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

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

Davies dives into a multi-decade history of the various programs that flew Russian aircraft in order to train American pilots. It bogs down some about two-thirds of the way through as he provides vignettes for every "bandit" who flew with the red eagles, but the opening and closing portions (addressing the start of the program and the intelligence analysis dimensions of the program) will delight military affairs buffs as well as professional policy wonks.