispanic turncoat in Clear & Present Danger.
I'm not sure why. May have had difficulty writing them, or it may just be he was writing military/spy thrillers in the 80's and 90's, when there was little female representation in those fields, either in fiction or real life.
Here's a pic of Mary Pat...and she's preggo.
LOL!!!!
>Here's a pic of Mary Pat...and she's preggo.
Check this lmao
he doesn't write women at all
>except Mary Foley, the CIA spook. Cathy was mainly a supporting character.
and not only does he write them like a man would write them, they're very mannish in character
>the Dems want a robust welfare state
but which involves
>the rich people staying rich (and becoming richer) while the poor are made even poorer
welfare states keep you poor anon
Yes, just look at Scandinavia, they're barely able to feed themselves. Everyday a struggle for a potato
>Yes, just look at Scandinavia
mini-nations with disproportionate wealth who are literally the 5%ers of Europe
look instead France, UK, Italy, Spain - think the US should trade places with them?
Was seizing Iceland actually in the opening moves of Soviet war plans? Because that was probably the single smartest thing they did in the book.
we don't know for sure
on the one hand, the morons did plan to take fricking COPENHAGEN
on the other, it's said now that the Soviets simply planned to turn this into Fortress Barents and rain ICBMs on NATO from there
the problem of trying to come up with a Cold-War-Gone-Hot-But-Not-With-Nukes scenario is that we don't know what they would have done in that position, the Soviets planned on using tac nukes from day one in the belief that NATO would not escalate to a strategic exchange
>hex
>ECW v2.0 pls go
Definitely. As portrayed in the book, pulling that off was critical to the Soviets doing even as well as it did.
I haven't read it yet, what does taking iceland mean to the soviets?
No idea, but I'd assume turning the flank of the GIUK gap to allow their subs/planes through undetected.
>I haven't read it yet, what does taking iceland mean to the soviets?
Cuts off the Icelandic airbases as air cover for the convoys, gives Soviet Naval Aviation a safe and clear corridor down to the Atlantic to launch on those convoys, cuts the SOSUS nexus in the middle of the GIUK gap, limits the endurance of land based air cover over the convoys, puts pressure on fighter bases in Scotland and Norway
>I haven't read it yet
you should
>turning the flank
destroying the centre position and turning its airfields against NATO, actually
based Tom
when anon said "based on tabletop wargames", he meant "the authors used the equivalent of Wikipedia stats of the time to inform their writing, and they took the stats from a tabletop game"
>/tg/ 40K style
even that 40K stole from Battletech
>when anon said "based on tabletop wargames", he meant "the authors used the equivalent of Wikipedia stats of the time to inform their writing, and they took the stats from a tabletop game"
No, the Dance of the Vampires chapter in RSR is literally a /tg/ writeup of a game of Harpoon that Tom played and the rest of the book is written around it.
bit underselling it
Clancy wanted to write a Cold War gone hot novel, found that Harpoon had ripped off all the Jane's stats (basically military wikipedia of the time) and got into Harpoon because of that
It's all here
That is such a good address that anons should watch.
That was fun to listen to. Clancy was a good speaker. I hadn't thought of it before but he really took off like a lightning bolt with these military and intelligence people. Part of the story I think is they were using him to improve their image after Vietnam and the scandals in the 70s. But he was a genuinely popular figure who breathed life into what they were doing and also helped popularize it so his contribution has been considerable -- and he was actually an "outsider" to it.
In that video, he pokes a little fun at the audience and the service branches, and he has some self-deprecating humor. He makes it very clear he's on "their team" as well. But the military / natsec community had probably been such sticks in the mud that he was exactly what they needed and what they wanted.
I almost want to see him as an outcome of the 1960s culture eventually working its way into and metabolizing in the military community and helping refresh it. I don't know if he would've seen in that way, but some of the images kind of make him look like Hunter S. Thompson. One interesting thing too is that he didn't see the U.S. as flawless (Clear and Present Danger is critical of the war on drugs and came out around the same time as Iran-Contra and had similar themes), but that ultimately America is a force for good and hope in the world. I think that combination is a more effective conservative ethic than the nihilism on the right nowadays.
Also this movie was pretty good:
>I think that combination is a more effective conservative ethic than the nihilism on the right nowadays.
Fricking this. I grew up in the 90s and my conservative values are basically a product of Tom Clancy and WE John's Biggles
>nihilism on the right
it's not nihilism; it's desperate contrarianism, because the GOP is hollow and suffers not from lack of direction, but lack of any substance whatsoever
>the GOP is hollow and suffers not from lack of direction, but lack of any substance whatsoever
Well of course, the only real value conservatives have is preserving the status quo: the rich people staying rich (and becoming richer) while the poor are made even poorer until we're back to chattel slavery (but with extra steps). Everything else is just theatrics to draw the dumb masses to vote for them.
>the only real value conservatives have is preserving the status quo: the rich people staying rich (and becoming richer) while the poor are made even poorer
That's literally the democrats you stupid frick.
Nah, the Dems want a robust welfare state. Repubs want blacks to accept being whipped to death as a retirement plan.
I liked this one.
It's not so much about conventional warfare but about the nuclear exchange that came shortly after.
Frick, I want a North Atlantic map so bad, lobbing Rb-04s with the Viggy.
Meant to reply to
Kola Peninsula “soon”
Arclight and Red Phoenix are my repeat read technothrillers
>Explosion at a Russian oil refinery
OH SHIT IS TOM RIGHT AGAIN?
Not unless Kadyrov or some other durka has gone bananas
Are there any books that explore what the world would look like after WW3 ends in a tenuous peace? I've been always been kind of fascinated by the concept, I think the scenario that seems the most interesting is the absolutely insane bullshit that happens in Modern Warfare 3. What could the world possibly look like after Russians gas Paris and invade Washington DC and then LOSE?
That would be cool
Tom Clancy was a lover of Russian hardware
He actually believed their specs
He actually thought the Russians believed in their communist paradise after the first few years (and purges) and were doing the best they can, instead of pretending and getting drunk and collecting free money
He basically was a military fiction writer who knew nuts about real life
>He basically was a military fiction writer who knew nuts about real life
Tom Clancy wrote Red Storm Rising deep in the Cold War when the exposure to Soviet citizens by your average American was very, very low, so he worked with what he had.
>He actually believed their specs
Soviet tanks and aircraft get an absolutely appalling ratio in the combat in RSR - when I read it as a child I thought he was taking the MURRICA thing a bit too far. Two decades later, I owe him an apology.
Not really, the Tu-22s absolutely wrecked 2 carrier fleets and all their equipment worked on the dot and commanders were smart and motivated, instead of being blind, lacking completely C4ISR, and led by fricking idiot hominids who were stealing all the food and equipment and sent men on meat wave attacks
That was a plot device crucial to the story and he and Larry Bond and a number of serving naval officers played an autistic amount of Harpoon scenarios to nut out a way that it could conceivably be done. The same carriers participate in another air battle with the same Backfires with a smarter commander and Soviet Naval Aviation gets wrecked.
bullshit.
Bond said this.
>He noticed that the speed of an AS-5 Kelt [an old Soviet air-to-surface missile carried by bombers] very closely matched the cruise speed of a Backfire bomber. Tom was the one who asked, what if the Russian fired these missiles as drones — the Russians had converted many of them into target drones — so on radar they look like a Backfire formation coming at a carrier? I was the one who told him how you could tell the two apart. But the Russians could hang a radar reflector on them so the itty-bitty missile would look like a big bomber. So we worked it out. It wasn’t part of Soviet doctrine, so the U.S. wasn’t ready for it. It’s a viable tactic, even if you can only use it once.
so one carrier group always gets wrecked until tactics get adapted.
>so one carrier group always gets wrecked until tactics get adapted.
That's the point, dickhead
>the Tu-22s absolutely wrecked 2 carrier fleets
They could have, IRL
it wasn't a clear win
in fact if anything, Clancy overestimated the effectiveness of Aegis and Phalanx, but that's compensated by him being shit at tactics and overestimating the effectiveness of Russian antiship missiles
idiot
>in fact if anything
>if
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Stark_incident
In the piss stained dreams of some stupid vatnick maybe
really?
what makes you think so?
tell us what you think a 1985 scenario would play out like, in detail
what's the orbat on both sides, what weapons will be used, how would they interact, what are the casualties?
missing the point completely.
in cmano, russia also conquers ukraine in three days without any problem.
in 1985 your supersonic booze carrier would be useless because everyone is either too drunk or corrupt and sold the booze.
hubris
Russia today is not what it used to be, and it hasn't universally fricked up across the board
otherwise why are they still able to hold off the AFU?
it's not hubris when specs in cmano don't match reality and execution leaves a lot to be desired.
kitchen can't even hit non-moving targets in ukraine. it's not going to hit a moving carrier.
>kitchen can't even hit non-moving targets in ukraine. it's not going to hit a moving carrier.
that's very true, and I said the same in my own breakdown of the
the problem is you, air defence officer, will not be able to tell which one of that fifty missile swarm is going to hit your carrier and which one will miss half a mile away so you're still forced to attempt to intercept them all so your air defence is saturated all the same
what this DOES mean is that leakers may or may not hit you, there is far less certainty than with NATO guided weapons, but throw enough shit and stick
>He actually thought the Russians believed in their communist paradise after the first few years (and purges)
One of the paradoxes is that some of the old dissidents' initial problem with communism was that they believed in it too much, and so their romantic/fanatical approach to communism meeting the cynicism of the regime eventually pushed them towards the democratic movement and often equally romantic/fanatic anti-communism and Russophobia. Then the ones who didn't really believe in it but comprised the security and military layer of the regime turned into unhinged anti-Western nationalists ranting about launching pinpoint nuclear strikes like Red Alert 2 villains or the rogue generals in Operation Flashpoint while trying to coup the government after Gorby came up with the novel idea of... the Soviet Union... but which didn't kill any of its own citizens... and had Pizza Hut... which lasted about all of five years.
Here's a fun fact for anyone who ever thought it would have been neat to have a conversation with Clancy about Red Storm Rising but never had the opportunity. Larry Bond is a good dude and will reply to an email, and is quite amenable to questions and comments about his own work, and working with Tom.
I hate larry bond for making Mig-21 credible
its a honky piece of shit
Would Tom Clancy be a Trump supporter if he were alive or would he be a Jeb Bush kind of Republican?
He would be an unironic Mitt Romney kind of guy, and unfortunately, I think he probably would've sided with the idea that Trump started an "insurrection", because he was naive about the aspirations and goals of the CIA and unaware or unwilling to accept the ideas behind the concept of the deep state.
He was the archetypical Reaganite, but wasn't a fan of Bush going into Iraq. I can see him reluctantly coming around to supporting Trump in 2016 but likely abandoning him after 2020.
>I can see him reluctantly coming around to supporting Trump in 2016 but likely abandoning him after 2020.
What about 2024?