Armored Cav (Tom Clancy's Military Reference)

This is a good REFERENCE book to quickly educate whoever it is you are teaching, which includes America's Soldiers who are still taught by rote memorization their specific tools and not the context of the modern battlefield--Clancy expresses the heavy fight here better than anyone so far. This is a fight with an armor versus firepower versus mobility struggle at its core, and its equipment driven. His biggest failing is not starting with the tracked tank in WWI and progressing through to Vietnam and giving us the historical context of Cavalry and how light tanks and tracked APCs in the jungles of Southeast Asia rumbled all over the countryside and trounced the enemy with light casualties. He avoids this controversy seeking instead to "plant the seeds" of a lighter, more rapidly deployable air-cavalry by describing the M8 "Buford" Armored Gun System as a replacement for the M551 Sheridan light tank, and conveniently not mentioning the latter was parachute airdropped into combat by the 3/73d Armor BN attached to the 82d Airborne Division for Panama. He then doesn't even mention the M8 in Airborne!, his other non-fiction U.S. Army book. This is a serious oversight. Clearly, Clancy knows the Armored Cav he is writing about is too heavy to rapidly deploy and he is trying to "nudge" it in the right direction without the 2-D tanker-mentality realizing it will have to fly in aircraft and parachute jump and have a negative knee-jerk reaction. But by not describing how U.S. armored vehicles were inferior in some ways to German tanks in WWII, Clancy fails to explain why we went overboard with the M1/M2-M3 families, creating the not-enough armor inferiority complex which drives many in Armor branch which has made the force too heavy to move and irrelevent in a world that moves by air.

However the "silver lining" in this "cloud", is that Clancy explains how the Armored Cav is a mini-combined arms team; with almost all the elements of combat power and if he had the history covered up front (easy to do---get Iron Chariots author Ralph Zumbro and add to the beginning) he could have shown that this combined-arms organization came out of WWII mechanized cavalry experiences when we had to fight for our reconnaissance. Clancy needs to mention briefly how the 1st Cavalry Division was once a helicopter Air Cavalry Division and what went wrong in Vietnam and why it reverted back to a heavy formation.

If you pay attention you will see that Major MacGregor was the S-3 for the Desert Storm armored fight described--he is now Colonel Douglas MacGregor whose book, "Breaking he Phalanx" enlightened the entire Army to the benefits of combining arms on a permanent basis--its his Cavalry mentality that is the inspiration behind the Army's current Brigade Combat Team "transformation" effort. Of course, it cost Colonel MacGregor his career for writing the book because he had a few ideas that were best not presented.

This book is a best-seller; I see no reason why it couldn't be updated with a history of mechanized cavalry to the present (pay attention to what the 11th ACR in Vietnam did), the portions on the M551 Sheridan/M8 AGS corrected and it taking on some new ideas and present the need for a lighter tracked AFV equipped "Global Cavalry" (not on road bound armored car wheels) that would be air-transportable in BOTH USAF fixed-wing aircraft and Army helicopters to effect decisive, 3-Dimensional maneuver capabilities. Such a 3-D force would be the ideal compliment to a heavier, 2-D force (not all of the force to conserve weight for strategic lift) composed of M1/M2s. The 3-D/2-D combination would make this force the force of choice for the 21st century.

Update this, book Mr. Clancy!!!

Airborne!


Skip this one   June 23, 1999
 3 out of 7 found this review helpful

The topic is well worth reading about, but Clancy has just gone through the motions with ARMORED CAV. Try one of his other books, many of them are excellent. DEBT OF HONOR comes to mind, as does EXECUTIVE ORDERS. Or read the new WWII novel, THE TRIUMPH AND THE GLORY, it was magnificent! But avoid Armored Cav, it didn;t do justice at all to a fine branch of the US Army, which deserves better than a half-hearted effort from an otherwise fine writer.


NOT INTERESTING   June 2, 1999
 0 out of 3 found this review helpful

IT IS NOT SUITABLE FOR PEOPLE OF ALL AGES ESPECICALLY TEENAGE


NOT INTERESTING   June 2, 1999
 0 out of 8 found this review helpful

IT IS NOT SUITABLE FOR PEOPLE OF ALL AGES ESPECICALLY TEENAGE


Fluffy   May 4, 1999
 4 out of 7 found this review helpful

Although the discussion of the equipment is comprehensive, the tactical discussion is very weak, and the maps of the Iraqi conflict utilized when talking to General Franks are childish at best. Clancy's discussion of the equipment seems like PR, there has to be some problems with equipment or tactics, but no discussion of it. And I guess to be honest, I don't care that he owns an M4 sherman and an HMMWV and that he "loves them", not very technical. I love Clancy's fictional writings, but I doubt I'll buy any of his other "factual" books.