Chains of Command

One of teh best I've read this year.


Excellent as usual.   June 3, 2003
 3 out of 4 found this review helpful

I say B****cks to the guy above. This book is great. I'm a big fan of Dale Brown and otherwriters like him. Nobody writes such fast-paced high-tech action as Brown. If you like military action and adventure look no futher. Brilliant fun. You don't need to understand jargon to read this - just take it as it is - it brings a dimension of realism and excitement of getting in with the high-tech, high-precision warfare that is common in Brown's novels. I've yet to find a duff Dale Brown. You'll find it hard to put down.


A truly awful book   August 22, 2001
 1 out of 9 found this review helpful

Chains of command is desperate stuff. It reads like a cross between a computer flight game manual and a Janes weapons almanac. The characters are one dimensional, and the book is stuffed so full of jargon and acronyms it makes it very, very hard to read. It is so full of ASRAMMS,AGM's Paveways and F111's you soon forget you are reading a novel. There is of course a stereotypical stiff upper lipped British pilot and plenty of gung ho, kick ass, all American boys (and girls) blasting bandits and bogeys from the sky, oh and you need some bad guys supplied as ever by the Russians. The plot is paper thin. It is pretty obvious the author has no time for Bill or Hilary Clinton, as the thinly veiled references to an unnamed Southern Democratic President and his wife, known as the "Steel Magnolia", reveal. The characters are one dimensional, the "high tech" literary style is dreadful and the attention to detail is tortuous.

All in all a dreadful book.


Gosh! It gets tedious finding new words to praise Brown.   May 21, 2000
 5 out of 6 found this review helpful

Yet another in a long-running series of action adventures with both geo-politics and flying to the fore.

As a former military pilot, I can fully appreciate the tensions that Brown builds up - albeit he was a navigator in strategic bombers and I was a lowly special forces helicopter pilot! Believe me, whatever level of military flying you're involved with, if you're mission-planning for a strike at or behind enemy lines, it's a truly frightening experience; there's always the wonder "will I get back or be hurt?".

Dale Brown understands this, and it comes through this story as in most of his others.

Well written, easy to read, exciting, but if you start it in bed at the end of the day, I defy you to switch the light off before you've finished it!