I've never read Red Storm Rising
GASP!
Wow...
It's far and away Clancy's best work, next to Without Remorse...
Red Storm Rising is basically World War Three... Arab Terrorists manage to destroy the USSR's largest Oil refinery, which in a few months plunge the Soviet Union into darkness, no electricity, no gas, no harvests, anything that needs oil, is gonna be outta fuel or un-makeable leaving Ivan in big trouble with a starving population. So they decide that in order to keep that from happening, they must take over the oil fields in the Middle East by invading Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia, et al...
In order for this plan to be successful though, they must first eliminate all NATO Forces in Western Europe, and do it before the US can mount REFORGER. So they launch an elaborate maskirovka (masquerade) which involves unrestricted sea, air, and land operations in Western Europe and the Atlantic Ocean, although they pull ALL their ballistic missile subs (Boomers) into port, so they're out of the fight. They don't want to go nuke or, on land,chem/bio..
In the beginning, they're pretty successful, going through the Fulda Gap into West Germany, and they put a damn-damn on the US Navy's Atlantic Fleet as well, invading Iceland with little resistance after a surprise attack on the USAF there, leaving the SOSUS line with huge gaps in the North Atlantic, through which Ivan's attack subs can go through undetected. They, along with the Red Air Force, raise hell with the merchant shipping trying to make it to port in England and France, and the US is stuck doing REFORGER and about the same speed it used in WW2, while the forward-based units of the US and NATO are getting their collectives azzes kicked, and it looks like NATO is gonna lose this one...
Not to write an entire synopsis, but if you can build whatever was "painted green" and shoots at you when the Cold War goes Hot in the mid-80s, that's the deal..
It was one helluva scary book if you were a Soldier, Sailor, Airman, or Marine in the 80s... It also should have been the FIRST Clancy novel made into a movie, but there's no way it could have been done in 100 minutes... It'd have to have been done, at a minimum, af a trilogy, like Star Wars was done initially... Would've taken 12 years to make, and would have actually covered a time-frame of about a real-world month, which is about how long the novel-time lasted, not counting the initial terrorist attack and the ramping-up to war... That took about six months, IIRC... But the actual "shooting war" was less than a month..
Anyway, US armor would be without "A"s anywhere, except for M60s and M113s, lol.. New armor, it would be mostly Bradleys and Abrams' without an "A" anything, and not a lot of them... The Stealth fighter in the book was based on the Testor's F-19 and called a "Frisbee" in the book by the pilots..
The fictional "Soviet" Testor's Stealth Fighter, the "MiG 37B Ferret-E" didn't show up in the book...
Tamiya's "Modern Armor Boom" of the late 80s was due to that book too, IMHO...
Basically, you can build anything that would have been floating, flying, or rolling in the early 80s, NATO or Warsaw Pact... But no F-15Es, no F-117s, B-2s, Challenger IIs, or that kind of stuff.. Just 70s and early 80s military stuff...
Maybe someone will do the "Order of Battle", lol...
I'll make my choice of kit (if I have any that will work) If I don't have any kits in my stash that are mentioned in the book, I'll choose another kit and plea my (it's) case.
It's probably the easiest route to just ask that, yeah... Rather than listing what CAN be done, just pick some kits out you want to do and ask if they can "play"...