The Guizhou University Kurt Vonnegut Book Club

Originally posted 12 May 2008...

In light of all of the ultra-nationalist rhetoric from both the CCP and angry young Chinese men regarding the Tibet riots and the Olympic torch relay, this give me hope for our relations with China, and for China's future.  Students at Guizhou University not only smuggle in copies of Kurt Vonnegut books to read and discuss in a very serious manner.  They seem to want a better understanding of the United States.

“We don’t understand all of what Vonnegut wrote,” the club’s president, Isabel Yuan, told me, “But we think reading him helps us understand America.” Isabel and I spoke over a steaming pot of bitter pu’ er tea in a restaurant not far from the Gui Da campus. She sat upright, her black eyes focused on the porcelain cup in her hand. “Vonnegut,” she continued, “is our window into the American mind.”

The students give each other writing assignments before meetings in a way that students at elite American schools are reputed to, but that I have a hard time imagining of my community college or university undergrads.

KC members had posed these questions at last month’s meeting, and each member had prepared a written answer, which they took turns reading, occasionally correcting each other’s pronunciation of uncommon English words (“paradigm,” “subversion,” “granfalloon”).
The most insightful essay came from the only male in the club, a 23-year-old with thick, wire-framed glasses. He went by the name Little Dragon (in honor of martial arts actor Bruce Lee), and read in slow, halting English: “Intellectuals in America and intellectuals in China serve different roles. In China, the role is to serve the state. In America, the role is to serve the truth.” Little Dragon paused, looked nervously at me while pushing his glasses up his nose, and continued. “But it is said that individual Americans feel lost. They have material excess but no equality, and democracy but no power. So Vonnegut sees there is no truth worth serving, and simply behaves ridiculous.”

Among the most interesting items are that few students have an awareness of the Great Firewall of China, which censors Internet traffic in and out of the PRC, unless you are savvy enough to use a proxy server or VPN to get around it.  That, and that the leader of the Kurt Club believes that Chinese students need to learn to mock their leaders in the way that Americans mock theirs.  I would suggest the British model myself, as it seems more tolerant of dissent than our own ultra-nationalistic and partisan mode.

Recruiting "Hackers"

We'll leave aside the whole issue of nomenclature - the hackers/crackers dichotomy - and just get to the meat of the problem.  The DoD, the entire U.S. government really, is in desperate need from experts in information security - the folks commonly known as hackers.  That need led to the creation of CYBERCOM to act as the nation's defensive bulwark against computerized intrusion and to develop some sort of offensive capability.  To attract young people with the right skills, the DoD sponsors competitions to find and develop potential recruits.

All that is fine.  The problem is that the military doesn't really get how to recruit and retain the people it needs.  Adam Weinstein points this problem out, but at the same time manages to minimize the problem by bringing Private Bradley Manning into his argument.  Manning is a good example of poor screening for security clearances, but not exactly a paragon of computing virtuosity.  Unless I've missed something critical, my 86 year-old grandmother has all the skills (but none of the desire) Manning needed.  He isn't so much an example of a "cyber-savvy intel weenie", but the traditionally dangerous disaffected insider.

Both Weinstein and West Point researcher Lt. Col. Gregory Conti miss the point when they address the problem of recruiting and retaining infosec capable geeks.  Weinstein argues that you have to show potential recruits that CYBERCOM is doing good things for the world as opposed to promoting death and destruction, while Conti argues that the DoD just needs to be ubercool to attract and keep "hackers".  Both arguments show that neither Weinstein or Conti (or the DoD) get the culture of the people they need (or think they need, which is a whole different story).

18 year-old Michael Coppola illustrates the problem to a small degree.  He rejected the idea of enlisted because he associates the military lifestyle with regimentation and lack of creativity.  While Conti argues that the culture of CYBERCOM is still malleable, I don't buy it.  The US Army just ordered Special Forces troops in Afghanistan without ongoing interactions with Afghans to shave their beards despite knowing that facial hair is an important cultural tool in that environment - a fact we've known since the Templars grew beards and cut their hair to gain the respect of their Muslim neighbors. 

That was a thousand years ago.

So we're supposed to expect that the DoD will allow a creative and libertarian culture at CYBERCOM, when the Special Forces guys in combat have to shave?  That's a joke, right?  Do these people even know what kind of tools CYBERCOM needs?  Look at the difficulty Weinstein reports at getting terminals that could access Facebook, and then tell me that CYBERCOM will provide its recruits with the unfettered access to the Internet they need to find new exploits in the wild, develop their own, and test them out.  Is that a realistic expectation when it seems like the approach is to make it seem like a cool job for young men?

In my old career as a Systems Administrator, I knew a few guys with the types of skills and a desire to serve in the military (they couldn't due to health issues) and appreciation of the military culture.  Most of the folks that the DoD would want to recruit, though, are interested in hierarchical organizations, want the freedom to dress as they want, wear their hair however they feel, work flexible hours, and expect to not only modify their machines at will, but to have free run of networks and the Internet.  That's a large part of the reason they want to work for companies like Google.  Maybe one percent of the potential "hackers" the DoD tries to recruit are likely to fit the bill.

I'm not even convinced by the numbers they say they need.  Does DoD really need 10-30,000 of them?  Or do they need a few hundred exceptional folks and a whole bunch of homegrown guys like me - who aren't coders, but are smart, interested, and determined to both secure and penetrate networks given the opportunity, time, and the tools.  Think of it this way - how many guys like Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, and Larry Bird does a basketball team need?  You need both stars and role players to win the championship.  To me, you need some brilliant guys, along with some guys who are good to get the infosec job done.  Just like in team sports. 

The Dream Team is not what DoD needs, just guys who can get the job done.

Books - New Acquisitions on Gender & History

As part of preparing for PhD comprehensive exams, I'm sitting in on Dr. Holly Grout's pro-seminar on Gender in European History.  My dissertation research about French and American soldiers in Vietnam has a large gender (masculinity) component, so this helps on multiple levels.

1. Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England
    
2. Judith Surkis, Sexing the Citizen: Morality and Masculinity in France, 1870-1920
    
3. Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London
    
4. Ann Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule
    
5. Joan Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man
    
6. Mary Louise Roberts, Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in fin-de-siècle France
    
7. Whitney Chadwick and Tirza Latimer eds., The Modern Woman Revisited: Paris Between the Wars

Vietnam War Reading

Every time Dr. Jones teaches his Vietnam War class, I get several requests from other grad students about what their options are for his book review assignments (they should really ask his PhD candidate Becky).  Each year I give them a basic list based on their preferences, but this time around, I'm going for a  master list that covers a little bit of everything.

Here's what I have so far, and it is by no means exhaustive, just what I have here in Tuscaloosa:

1. Bing West, The Village
2. Harold Moore and Joseph Galloway, We Were Soldiers Once... And Young
3. Bernard Fall, Hell in a Very Small Place
4. Bernard Fall, Street Without Joy
5. Frances Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake
6. Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History
7. John Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife
8. Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War
9. Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie
10. William Duiker, Ho Chi Minh: A life
11. Rick Newman and Don Shepperd, Bury Us Upside Down
12. Tom Mangold and John Penycate, The Tunnels of Cu Chi
13. H.R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty
14. James Olson and Randy Roberts, Where the Domino Fell
15. Truong Nhu Tang, A Viet Cong Memoir
16. William Duiker, Sacred War: Nationalism and Revolution in a Divided Vietnam
17. Mark Moyar, A Triumph Forsaken
18. David Anderson, Facing My Lai: Moving Beyond the Massacre
19. Kendrick Oliver, The My Lai Massacre in American History and Memory
20. James R. Ebert, A Life in a Year: The American Infantryman in Vietnam, 1965-1972
21. Deborah Nelson, The War Behind Me
22. Frederik Longevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam
23. Michael Lind, Vietnam: The Necessary War

This list is light on the air war and naval warfare, so that needs to be fixed.  Any comments or suggestions for what might be missing?

Misusing History, Max Boot Style

Last Wednesday Jason Sigger at Armchair Generalist took Max Boot to task for his argument that decreasing American armed forces was directly correlated to foreign aggression, so we have to maintain or grow the military to maintain peace and stability despite the increasing cost and outsized effect on the Federal budget.  As Jason points out, Boot ignores all of the social, economic, and cultural factors related to war.  Of course, that's as far as he goes.

Boot's argument is actually worse that Jason makes out. Taking every major conflict the United States fought in turn, Boot argues that merely maintaining a large standing military would have prevented or reduced all those wars, and provides numbers to prove his point.  The problem is that he does so by completely ignoring the context in which those conflicts occurred, and goes off the rails almost immediately.

In his theory, Boot contends that if only the young American republic had kept the standing army at 35,000 men instead of reducing it to a paltry 10,000, the Whiskey Rebellion, War of 1812, Quasi War, and conflict with the Barbary pirates would have all been avoided.  Of course, this requires us to ignore the Founding Fathers' fundamental ideology against standing armies and the ideology of the Revolution arguing that it was both the right and duty of citizens to resort to arms to defend against oppression.  It also assumes that keeping soldiers would have been effective against Great Britain, or would have somehow translated into strength at sea (against Great Britain, France, and Barbary).

The Civil War gets similar, if even less nuanced treatment.  Arguing that 50,000 troops were too few to effectively enforce Reconstruction in the defeated Confederacy, Boot ignores that fact that many in the North simply did not have the political will or interest to radically redraw the political and social order of the South over the long term.  Northerners also had no interest in paying the taxes needed to support large bodies of troops - one of the debates featured in the 1876 Presidential election was over the Federal budget and cost of maintaining a large standing Army.  If Boot thinks that large bodies of Union troops could have forced permanent social, economic, and political change in just 11 years after the end of the Civil War, he is sadly mistaken.  Fighting the pro-Confederate insurgency would have required a permanent Federal presence lasting generations.

Despite all of this, Boot's argument runs into its biggest problems when he addresses the 20th century.  Boot has completely taken leave of his senses if he truly believes that Woodrow Wilson, who could barely drag his nation to war by relying on the Zimmerman Telegram, sinking of the Lusitania, and the Creel Commission, and could not get a Republican Senate to join the League of Nations at the end of the war, could have persuaded them to maintain a force much larger than the 250,000 man force that still existed in 1928.  When arguing that American forces in France or Poland would have somehow deterred Hitler in 1939, Boot conveniently ignores American isolationism in the interwar period and the hoops FDR had to jump through to provide aid to England with the Lend-Lease Acts of the 1930s, which were a response to the cost of America's involvement in World War I.

The fact of the matter is that the size of our Armed Forces is not the only factor leading to these conflicts or how quickly or easily they were ended.  We do need to have a national conversation about the size military we need, and what we need to use it for, what the threats we face are, and how to pay for it all.  But, in having this conversation, we should not be distracted by false assertions and emotional arguments about the past.  Hard as it is to do, we need to examine this complex and serious issue as rational and responsible citizens.  That means accepting that the world is a complicated place, and that mere numbers of troops won't solely determine whether we are secure, or not.

Containing China

There's more going on in East Asia re: containing China's influence in the region. 

While the Clinton State Department works to increase ties to Vietnam, Defense Secretary Gates is working to increase military cooperation with Indonesia, in moves designed to show U.S. commitment in the South China Sea and to bolster efforts to defend freedom of the seas in the face of Chinese territorial claims.

At the same time, the United States agreed to sell Taiwan two Oliver Hazard Perry class frigates for anti-air and anti-sub work, bolstering the island's defense against the PRC, which continues to claim that Taiwan is historically part of China.  Other regional powers are also working to build defenses against a potential sea threat from the PRC.  Japan is building supersonic anti-ship missiles that it can launch from fighter aircraft to counter Chinese carriers, destroyers, and cruisers, and increasing the size of its submarine fleet to counter the larger number of submarines deployed by the People's Liberation Army Navy.

What I find interesting is that the label "containment" doesn't appear in these discussions.  Instead Clinton and Gates are working to maintain the "balance of power" in East and Southeast Asia by building partnerships with regimes that are liberalizing and modernizing while still trying to push them on human rights issues.  On the surface this is different from Cold War containment, in which any opponent to the Soviet Union was our friend, no matter how nasty that "ally" might be, but containment it is, and our partners are still folks who fear an aggressive larger neighbor. 

The change in labels from "containment" to "balance of power" makes some PR sense.  Given America's Cold War efforts at containment, China might see it as an aggressive move against them, and the Obama administration's efforts are not so much a move to isolate China completely, as to keep the PRC in check.  To my mind, though, the phrase "balance of power" recalls the 19th and early 20th century European diplomacy leading up to World War I, and we all know how that worked out.

Desert Shield, Desert Storm, Desert Stuck...

That's how my Dad described it when he got back from Bahrain Mother's Day of 1991. 

It's hard to believe that 20 years ago, President George Herbert Walker Bush deployed the 82nd Airborne Division and the First Air Wing to Saudi Arabia to deter Saddam Hussein from invading Saudi Arabia.  At the time I was a sophomore at USF, starting my first semester of Army ROTC, and arguing with my soon to be ex-girlfriend about the deployment.  She had joined the National Guard to get money to pay for school and was upset about the prospect of having to deploy to the desert (that didn't happen since she spent the next 8 weeks in Basic Training at Ft. Dix, followed by a year at Ft. Sam Houston).  My unfeeling response to her was to ask her exactly what she had expected when joining the Army...

Desert Shield and Desert Storm were an interesting experience in Tampa.  An anti-war group on campus tried to prevent us from wearing our uniforms, when there were rallies at the campus flea market the cadre warned us to not start anything (we promptly went over wearing our gold and black t-shirts), the campus police stopped to investigate our early morning ruck-run, and when our color guard participated in parades, SGM McLaughlin reminded us to defend the colors from protesters.  The flag-bearers were specifically reminded that they were carrying a spear.

The one thing that really gave us pause was the deployment directive posted in the cadet lounge.  It specified that in the event of a full-scale call-up of all forces, cadets who had finished Advanced Camp would be commissioned, that cadets in their third year would finish training before commissioning, and scholarship cadets would be enlisted in the ranks.  The rest of us would stay in school, assuming we didn't volunteer on our own.

These days I teach college students, mostly freshmen and sophomores, who are 18 or 19 years old, but nothing has made me feel quite so old as this anniversary.