I stopped reading Clancy after the appallingly bad Debt of Honor, which left me

1. amazed that anyone could write a thriller about Japan that was even dumber than Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun, and
2. certain that if Clancy was this wrong on a subject I did know, he was probably just as wrong on many of the subjects I didn’t know.

(And that doesn’t even address the quality of the writing.)

But, regardless—and taking it as a given that there are no irredeemable genres, only irredeemable books—this seems like the sort of thing that could fuel a really classy technothriller.

It was a problem all the ground forces suffered. Some units outran the range of high-bandwidth communications relays. Downloads took hours. Software locked up. And the enemy was sometimes difficult to see in the first place. As the marines’ own “lessons learned” report puts it, “The [First Marine] Division found the enemy by running into them, much as forces have done since the beginning of warfare.” Describing the army’s battle at Objective Peach, John Gordon, another senior researcher at Rand and also a retired army officer, put it this way: “That’s the way it was done in 1944.”

. . . Once the invasion began, breakdowns quickly became the norm. For the movement of lots of data—such as satellite or spy-plane images—between high-level commanders and units in the field, the military employed a microwave-based communications system originally envisioned for war in Europe. This system relied on antenna relays carried by certain units in the advancing convoy. Critically, these relays—sometimes called “Ma Bell for the army”—needed to be stationary to function. Units had to be within a line of sight to pass information to one another. But in practice, the convoys were moving too fast, and too far, for the system to work. Perversely, in three cases, U.S. vehicles were actually attacked while they stopped to receive intelligence data on enemy positions. “A lot of the guys said, ‘Enough of this shit,’ and turned it off,” says Perry, flicking his wrist as if clicking off a radio. “‘We can’t afford to wait for this.’”

In science fiction we call this AM/FM—“distinguishing the inevitable clunky real-world faultiness of ‘Actual Machines’ from the power-fantasy techno-dreams of ‘Fucking Magic.’” Do any of the technothriller writers do this? Or are technical difficulties something that only happens to the Bad Guys?