These days, you can find all sorts of fascinating details online! Not to mention truth being surpassing strange enough to render even highly improbable fiction not that startling.
Well, some kind of mind control must be involved when they insist on prefering to had such a lousy football team.
:), I think i have some cousins in the US and in Israel too, the (FrodoLastname) diaspora is extense 
I have no way of knowing. You certainly using English well enough in your posts, but even native English speakers can’t write well enough to come up with a publishable novel.
Simple workaround - write your story in the first person singular, told from the perspective of a character who speaks Spanish as a mother tongue, English as a second language. I could be wrong, but I imagine there are a few guys in both the US and Argentine armed forces who are in that exact situation.
The Tom Clancy story is even more amazing than that, as prior to its publishing The Hunt for Red October, the Naval Institute Press was a publisher of naval, military and maritime professional texts and histories, and had never previously published any original fiction (though they did reprint some naval classics). However, the manuscript of Hunt so impressed the editorial board (largely retired naval and other maritime service officers) that they decided to break from their prior practices and put it out in hardcover.
I might suggest getting an appropriate wargame, learning how to play, and playing out any larger scenario. Worked for Clancy a few times, and it’ll help you avoid obvious boners.
A military techno thriller, lol.
Its going to be a language all its own.
Declan
Usually most military sci/fi and techno thrillers global plot are based on past actions, your just swapping out the actual military and inserting your own. So instead of the British , it would be the Argentinians , and replace the zulus with whomever you want and redo Roarks Drift.
Start with the current Argentinian Order of Battle, depending on how vast you want the scope of the novel to be, either your fighting ww3 and you want the whole Argentinian military involved , or you just want a slice of it, either company level, battalion level or division level and amend your plot as required.
For the sake of using examples , a company level engagement can be in one place, while a more global style epic will be taking place in more than one locale and using forces that can be naval , aerospace or army, possilby at the same time.
If your going the global route, i would suggest you actually start out writing anywhere from 4 to 8 separate books and interleave them after you finished.
Your weapons dont have to be futuristic, just employ them as per doctrine that should be open source.
Declan
Not only would it be a good workaround, but it also makes the idea more interesting. The last thing you want is to be just like any other military thriller. The bilingual idea would give you an edge.
For modern submarines, assuming the Commanding Officer (CO) has the conn in the first place (as opposed to the Officer of the Deck), the order would actually be “Diving Officer, submerge the ship to [depth] feet.”
The Diving Officer of the Watch (DOOW) would then give the order, “Chief of the Watch, announce ‘Dive, Dive’ over the 1MC; sound two blasts of the diving alarm; and announce ‘Dive, Dive’ over the 1MC.”
The DOOW then orders the Chief [Petty Officer] of the Watch to open the forward main ballast tank vents…and so on.
Subs are now ships insted of boats? Damn, I am getting old and out of touch…
As others have said, if you are unsure about something, try to find someone who has experience in that field and run it by them so at least it passes basic muster.
Kind of a related note. I played the game Crysis a couple weeks back and was enjoying the game until I got to the Aircraft Carrier at the end. Perhaps it’s because I work on an Aircraft Carrier, and it became very clear there was a bit of DidNotDoTheResearch
I’ll forgive the fact that the whole “SCRAM the reactor” sequence made me want to bash my head againest the desk, but what did bother me was that the uniforms(other then the airdales) are totally wrong, so much that it’s obvious that nobody at Crytek bothered to take the 5 minutes and check the Wikipedia article on Naval uniforms. Or the fact the Chief Engineer tends to be a Senior Officer, and not an enlisted 1st class.
I’m usually pretty good at picking out non-native-English speakers trying to write English (I are a teachur( (with a lot of Mexican, Brazilian, and Panamanian college students).
And I would’ve guessed you were “Good Ol’ Down-Home A-murr-can”! (That’s making-fun-of-cultural-chauvinists humor for “Native English Speaker”).
And you can always have a Smarty-Pants Native (or an editor) proof it.
Don’t go into too much detail, though. Those who actually served with the equipment you write about will roll on the floor with laughter if you do something obviously wrong. There was a scene in the Hunt for Red October involving a Harrier that did it to me. You may want to concentrate on operational or even strategic-level plots.
Try to get a grasp of the basic physics of the weapons or technology involved.
To make things realistic, don’t have things work well all the time. Planes and tanks break down, guns jam, missiles miss. (A old USMC aviation joke is that missiles are so named because if they actually hit their targets, they’d be called “hitiles” instead!) Have the “good guys” win in part by overcoming these problems.
Good luck to you, in any language you choose to write in! Maybe you could write about a second Chaco War or something like that…
Formally, yes. Informally, no; they’re still referred to as boats. It depends on the context.
FWIW, modern attack subs are several times larger than WWII destroyers (comparing relative displacements). Modern ballistic-missile subs are comparable in size to WWII heavy cruisers.
Quite possibly, but don’t use sentences like the one I quoted above in your story. You need a period after the second “in English,” not a comma because what follows is not a dependant clause. Other than committing the offence of comma splicing, I don’t notice any issues in your posts
I like this Argentine thriller idea and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Date: 2014. Argentina faces an impending mate shortage due to the effects of global warming and the new strain of mate blight that emerged in the summer of 2011. Uruguay has already collapsed due to the shortage and is a Somalia-type failed state with local warlords and hordes of solitary wandering men, all with a thermos under their arm. Argentina decides that to avoid the fate of their Platense brethren, they have no choice but attack Brazil and Paraguay and take their mate fields for the good of the country. The action is narrated by a young Argie recruit named Frodo who is sent into action.
I missed the edit window by about a half-hour, but to continue…
The story is narrated by raw recruit Frodo (perfect because he doesn’t know much about the military) in charmingly Argentine-inflected English, complete with occasional humorous idiosyncratic grammatical errors and plenty of Argentine slang (perfect because you don’t have to worry about getting everything exactly right). He is telling his picaresque tale to an American CIA officer in an Organization of American States prison camp, which has entered the war on the side of the Paraguayans and Brazilians.
Frodo weaves a tale of wartime atrocities, jungle survivalism, mate farmers’ daughters, and how the British improbably entered the war on the side of the Argentines, after securing an agreement that all up and coming Argie footballers will enter the Premiership free of charge and be available for loan to the English national team.
I predict a bestseller!
You can even make totally egregious howlers and it’ll sell. There’s a book by an ex-military officer who’s published several thrillers in which Iran sends troopships to attack an American airbase and for specious plot reasons the US can destroy the merchant ships but cannot be seen doing so. (Never mind that everyone would recognize the right of self-defense if attacked.) The president agonizes over the fact that aircraft attacks would be visible, and wishes impotently that there was some way to sink a ship by surprise from an unseen weapons platform.
The entire United States submarine force is not mentioned in the book.
The Iranians successfully kick American buttocks in the story because no one, neither the president, his advisers, nor (most importantly) the author, remembers that submarines exist.
Assuming the author didn’t want to use submarines to solve his plot, all he’d have to do would be to insert a single sentence, “Mr. President, the Strait of Hormuz is too shallow for our attack submarines to operate – that option’s off the table.” It doesn’t have to be TRUE, mind you; the readers will forgive you even if they know better. But the fact that no one thinks about submarines at all – that they don’t even come up – is laughable.
If tripe like that can get published and read, you’ll be fine.
Why couldn’t the US be seen attacking Iran?