Red Storm Rising (review)

228 SAIS REVIEW the Soviets believed 007 to be a spy plane. Johnson, of course, views it as part of a deliberate cover-up once the "spy mission" had gone wrong. Both Hersh's and Johnson's theories are a bit like Rube Goldberg contraptions — absurdly complicated but intriguing. A large measure of conjecture is unavoidable because so much information has either not been made available, or, like 007's black box, will never be (thoughJohnson thinks it possible that even here a cover-up took place). In the end what one believes depends a great deal on one's philosophy of history— conspiracy or confusion. It is certainly difficult to see how any secret plan on the scale imagined by Johnson would not have leaked in some form after the shootdown. Despite the many improbabilities and glib suppositions, it is easier to believe Hersh, to believe in the foul-up rather than the plot. One thing seems clear: plot or no, the incident was an intelligence and propaganda gold mine for the United States and a fascinating object lesson in superpower relations. Red Storm Rising. By Tom Clancy. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1986. 652 pp. $19.95/cloth. Reviewed by Frederick Ehrenreich, Ph.D. candidate, SAIS. World War III sells. This fact propelled Red Storm Rising, Tom Clancy's second military suspense novel, to the top of The Washington Post's area best-seller list within days of its publication. Its scenario of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe and detailed descriptions of contemporary military hardware and tactics made it the book to take to the beach this past summer for military officers, intelligence analysts, and armchair strategists of all varieties and competencies. Clancy's book invites comparison with The Third World War: August 1985, the very successful novel by British General SirJohn Hackett—published in 1979 as a warning against NATO complacency— and its sequel, The Third World War: The Untold Story. It is a testament to Clancy that the Maryland insurance man and war game aficionado has written a book on a par with the work of Hackett, a former commander of NATO's Northern Army Group who has been described as Britain's foremost soldier-scholar. Clancy's version of World War III is seen through the eyes of participants, including two Soviet generals, a U.S. tank commander, a candidate-member of the Soviet Politburo, the pilot of a "Stealth" fighter, and three U.S. naval officers (who between them manage in the space of a few months to serve on two antisubmarine warfare (ASW) frigates, an attack submarine, two aircraft carriers, and in several important intelligence and advisory positions to U.S. and NATO commanders). Written from this personal perspective, Red Storm Rising is often more interesting than Hackett's work, which contained so many bureaucratic organization names and acronyms that it sometimes read like the Pentagon telephone directory. As one might guess from a book that has a picture of a submarine on the cover, the story concentrates on the naval aspects of the war. Indeed, Clancy admits in the foreword that his purpose in writing Red Storm Rising was to BOOK REVIEWS 229 describe a contemporary battle of the Atlantic. The detailed descriptions of the high-tech cat-and-mouse games played by submarines and ASW forces carry on in the style of The Hunt for Red October, Clancy's earlier novel, a book described by one Pentagon analyst as a first-rate textbook on antisubmarine warfare tactics and technology. Interesting as naval warfare is, the layman reader may wish that the action shifted back more frequently to the European battlefields— or anywhere else— during those passages in which the author devotes several pages to a helicopter dipping sonar buoys in an hours-long effort to find a submarine whose actions are peripheral, at best, to the outcome of the war. Clancy is particularly effective in detailing the U.S. effort to resupply the allied armies in Europe using Atlantic convoys and the navy's efforts to defend the merchant ships from submarines and fleets of long-range Backfire and Badger bombers. He vividly describes how each side takes...