You have to remember that Tom Clancy is also a product of the Cold War and, especially when he first began writing, was influenced by (and contributed to) the quantity of academic and pseudo-academic sources in the West hypothesizing about the Doomsday scenarios of a Third World War in Europe. Clancy was in no way alone in capitalizing on this plethora of material to craft new, exciting, and topical stories about common Cold War fears which had, by the 80's infiltrated most aspects of Western culture after 30+ years of living under the threat of MAD. Clancy's biggest example of this is probably "Red Storm Rising," which, although successful, was just one of a number of other stories like Sir Kohn Hackett's "The Third World War: August 1985," which combined public fears of war with declassified and readily available NATO source material. Clancy's books in general have a pattern of doing this - closely following current events to create stories which are uniquely topical. Thus we get Clancy novels like Patriot Games (Irish Time of Troubles), The Cardinal of the Kremlin (the Soviet-Afghan War), A Clear and Present Danger (80's War in Drugs), Executive Orders (the Gulf War), and The Sum of All Fears/Rainbow Six (War on Terrorism) which all closely follow the events they are based on both in theme and in publication date.

I write this to give a bit of context to Clancy as a writer, and specifically as a topical writer. Clancy has frequently collaborated with military and government sources to research and write his books. However, he is first and foremost an author - an entertainer. His access to military information is in no way exclusive and there are a number of other authors who used the same types of sources to write similar works. Clancy is just the most successful author in this particular niche of military-political dramas. In some regards, one could say that Clancy has been more prescient, as well as more successful and prolific, than other authors in this genre. Both "Rainbow Six" and "The Sum of All Fears," are novels about the threat of terrorism which predate the War on Terror. Some of his writing about the importance of drones and information warfare (Executive Orders and onward) is strangely prescient for a mid-90's novel. But at the end of the day, it is clear that Clancy isn't any more than he appears - a topical writer using current events and current military literature to create his stories.

So was the current, let's say mid-to-late-80's declassified literature about Soviet military readiness (and thereby Clancy and other fiction authors using that material) accurate? Obviously, studies and plans funded by NATO were by their very nature intended to be as accurate as possible, given the limitations of Western intelligence regarding the Soviet military and state. But they painted an incomplete picture of the Soviet Union, and often even the best analysts could make gravely incorrect inferences. Just look at the failure of Western intelligence to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union for how incomplete an understanding was possessed by Western analysts. Some types of information were also much harder to obtain. It was relatively easy for the West to accurately estimate the strength of Soviet forces - numbers of tanks and guns and aircraft were readily available and relatively accurate. So too estimates on troop numbers and dispositions. But information on the inner political workings of the Soviet Union remained poor and the question of exactly how these forces would potentially be used remained open to speculation.

Thus, if we take "Red Storm Rising" as an example, we can see that most of the raw information - names and sizes of units involved, likely routes of attack, capabilities of many weapons systems, etc. - Clancy is remarkably in line with NATO estimates and plans. However, when we get beyond the military minutiae and into the plot of the book, we see an unimaginative alternate history scenario in which it is the threat of nuclear war, and not the national question or economic concerns, which leads to the collapse of the USSR. The novel reads like a dramatization of one of NATO's wargames from the early 80's, and in many ways that's all it is. The book also suffers from a lack of up-to-date information regarding some military technologies - the depiction of stealth aircraft is completely mechanically wrong, but relatively accurate in how they would have been employed. Finally, while Clancy does a fairly good job with estimated military numbers and dispositions, he obviously has no knowledge of the overall state of readiness, technical problems, etc. affecting Soviet forces. Clancy tries to take a balanced approach here, because he is a good writer who has read a lot on the subject, but still has to resort to combining factual (the state of Red Army NCO system) and fictional (battery shortage) explainatiins for events. This is again, just a result of Clancy's limited source material, which did not include classified information and had a motive to overstate Soviet military preparedness. So I would say that Clancy certainly did his homework, but at the end of the day his job was to create a plausibly realistic alternate scenario, and one should not expect any serious degree of accuracy or rigor from his works of fiction, despite his efforts in that regard.