Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Its hard to compress more information in one small book than Clancy has done in Armored Cav, if you want to quibble with details write your own book and do better! Clancy has to take what he's been given and make an educated opinion of things to say what he has to say. He is wrong about the M551 Sheridan and the BFV for example, but that's ok, he has no direct personal experience.
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!
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