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RSR could have been tolerable if it weren't for the really godawful Iceland sub plot
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Mar 30, 2022 13:11
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:RSR could have been tolerable if it weren't for the really godawful Iceland sub plot The war part or the romance part?
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Mar 30, 2022 13:53
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Gewehr 43 posted:The war part or the romance part? the romance part, the war part was fine
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Mar 30, 2022 13:54
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Jesus I forgot about that. "Yes, i saved you from a brutal murder rape, we will have a completely normal relationship in the real world when the hero worship fades and you realize I burp and fart and scratch my balls like every other man!"
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Mar 30, 2022 14:19
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I sort of met - more like "was in the same room with and was introduced to" - Clancy in the mid 90's at a Naval History conference; I attended because I was working for the museum at the time. It was awful. He was utterly full of himself and talking down to everyone, lecturing everyone who would listen on his - views - in a room full of Admirals and PhD historians. They were all such professionals that they were exceptionally polite to him, even though he came off as a fool. It was just embarrassingly ugly. If he wasn't such a fatuous prick I would have felt bad for him.
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Mar 30, 2022 15:06
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Iirc Red Storm Rising was based on games of Harpoon played by Clancy and Bond which is incredibly goony
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Mar 30, 2022 15:12
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Cessna posted:I sort of met - more like "was in the same room with and was introduced to" - Clancy in the mid 90's at a Naval History conference; I attended because I was working for the museum at the time. This is a novel way of euphemistically throwing some shade and I appreciate it. Never seen the double hyphens before, but I instantly understood the tone. Like a shorter, classier way of saying "uh shall we say". I'mma steal the hell out of that.
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Mar 30, 2022 15:14
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MikeCrotch posted:Iirc Red Storm Rising was based on games of Harpoon played by Clancy and Bond which is incredibly goony It is, they flat out state it in the introduction. Horrible romantic subplot aside, I still enjoy that book a lot. His 80s books are mostly entertaining, his 90s stuff (Where it fully veers into the ‘Ryanverse’ with fictional presidents and whatnot) is where it starts getting progressively insane and/or uncomfortable, and then somehow even worse in the 00s.
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Mar 30, 2022 15:22
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Ensign Expendable posted:This threw me for a loop until I realized that the translator fell for a false friend. The artillery dude would have shouted "рама" - which could indeed translate as "frame" or "chassis". In this case "рама" is the nickname for the Fw 189 recon plane and therefore not a "chassis" at all. That's really interesting! Reading it, I was slightly confused why she'd assume a plane instead of a tank, but figured that she'd presumably have known what to look out for better than I would. I'm going to guess the double meaning is intentional to the story then, with the sexist comment being chassis and her original interpretation being the plane. It makes the story better, I'm actually a bit surprised there wasn't a translator's footnote. Same woman also had a story about being invited to eat with some other officers. As they are sitting down in this farmhouse, she starts reflexively looking around. One of the other officers makes a joke that Sappers are paranoid and always think there is a bomb. The other officers all laughed. Then she finds a bomb that would have killed them all if it went off. They stop laughing.
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Mar 30, 2022 15:23
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Cessna posted:I sort of met - more like "was in the same room with and was introduced to" - Clancy in the mid 90's at a Naval History conference; I attended because I was working for the museum at the time. In a way, it feels good to know that Tom Clancy is exactly the sort of rear end in a top hat one would expect. Or should I say was.
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Mar 30, 2022 15:28
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MikeCrotch posted:Iirc Red Storm Rising was based on games of Harpoon played by Clancy and Bond which is incredibly goony I thought he did that for parts of Hunt for Red October as well, but I don't know for sure. fartknocker posted:Horrible romantic subplot aside, I still enjoy that book a lot. I really didn't like it. It has been a long time since I read it, but it came off as reading some sort of General Dynamics catalog filler text about how all of our cool weapons were just soooo good and crewed by steel jawed professionals, who will beat the
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Mar 30, 2022 15:34
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What I've been wondering given, ah, recent discoveries about the state of Russia's military: I know that in 1945 the Red Army was the premiere fighting force in the world but did they end up becoming a paper tiger, and if so, when?
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Mar 30, 2022 15:47
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I imagine the nineties until now a huge amount of overt and covert state backed corruption has been ravaging pretty much the whole Russian Federation and really has not stopped ever.
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Mar 30, 2022 15:50
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zoux posted:What I've been wondering given, ah, recent discoveries about the state of Russia's military: I know that in 1945 the Red Army was the premiere fighting force in the world but did they end up becoming a paper tiger, and if so, when? 75+ years of believing your own hype.
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Mar 30, 2022 15:51
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SeanBeansShako posted:I imagine the nineties until now a huge amount of overt and covert state backed corruption has been ravaging pretty much the whole Russian Federation and really has not stopped ever. My best friend's dad was an Army intelligence officer in the 70s and 80's, stationed in both Moscow and West Berlin. I asked my friend to ask him what he thought about all this and he said basically "exact same poo poo as today", but I was wondering if there was any hard evidence or scholarship about the quality of the later Cold War Red Army. I mean, the public was certainly sold this idea that the Soviets were at least a match for NATO, if not superior.
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Mar 30, 2022 15:59
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Wasn't the pretext for the Russian invasion of the western US in Red Dawn based on a wargame that John Milius and Kevin Reynolds played or something like that.
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Mar 30, 2022 16:09
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I would reject the premise and say that the Russians are suffering today from all the things they've been crap at (reliance on centralised C2, minimal tactical training, poor target identification and tasking to fires), combined with satellites making the one thing they were geniuinely good at (operational deception and surprise) largely neutered. Then we have changing conditions of the battlefield meaning that the kind of flexible light infantry groups the Russians don't really train to fight can carry orders of magnitude more firepower with them than anyone could in 1945.
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Mar 30, 2022 16:10
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I think it's worth noting that both NATO and WP/Soviets both ebbed and flowed over time and both armies changed a fair bit over the decades. The US and other Western armies of the late 70s were in pretty poor shape to put it mildly to think of one example.
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Mar 30, 2022 16:13
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fartknocker posted:It is, they flat out state it in the introduction. Horrible romantic subplot aside, I still enjoy that book a lot. His 80s books are mostly entertaining, his 90s stuff (Where it fully veers into the ‘Ryanverse’ with fictional presidents and whatnot) is where it starts getting progressively insane and/or uncomfortable, and then somehow even worse in the 00s. The Ryanverse gets insane when you realize just how much poo poo goes down during Ryan's presidency in the later books that have his name on them after he passed. I may have missed something, of course, some third-term bullfuckery that happened after Ryan ascended to the presidency in the end of Debt of Honor - I think there was less than a year on Durling's term when that happened, so Ryan probably got at least 9 years out of the gig? Maybe more? Either way, Threat Vector alone was a lot to unpack in a single presidency, never mind when you throw in the Jack Ryan Jr. and The Campus books.
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Mar 30, 2022 16:18
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Clancy really went overboard with Threat Level Midnight
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Mar 30, 2022 16:22
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zoux posted:What I've been wondering given, ah, recent discoveries about the state of Russia's military: I know that in 1945 the Red Army was the premiere fighting force in the world but did they end up becoming a paper tiger, and if so, when? I think that's a little bit arguable, or maybe my thought is premiere is the wrong word for it (Probably the single strongest army, but that comes with a lot of caveats). Literally everyone was knock down drag-out exhausted in 1945, that includes the red army and the USSR as a whole. It took them a decade to get back on their feet as a country after the horrific effects of WW2, and that's with the wholesale looting of Eastern Europe for it. It so happens that the people they were fighting were significantly more exhausted. I think my point is not that the Red Army of 1945 was bad, that would be a ludicrous assertion, but that its air of invincibility is perhaps a little overblown and is a deliberate propaganda construct of the USSR that needs to be examined. I'm personally not at all convinced that if Stalin had decided he wanted to end his empire at the channel he could have achieved it which is something that tends to get thrown about (not by you but with regards to the Red Army in 1945 generally). However we do see throughout the Cold War see that the Soviet army is something of a blunt instrument, this is not unique to the Soviets but they never seem to progress past that sort of thinking. When they suffer setbacks in Afghanistan in the 80s they resort to levelling the place, when the Russians suffer setbacks in Grozny in the 90s they level the place, when they were assaulting Germany in 1945 they levelled the place (again to emphasise this is not a unique feature of theirs in 1945), ditto Hungarian revolution and we see that again in Syria and again in Ukraine. Soviet troop quality was so parlous at the end of the cold war that their troops were hired as mercenaries by the disintegrating SSR's to fight for them. However now they do not have the mass and huge quantity of poo poo necessary to operate as a blunt instrument against an enemy that wants and has the ability to fight back, we actually see that in Afghanistan as well historically. If we look at Afghanistan, their peak troop numbers weren't more than around 120k, which is less than the US alone committed at peak to Iraq, ignoring coalition commitments. But to answer your question, i think that soviet military quality is really sapped by the 1980's, Afghanistan and the general malaise of the USSR of the late 70's and early 80's leading to supply shortages and corruption hollowed it out far more than was apparent at the time in the west. What they were extremely adept at is fighting the propaganda war.
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Mar 30, 2022 17:29
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I feel like it's incorrect to say the Red Army of 42-45 had poor light infantry training- there were a lot of badass razvyedchik companies involved in operations like Bagration. In the modern day, lol. The T-64 and its son the T-80 is the last real piece of armour, with T-72 and its son T-90 being what's known as "kinda piece of poo poo." Rumor has it there are a nearly double digit of T-14s out there, but they can't be deployed yet because they need to look badass for the victory day parade.
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Mar 30, 2022 18:36
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If Viktor Suvorov's The Liberators: My Life in the Soviet Army (1981) is to be believed there were already a bunch of problems by the late 1960s. NOTE: I have no idea if The Liberators is to be believed.
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Mar 30, 2022 18:39
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:I feel like it's incorrect to say the Red Army of 42-45 had poor light infantry training- there were a lot of badass razvyedchik companies involved in operations like Bagration. But is that indicative of high level training, or robbing other units for veteran soldiers and concentrating them in smaller units for specific purposes? You see that with the WW1 stormtroopers. They were some legit badasses and could do some really impressive poo poo, but they were also a fairly limited resource that couldn't be replenished to the same level of effectiveness once they were gone. edit: not a rhetorical question, I don't know enough about mid-war Soviet infantry training to answer,.
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Mar 30, 2022 18:40
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Rascar Capac posted:If Viktor Suvorov's The Liberators: My Life in the Soviet Army (1981) is to be believed there were already a bunch of problems by the late 1960s. Suvorov is generally untrustworthy, but the engine problems of the T-64 were well known. They initially used a very low silhouette opposed piston design that was expensive and had a lot of teething problems. Edit: From Wikipedia, and this lines up with what I was taught - quote:The 5TDF opposed-piston engine, while powerful and compact, was very finicky and prone to malfunctions and fires. Russian expert Viktor Murakhovsky, then a battalion commander in Group of Soviet Forces in Germany reflected that in his unit the rate of the engines requiring a major overhaul was close to one per tank in a year. He also noted the difficulty of starting this engine, especially in the damp German winters, and that starting aids used by soldiers, like the high-pressure air and/or oil injection, often caused engine fires. I remember being taught the start-sequence of the BMP-1, and it is the stuff of nightmares. I don't remember it for the T-72, but if Soviet/Russian armor is broadly similar, it isn't good. Cessna fucked around with this message at 18:52 on Mar 30, 2022 |
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Mar 30, 2022 18:45
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zoux posted:What I've been wondering given, ah, recent discoveries about the state of Russia's military: I know that in 1945 the Red Army was the premiere fighting force in the world but did they end up becoming a paper tiger, and if so, when? The Russian army is very small nowadays and it went into Ukraine with a very optimistic expectation of how the invasion would proceed. I don't think anybody with common sense was expecting the Russian military to be rolling across Europe or whatever, so the talk of it being a paper tiger doesn't compel me. In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed and propelled the economy several decades backwards, as well as jettisoning like 50% of the population. Russia has spent the last 30 years trying to recover from that, which might explain why the Russian military isn't the same as the Soviet military. Slim Jim Pickens fucked around with this message at 19:59 on Mar 30, 2022 |
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Mar 30, 2022 19:56
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Cessna posted:I thought he did that for parts of Hunt for Red October as well, but I don't know for sure. I’ve always read Hunt for Red October as Clancy filtering the rumors about K-129 and Project Azorian that must’ve been floating around through the seventies. Not any kind of direct adaptation, just a very vague couple of ideas and/or drunk sea stories that Clancy fleshed into a full novel. …It’s certainly more creative than anything else he did subsequently…
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Mar 30, 2022 20:20
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:The Russian army is very small nowadays and it went into Ukraine with a very optimistic expectation of how the invasion would proceed. I don't think anybody with common sense was expecting the Russian military to be rolling across Europe or whatever, so the talk of it being a paper tiger doesn't compel me. Sure, but the genesis of the question was my (admittedly anecdotal, single-sourced) friend's MI dad who said that he saw the same poo poo when he was stationed in Moscow and Berlin. I had expected him to say, oh they're way worse now, but in his opinion they aren't. I had also thought the Soviet army was a formidable fighting force, at least through the 80's. I mean it took a whole Rambo to defeat them in Afghanistan.
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Mar 30, 2022 20:22
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My recollection of Clancy was that he was an insurance saleseman and a military history/wargaming dork, and his sales territory included the area near one of the big nuclear reactor facilities in Virginia. Of course, 90% of the people who worked at those plants got their training in the US Navy, usually on subs, and there's nothing old soldiers and sailors love more than telling long stories about their time in the service and passing along rumors and scuttlebutt. And Clancy was almost perfectly positioned to sit and soak up all those old stories and rumors (I'll bet he sold a ton on insurance to vets grateful to have an appreciative audience) and then go home to his den full of Jane's Fighting Ships and Avalon Hill boxed wargames and write all that up into a novel
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Mar 30, 2022 20:30
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MrYenko posted:I’ve always read Hunt for Red October as Clancy filtering the rumors about K-129 and Project Azorian that must’ve been floating around through the seventies. Not any kind of direct adaptation, just a very vague couple of ideas and/or drunk sea stories that Clancy fleshed into a full novel. He also borrowed ideas from the attempted defection of the Storozhevoy in 1975.
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Mar 30, 2022 20:31
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FMguru posted:My recollection of Clancy was that he was an insurance saleseman and a military history/wargaming dork, and his sales territory included the area near one of the big nuclear reactor facilities in Virginia. Of course, 90% of the people who worked at those plants got their training in the US Navy, usually on subs, and there's nothing old soldiers and sailors love more than telling long stories about their time in the service and passing along rumors and scuttlebutt. And Clancy was almost perfectly positioned to sit and soak up all those old stories and rumors (I'll bet he sold a ton on insurance to vets grateful to have an appreciative audience) and then go home to his den full of Jane's Fighting Ships and Avalon Hill boxed wargames and write all that up into a novel This is a far more cogent way to say what I said.
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Mar 30, 2022 20:32
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The rights to the Jack Ryan character are a loving mess, and there is a history of lawsuits. It wasn't clear if his first publisher had the rights to the character or Clancy did. That eventually got settled and he entered into a terrible contract with Paramount that seem to have given Paramount film and TV rights in perpetuity. During his divorce, it got complicated because all of the rights were in a jointly owned company. And now his widow is suing claiming the rights belong to the estate. Basically he is the poster boy of get a good lawyer, not your loving buddy.
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Mar 30, 2022 20:39
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Thomamelas posted:The rights to the Jack Ryan character are a loving mess, and there is a history of lawsuits. It wasn't clear if his first publisher had the rights to the character or Clancy did. That eventually got settled and he entered into a terrible contract with Paramount that seem to have given Paramount film and TV rights in perpetuity. During his divorce, it got complicated because all of the rights were in a jointly owned company. And now his widow is suing claiming the rights belong to the estate. Amazon has a Jack Ryan show that's about to premiere it's third season, though.
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Mar 30, 2022 20:41
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zoux posted:Amazon has a Jack Ryan show that's about to premiere it's third season, though. Paramount TV is one of the production companies involved in it.
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Mar 30, 2022 20:45
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The Soviet Union was always considerably poorer than the US, and they couldn't afford to maintain military parity, although they maintained the appearance of strength. Their military expenditure per capita was lower than the US from the 50s until the late 70s, so the military gap was gradually growing through that time. Soviet generals lived in fear that one day American tanks would invade East Germany, while American planners worried about the reverse scenario.
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Mar 30, 2022 21:21
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My take on Tom Clancy, speaking as someone who read most of his books in middle school/high school and never again since, is that he was legitimately good when writing within a narrow focus of military action and espionage. However, everything outside of that focus — particularly politics and especially relationships — was almost always just absolutely awful and drenched in low-to-mid key racism and misogyny. So while some of his early books are legitimately pretty good (Or at least, I remember them being good  ), as time went on they just became worse and worse, as Clancy filled them with increasing levels of pure dreck as he strained both to create compelling plots and to contrive legitimate opponents for the US after the USSR fell. The Sum of All Fears is, imo, a good example of Clancy at his best and worst: Throughout the book, a pair of terrorist cells conspire to construct and detonate a nuclear bomb on US soil, in order to compel a nuclear confrontation between the US and USSR. This culminates in a nuclear detonation in Denver at the Superbowl, a tank battle on the streets of Berlin, and a confrontation between a Soviet attack sub and a US missile boat in the northern Pacific. Both sides strain to understand what just happened as confused and contradictory information paints an incomplete picture, and the US President nearly orders a nuclear strike before Tom Clancy's self-insert hijacks the Hot Line to explain what's going on and cool down tensions. All of this (except for the ending bit) is (In the view of when I read it when I was 13) great, with lots of action and extremely high stakes. However, it is also only makes up, at most, a third of a very large book — and the other 2/3 of the novel is just awful, featuring a nonsensical subplot where the National Security Advisor (who's portrayed as an evil feminist harpy that's also loving the president) tries to break up Jack Ryan's marriage, the world's worst proposal for peace in Israel, and all kinds of other nonsense. So, yeah. Not the worst author I've ever read, and many of his books have legitimate good moments. But there's also a whole lot of bad, and it would only get worse as the books became longer and the plots/opponents grew less plausible.
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Mar 30, 2022 21:38
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I will say that his treatment of the Muslim terrorists in that book, along with the incident sparking the crisis in Israel in the first place, are pretty solid.
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Mar 30, 2022 21:42
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zoux posted:Sure, but the genesis of the question was my (admittedly anecdotal, single-sourced) friend's MI dad who said that he saw the same poo poo when he was stationed in Moscow and Berlin. I had expected him to say, oh they're way worse now, but in his opinion they aren't. I had also thought the Soviet army was a formidable fighting force, at least through the 80's. I mean it took a whole Rambo to defeat them in Afghanistan. The same what? Attempted invasion of Moscow or Berlin?
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Mar 30, 2022 21:44
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:The same what? Attempted invasion of Moscow or Berlin? Basically that the Soviet military in the 1980s was just as plagued by the same issues we're seeing in Ukraine today. Bad command and control, bad logistics, corruption, etc. Secondary question based on viral video of a Japanese woman learning for the first time that Imperial Japan was allied with Nazi Germany: how do they teach WWII in Japan? zoux fucked around with this message at 21:58 on Mar 30, 2022 |
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Mar 30, 2022 21:47
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Acebuckeye13 posted:the world's worst proposal for peace in Israel lol was this the one where Swiss troops were deployed
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Mar 30, 2022 22:04
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