Customer Reviews

War of Eagles: Op-Center 12 (Tom Clancy's Op-Center)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I am a fan of the Op-Center books and have read all but two of them. I love the action and suspense and the characters are great. This book had potential, but was ruined when Paul Hood was removed from Op-Center. He has been the central character throughout the series and to remove him is absolutely absurd. It would have been different if he retired or quit on his own, but he was fired and a general took his place. Throughout the book I hoped that Hood would regain his job, or that the tyrant general would get fired. At the end I was thoroughly dissapointed to find that Bob Herbert, another main character, was fired. I felt as though the enemy had won for the first time in this series. I have never written an online review before, but I felt that it was necessary in this case so that Op-Center fans could avoid this horrible book.

This is the best one yet of the bestselling Op-Center series! The leading characters are all there, and the action kept me on the edge of the seat. It ends in a way that leaves the reader even more hungry and anxious for the sequel to the story.

The same characters are here, but they are assigned different roles. Altogether it held my interest throughout.

If you are a fan of the Op-Center series you will be very dissapointed. It is a slow moving story line and our favorite characters of the past are now written with little or no personality. Story lines must advance but the series is being killed.

After the disappointment of the previous book in the Op-Center series, I was fully prepared to be disappointed by this one as well. Fortunately, this book is a significant improvement on the previous book, as well as several before that. Op-Center has a new director and Paul Hood has moved to the White House as a special envoy to the President, and is immediately faced with a crisis brewing in China. This story is well paced, with a credible crisis and great character interaction. Like the other Op-Center books, this book will never be mistaken for great literature, but it is entertaining and manages to avoid most of the flaws that marred many of the earlier books.

This is the first Op-Center book I have read, and I may read one or two more. As a retired Military Intelligence Officer of 25 years, I found the story to be of little relation to reality from many different standpoints. Many of the terms used by the author were not correct, ex., "operative," instead of "agent:" "floater," (?) instead of "sleeper" or "mole," etc. (I thought a floater was someone who went around filling in temporarily for folks who were absent). The author wrote from a "mickey mouse" standpoint and apparently had only a fractional understanding of the real world of intelligence collection (IC). IC is separate from political operations, such as most of the book is about. "Intel collects and reports, and the pol agents do."

The author seems to be trying to educate his readers to believe that the Chinese are really nice peaceful and friendly people who only want to be friends with the US and are really just like us. Whether that is really true remains to be seen. The Chinese come from an entirely different background, history, political and social system. In fact, China is dominateded by a serious Marxist Socialist government whose ultimate goal is to put the whole world under Marxist Socialist control, making everyone a government subject and a political and economic slave under centralized tyranny, as George Orwell's "1984" depicts. This is already true inside China. If a tiger takes a bath in bleach and says, "I'm only a big pussycat," what is it?

Much of the real life backdrop was omitted, concentrating only on the central characters and immediate action, thus giving a distorted picture. In real life, many, many more functionaries would be involved. The book is written from an outsider's standpoint, with little understanding of real life military and high Federal governmental office atmosphere and operations. Folks are nowhere near as direct, candid and forthright as depicted.

The story was overly simplistic so as to be unrealistic to the knowledgeable, but exciting to the uninitiated nontheless.

Constantly referreng to Mike Rogers as a "former general" was most inaccurate. Once a general, always a general, just not on the active duty list anymore; but still entitled by Congress to the privileges of the rank.

Putting a three star general with a military intelligence background in charge of political operations is like asking a dentist to perform brain operations, to draw a poor analogy. And the Army general should be only a two star, and probably only a one star. Three stars are only figureheads that shake hands and say nice things. Even an Army Divisional Commander of 13,000 troops is only a two star. LTG Carrie demonstrates a rather unrealistic leadership style, more suited for a field combat command than working with highly professional civilian intelligence and political specialists. In real life, she wouldn't last very long; She has the "wrong stuff" for that job.

She is so out of step with the subtle Op-Center organizational milieu as to be a "cow in a china shop." About the last thing you do as a new military boss is to immediately start making sweeping changes. This only causes confusion, anxieties, power vacuums, misunderstandings, fear, conflicts, loss of organizational balance and efficiency, loss of effectiveness and generally sets the organization back significantly. The axiom applies, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." After the people start getting used to you, thru frequent contact, then you can start making necessary personnel or organizational changes; but not too fast. When you have good people under you getting the job done, you leave them alone even if they have a wart or two (unless they are wrong-doing or corrupt). If people are not allowed to make mistakes, then they will only watch out for themselves to the detriment of the organizational mission. The commander's job is to defend and protect his/her people who are doing their jobs, not offer them up for sacrifice. This general obviously doesn't know how to be human or relate to or understand her subordinates. She doesn't understand the new unit she is in, and undoubtedly will cause the unit to fail in its mission. You treat your people like you would want to be treated (The Golden Rule) applies here as elsewhere.

Hide-bound martinets look good in pictures, but seldom are successful in reality when real jobs calling for teamwork need to be done. Many leaders in the Vietnam Conflict were "fragged" (a live grenade slipped under their beds at night) because they didn't understand how to be human as a leader.

Under her, I do not believe Op-Center will be very efficacious in the future. When you cut the heart out of an operating unit, it takes a long time to come back up to speed. Rather O-C probably will fall into the background when a new team will emerge under Paul Hood and Bob Herbert, et al, directly under the White House. The book is not bad reading, but don't believe everything in it to be gospel, because it is far from that. I give it 3 stars only because it gives some interesting food for thought.

This book breaks your mind right up front.

I have read and followed the op center series.

It's a great series.

This book may not be Tom Clancy's best, but I really didn't think it was that bad. I think he had some strong characters but the story dragged in some places. I'm not sorry that I bought and I would recommend it with a warning: It's a little hard to follow, so you have to read more than one chapter at a time.