*And the physical perfectness of the Kohlhammer-ers: women civilians (in a dangerous profession, I'll give) are apparently stronger and faster than trained '40s Marines. OK, in very exceptional cases that might even be true, but I refuse to think that would be the norm. Not with anything short of genetic tampering, but they aren't that Draka yet, right?
Not really. Julia is a special case among special cases. She's a combat embed who has been cleared (read: trained) to 21C tactics, and knows martial arts that they really don't teach in 41. She wears commercial armor that is even better than the standard 21C. And like the other 21C soldiers, she has the inserts that chemically let her ignore fatigue, sleep deprivation, or even being shot.
And she's the only one like that.
Her coworker who gets killed in Hawaii is clearly not such, hence why she never does it if she can. A disparaging one-liner in the first book mentions that most the other reporters on the
Clinton don't do what she does.
After that, the only "civilian" women who approach your are in fact retired soldiers or sailors, not all of whom are even implied to fit your expression. The ones who do, like Slim Jim's advisor/attorney, do so because they are trained marines. IE, they know how to fight so they won't be overpowered. I can't recall once that it was shown that the women of 21C routinely phisicaly overpowered men; in fact in the third book it's noted that women have a harder time flying the older planes because of the lack of very good hydrolic systems.
*The murderous (or rather, robotic-killing impassionate) attitude of the various Kohlhammer-ers disturbs me less than the destruction of the '40s culture. This is nothing but a blatant attempt by a liberal author to slight the War on Terror, and can be disregarded as such. (So should the cultural subversion be a political statement, I guess, but since it's much more detailed and personal, it irritates me all the more...)
No, it's proof that he knew what he was trying to do: to scare you from assuming that Kolhammer's ways were naturally good. It's a clearly intended societal clash point, and one that comes up again and again in the second and third books.
The author presents a picture of what could happen if things go bad. He doesn't say that they are good or will solve the problems; the 21C were still fighting the "C" word despite over a decade of their RoE, and all the power at their fingertips wasn't good for building things, just blowing them up. When they mention campaigns such as Lebanon or Iran, they comment on how onesided it was and how it was so violent and destructive. What they never say or imply, however, is that these fights ever made anything better. The closest thing is when they comment on how liberating NK was like seeing Stockholm Syndrome writ large, but that's about it.
Saying that the author advocates this mentality, which is shown to have been merely vengefully satisfying rather than effective on the root of the problem, is nearly as absurd as accusing Stirling of wishing for a Draka reality because he had the Draka win.
Thing is, they have suddenly lost most of the technology that's been making their lives lazy and comfortable for the last decades. They should be, like, 19th century aristocrats thrown back to the Dark Ages. They'll survive, but they won't thrive.
