By Dale Brown (Morrow 2009)

I almost didn’t read this book in the Skymasters series because the “bad guys” were the Turks, and I’ve learned to consider Turkey a friend of the USA. Ostensibly, Turkey is an ally when this book begins, but there’s trouble in the President’s palace. The PPK (Kurdistan Worker’s Party) hiding in northern Iraq has been raiding into Turkey, and the Turkish military wants to wipe it out once and for all. They mount a raid on Northern Iraq, assigning their best general, Besir Ozek,  to carry  out the raid. What the Turks don’t know is that Skymasters is on the forward base helping with the transfer of the facility from American to Iraqi military control.
It wouldn’t be a Brown novel without Tin Men, Cybernetic Infantry Devices, drones armed with fantastic weapons and  unmanned XC-57 planes with jaw-dropping capabilities. Brown has enough support from real military experts to make things realistic even when he’s describing things that seem too far out. We’ve learned over the years, however, that things that seem far out in a Dale Brown novel become real systems and weapons in our own military in a few years. So if you want to know where the military is headed, read Dale Brown.
My only complaint with Brown is that he puts women in roles that would be better manned by men, not because women aren’t capable of handling the jobs, but because it seems like he has put women in the story just because someone told him to. Military thrillers don’t need women fighters to make them good books.