Tom Clancy: from the Cold War to counterterrorism…
I read most of Tom Clancy’s books until he started writing about a secret, privately financed, vigilante organization…a bit over the top for even this old thriller writer. Up to that point and independent of his politics, I thought he could spin a good yarn backed by enough techno-babble that it all seemed real (see the Clancy quote running across the banner of this website). In fact, I’d wager that some higher mucky-mucks in the Pentagon weren’t happy at times with his description of U.S. and Soviet military capabilities.
More importantly, Clancy covered an era from Cold War to counterterrorism. His first two books, Hunt for Red October and Red Storm Rising, portrayed anti-Soviet operations featuring the U.S. Navy (the latter is an interesting Tolstoy-length account of what World War III might have been like). The last books I read focused on terrorism (did the Japanese pilot who flew his aircraft into Congress in Debt of Honor provide ideas for the 9/11 terrorists?). In between, he even touched on the emergence of China (The Bear and the Dragon), although he didn’t predict the kind of fascist capitalism that has taken over in that country.
Thriller writers who write about the near future often swim in treacherous waters. My own The Midas Bomb, finished at the end of 2008 but not released until fall 2009, portrays events that take place in 2014. The first of the “Detective Chen and Castilblanco Series,” in a sense it becomes out-of-date next year. I’m a bit more safe than Clancy because I consider all my opus so far to be in the sci-fi thriller genre, so I can claim that in some parallel universe, in some other world of the many worlds of quantum mechanics, the events portrayed there happened.
Clancy, on the other hand, never claimed to write sci-fi. He admitted that some of the technical systems he portrayed were his fictional creations. He also said that it scared him when they turned out to be so close to emerging reality. As a consequence, his books, in a sense, are out-of-date. Because they’re such good yarns (although Red Storm Rising and some of his other books became a bit tedious), I’ll give him a bye: let’s assume that they took place in one of those alternate worlds where Jack Ryan indeed became president as he continued to save the world (never mind that he morphed from Baldwin to Ford and Affleck). I can state, for example, that Hunt for Red October is by far the best book and movie about submarines I’ve ever read and watched—and insist that Connery stole the show from Baldwin! In a real sense, Clancy’s output went downhill from there, but his later books were still better than most thrillers.
Probably the service that benefitted most from Clancy’s prose was the U.S. Navy. It was always clear to me that the author was enthralled with the techno-wizardry and mighty force projection that Mr. Obama recently used as a credible threat against Syria. Clearly, the threat of GPS-guided cruise missiles and long-range guns found in Navy cruisers and destroyers makes two-bit dictators quiver in their boots, not to mention the firepower found in the planes on Navy aircraft carriers. The problem nowadays is that this Navy, developed to counter the potential Soviet fleet and air attacks projected in the Cold War, is more akin to cracking a walnut with a sledgehammer. Army action portrayed in Red Storm Rising, the so-called massive invasion incorrectly called “boots on the ground,” is also limited today as an effective strategy.
Today’s counterterrorism efforts need surgical precision. Drones and special forces are much more effective in these efforts and, in spite of what many detractors say, more protective of innocent civilians (that terrorists often mix their families in with them shows the extremes of their ideology). One might ask if Obama would really have carried out his threat against Assad? Could his advisers from the Pentagon actually guarantee that they wouldn’t hit chemical weapons storage sites? Clearly, they couldn’t know where all these weapons are stored, a problem that surely haunts U.N. inspectors. Moreover, Assad has had ample time to hide some of these weapons, possibly at some of the sites initially in Obama’s target list.
Libya and Tunisia showed the advantage of having the Navy’s floating airfields, which haven’t changed that much since Red Storm Rising. U.S. air power was successful in restricting those skirmishes to the ground where the Libyan and Tunisian rebels could be successful (I won’t question here the political fallout except to say that Benghazi will haunt us for a long time). But, in the future, the floating airfields and cruisers and destroyers originally designed to protect them will go the way of the dinosaurs. Scramjet technology will allow time critical force air strikes all over the world from the two coasts of the U.S., if counterterrorism efforts don’t dominate our future lives. Satellites, armed with supersonic and precision missiles, will allow U.S. forces to spot a terrorist group from space and take them out, a more generalized version of what happens with drones (the latter may remain cost effective for a long time, though).
Future writers of military thrillers will probably feature many such systems in their literature. But maybe military thrillers will wear thin and their day is past? Will there be an audience for future Clancys? There certainly seems to be now, especially in video games (Clancy has his own). We can ask whether Grand Theft Auto will spur violence among the adults who grew up with these games. We can also ask the same question about war-fighting games. Right now there is a market for these genres. Boys (and maybe girls, as the Pentagon continues on its road to unisex forces?) continue to play at war, here and abroad. I’ve often seen it. The difference between fiction and real life is that in the former it only has to seem real—in the latter, the dead and the wounded stay that way. At least, like Clancy, let’s stick to the fiction!
And so it goes….
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