Steve Davies (1)

This is the complete history of the Red Eagles, a squadron of American pilots that flew MiGs to train other pilots how to fight the Russians and their clients. Davies apparently interviewed almost everyone associated with the Red Eagles, and left no stone unturned. On the downside, this means lots of boring details about changes in command. But buried in the mass of the book are real nuggets of military history gold: black bureaucracy, fighter pilot hijinks, the difficulties of maintaining show more Russian aircraft without the benefit of spares or manuals, and of course, the stone-cold badassery of the pilots who went up in these airplanes day after day, and mostly brought them back home through the worst conditions. I won't spoil the good bits in this review, but the MiG-23 is just not a good airplane, and it is amazing that it only killed one American. show less

Interesting book though it follows the history of a squadron with people coming and going. So it does not have the same cohesive storyline one usually has with a biography or something along those lines.

It is interesting to think that we acquired a number of Russian fighter planes and were able to fly against them in training scenarios so that our fighter pilots were ready to go against them if we needed to. Also interesting that the people that flew in this secret program had better info show more on their abilities than some other agencies in the US giving the Air Force info on the MIG.

Perhaps the saddest part of the story is at the end when you find the reason this squadron goes away is because of military cutbacks in funding. Also, the books points out that it is unlikely that we have anything like this now for the same reason. That is a shame because flying against enemy air tech in training could certainly cut down on losses on our side and ensure we understand the capabilities our foes have. I guess America is just betting no one will go up against us with high tech fighters our Air Force would have to take out. Hope that works out. show less

This is the story of the secret programs from the late 1960 to the First Gulf War to acquire, test and use Soviet equipment to help train US military pilots and aviators. I thought the book would be reasonably interesting, but instead it is a overview of a lot of government programs and agencies. Additionally there are a lot of people introduced throughout the book, often with several pages of background about them. Ultimately it is a book about people and agencies and not a lot about the show more hardware and the flying, which I was more interested in. show less

On the whole, this is an entertaining book about an opaque subject, as the author appears to have written as much of a detailed narrative as the anecdotal material available to him would allow. What would have made the book a bit stronger is to treat the "Red Eagles" as more of a case study of how a "black" program is handled; though Davis is careful to place the "Red Eagles" in the context of the wider "aggressor" community in the USAF. Actually, a lot of the material to do this is in the show more book, it just needed to be a bit better organized. show less