This book is hard on NATO, because everyone else is so anxious to handle it with exaggerated delicacy. I am personally firmly committed to this most successful of all alliances, but I also believe that we have allowed NATO to evolve into something of a spoiled child at an unacceptable relative cost to the security and economy of the United States. NATO has tremendous latent combat power that may fail to show to full effect on the battlefield simply because we have all been so anxious to avoid sober self-criticism in peacetime. As a citizen of the United States, I place a value beyond words on the preservation of western civilization (with all its discontents), yet I cannot rationalize the sacrifice of a single American soldier’s life because we acquiesced to folly in fear of an ally’s tantrum.
This book does not presuppose that a war is either imminent or inevitable — indeed, the declarations of Mikhael Gorbachev offer grounds for careful optimism — and it should be clear from the events described in these pages that war is not becoming any more attractive an option for the solution of our problems as military technology improves. Authors are marvelously privileged in that they can kill tens of thousands without shedding any real blood, but the paper war in which the reader engages is only a comfortable shadow of the potential horror of modern land warfare. This is ultimately a work of fiction; a cautionary tale on one level, an effort at creative investigation on another, it frankly means to entertain. If there is a conscious message between its covers, it is not that there will be a war with that differently uniformed collection of human beings east of the Great Wall of Europe, but that, should such a war occur, we will be opposed by other men of flesh and blood, with their own talents, ambitions, and dreams. Thankfully, I believe that the great majority of them resemble the great majority of us in their desire simply to get on with the business of living.
About the Author
Ralph Peters is a veteran U.S. Army intelligence officer, with extensive tactical experience in Europe. A Soviet analyst and linguist, he has published widely on military affairs, and his work has been translated into various foreign languages. An earlier novel, Bravo Romeo, appeared in 1981.
“RED ARMY is about the men behind the Soviet guns,” he writes. “My fundamental goal was to bring those men to life, in their rich human variety… to see how they might respond in the context of modern battle.”