Political Booknotes
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES The Straw Giant: A Report from the Field. Arthur Hadley. Random House, $19.95. In a news-oriented society such as ours, it's easy to forget how quickly ideas...
...Nor does it mean precision weapons will never become truly effective...
...What's needed is the willingness to translate reform suggestions to reality...
...it subtracts from overall well-being...
...He makes a far more compelling argument when he cites the intrusive role of military activity...
...Charged particle beams (essentially, lasers firing matter rather than energy) haven't worked yet in laboratory conditions...
...Now from the same grotesque world comes a saner and meeker voice—a plastic surgeon who, though serious about his profession, admits that it is more "cosmetic" than therapeutic as he sets out to explore the contradic.tions and rationales of this hybrid form of medicine...
...Robert Goldwyn...
...that's another story) on Capitol Hill and even within the military, a book like The Straw Giant just seems like more of the same...
...Robert Montgomery, Clarence Ayres, and Edward Everett Hale set a nation-wide example in pursuit of relevant and often inconvenient truth...
...the ground when Hadley predicts, "There appears to be a ddistinct possibility that within ten years we can protect a limited number of missile silos with a system of charged [particle] beams at heavy but not prohibitive expense...
...Goldwyn defends his work while grappling seriously, if not conclusively, with its assumptions...
...After looking at the American industrial decline, Dumas takes effective issue with those who espouse the commonly cited solutions or evasions: those who think that our genius in financial management, mergers and acquisitions, and paper entrepreneurship is our solution...
...John Kenneth Galbraith...
...Robert Goldwyn, who has spent his professional life as a surgeon at a Harvard teaching hospital, is a moderate compared to Geist's mad redesigner of flesh...
...Or that Army Delta Force commandos could...
...Air Force and Army pilots with the requisite training were available but passed over...
...Amy E. Schwartz The Overburdened Economy...
...I would be inclined to think him a trifle too narrow in the way he confines contributive activity to visible or tangible, touchable goods and services...
...Nor, Hadley says, were the Marines told they were flying a path that followed holes in the Iranian radar system, meaning that they could have safely risen above the storm...
...No classification of economic activity of the magnitude of Professor Dumas's will be without its critics, and the more motivated technical nitpickers will rejoice...
...And yet he remains puzzled that, while most surgical patients come unwillingly or with little choice to surgeons in search of health, his own patients are willing—often recklessly so—to risk their health in return for the evanescence of better looks...
...Last December, William Geist of The New York Times did an "About New York" column on the holiday crush in the office of a "while-uwait" plastic surgeon...
...Their comfortable redundancy is indicated by the recurrent sacking of hundreds or thousands of white-collar and managerial personnel in the interest, it is always said, of greater efficiency...
...Comprehensive reform is not likely until we have a president and a secretary of defense who aren't afraid to say the magic word "No...
...The JCS penciled in Marine pilots who had never trained for long-range flight in order to give each service a piece of the action...
...Hadley's primary contribution to the defense reform debate is to detail field-level operational foul-ups, such as the fact that there were four officers with the title "commander" at the desert staging site during the Iran raid, none with true authority...
...Men and women alike brought in torn-out magazine pages with faces they wanted...
...Along the same lines, The Stra.w Giant loses touch with...
...Forest Service didn't wheedle their way into the mission, too...
...Admitting his own preoccupation with appearance doesn't save him from inconsistencies or absurdities...
...He doesn't operate in his office or on a patient's whim, and he tries, for example, to discourage women from having breast-enlargement surgery just because their husbands want them to...
...He hopes his daughters will escape the tyranny of appearance that makes women "sacrificial lambs," yet admits that "as a plastic surgeon . I both answer that need and create it ." Goldwyn covers well the medical profession as a whole, describing at length current health.issues and the sociology of hospitals...
...A few encouraging signs exist...
...those who say that the future lies with "high-tech" industries, in which we are already in a trade-deficit relationship with the Japanese...
...Neutral employments neither add to nor subtract from such service...
...After criticizing the ability of interservice factions to cooperate with each other on rudimentary matters, he glides past the complication that many smart munitions can function only with split-second coordination among distant units...
...I urge for it and Professor Dumas the attention they both deserve...
...Caspar Weinberger...
...Dodd, Mead, $16.95...
...the Senate has unanimously passed Barry Goldwater's JCS reorganization bill...
...his knowledge seasons a topic too often presented in terms of clean, neat data...
...Management, having the decisive power in the modern great corporation within a tolerant constraining structure, relentlessly multiplies its own numbers and privileges...
...Finally, Hadley notes, because the Marines could not communicate with other services, "there was no way for them to learn that the dust storm would end after roughly an hour and that at Desert One it was a relatively clear and starlit night ." Sympathy for such unglamorous realities faced by grunts comes from Hadley's having personal familiarity with field conditions...
...What's the next step for defense reform...
...Instead he divides economic activity into three categories— contributive, neutral and intrusive...
...Five years ago, when a certain regular contributor to this magazine wrote a certain book criticizing the nature, structure, and cost effectiveness of the American military, he was condemned as unreliable and irresponsible (if not an outright fellow traveler...
...Intrusive resource use is a flat subtraction therefrom...
...The author, Arthur Hadley, is a longtime military journalist who served in a tank division during World War II and has written on Pentagon affairs for many publications, including the legendary Reporter magazine in the 1950s...
...Women debated having their eyeliner tattooed on, an operation which, once the scabs and bruises heal, spares the wearer the worries of smudged makeup...
...the Air Force and Naval aviation are grudgingly substituting reliability for mega performance...
...Star Wars, indeed...
...Contributive resource use consists, broadly speaking, of those employments of capital and labor that serve the wants and desires, public and private, of people at large...
...Computers and sensors continue to improve, and it's entirely possible that an unstoppable combination will someday be developed...
...The Army has reformed its internal organization to increase unit cohesion, and made its training more realistic...
...Lloyd J. Dumas.University of California Press, $18.95...
...the slightest breakdown in synchronization will send the missle humming off into the wild blue yonder...
...This doesn't diminish the courage or skill shown by U.S...
...those who see serviceslow, wage employment serving junk foods—as the next natural step in our economic development...
...The Marine pilots, Hadley says, were trained exclusively in clear weather...
...Is the fixation on ,beauty to humanity's credit (an "aesthetic sense"), or merely a way to objectify and enslave...
...For the Libya raid—which was staged at a time and place of our choosing, after months of preparation and against lightly defended targets—the Pentagon employed the smartest weapons at its disposal...
...Intrusive resource use is not passive...
...He is kinder than most commentators to the Marine helicopter pilots...
...A CIA report of sandstorms— which is what they encountered, making the effort more comparable to driving 70 miles per hour without headlights through a blizzard—was never forwarded to them...
...Women bought bathing suits that didn't fit, wore them to the doctor's office, and commanded the surgeon to "get rid of everything bad that shows ." Some bought ball gowns with plunging necklines and large bodices, then went to the doctor for the cleavage to fill them up...
...Those so employed, in a manner of speaking, neither add to nor subtract from serviceable production...
...More than any other explanation, this accounts for our industrial decline...
...The Straw Giant is less convincing when the author attempts to make a case that an "accuracy revolution" brought on by precision-guided weapons has fundamentally altered the nature of warfare...
...Somewhere in the industrial environs of Tokyo, and in only slightly smaller dimension near Seoul, there should be a flower-strewn statue of Mr...
...The Straw Giant is a well thought out, careful book that reflects his lifetime of experience...
...The epitome of neutral resource use, neither contributing nor damaging, is the modern managerial exfoliation, public and private, which Dumas examines at length...
...For example, Goldwyn takes a strong stand on the malpractice scare, arguing that "at the risk of alienating my medical colleagues, I think the presence of attorneys and the threat of malpractice have upgraded what our patients receive...
...POLITICAL BOOKNOTES The Straw Giant: A Report from the Field...
...Is it his fault, or theirs, if people seem unable to realize that nature and death, surgery and healing, involve imponderables—if they, in fact, adopt a "shopping mall" attitude toward their bodies...
...The Army's new Hellfire antitank missile is launched from a helicopter but controlled by another aircraft or troops at the front...
...Ho hum...
...Several bombers turned back because their ground sensors couldn't lock on targets, and of the weapons fired it appears roughly half hit what they were aimed at...
...Its manifestation of dominant, even massive, importance is the military establishment, which reaches into the economy for the capital, labor, and especially the technological skills and resources that would otherwise be used in enlarging and improving the production of civilian goods and services...
...Today, with most premises of the military reform movement widely accepted (if not acted on...
...Many categories of weapons have become more accurate, but for all his skepticism in other areas, Hadley takes performance claims about precision weapons at near face value...
...Evidence of Pentagon incompetence...
...Results were mixed at best...
...Why, he wonders repeatedly, does society put such value on beauty in women (85 percent of his patients are female) that they'are willing to risk their health for small temporary gains...
...No more evidence is required: books like National Defense, The Pentagon and the Art of War by Edward Luttwak, and now The Straw Giant provide all one could ask...
...Others just needed the excess fat sucked out from under their skin through a rubber hose...
...he is the "dream dispenser" who frees people magically from the prison of unlucky birth, something no society has ever before had the ability to do...
...Thus he denies a contributive role to some police services—saying that these prevent "undesired redistribution [of wealth and do not] add to the aggregate standard of living ." I would urge that tranquility of life is an important part of the living standard, perhaps also contributing to a more effective production of wanted goods and services...
...Gregg Easterbrook Beyond Appearance: Reflections of a Plastic Surgeon...
...After saying, in the tradition of Thorstein Veblen, that these terms are value-free and purely scientific in mood, he goes on to argue the contrary with no slight energy...
...Goldwyn's clear and confident view of the medical profession as a- whole only makes him agonize more over the peculiarity of his own service...
...He repeatedly cites possible lawsuits as the reason for taking time on some tedious "detail" of good care, such as keeping good operating records, or making sure that-an unconscious patient is not lying in a position that will give him bedsores...
...In a news-oriented society such as ours, it's easy to forget how quickly ideas transmute from heresy to conventional wisdom...
...Of billions wasted...
...In his latter chapters, Professor Dumas goes on to consider, perhaps a trifle less persuasively, what would be involved, politically and administratively, in moving resources from intrusive and neutral into contributive production...
...Though they performed poorly, Hadley sympathizes with the physical and mental strain they endured flying helicopters 500 miles in the dark at treetop level—it's like driving 70 miles per hour at night without headlights—and mainly faults the committee mind-set of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS...
...On the other hand, he sees nothing peculiar about the beautiful, paranoid woman who makes an appointment with him every year to scrutinize "before" pictures for signs of aging—only to leave in great disappointment each time it turns out she has not sagged enough yet for a facelift...
...His chapter on the attempted raid is among the best accounts of this sad event, partly because he understands the position of the soldiers involved and places the blame on the command chain, not on individuals in the field...
...Still, one suspects that within the Pentagon, generals and admirals who five years ago would have gone berserk over the mere existence of books like The Straw Giant are now reading them, nodding in secret agreement, and going back to business as usual...
...In retrospect it's amazing the Coast Guard and the U.S...
...But I make such complaints largely to show this review is a careful and responsible assessment of an extremely interesting, even exciting, book...
...This dense, original, competent, and plainspoken book is in that tradition...
...talk directly to the White House but not to the Marine or Air Force units involved in the operation, or even to Rangers (from the same service, but a separate hierarchy) guarding the site perimeter...
...He is quite certain he really does make people happy...
...the notion of operational beam cannons within a decade seems remote...
...Lloyd Dumas is a professor of economics at the University of Texas in Dallas, which is part of an educational system that, especially at Austin, has been insufficiently celebrated for its initiative and independence in economic thought over the last 50 years...
...It was a nightmare glimpse of decadence...
...This it does by seizing on manpower, intelligence and capital and taking them away from public use...
...Instead they continued to hug the ground, the sand chewing up fragile helicopter parts that ultimately failed, and pushing themselves to a state of nervous exhaustion...
...forces during the raid, but it offers another caution against thinking weapons have become smarter than the people operating them...
Vol. 18 • September 1986 • No. 8
