Airborne

Guided Tour

by Tom Clancy

They are America's front lines--serving proudly in forward areas around the world. Representing the very best from the Army and Air Force, the Airborne Task Force is an unstoppable combination of manpower and firepower. Now, Tom Clancy examines this elite branch of our nation's armed forces. With pinpoint accuracy and a style more compelling than any fiction, the acclaimed author of Executive Orders delivers an fascinating account of the Airborne juggernaut--the people, the technology, and Airborne's mission in an ever-changing world... * Two Tom Clancy "mini-novels"--real world scenarios involving the airborne task force * Airborne's weapons of the 21st century, including the Javelin anti-tank missile, the fiber-optically guided N-LOS fire support system, and the Joint Strike Fighter * 18 weeks: Life in an Airborne Alert Brigade * Exclusive photographs, illustrations, and diagrams PLUS: An in-depth interview with the incoming commander of the 18th Airborne Corps, General John Keen

Genres: Nonfiction, Military Fiction, History, War, Military History, Ebooks, Reference

352 pages, ebook

First published November 1, 1997

About the author

Thomas Leo Clancy Jr. was an American novelist and military-political thriller pioneer. Raised in a middle-class Irish-American family, he developed an early fascination with military history. Despite initially studying physics at Loyola College, he switched to English literature, graduating in 1969 with a modest GPA. His aspirations of serving in the military were dashed due to severe myopia, leading him instead to a career in the insurance business.
While working at a small insurance agency, Clancy spent his spare time writing what would become The Hunt for Red October (1984). Published by the Naval Institute Press for an advance of $5,000, the book received an unexpected boost when President Ronald Reagan praised it as “the best yarn.” This propelled Clancy to national fame, selling millions of copies and establishing his reputation for technical accuracy in military and intelligence matters. His meticulous research and storytelling ability granted him access to high-ranking U.S. military officials, further enriching his novels.
Clancy’s works often featured heroic protagonists such as Jack Ryan and John Clark, emphasizing themes of patriotism, military expertise, and political intrigue. Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, he became one of the best-selling authors in America, with titles like Red Storm Rising (1986), Patriot Games (1987), Clear and Present Danger (1989), and The Sum of All Fears (1991) dominating bestseller lists. Several of these were adapted into commercially successful films.
In addition to novels, Clancy co-authored nonfiction works on military topics and lent his name to numerous book series and video game franchises, including Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon, and Splinter Cell. His influence extended beyond literature, as he became a part-owner of the Baltimore Orioles baseball team and was involved in various business ventures, including a failed attempt to purchase the Minnesota Vikings.
Politically, Clancy was a staunch conservative, often weaving his views into his books and publicly criticizing left-leaning policies. He gained further attention after the September 11 attacks, discussing intelligence failures and counterterrorism strategies on news platforms.
Clancy’s financial success was immense. By the late 1990s, his publishing deals were worth tens of millions of dollars. He lived on an expansive Maryland estate featuring a World War II Sherman tank and later purchased a luxury penthouse in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.
He was married twice, first to Wanda Thomas King, with whom he had four children, and later to journalist Alexandra Marie Llewellyn, with whom he had one daughter.
Tom Clancy passed away on October 1, 2013, at the age of 66 due to heart failure. His legacy endures through his novels, their adaptations, and the continuation of the Jack Ryan series by other writers.

Reviews

[itchy · Rating 4 out of 5]

eponymous sentence:
p13: "Airborne... all the way!"

ocr:
p31: When it first rolled out of the hanger in Marietta, the C-5 was the largest production aircraft in the world.4

p68: We're also still modernizing our fleet of armor with the M1A2 variant of the Abrams main battle tank, and the coming--A3 version of the M2/3 Bradley fighting vehicle.

p78: The Center's responsibilities have ranged from developing the specifications of the M2/3 Bradley Fighting Vehicles to the development of tactical doctrine for the employment of the new Javelin antitank guided missile.

p82: The 1/507th also controls a command exhibition parachute team (the Silver Wings), does off-site (non-resident) j umpmaster and Drop Zone Safety Team Leader (DZSTL) training, certifies airborne instructors, conducts airborne refresher training, as well as writing and maintaining the Army's standard airborne training doctrine.

p109: Body armor is particularly valuable in peacekeeping and "operations other than war," where the hazards are sim-ilarto those encounters by civilian law enforcement.

p121: Even if the con-tentof the message is scrambled by encryption, the enemy can still extract useful information by analyzing the radio traffic pattern.

p172: The sexier and more expensive Paveway-series laser-guided bombs (LGBs) or the GBU-15/AGM-130-series electro-optical guided bombs and missiles are reserved for the supersonic members of the USAF Air Combat Command (ACC).7

p207: The change came as a result of something completely unrelated to the Globemaster program: a Justice Department/DoD investigation of contractor insider-information trading known as Operation III Wind.

p268: While Christa I stayed up front, John and Glen moved down to the cargo compartment to watch the loadmasters at work.

p285: In reserve would be2/504, acting as the "push" battalion for the other two, should a deployment be needed.

p363: This actually happened to several Soviet airborne operations behind German lines on the Eastern Front during World War 11.

p363: 4 Admiral Johnson was assigned the job of Chief of Naval Operations following the suicide death of his predecessor, Admiral Mike Boorda, USN.

p366: 7 For a better understanding of this AGM-65 Maverick, see Fighter Wing (Berkley Books, 1995).

Those short yarns at the end were nice treats. All the way.

[Stingray · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tom Clancy’s „Airborne: a Guided Tour of an Airborne Task Force” delivers exactly what the title says to the reader, a vivid, detailed and very enthusiastic but outdated and purely descriptive overview of U.S. Army airborne forces.

The author is widely known as a military and technology enthusiast and this book provides him with ample opportunity to indulge in both. The author wants to provide an overview of the airborne forces for the average reader with no background knowledge. He thus starts out with a short historical introduction how the airborne forces developed over time. The main part about modern day forces is introduced with a lengthy interview with General John M. Keane, then the corps commander of the airborne forces. Then the author provides a documentary-style look on the airborne training program in Fort Benning in great detail. Following this he does a detailed review of weapons, equipment, vehicles and even combat rations with much detail but also his usual grandeur, that every piece of equipment was world class, the best there was, etc. Although the descriptions for example of the helicopters only provide an overview, especially the technical drawings are nicely done. The next chapter on the Air Force recognizes the close coordination of Army and Air Force units in deploying airborne forces. Here this coordination is described as well as the aircraft used to transport and support the forces. The following chapter on the rotating ready brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division describes the training and certification cycle the brigades rotate through and stand ready to deploy on short notice globally. Only in the last chapter Clancy writes fiction as he tries to describe realistically how an airborne task force was to deploy in a fictitious scenario.

Overall this work is by now severely outdated. Written in 1997 Clancy provides information on organizational structures, which have since changed, equipment long exchanged or systems like the RAH-66 and LOSAT, which never became operational. Although many elements Clancy describes are still valid today, the uninformed reader has no way of knowing, which information is still relevant and which is not. A second major drawback of the book is its completely descriptive nature. The author only describes and neither analyzes nor reviews critically. He enthusiastically describes how everything was working just fine, everybody was hard working and motivated and the equipment was superb. Even for the uninformed reader a more realistic appraisal of the situation would have been nice. Nevertheless the book provided a good introduction to the topic at the time and came with a nice bibliography, good drawings and organigrams and provided information in a vivid and accessible fashion.

Overall this is an outdated introduction to the airborne forces of the U.S. Army, which is well written, if somewhat overenthusiastic and may still be used to get access to the topic as long as more updated works are also consulted.

[ED Anthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

Decent book if you want super detail about airborne history, activities and training organization in the 1990's. A lot of Air Force and Marine/Navy information include. Lots of detailed info on kinds of military armament that no longer is utilized. Needs to be updated for readers now.
No mention of Special Forces or 173d Airborne in Vietnam. Tedious read.

[Timothy M. Tress]

Great info on USA airborne warriors.

[Harold Martinez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Was part of the 1st Bn. 508 PIR. The book brought back so many memories and so factual. Good history and fantastic reading.

[Hilmi Isa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seperti Fighter Wing: A Guided Tour of an Air Force Combat Wing,Airborne merupakan salah satu buku di dalam siri Tom Clancy: A Guided Tour (buku kelima). Pada buku kali ini,Tom Clancy menghidangkan kepada para pembaca bagaimana sebuah unit tentera unik,kumpulan tentera yang dipanggil Airborne atau Paratrooper,beroperasi. Lebih tepat,unit tentera darat Amerika Syarikat (AS) yang mempunyai keupayaan melakukan terjunan daripada kapal terbang,menyerang sasaran dengan jumlah yang besar iaitu 82nd Airborne Division menjadi fokus perbincangan utama.
Perbincangan mengenai unit tentera ini agak komprehensif. Ini termasuk sejarah 82nd Airborne Division,peralatan yang digunakan,strategi dan taktik operasi tentera berpayung terjun dan lain-lain lagi. Namun,tidak terhad kepada itu sahaja. Beberapa perkara lain yang berkaitan dengan operasi penerjunan anggota tentera daripada pesawat pengangkut tentera dan yang membantu perjalanan operasi yang lancar turut dibincangkan. Sebagai contoh,pesawat-pesawat utama (C-130 Hercules dan C-17 Globemaster III) yang digunakan untuk mengangkut anggota tentera divisyen ini juga dibentangkan oleh penulis dengan agak teliti. Ini termasuk sejarah pengoperasian,spesifikasi,rekod operasi dan lain-lain perkara berkaitan. Turut diselitkan dua buah novel mini yang membantu para pembaca memahami dengan lebih jelas peranan,keupayaan dan bagaimana 82nd Airborne Division diaturgerakkan jika berlakunya konflik di serata dunia.
Terbitan asal buku ini adalah pada tahun 1997. Kini,pada tahun 2013,sudah 16 tahun berlalu. Sudah tentu,dengan peredaran waktu,banyak perkara yang telah berlaku kepada tentera darat AS secara amnya dan kepada 82nd Airborne Division secara khususnya. Sebagai contoh,senjata atau raifal utama yang dibincangkan di dalam buku ini adalah M16A2. Namun,pada masa kini,raifal utama divisyen ini adalah M4A1 (senjata ini berkemungkinan akan juga digantikan pada masa hadapan). Ada juga program-program ketenteraan yang dibatalkan atas dasar kos yang tinggi. Sebagai contoh,pada tahun 2004,program helikopter stealth RAH-66 Commanche telah dibatalkan atas faktor kos kajian dan pembangunan yang tinggi dan ketidakpraktikalan fungsi dan penggunaan helikopter tersebut di medan perang sebenar. Namun,pada masa yang sama,wujud juga program ketenteraan yang dibincangkan di dalam buku ini menjadi kenyataan dan dan dimasukkan di dalam perkhidmatan. Sebagai contoh,First Strike Ration yang mengandungi makanan yang mudah dimakan di mana-mana sahaja ketika di dalam operasi tentera. Menunya juga lebih menepati kehendak generasi anggota tentera masa kini. Ini bermakna,ada sebahagian maklumat yang terkandung di dalam buku ini sudah lapuk dan tidak relevan. Namun demikian,kandungan buku ini masih relevan terutamanya yang berkaitan dengan sejarah dan taktik pengoperasian tentera payung terjun yang masih tidak berubah sehingga sekarang.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of Clancy's non-fiction looks at the armed forces in the 90's, I approached this book as history. Though written at the time to give a contemporary look at the airborne training, operations, technology/equipment, and units, the airborne world shown in this book was not the post-911 airborne I myself am familiar with. It put real flesh on the bones of stories I'd hear from the older paratroopers who had grown up living in the DRB cycle and getting EDRE alerts. During "peak" Iraq, these weren't happening as a practical matter of the deployment cycle.
It was also interesting to see those predictions of Clancy's (really, the anticipated "Force XXI" future the Army was planning out at the time) that turned out wrong in the aftermath of September 2001. A glaring example was the planned integration of the Comanche helicopter into contingency operations, which was cancelled in 2004 due to high costs and the need to develop UAV technology. One prediction, at least, was correct: "If America has gone there, the 82nd has usually been leading the way... and will be the country's spearhead in the future."
With that said, I have to give a point off for the prose of the book. While I can forgive the laborious detail when describing systems (one has to expect such from Clancy), the book often slips into a badly executed and forced conversational style with too many oddly placed exclamations (!) and forced slang that doesn't ring true (I've never head an American say "para", for example, when referring to paratroopers).

[Liam · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was an extremely shoddy piece of hackwork even by Mr. Clancy's low standards. I suspect the old bastard made some bad investments along the way, probably during the 1980s, because he turned into a greedy fucking rip-off artist in the '90s. It is a shame that this particular book is so bad, from my perspective, for two reasons: firstly, paratroopers generally make a damned good story, and it is a story which I personally find quite fascinating; secondly, David Petraeus (then a Colonel) was a brigade commander in the 82nd Airborne Division when Clancy was researching this book, and he would have been an interesting individual even then. That second point is actually the main reason I made the effort to get a copy of this book, although it had been on my "to-read" list for some time. Unfortunately, not only does the book provide little coverage of Petraeus, offering no insights into his character or personality, but it also reads like an undergraduate term paper plagiarized in pieces from newspaper articles and military manuals by an imbecilic student. Clancy spends most of the pages on his usual dumbed-down technical specifications of military equipment, in this case ad nauseum... I'm really fucking glad I only paid 1¢ plus shipping for this book, 'cause that is just about what it's worth!

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

As all books by Clancy I loved it. Somehow different from standard novels