I am a fan of Tom Clancy and have read a number of his books. I had not read this, however, which is one of his first, being written just after "The Hunt for Red October." I picked it up and was not disappointed.

Essentially this book is reading a war game played out between the USSR vs. NATO. It is a "what if" scenario taking into account myriad factors according to Mr. Clancy's idea of what would occur. It is light on character development but heavy with what Clancy is known for: technically accurate, modern military action. The plot moves quickly, and every page I felt like I was learning some new fact about military hardware or doctrine. The characters are stereotypical American military men who nearly always seem to make the right decisions, as is often the case with Clancy. In his later books you start to see American characters that are less moral, but the line between good and evil is always clearly drawn.

As the reader, you are also keenly aware of Mr. Clancy's political and religious stance as he pulls no punches in proclaiming America as the world's greatest country, or Christianity's virtues. He is at times a little heavy handed with it, which can be a good or bad thing depending on the reader's own beliefs, but for me it never detracted from the story to the point where it was annoying as I found to be the case in some of his later books where he preaches to the reader through his characters.
One aspect of this book that I really enjoyed was the way in which Clancy humanizes the Russian Characters. At times, I found myself pulling for some of them which is the mark of a good writer in my mind. In many of his later books, the antagonists are purely evil with no redeeming characteristics. This detracts from the story in my opinion as they become symbols for ideas rather than actual people.

An interesting aspect of reading this book now after having read all of Clany's more recent books with his famous Jack Ryan character, is seeing how the enemy in the books has changed over time. Then it was the Russians, and now in later books it has gone from extremist Muslims to the Chinese. The story remains largely the same in these books, only the enemies change. The plot in this book is incredibly similar to that of "The Bear and the Dragon," only now that the Russians are no longer communists, they are our allies and not our enemies.

On the whole, if you like action and military technology, this will be a great book for you. If those subjects hold little interest for you, you won't find much to like here. I thoroughly enjoyed it and recommend it.

I'm happy that there's now a Kindle version of this book. There is a problem with the Kindle edition, however. The paragraph spacing is set to have a large space after every paragraph, instead of just major section breaks. This makes, for instance, conversations in the text very distracting with all the whitespace. I'm hoping they correct this and then we can redownload it. In a thriller like this, the difference between contiguous paragraps and separated paragraps is meaningful (it's sort of a punctuation in itself.) So I claim this is a typographical error and it's very distracting.

The book is a classic...one of my favorite books. I am reading the kindle version, and there are issues with optical character recognition. I becomes '1', 'rm' scans as 'm'. Tons of these issues. It is not hurting my enjoyment of the book, but for $6 plus, you would think that someone would proof the kindle version.

Or, another way to put this review is 5 stars for the book, 2 stars for the OCR.

I have many, many, many different war books, fiction and non-fiction, but this is the best that has ever been written. I will read 2-3 of my other books and then pick this one back up to re-read it. I love this book and wish he would come out with a newer version with today's military hardware, global politics, and the world economic situation. It would be very interesting to see just how well Clancy could put a 2009 storyline together in the same magnitude of Red Storm Rising!!

Though this isn't one of Mr Clancy's well-known Jack Ryan stories, it might just be his best novel. The story starts off with a bang, then slowly (but not TOO slowly) builds into one of the most exciting war novels I have ever had the pleasure to read. The plot device of sharing several points of view of a given incident is enlightening and fuels the book's lightning pace. This one should have been made into a blockbuster movie, but I suppose the scope of the thing precludes that possibility. Too bad. One of my personal all-time favorites.