[In the following review, Lehman offers a favorable assessment of Debt of Honor.]

After The Hunt for Red October established Tom Clancy as the Pentagon's Boswell, he found himself accorded the honors and access of a field marshall. A former Marine and lifelong military buff, Mr. Clancy used this access to soak up even more of the technical detail and the cultural attitudes of the politico-military world. Thusly armed, he produced a new class of literature—techno-thriller.

So what if his prose reads like a government manual. What, I often wonder, do his critics think bureaucrats talk like? Billy Crystal? The very woodenness of the dialogue highlights the real stars, who are not the two-dimensional people but the three-dimensional weapons. Mr. Clancy's gift is in crafting a plausible story, full of thrills, that puts all the neat gadgets and elite forces through their paces. Anyone wishing to understand how nuclear reactors on a warship generate power by boiling water will please to turn to page 329. For readers new to Mr. Clancy, Debt of Honor is certainly a good starter. It has dueling submarines, terrorist hits, venal politicians, smarmy lobbyists and a familiar hero, Jack Ryan, recently embodied by Harrison Ford on the big screen. It also has way too many pages.

The scene opens with an administration confused by the post Cold War's new world order. Lest we think this is the Clinton administration, it is established right off that it is the vice president who is the womanizing lecher. The secretary of state is a feckless wimp and the secretary of defense and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are political hacks determined to dismantle the armed forces built by Ronald Reagan. America's Navy is half of what it was 10 years before. Trade policies have severely eroded relations with Japan, whose military has been busy building secret nuclear missiles. The ensuing economic chaos in Japan brings in a new government controlled by thuggish industrial tycoons.

These thorough baddies begin at once to execute a carefully planned destruction of the U.S. and its economy. They sabotage our financial systems by deploying a computer virus that erases an entire day's trading on Wall Street, and by shoving the president of the New York branch of the Federal Reserve in front of a taxi "with newly refurbished brakes"—this detail will be unconvincing to seasoned riders. They also disable the Seventh Fleet in the Pacific and occupy the Mariana Islands. Fortunately for the fate of the nation, Ryan has been persuaded to leave the world of investment banking and has joined the White House as national-security adviser. Before long Jack Ryan will be closer than ever to the Oval Office, but in the meanwhile he renews contact with some old pals in the KGB and figures out what the Japanese really want, namely Siberia.

Jack's counterattack is fiendishly clever, employing double agents, assassination, press manipulation and the use of every high-tech weapon not yet beaten into a ploughshare. Given current congressional attempts to kill several controversial weapons, it is amusing to see that Mr. Clancy has built them all and that they perform flawlessly. He activates the Air Force F-22 fighter, which currently exists only in prototype and will be capable of operating in "supercruise"—flying at supersonic speed without consuming a costly 120,000 pounds of fuel per hour, and he brings on a stealth Commanche helicopter for an attack on Japan.

Mr. Clancy's trademark obsession with detailed technical descriptions keeps the kettle boiling. He tells us how the orbits of CIA spy satellites can be redirected for real-time surveillance, for example, and how important copper mesh is to stealth. The material, placed as a lining, absorbs incoming radar (I guess this information is no longer classified).

But if all of this sounds too much like Boy Scouts run amok for your sensibilities, Mr. Clancy will soothe you with his sensitive, newly acquired political correctness. Now half of his fighter jocks are ladies, most of the good guys are black, Hispanic or acceptably ethnic; the wives and daughters are surgeons and lawyers; charges of sexual harassment bring down the vice president (thereby creating a vacancy for the upwardly mobile Jack); and just about everyone from the president to the sonarman agonizes deeply over the very caring Japanese in subs who are about to be pulverized into fish food.

The last chapter alone is worth the price of the book, at least for those of us who cannot look at the Capitol without thinking of term limits. Mr. Clancy carries out a fantasy I have dreamed about for years, one that involves a very large plane and a kamikaze pilot: "The entire east face of the building's southern half was smashed to gravel which shot westward—but the real damage took a second or two longer, barely time for the roof to start falling in on the nine hundred people in the chamber."