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Red Storm Rising
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 Cover of 1986 first edition |
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| Author | Tom Clancy & Larry Bond |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Techno-thriller, Novel |
| Publisher | Putnam Publishing |
| Released | August 1986 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 656 p. (hardback edition) |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-399-13149-3 (hardback edition) |
Red Storm Rising is a 1986 techno-thriller novel by Tom Clancy and Larry Bond about a Third World War in Europe between NATO and Warsaw Pact forces, set around the mid-1980s, probably in 1986 or 1987. Though there are other novels dealing with a fictional World War III, this one is notable for the way in which numerous settings for the action—from Atlantic convoy duty to shooting down reconnaissance satellites to tank battles in Germany—all have an integral part to play on the outcome. This is one of two novels that has no association with Clancy’s others, as it does not fall in the Ryanverse.
The novel eventually lent its name to a game development company called Red Storm Entertainment, which Clancy co-founded in 1997.
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Azerbaijani terrorists destroy a new oil-production facility at Nizhnevartovsk, USSR, severely crippling Soviet oil production and threatening to wreck the Soviet economy. Facing a perceived need to make crippling concessions to the West to survive the crisis, the Politburo chooses a different path: war. The Politburo decides to seize the Persian Gulf oil fields by force. According to the Carter Doctrine, any attack on the Persian Gulf is an attack on a vital strategic interest of the United States, and will be treated as such, meaning a military response. To prevent NATO’s combined reaction, they first launch a KGB operation to split NATO by making it appear as if West Germany launched an unprovoked terrorist attack on the Soviet Union, followed by an invasion of Europe in response to that “attack.” With West Germany occupied, and NATO defeated, it is expected (well, hoped) that the United States will not feel the need to rescue the Arab oil states, as it can meet its oil needs with Western Hemisphere sources.
The KGB operation has limited success: the coming Soviet attack on Germany is detected only a few days in advance when a Spetsnaz major is captured in Aachen. The officer’s capture gives NATO time to start mobilization and providing sufficient evidence to prevent the complete fracturing of the alliance. Nonetheless, it scores some success, as several countries, notably Greece and Japan, are convinced that this is a “German-Russian disagreement” that they refuse to be involved in. Thus, the Soviets have a quiet Pacific theater, and remove the southern front in the coming conflict in Western Europe as Turkey is unable (or unwilling) to launch an offensive alone. NATO aircraft manage to reduce Soviet ground superiority early in the war by using first-generation stealth planes and tactical fighter-bombers to eliminate five Soviet Mainstay AWACS aircraft, several bridges, bridge equipment and crews, and Soviet tactical fighters, but this advantage is short lived. Germany becomes the epicenter of the conflict; here, NATO forces slowly give ground while inflicting terrible losses on the Red Army.
One of the strategic masterstrokes of the Soviet Union’s opening moves in the war is its seizure of Iceland, capturing the NATO air station at Keflavík. This disrupts the G-I-U.K. SOSUS line (American seabed hydrophones), expected to prevent the Soviet Navy from operating effectively in the Atlantic by making it impossible for their ships and submarines to enter the Atlantic undetected. In addition, the Soviet Navy isolate and protect their SSBN fleet, freeing their SSN force. The Soviet Navy is able to act as an offensive weapon, and the Warsaw Pact seriously damages NATO’s war effort by interdicting resupply convoys coming from North America with both aircraft and submarines. This advantage is put to immediate use, as a NATO carrier battle group, led by USS Nimitz, USS Saratoga and the French carrier Foch, is successfully attacked by Soviet Backfire bombers. Foch is sunk, the transport Saipan explodes, taking 2,500 Marines with her, and the two American carriers are forced to spend several weeks in drydock at Southampton, England.
In West Germany, the battle becomes a war of attrition that the Soviets expect to win, having greater reserves of men and matériel. NATO holds the Warsaw Pact forces to small but continual advances, but only through the profligate expenditure of every weapon at hand, and as the Soviet success in destroying the Atlantic convoys continues things start to look grim for the NATO forces. With the death of the Soviet political favorite CinC-West by a NATO air attack on the Russian rear lines, the more competent CinC-Southwest and his second-in-command, General-Colonel Pavel Leonidovich Alekseyev take over on the German front. Alekseyev commands a successful Soviet attack on the town of Alfeld, finally giving the Red Army the breakthrough it needs. As the OMG (Operational Maneuver Group) forces start to deploy, NATO looks to lose hold on all of Germany east of the Weser.
When a brilliantly timed naval attack on Russian bomber bases with submarine-launched cruise missiles cripples the Soviet bomber force, the Soviets lose their most effective convoy-killing weapon. Simultaneously, the Red Army proves unable to capitalize on its breakthrough, which leads the Politburo to consider the use of tactical nuclear weapons at the front to regain the initiative. A captured Soviet pilot from the Iceland campaign also (under heavy “medication”) reveals to the NATO forces why the war was started: OIL. The NATO forces immediately reevaluate their bombing tactics over the front and start blowing up every fuel depot they can find (which had been widely spaced and smaller than usual); this cripples the Soviet tanks, keeping them from launching at least one major attack which would have caught the NATO forces shorthanded and allowed reinforcements to arrive prior to the battle.
Eventually, General Alekseyev recognizes this suicidal madness for what it is, and joins forces with the head of the KGB and the Petroleum Minister, Mikhail Eduardovich Sergetov, in staging a coup d’état, replacing the Politburo with a Troika consisting of Sergetov, Agriculture Minister F. M. Krylov, and longtime Politburo member Pyotr Bromkovskiy. A cease-fire is sought by the Soviets and accepted by an exhausted NATO, and the aftermath of the war is left unwritten.
- General-Colonel Pavel Leonidovich Alekseyev, SA – first 2IC-Southwest and later Commander in Chief, Western Theater
- Commander Edward Morris, USN – Commanding officer, USS Pharris, later USS Reuben James
- Commander Daniel X. McCafferty, USN – Commanding officer, USS Chicago
- Sergeant First Class Terry Mackall, USA – tank commander on the German front. Promoted to 2LT during the course of the war.
- Mikhail Eduardovich Sergetov – Candidate (nonvoting) Member of the Soviet Politburo and Petroleum Minister.
- Lieutenant Commander Robert A. Toland, III., USN-R – NSA analyst. Promoted to commander just prior to the outbreak of war.
- First Lieutenant Michael Edwards, USAF – Meteorological officer, Keflavík Air Base
- Captain Ivan Mikhailovich Sergetov, SA – Alekseyev’s aide-de-camp and Sergetov’s son. Promoted to major during the war.
- Major Amelia “Buns” Nakamura, USAF – A female F-15C pilot who becomes the first American female ace pilot by shooting down three Tu-16 Badger bombers and, using ASM-135 antisatellite missiles to destroy two Soviet ocean reconnaissance satellites.
This techno-thriller is an examination of a conventional ground war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Clancy suggests that several conventional ideas about a ground conflict between modern armies are wrong. For example, he proposes that munitions expenditures would be far higher than projected; that combat helicopters like the AH-64 Apache and the Mi-24 Hind are not nearly as survivable as projected; that the mobility granted by modern armor means that the Soviet doctrine of a massed thrust achieving a breakthrough of the enemy lines is ill-founded—the enemy can withdraw and reform its lines too easily for his forces to break; and modern air power can only dominate a battlefield in the absence of an opposing modern air force.
Clancy also incorporated the rumored F-19 stealth fighter into his plot. The existence of stealth aircraft was an open secret among aerospace watchers in the 1980s, but was highly classified at the time the novel was written. In actuality, computers of the day were not powerful enough to design the F-19’s curved surfaces, resulting instead in the simpler and more angular F-117 Nighthawk.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq, although far more of a mismatch than a late-1980s NATO-Warsaw Pact conflict would have been, did provide some evidence for Clancy's hypotheses. The US Army’s Apaches proved more vulnerable to ground fire than had been predicted, and by the war’s end the majority of close air support was being delivered by the more heavily armored A-10 Thunderbolt II ground attack aircraft. Fittingly, Clancy identifies the A-10 as being a key weapon in his Red Storm Rising scenario. His predictions on the high rate of munitions expenditure also appears to have been borne out—even though the initial attack on Iraq was short, it drained U.S. arsenals to an alarming extent, forcing the Pentagon to undertake a crash program to rebuild stocks of smart bombs.
Evidence for the prediction of high expenditures of munitions was already available from the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In this conflict both sides consumed munitions so rapidly that within one week of the start of combat, both the United States and the Soviet Union had to airlift munitions to their respective client states (Israel for the U.S., Egypt and Syria for the Soviet Union) to avoid a collapse of their respective armed forces.
Another point of interest is the use of America’s Iowa-class battleships, which in the novel are sent to Iceland to support the United States Marines during their amphibious landing. The effective use of battleships in modern war was demonstrated during the 1991 Gulf War, when the Missouri and Wisconsin shelled shore-based artillery sites, antiship missile facilities, and Iraqi troop concentrations arrayed along the coasts of Iraq and Kuwait, and on Faylaka Island.
Red Storm Rising is basic literature at many military academies inside and outside the United States, as are several other books by Tom Clancy[citation needed]. It is also frequently referred to by military scientists and is widely considered to be one of the most realistic representations of an imagined East-West war[citation needed].
In 1989, TSR, Inc. released a board game designed by Douglas Niles, based on the book. The game won the Origins Award for Best Modern-Day Boardgame of 1989 and Best Graphic Presentation of a Boardgame of 1989.
There is also a computer game based on the book’s scenario produced and released by MicroProse in the late 1980s. The player has a nuclear submarine in his command. It features adventure elements and a plot in addition to the simulation. The skill level can be changed by changing some of the initial conditions of the scenario. The game was released for the Amiga (released in 1990), Atari ST (1989), Commodore 64 (1988) and IBM-PC (circa 1989) home computers.
The game centers around the effects that submarine warfare would have on the World War III concept presented in the Tom Clancy book. There were two styles of play: Single missions, where one can select the general type of engagement they would fight; and the campaign, where a strategic map and issued missions added another layer of depth to the game.
Unlike other games at the time like the World War II simulation Silent Service, or EA’s 688 Attack Sub, Red Storm Rising (RSR) was not as graphically based. The game centered around a screen that showed the “plots” of the ships, using the abstract symbols used by the USN. From this screen you could set a course, target your weapons, and see incoming fire. The enemy was not always clear however, as your passive sonar had to build up a “contact rating.” If this was below 90%, your contact would be “possible” and there would be a chance that the distance would be off, at higher levels sometimes by a very significant amount.
Other screens included a “acoustical signature” screen, where the “contact return” would show on the analyzer and one could match it to known signatures. A correct guess would boost the contact rating by 10% and put an ID tag on the ship icon. The “Oceanic” or “Sea Conditions” screen showed the current model of the acoustical conditions of the game area. It provided a depth view with concepts like the thermal layer to allow the player to “hide” by placing the submarine in a more advantageous acoustical position.
The game was very popular, but did not spawn a series of games like Silent Service or 688, mainly because the simple graphics were not as worthwhile to update as games moved into 3D. Still many consider it to be the most realistic portrayal of nuclear submarine combat, almost entirely dispensing with the notion of “periscope runs” in the face of modern sonar.
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