Funny, remember reading years ago on FR about Clancy's "Sum of all Fears" and that a Freeper had corrected some of his blatant errors on nuke design. With a passing knowledge of the designs, I spotted the glitches, but ya never know. Before my time on FR so I missed the thread.
There is a lot out there in open source and not hard to make connections if you are inclined. Some years ago when I had access to classified briefings, it was amusing to see the same or similar info elsewhere (AvWk cough cough).
As time goes on, I do have to be careful to separate what I remember as to where it came from. Some is so outdated it certainly no longer matters, but these days, ya never know who is listening.
Schultz mode on:
I know nothing, nothing!
/Schultz
That sounds like technical, and I don't know if he bent the info for a novel, but Clancy was investigated, is what I read.
My interest was in grasping the global movement, strategic effects, vast reading and scouring for information about trends, sensing when something was fading, or asserting, who was bluffing, who was panicking, sensing the changes in focus and emphasis.
Remember SDI? Well I don't know anything about that science, but the Soviets did, my interest was in watching them and their reaction to it, they hated it, feared it, despised it.
In War and Peace, when Kutuzov is trying to gauge the battle progress, he isn't interested in the words reported by his lieutenants, but their demeanor.
Kutuzov was trying to read through them, not to hear their words, but to see through their eyes, to see the truth of what they felt was really happening, so that he could sense the waves of the battle, not be fed words.
I really like Clancy, and the only places that I spot glitches is when he gets too deeply into religion and economics—which happen to be two fields where I hold degrees. Your observations confirm my sense that he talks a good enough technical game to awe the layman, but, in the end, doesn’t quite know what he is talking about.