Full Strat Disclosure #5: Whit Jackson’s Cyber AC
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This is the fifth edition of Full Strat Disclosure. The goal of this project is to provide a free place to discuss and learn strategy from some of the best. Coaches and judges will discuss a case they either wrote or coached and detail the strategic thinking behind it. On this edition, Whit Jackson will discuss his Cyber AC on the topic “In the United States, national service ought to be compulsory.”
WJ: This is the version of the cyber aff I read on the September-October national service topic in quarters of Bronx. I liked this aff because it had a lot of substantive tricks and outs I could leverage against different types of arguments, and the offense was nuanced enough to get out of a lot of generic impact defense and counterplans. A few things to note:
1) I was expecting the 1NC to be either a phil NC or a high theory K which is why I read more framing and FW warrants in the place of substance than I would in a round where I expected the neg to concede framing.
2) The reason I only read one advantage to this aff throughout the topic was it allowed me to really develop the offense in-depth. Rather than adding a second contrived advantage scenario, reading a single well constructed advantaged with multiple nuanced helped tell a convincing ballot story with strong evidence.
3) I tried to chose impact that were hard to impact turn – a major reason I chose blackouts and NoKo over things like heg and econ was because it’s much harder/sillier to go for blackouts or North Korean human rights abuses good and nullify all the topical offense.
4) Application of offense to NCs – especially considering I was reading this aff at a Northeast tournament I tried to have impacts I could spin to turn phil NCs in case I lost the framework debate.
5) Disad interaction – while the aff only had two explicit extinction scenarios, the impact and internal link evidence I chose had warrants on why cyberattacks hurt the economy, IR, intellectual property, etc which were all common impacts to disads read against the aff to help turn the offense.
6) Every card has a purpose – I’m not a fan of adding extra cards just to have more cards, every card in the case has a unique function, even if it also supports warrants in other cards.
WJ: This card is an epistemological justification for why happiness/pleasure is objectively morally relevant. It argues that our sensory perceptions can provide a basis for rational moral judgements which both answered a lot of “util subjective” dumps people were reading as well as helped answer NCs like Kant and Libertarianism which used rationality/a priori justifications for morality.
WJ: This card uses a thought experiment from David Parfit in order to justify why a static, continuous personal identity doesn’t exist. I thought it was strategic to read in this round because 1) it answers a lot of normative ethics like Kantianism which rely on a static moral subject and 2) helps delink from a lot of high theory Ks like Deleuze that K debaters had been reading because it agrees with a lot of their stances on the nature of subjecthood
WJ: The argument directly below helped apply the aff offense to turn NCs that rely on a distinction between intended consequences and forseen consequences
WJ: I didn’t normally read the card above, but in this round I replaced Bostrom with it because it has a similar warrant but also made more specific claims about subjecthood and why the aff would turn something like Deleuze 
WJ: This card is uniqueness evidence. It shows that in the status quo our defenses to cyber attacks are too weak because of the lack of a coordinated effort to improve systems. I liked this card for a few reasons
1) It says that defenses are weak in spite of strong offense which was able to answer a lot of neg uniqueness evidence that just said “we’re good at attacking other countries now
2) It critiques the influence of private interests and the military industrial complex and says they’ve pushed ineffective reform which was good defense to security Ks
3) It justifies why the problem is fixable, which answered a lot of cards that say “it’s impossible to stop cyberattacks”
WJ: This card is link uniqueness, it establishes that staffing problems exist in the status quo which prevent responses to cyber attacks and they will not be solved absent major changes to recruitment. The card helped answer the Incentives CP because it warranted why many cyber workers are not even interested in working for the military
WJ: This was a solvency card that supplemented the ones at the bottom of the case. It answered a lot of advantage counterplans like incentives that took people out of their existing jobs and made them full-time military employees. The card argues it’s necessary to have people that are experts and work in fields like power grids, defense contracting, etc but can be called up if necessary because they have specialized experience.
WJ: This is the internal link/uniqueness card I read for the grid scenario. It warranted why Cyber Attacks pose a threat to the power grid in the status quo. Why I chose the card:
1) It makes a pretty compelling case for why the threat was real – it has examples where similar attacks worked in other countries, gives hard numbers on the scope of possible damage, and shows that attempts are being made in the squo
2) It answered a common impact defense card that the individual plants/the grid is isolated – it warrants why even a few power plants being taken down would cause overloads on other grids and cause a “cascade” of attacks
3) It gave two answers to the argument countries don’t have incentives to attack the grid – a) countries are attempting in the status quo, b) even if countries like China don’t, hostile actors like terrorist groups and North Korea aren’t
4) It turns econ and geopolitics disads (and military strength > cyber strength) – the card establishes the aftermath would cost hundreds of millions and it would escalate to conventional warfare in retaliation
WJ: This card was the one of the two explicit extinction impacts in the case. I liked having an impact that terminated in something other than nuclear war because it meant people couldn’t just dump on nuke war doesn’t lead to extinction. The card warrants why even a short large scale blackout would be disastrous due to nationwide interdependence on things like food supply lines and water sanitation. To be honest, it wasn’t the greatest card but most people responded with impact defense that wasn’t applicable (eg. Blackouts don’t lead to nuke war), so I went for it more often than I expected to. I used it as a turn to structural violence NCs a few times because those most effected by things like long-term food inaccessibility would be vulnerable populations.
WJ: This card was uniqueness/internal link evidence for why it’s urgent to increase defenses against North Korean cyber-attacks. The card says North Korean cyber-attacks on defense contractors and banks are being used to support their nuclear weapons programs by providing blueprints and funds. The scenario was able to get out of a lot of answer people read because they assumed it was about North Korea hacking and launching our nukes, rather than using cyber attacks to build their own. It also warrants why they pose a threat to the power grid which so even if I didn’t go for this scenario I could cross apply the card as an internal link.
This card says North Korea is able to continue abusing human rights because hacking and cybercrime allows them to diminish the impact of sanctions on them. The warrant’s not great but helped link to NCs and weigh the case against Ks (eg. I won a round earlier in the tournament on “North Korean labor camps not virtuous”).
WJ: This is the second impact extinction impact card I read which argued that as North Korean nuclear capabilities grow (which are enabled by cyber attacks), it increases the probability of both intentional and accidental nuclear war. I liked this card for a few reasons:
a) It answered a lot of impact defense about why North Korea wouldn’t intentionally attack others, because it argues even “benign” tests could lead to misinterpretation by other countries and lead to retaliation
b) We hit the security K a lot with links about demonizing North Korea or saying they’re irrational, but this card helped delink because it says miscalc and misinterpretation are just as likely to cause a war
WJ: The plan argued the government should create a reserve military force and conscript all employees responsible for protecting infrastructure deemed critical to national security. In the case the infrastructure they worked on was attacked, the government would call them up and they would be under the control and command of the military
WJ: This solvency card was an answer to counterplans that added people full-time to the military. It argues that different types of infrastructure have specialized needs and that using people who didn’t know the intricacies of civilian infrastructure would create knowledge deficits and make them less effective.
WJ: This card was a solvency deficit/econ DA to incentives counterplans as well as a justification for why conscription was necessary to get the best qualified people. It’s hard to convince someone with a $500,000/year job at Google to work for a much lower salary in the military, which means either a) its prohibitively expensive to get top-tier experts or b) the only people who accept will be those least-qualified which are both reasons the CP couldn’t solve.
WJ: This was a materialism justification for why theorization needs to be able to answer global problems rather than just describe the world we live in. I used it to preempts high-theory Ks because it justified why a permutation/fiat is necessary in order to solve global problems and challenges.
