Still true!
Joseph Heller’s classic is 50 years old. Unfortunately, it still rings true in today’s military, according to this BBC article:
In Catch-22, for those lower down the food chain, there is nowhere to go to question methods. The same can be true today mainly because the army employs the same top-down reporting system that was in place 70 years ago, says Lt Col [Paul] Bates [a British army officer now serving with the U.S. Marines in Afghanistan]. “This is where the military finds itself in a Catch-22. It needs to adopt a strict hierarchical system in order to fulfil its mission. There is little time for debate in a conflict situation. And yet this system can give birth to both brilliance and toxicity.”
Kind of like deadline-driven journalism.