Fifty years ago, Joseph Heller published Catch-22, giving us a new idiom and forging a new perspective on the business of war. While other novels—such as Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front—stripped warfare of its romance, Catch-22 exposed it as just another form of the fundamental absurdity of bureaucracy. Writes Walter Kirn in Slate:

Then, that fall, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 appeared, abruptly downgrading war’s special status as an existential crucible and also, unwittingly, beginning the process of rendering four-star male novelists irrelevant. The book treats war on a par with business or politics (to Heller they were very much the same), portraying it as a system for alienating people from their own interests and estranging them from their instincts. Protocol replaces principle, figures plucked from thin air supplant hard facts, and reason becomes rigamarole. Heller’s island airbase of freaked-out aviators oppressed by cuckoo officers is the ding-a-ling civilian world in microcosm, not an infernal, tragic realm apart. The men who can feel aren’t agonized, they’re addled. The ones who can’t feel (and therefore give the orders) are permanently, structurally annoyed. The naked and the dead are here but invisible to the beribboned and the daft.

In 1979, shortly after the release of Good as Gold, Charlie Reilly interviewed Heller for Inquiry magazine, then published by the Cato Institute. They discussed the new novel and its narrative structure, Heller’s humorist techniques, and how Heller deals in his writing with terrible, real-world events.

Q: Another thing that interested me was the effect that writing about the Vietnam War had upon you. It seemed apparent in Something Happened that you felt a sense of moral outrage over our role in the war, and in this one Gold seems to boil in rage at some aspect of it. Was it difficult to write about an issue that is so enraging and draining?

HELLER: No, and this is true of Catch-22 as well. When I’m writing, I am only interested in writing. Now when I’m not writing, I confess I can hear something that will make me boil over. A phrase that really gets to me, for instance, would be one of those neoconservative references to Vietnam as a national tragedy, but only because we lost. That thought fills me with ire. To begin with, the person who says it is typically untouched by tragedy; like me, he has not lost a son or a job. In addition, the implication is that if we had won, the war would have been somehow less tragic. People with that mentality, I have to admit, impress me as being the scum of the earth.

Read the whole thing here.

Joseph Heller in the Pages of Inquiry is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Obama administration has just carried out one of its standard rituals — choosing a new commander of NATO.  But why are we still in NATO?

Reports the New York Times:

When Adm. James G. Stavridis took over the military’s Southern Command in late 2006, his French was excellent but he spoke no Spanish. Not content to rely on interpreters, he put himself on a crash course to learn the language.

Over the next three years, his fluency was measured not only in the high-level meetings he conducted in the native tongue of his military hosts. He also read the novels of Gabriel García Márquez, the Nobel laureate from Colombia, in the original rich and lyrical Spanish.

Now Admiral Stavridis’s boss, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, has given him a new assignment, which starts Tuesday.

“Jim must also learn to speak NATO,” Mr. Gates said.

As the new American and NATO commander in Europe, Admiral Stavridis, 54, becomes the first naval officer appointed to a position previously held by famed ground-warfare generals.

It is two jobs in one, as he oversees all American forces under the United States European Command and — far more important today — serves as the supreme allied commander, Europe, NATO’s top military position. He takes the NATO command as the future viability of the alliance is tested by whether he can rally members to make good on their promises to the mission in Afghanistan.

Adm. Stavridis obviously is a talented officer.  Alas, his chance of winning more meaningful support from the Europeans for the mission in Afghanistan is nil.  The Europeans don’t want to fight, especially in a conflict which they don’t view as their own.

But the most important question these days should be:  why does NATO still exist — at least, a NATO dominated by America?  No one, not even Russia, threatens “Old Europe.” 

Moreover, Europe is well able to defend itself.  The continent has a collective GDP more than ten times that of Russia, and even larger than that of America.  Europe’s population, too, is bigger than those of both Russia and the U.S.  The Europeans needed America’s military aid during the Cold War.  But no longer.

What of the Eastern Europeans, who worry more about Moscow?  We should wish them well, but we have no cause to threaten war on their behalf.  Security guarantees should not be distributed like party favors, inexpensive gifts for friends and acquaintances alike.  Rather, security guarantees should be issued to defend America.  It is hard to make the argument that, say, Albania, is relevant to America’s security, let alone vital to it.  Two decades after the end of the Cold War, we should start reshaping our alliance commitments to reflect our vital interest.

Appointing Another Supreme Commander of NATO is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Last week, I had the opportunity to testify before the House Science Committee‘s Subcommittee on Technology and Innovation on the topic of “cybersecurity.” I have been reluctant to opine on it because of its complexity, but I did issue a short piece a few months ago arguing against government-run cybersecurity. That piece was cited prominently in the White House’s “Cyberspace Policy Review” and — blamo! — I’m a cybersecurity expert.

Not really — but I have been forming some opinions at a high level of generality that are worth making available. They can be found in my testimony, but I’ll summarize them briefly here.

First, “cybersecurity” is a term so broad as to be meaningless. Yes, we are constructing a new “space” analogous to physical space using computers, networks, sensors, and data, but we can no more secure “cyberspace” in its entirety than we can secure planet Earth and the galaxy. Instead, we secure the discrete things that are important to us — houses, cars, buildings, power lines, roads, private information, money, and so on. And we secure these things in thousands of different ways. We should secure “cyberspace” the same way — thousands of different ways.

By “we,” of course, I don’t mean the collective. I mean that each owner or controller of a prized thing should look out for its security. It’s the responsibility of designers, builders, and owners of houses, for exmple, to ensure that they properly secure the goods kept inside. It’s the responsibility of individuals to secure the information they wish to keep private and the money they wish to keep. It is the responsibility of network operators to secure their networks, data holders to secure their data, and so on.

Second, “cyber” threats are being over-hyped by a variety of players in the public policy area. Invoking “cyberterrorism” or “cyberwar” is near-boilerplate in white papers addressing government cybersecurity policy, but there is very limited strategic logic to “cyberwarfare” (aside from attacking networks during actual war-time), and “cyberterrorism” is a near-impossibility. You’re not going to panic people — and that’s rather integral to terrorism — by knocking out the ATM network or some part of the power grid for a period of time.

(We weren’t short of careless discussions about defending against “cyber attack,” but L. Gordon Crovitz provided yet another example in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. As Ben Friedman pointed out, Evgeny Morozov has the better of it in the most recent Boston Review.)

This is not to deny the importance of securing digital infrastructure; it’s to say that it’s serious, not scary. Precipitous government cybersecurity policies — especially to address threats that don’t even have a strategic logic — would waste our wealth, confound innovation, and threaten civil liberties and privacy.

In the cacophony over cybersecurity, an important policy seems to be getting lost: keeping true critical infrastructure offline. I noted Senator Jay Rockefeller’s (D-WV) awesomely silly comments about cybersecurity a few months ago. They were animated by the premise that all the good things in our society should be connected to the Internet or managed via the Internet. This is not true. Removing true critical infrastructure from the Internet takes care of the lion’s share of the cybersecurity problem.

Since 9/11, the country has suffered significant “critical-infrastructure inflation” as companies gravitate to the special treatments and emoluments government gives owners of “critical” stuff. If “criticality” is to be a dividing line for how assets are treated, it should be tightly construed: If the loss of an asset would immediately and proximately threaten life or health, that makes it critical. If danger would materialize over time, that’s not critical infrastructure — the owners need to get good at promptly repairing their stuff. And proximity is an important limitation, too: The loss of electric power could kill people in hospitals, for example, but ensuring backup power at hospitals can intervene and relieve us of treating the entire power grid as “critical infrastructure,” with all the expense and governmental bloat that would entail.

So how do we improve the state of cybersecurity? It’s widely believed that we are behind on it. Rather than figuring out how to do cybersecurity — which is impossible — I urged the committee to consider what policies or legal mechanisms might get these problems figured out.

I talked about a hierarchy of sorts. First, contract and contract liability. The government is a substantial purchaser of technology products and services — and highly knowledgeable thanks to entities like the National Institutes of Standards and Technology. Yes, I would like it to be a smaller purchaser of just about everything, but while it is a large market actor, it can drive standards and practices (like secure settings by default) into the marketplace that redound to the benefit of the cybersecurity ecology. The government could also form contracts that rely on contract liability — when products or services fail to serve the purposes for which they’re intended, including security — sellers would lose money. That would focus them as well.

A prominent report by a working group at the Center for Strategic and International Studies — co-chaired by one of my fellow panelists before the Science Committee last week, Scott Charney of Microsoft — argued strenuously for cybersecurity regulation.

But that begs the question of what regulation would say. Regulation is poorly suited to the process of discovering how to solve new problems amid changing technology and business practices.

There is some market failure in the cybersecurity area. Insecure technology can harm networks and users of networks, and these costs don’t accrue to the people selling or buying technology products. To get them to internalize these costs, I suggested tort liability rather than regulation. While courts discover the legal doctrines that unpack the myriad complex problems with litigating about technology products and services, they will force technology sellers and buyers to figure out how to prevent cyber-harms.

Government has a role in preventing people from harming each other, of course, and the common law could develop to meet “cyber” harms if it is left to its own devices. Tort litigation has been abused, and the established corporate sector prefers regulation because it is a stable environment for them, it helps them exclude competition, and they can use it to avoid liability for causing harm, making it easier to lag on security. Litigation isn’t preferable, and we don’t want lots of it — we just want the incentive structure tort liability creates.

As the distended policy issue it is, “cybersecurity” is ripe for shenanigans. Aggressive government agencies are looking to get regulatory authority over the Internet, computers, and software. Some of them wouldn’t mind getting to watch our Internet traffic, of course. Meanwhile, the corporate sector would like to use government to avoid the hot press of market competition, while shielding itself from liability for harms it may cause.

The government must secure its own assets and resources — that’s a given. Beyond that, not much good can come from government cybersecurity policy, except the occassional good, long blog post.

Some Thinking on “Cyber” is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Fred Kaplan and the New York Times say that the decision to replace General David McKiernan with Lt. General Stan McChrystal as the principle US commander in Afghanistan is another step in the COINification of the Pentagon under Robert Gates. They say we’ve replaced a conventional warfare guy with an unconventional warfare guy.

That’s too simple. McChrystal is known for his mastery of the sharp or kinetic end of the counterinsurgency mission. The command he headed from 2003 to 2008 – Joint Special Operations Command — is essentially the operational component of Special Operations Command, which has really become a fifth service. JSOC organizes special operations missions in war zones.  According to many officers, JSOC has also become enraptured with direct action. That means using intelligence from various sources to plan raids, often kicking down doors in the dead of night, interrogating people to generate more intelligence, doing it again immediately, and eventually capturing or killing insurgent leaders with the intelligence gleaned. 

Bob Woodward’s latest book argues that JSOC’s role in employing these tactics in Iraq was crucial to the supposed success of the surge. But some informed observers beg to differ, arguing that standard counterinsurgency tactics and the contributions of Iraqis themselves mattered far more.  Some complain that JSOC’s aggressive tactics and limited coordination with those in the regular chain of command undermined pacification efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In the (recently released!) book on the post Cold War evolution of the US military that I co-edited, Colin Jackson and Austin Long have a chapter discussing the politics of special operations command. They argue that the direct action theory of victory in counterinsurgency is a close relative to the air force’s theory of decapitation, which says you can defeat a nation by attacking its leaders from the air.  They explain that direct action has long been the favored tactic of secret or “black” SOF organizations like Delta Force, but that the wars made it the dominant mission in SOCOM as a whole, crowding traditional “white” counterinsurgency missions like population protection, force training, and civil affairs. To them, that is a problem, because the direct action theory of victory is badly flawed.  You can’t kill your way to victory in these sorts of wars, they argue. That’s particularly true in Afghanistan, I’d add, where distance and poor roads make the exploitation of intelligence far more time-consuming.

I don’t know to what extent McChrystal shares the black SOF worldview. He would probably say that direct action is just part of the toolkit.  It is possible, however, that his appointment reflects a decision to downplay nation-building in Afghanistan and focus more on killing raids and training Afghan soldiers.

It is also interesting to speculate about what Michael Vickers (the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations, Low Intensity Conflict and Interdependent Capabilities) had to say about this. Vickers — a key advisor to Gates and a carry-over from the Bush administration — is said to be skeptical about troop surges in counterinsurgency, preferring to train local forces.

According to Greg Grant of DoD Buzz:

In a speech before a defense industry gathering last month, Vickers said he foresees a shift over time from the manpower intensive counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan to more “distributed operations across the world,” relying on close to 100 small teams of special operations forces to hunt down terrorist networks, part of a “global radical Islamist insurgency.”

I don’t like the across the world part, but if this appointment means more limited objectives in Afghanistan, it’s good news.

A final note on McChrystal: he reportedly runs many miles a day, sleeps only a few hours, and avoids eating until evening to avoid sluggishness. Apparently the iron-man thing goes over well with Rangers, but I think commanders, whose job is mostly thinking, should get a good night’s sleep and three square.

McChrystal and Direct Action is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

President Barack Obama based his candidacy in part on the promise to set a new tone in Washington.  But we saw a much older tone emerge with his demonization of hedge funds over the Chrysler bankruptcy.  Reports the Washington Post:

President Obama’s harsh attack on hedge funds he blamed for forcing Chrysler into bankruptcy yesterday sparked cries of protest from the secretive financial firms that hold about $1 billion of the automaker’s debt.

Hedge funds and investment managers were irate at Obama’s description of them as “speculators” who were “refusing to sacrifice like everyone else” and who wanted “to hold out for the prospect of an unjustified taxpayer-funded bailout.”

“Some of the characterizations that were used today to refer to us as speculators or to say we’re looking for a bailout is really unfair,” said one executive who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. “What we’re looking for is a reasonable payout on the value of the debt . . . more in line with what unions and Fiat were getting.”

George Schultze, the managing member of the hedge fund Schultze Asset Management, a Chrysler bondholder, said, “We are simply seeking to enforce our bargained-for rights under well-settled law.”

“Hopefully, the bankruptcy process will help refocus on this issue rather than on pointing fingers at lenders,” he said.

I won’t claim any special expertise to parse who is responsible for what in the crash of the U.S.  (meaning Big Three) auto industry.  However, attacking people for exercising their legal rights and trashing those who make their business investing in companies hardly seems like the right way to get the U.S. economy moving again.

During the Depression, FDR’s relentless attacks on business and the rich almost certainly added to a climate of uncertainty that discouraged investment during tough times.  Why put your money at real risk when the president and his cohorts seem determined to treat you like the enemy?  While President Obama need not treat gently those who contributed to the current crisis by acting illegally or unscrupulously, he should not act as if those who simply aren’t willing to turn their economic futures over to the tender mercies of the White House are criminals.

We’ve just lived through eight years of bitter partisan warfare.  The president shouldn’t replace that with a jihad against businesses that resist increased government direction of the economy.

Like FDR — In a Really Bad Way is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog