โ Scribed by Brown, Dale
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Brown's expertise in depicting modern sea-air combat makes his latest techno-thriller a heavy contender for a hot summer read. In 1994, confrontation between China and the Philippines over the oil-rich Spratly Islands flares into a shooting war. A nuclear strike on the Philippine navy brings America into the game, and an anxious president commits the First Air Battle Wing, whose core is a force of B-52s, B-1s and B-2 Stealth bombers crewed by the elite of the Strategic Air Command, to smash a Chinese invasion fleet heading for Mindanao. Brown's presentation of the Sino-Philippine dispute is unconvincing, and his two-dimensional characters, including Air Force Col.Mac MacClanahan (from Flight of the Old Dog , do little more than advance the plot. Moreover, his conviction that aircraft can ultimately overwhelm seaborne defense systems and his insistence on the continued importance of manned strategic bombers are not likely to be universally conceded. These shortcomings, however, are far outweighed by Brown's ability to convey the technological tactics of modern warfare, especially the decisive role of electronics in cockpits and on ship's bridges, and to integrate these details into an exciting war story. Author tour.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
War erupts almost immediately when America pulls out of the Philippines and China slips in to fill the power vacuum. A few of the characters flying Brown's gadget-filled war planes previously appeared in Day of the Cheetah (1989). Glossary entries (176) and a warm dedication to strategic air power generalissimo Curtis LeMay accurately signal the approach of a superacronymic, high-tech military adventure. The casus belli this time is Chinese enforcement of that country's ancient claim to the Spratly Islands--a tiny, uninhabitable, barely visible, mineral-rich chain halfway between the Asian mainland and the Philippines. The Philippines, at last free of their long-term American tenants, also claim the Spratlys, and a shootout in the atoll between the two Asian nations' navies escalates much too quickly into full-scale war as the Chinese, led by a maniacal admiral, pop off a small nuclear device and then take the opportunity to invade the Philippine mainland--where the leftist first vice-president in the coalition government is only too happy to welcome them. A very unhappy American government has to throw together a battle plan on very short notice, but thanks to the inventive skills of the military-industrial complex's most talented techno-weenie, the Air Force has use of a new generation of spy satellites that, when paired with a souped-up B-2 Stealth bomber turns the air war into an immense video game. Genuinely exciting fight scenes are swamped by oceans of technical detail of interest primarily to the pencil-protector crowd. -- Copyright ยฉ1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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