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ОглавлениеCHAPTER 1
Worth the Waste
Waste features prominently in discussions of the US military, offering one way of reckoning with the impact of permanent war preparation, bridging the virtual gap that appears to separate civilians from the costly and destructive military assembled in their name. In a 1968 issue of the Washington Post, an article on military procurement reported that “much of the $45 billion spending buys nothing” (quoted in Melman 1970b, 181). Half a century later, it is still routine to read about the Pentagon wasting billions of dollars on unnecessary or overpriced materials. Many accusations of wasteful spending circulated during the startling military buildup of the Reagan years, especially surrounding the Strategic Defense Initiative (aka “Star Wars”). But criticism of these practices also continued afterward (Turse 2008, 83).
Lockheed Martin leads all military manufacturers in profits from arms sales, with over $53 billion in net sales in 2018 alone (Lockheed Martin 2019). It is also the recent beneficiary of some of the largest military contracts ever, contracts that have been heavily criticized by prominent politicians, from across the political spectrum, as enormous wastes of money. These criticisms suggest that military waste is a result of pure greed, that is, the self-interest of politicians, members of the armed services, and corporations. Worse, it is greed that hides behind the perceived need for a strong national defense. While this can explain a lot about what has happened in the United States over the last century, things are more complicated if one examines the functioning of military contracts in practice. Drawing inspiration from the history of critical military studies, this chapter asks to what extent people who work within the defense industry think of and anticipate the problem of waste.
It is important to understand the worlds and lives of people who make the world’s weapons, because criticisms of military waste that fail to do so have proven ineffective. In the last ten years there has been an ongoing national debate about controversial government contracts for the F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lightning, incredibly expensive fighter jets whose utility for the War on Terror has been called into question by both politicians and military analysts. Both planes were developed by Lockheed and have cost the Department of Defense (DoD) record amounts (Soar 2017).1 In part the planes are so costly because their production is distributed throughout congressional districts, and this is what makes it difficult for the likes of Barack Obama or Donald Trump to succeed in eliminating them entirely. During the budget cuts of Obama’s first term, the F-22 was criticized as the most expensive fighter jet in the nation’s history, costing as much as $350 million dollars per plane yet useless for the new kinds of wars being fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. Moreover, in the month following September 11th, the Bush administration had awarded Lockheed Martin what would amount to an even larger contract for the F-35. The Obama administration did not scrap either program completely, but claimed that the F-35 made the F-22 redundant and capped production of the latter at 187 planes. Given that forty-four states benefited from producing parts for the F-22, however, even this decision was bitterly fought within Congress and required the threat of a presidential veto. Obama was partly successful in placing spending caps on military expenditures, enacted in 2010 as a product of debt ceiling negotiations with House Republicans. More recent politicians have criticized these caps, as have members of the military establishment.2 Early in his first term, Trump began criticizing the F-35 program as wasteful in public addresses, promising to renegotiate the contract with Lockheed. When the price subsequently went down by $700 million, Trump took credit (despite the fact that this reduction in price had already been arranged).
Obama and Trump are only continuing a tradition in American political discourse about the risks of wastefulness from war spending. Concerns about complicity between the DoD, politicians, and military manufacturers are often traced to former general and president Dwight D. Eisenhower. During his farewell address in 1961, Eisenhower echoed concerns, expressed by C. Wright Mills five years earlier, that an emerging military industrial complex was beginning to dictate foreign and domestic policy and hijack American democracy for its own ends. According to the military industrial complex thesis, a permanent war economy can lead to a mutually beneficial relationship between politicians, the military and industry as a result of each group pursuing its own interests. In effect, what is normally perceived as a public good, defense and security, becomes instead tethered to the abstract law of competition that is meant to characterize the market. Eisenhower sought a way to render legible new forms of power and corruption that threatened American society. Put differently, Eisenhower’s reference to the complex was calling for the public to hold the power elite to democratic account. Throughout the Cold War, it was debated whether military buildup could be ultimately converted to civilian use or, as some argued, represented a disruptive and parasitical influence on the economy.3
The notion that the American military budget is bloated and inefficiently spent is over a century old. Thorstein Veblen—often credited as the first major critic of conspicuous consumption—defined all militaries as wasteful, not because they are immediately harmful economically, but “because these expenditures directly, in their first incidence, merely withdraw and dissipate wealth and work from the industrial process, and unproductively consume the products of industry” (1904, 90). In 1918, at the conclusion of World War I, Veblen’s concerns were realized as congressional investigations accused newly developed airplane manufacturers of being wasteful war profiteers. Lockheed was among those accused.4
At the onset of the Cold War, America’s contemporary war economy and security apparatus were established. At this time, military lobbyists successfully argued that domestic military industry might stagnate without permanent state investment, which would allow the United States to fall behind its global competitors. As government spending went down in the late ’60s, in response to the high cost of the Vietnam War, so did the profits of armaments manufacturers. This hit airplane manufacturers especially hard and, in 1971, Lockheed pleaded for a loan from the government in order to avoid bankruptcy. The Nixon Doctrine was partly a solution to this crisis, encouraging the sale of US arms to allies abroad in order to offset the cost of permanent war preparation (Custers 2007, 327). Not long after Eisenhower’s warning, the complex appeared to be beyond the control of politicians and voters, partly because the United States became the world’s weapons manufacturer. Even after Trump’s criticisms of the company, for example, Lockheed still recorded higher profits than expected in 2017, credited to the sale of F-35s to England and elsewhere. This also has its origins in the Cold War. From one point of view, military spending is a wasteful use of taxpayer money. In the case of nuclear weapons, Peter Custers argues, the polluting by-products, the wasted money, and the wasteful destructiveness of the weapon itself mean that their production amounts to a net loss of valuable capital, labor, and life, whether or not they are ever used in warfare.5 From another point of view, what Custers calls the “social waste” of military products helps to productively sustain armament corporations and national economies through the “substitution orders” of arms exports, largely by making use of unequal and disparate exchange with poorer nations (Custers 2007, 381). This more global focus on circuits of capital is what makes Custers’s Marxian-inspired critique different from the more statist criticisms of Eisenhower, Obama, and Trump, despite their shared focus on waste.
Though the military industrial complex is most closely associated with Eisenhower, Marxian theorists have been the most consistent critics of this arrangement, beginning with the connection Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin (1917) made between imperialism and capital accumulation.6 At the start of the Cold War, Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy developed Luxemburg and Veblen’s ideas; they argue that state military expenditures are more attractive for manufacturers because, unlike investment in public infrastructure, for example, they require endless innovation and “include a generous margin for a mythical risk factor” (1966, 208). It was easier for industry to make these demands during the Cold War, which involved a shift, in the United States and other militarized democracies, from mass conscription to greater military capitalization, including investment in expensive ships, bases, submarines, bombs, satellites, and aircraft (Holley 1971, 18). According to Baran and Sweezy:
It is a commonplace that warfare is becoming more and more a matter of science and technology, less and less a matter of masses of men and weapons. Rockets and missiles are replacing bombers and rendering fighter planes largely purposeless; huge fleets of surface vessels are obsolete; massed armies are giving way to highly specialized troops wielding an array of fantastically destructive weapons (1966, 214).
They go on to argue that, with more money spent on outlays for research and development and less for mass production, far fewer people are employed by military spending than once were.7 Processes like research and development, which will be considered below, would be among the wasted and unrecouped expenditures associated with military production. This is so because a product that is tested and not procured by the defense establishment is a loss of capital investment rather than a source of new capital in the form of profit (Custers 2007, 67–69).
One thing that criticisms from presidents and social critics leave out, however, is that military manufacturers have their own methods of conceptualizing and eliminating waste as part of product design, development, and maintaining customer ties. The people who make the permanent war economy possible live by certain values and typically believe that what they do contributes to the public welfare.8 Strange and alien as the complex can seem, it requires actual people to make it possible, negotiating contracts, changing designs, testing products, and sometimes maintaining them after they’ve been sold. Each step along the way can lead to waste: wastes of money, of time, of effort, and of lives.
Waste can be thought of in at least three senses, all of which I consider.9 First, waste can be associated with wastefulness or profligacy and lead to accusations of moral wrongdoing from others. As we have seen, this way of talking about waste has been common in discussions of the US military over the course of its history. Furthermore, avoiding this kind of waste, or accusing others of it, can be ethical acts that help a person identify as part of a like-minded community: in the case of military manufacturers, this might include being a good engineer or project manager. Second, waste in a more strictly economic sense can be considered as including any externality or by-product of value accumulation, anything unnecessary that results from the creation of something else. This is more closely tied to the Marxian critique of militarization already discussed. In my analysis, this includes places like the tri-city area of the Southern Tier of New York that have suffered from deindustrialization as circuits of capital leave material and human waste in their wake. Finally, waste can be considered more ontologically as the inevitability of entropic change, which means that no form lasts forever and all will eventually cease to be. This last sense of waste tends to be absent from public critiques of the permanent war economy, but it is very evident in conversations with military manufacturers.
I first contacted Simon, a retired resident of Binghamton, New York, because his neighbor told me that he was an avid amateur astronomer and I was interested in orbital space debris (the topic of chapter 4). But when we finally sat down together in his modestly decorated living room, we ended up talking mostly about his career at Lockheed Martin. Within a few minutes, Simon began describing his life as an engineer for the world’s leading weapons manufacturer and the difficulty of disposing of military technology. Crouching forward and speaking in his high, nasal voice, he spoke of the Seahawk helicopter, which he had worked on for several years:
[It] has certain equipment on board that is classified, not top secret, it’s classified secret or other classifications. . . . So even if the aircraft is lost in battle, you have to dispose of the pieces, sometimes by bombing the carcass. If it goes down in Afghanistan, you bomb it in Afghanistan. . . . Sometimes it’s too hard to destroy, or sometimes it’s radioactive, or sometimes it’s an emitter.
He went on like that and, much to my surprise, we talked less about astronomy that day than I had expected. Simon was the first person to make clear to me just how much military manufacturers think about the subject of waste in that third sense, that is, about how all products eventually fall into disuse. Even during its initial design, manufacturers are thinking about the end of a product’s life. This is an altogether different way of conceiving of waste, as the inevitability of entropic loss rather than the by-product of inessential and self-interested human decisions. And, as I will argue, it is important for casting or avoiding blame for moral wrongdoing, or waste in the first sense.
Military manufacturers like Simon also spoke about wasted time and money, but these were also typically interpreted in a way that not only differed from the military industrial complex critique, but anticipated and deflected such blame. Based on interviews with current and former military industry insiders, I argue that some forms of waste are meant to build relations of trust between military manufacturers and the defense establishment, while others are incorporated into design and testing production processes, as with the Seahawk helicopter. Far from an irresolvable contradiction within circuits of capital, waste is actively managed and imagined within military industries as they endeavor to build enduring customer relations and durable machines. I do not accuse military manufacturers of being wasteful, in the first, moralizing sense, per se; rather, I review the ways in which they knowingly produce or avoid waste while pursuing other ends, including but not limited to private self-interest.
Drawing on interviews conducted with current and former employees of the US DoD and Lockheed Martin, I focus on the reflexive practices of military producers themselves, that is, what they know and how they talk about what it is they do. As Collier and Ong characterize it, reflexive practices are “modern practices” that “subject themselves to critical questioning” (2005, 7). Critical questions possess political, technological, and ethical dimensions that test normative assumptions about how things are built. The three sections of this chapter focus on these dimensions in turn. Rather than pure, impersonal greed or corruption, the actions of arms manufacturing insiders appear governed by a variety of personal motives and social values. Rather than conceive of military waste exclusively in terms of money, moreover, they tend to frame waste in terms of engineering practices, which—far from being purely technical—may alternatively depoliticize and de-moralize the waste of the American military, or identify altogether new targets for public scorn.
My goal is not to trivialize the very real dangers that the military industrial complex poses, but rather to make it easier to relate to the permanent war economy, which can otherwise appear governed by impersonal entities (the DoD, Lockheed) and irresistible forces (greed, corruption). Talking about human stories and motivation scales such phenomena down to size and makes the abstract complex a matter of ordinary people struggling for themselves and their communities. The point is not only to make it easier to understand those making a living off of an entrenched system, in this case the permanent war economy, but also to sharpen our ability to critique and rethink that system in response.
IBMERS
The Owego Lockheed Martin plant began as an IBM facility, and locals still refer to all those who work or worked there as “IBMers.” The plant supplied high-end electronic equipment to the US military since the time of the Second World War. IBM was especially critical in the development of the Cold War continental surveillance system, Semi-Atomic Ground Environment (SAGE), “the single most important computer project of the postwar decade” (Edwards 1997, 75). IBM gained its reputation for computing as a result of its work on SAGE for the Air Force and would continue this relationship with the military for the rest of the twentieth century. The IBM facility in Owego was built as part of a general shift toward high-tech military weaponry. Part of IBM’s Federal Systems Division, the Owego plant helped to develop technology for government censuses, satellite programs, and other high-tech equipment. IBM was attracted to the area because of the existing manufacturing base, established by the Endicott-Johnson Shoe Company (known as EJ), which had flourished from its own military contracts, producing boots for infantry until as late as the Vietnam War. EJ is credited with building up the tri-city area, from parks and carousels to residential areas and large factories.10
The end of the Cold War meant a radical reduction in military production all over the world, the effects of which are also debated. After military buildup in the 1980s, US defense budgets fell by nearly 30 percent, more than two million service members and civilians lost their jobs, and over a hundred military bases closed. Though military spending increased in the early twenty-first century with the new War on Terror, the impact of spending cuts was felt throughout the country. The results were uneven—just as military buildup impacted different regions in different ways, so too did the radical reduction and restructuring of defense spending that followed the end of the Cold War.11
IBM eventually sold off the military division during the post–Cold War spending cuts of the 1990s, leaving the area almost entirely not long after. When EJ and IBM eventually sold off their local capital and shuttered their doors, the local community was devastated, leaving very few still employed in manufacturing. If one goes by voting results, locals tended to believe Hillary Clinton in 2006 when she ran for her New York seat in the US Senate and promised to bring work back to the Southern Tier. They also supported Governor Cuomo when he said the same thing in 2010, and some blamed him when, for example, Restore New York grants from Albany failed to support local initiatives. On the same day that Albany announced it would not support a local bid to develop two casinos, in 2015, the state government also issued a ban on fracking to extract energy from the gas-rich Marcellus Shale, which includes all of New York’s Southern Tier region (as well as neighboring Pennsylvania, where the practice is allowed). This was enough for various towns across the Southern Tier to begin talk of seceding from the state to gain the attention of lawmakers (Susman 2015). It is no accident, therefore, that most voters in this area did not support Clinton’s presidential run in 2016 or Cuomo’s reelection for governor in 2018. When Southern Tier voters changed allegiances and overwhelmingly voted for Trump, unlike New York State as a whole, it was in part because he claimed he would bring back American manufacturing.
On the one hand, these losses, hopes, and disappointments are a familiar part of the gradual process of deindustrialization affecting the whole country and many parts of the world. Christine Walley (2013) points out that this is more aptly characterized as reindustrialization, or accumulation by dispossession, as global markets are used as an excuse to introduce more flexible and profitable arrangements (i.e. reduced wages and benefits) and overall “leaner” workforces. On the other hand, for military manufacturers, the gradual disappearance of military contracts from the area is part of a general geographical shift. The economic effects of permanent war preparation have never been uniform, throughout either the United States or the world. The Cold War ushered in the growth of an American gun belt, stretching from the Pacific and Mountain regions across the South Atlantic and into New England (Markusen et al. 1991). As the gun belt grew, people suffered in those regions historically dependent on manufacturing, including the Midwest, Northeast, and Mid-Atlantic, leaving a rust belt behind.
In an online discussion forum known as City-Data Forum, a thread was created in 2009 titled “is binghamton, ny really that bad . . .?” One person, self-identifying as a lifelong resident, summarized the city’s history in this way:
Once upon a time, the entire Southern Tier was a great place to live and then one by one, the factories and big-businesses moved out. Some of the most important to the area: Endicott-Johnson Shoe Factory closed it’s [sic] doors, IBM-Endicott closed their doors; NYSEG downsized and laid-off, Frito-Lay has downsized and laid-off, basically over the years business has declined or moved. Now, Binghamton has a large population of senior citizens and students and an even larger population of people who are “stuck.” This area is a vacuum it sucks you in and you can’t get out because you never have the available resources.12
What is stuck in the tri-city area is not only people, but buildings. Much of the previous gun belt has begun to rust. Urban spelunkers record their journeys into old EJ factories with Go-Pro cameras mounted to their heads, posting them on YouTube or bragging about them on Reddit. Some of this old capital—which might have been maintained through corporate or state investment—is now being scrapped and remade into a pharmacy school by Binghamton University with a grant from the state, and members of the Environmental Studies department giddily imagine how to reuse these materials as “green infrastructure” to create living buildings in situ. An Upstate Revitalization Initiative is providing half a billion dollars over five years, which may finally lead to demolishing and refurbishing properties long thought too cost-prohibitive to restore (Platsky 2016). Meanwhile, at TechWorks, a local museum and hands-on educational workshop, retired and employed IBMers work with local college students tinkering with salvaged products created by local industries, from space-simulators produced for NASA to typewriters, printers, and old IBM computers. The archaeologist who runs TechWorks and her volunteers are trying not just to preserve the area’s material history but to show it off and make it sing.
If all this abandoned capital is waste—and I suggest we call it that—it is not just the waste of industry, but of the uneven investment cycles characteristic of the permanent war economy. The sale of the Federal Systems Division, followed by the departure of IBM, led to massive layoffs from which the area has not recovered. The old IBM, people like to say, really cared about its people and the community, but all that unexpectedly changed in the 1990s. Implicitly, that means they blame the new IBM, first and foremost, for what has happened since. In 1996, the former IBM facility was purchased by Lockheed Martin, a California-based aeronautics company that was nearly sold off to a scrapyard during the Depression, but was now leading the corporate consolidation of the post–Cold War era, along with the other big military manufacturers. Eddy, a former employee, told me that people who split off from IBM along with the Federal Systems Division managed to survive the layoffs that came later, though no one in the area was completely immune. Consolidation and plant closings furthered this transformation into a more post-Fordist production regime, which American military manufacturers were arguably shielded from during the 1970s and 1980s.13
POLITICAL DIMENSIONS: CULTIVATING CUSTOMER TIES
As Walley (2013) argues of industrial Chicago, industry has not entirely disappeared from the Southern Tier. Lockheed is still operating out of the Owego plant. But recent changes have created greater competition among the remaining companies for existing contracts, putting more pressure on military manufacturers to appeal to the client, that is, the DoD. As a result, current employees feel additional scheduling and cost pressures. In some cases, these pressures manifest in the social relationships of client and seller. However, market relations are never purely reducible to economic competition, which is premised on an idealized conception of marketplaces and market behavior.14 From the point of view of those involved in military contracting, wastes result from trying to please and maintain a good relationship with the customer, not simply as part of the abstract logic of the marketplace. The ultimate meaning of this relationship may still come down to reducing cost (for the client) and growing shareholder value (for Lockheed), but in practice it involves real people communicating with one another to solve problems and come to agreements.
I talked about this with Louis, a retired analyst for the DoD (specifically the Defense Contract Management Agency, or DCMA). I met Louis through the local Kopernik Astronomical Society, where he has volunteered in retirement alongside other current and former DoD and Lockheed workers. Louis explained to me how trying to satisfy the customer could lead to waste in the form of “mission creep”:
It’s a fancy term for, you start out and you say “I want this vehicle to do mission one, mission two, mission three. . .” And then, two years later into the development cycle, a new secretary of defense comes along and says, “Oh, guess what: I want you to do X, Y, and Z in addition to one, two, and three.” And all the military planners go, “Okay. . .” You know, and then they go back and look at all the other contracts and say, “Well, we’re developing this vehicle that can do these things, but we really need to add more capability.” Never mind the fact that it doubles the price, and/or increases the delivery schedule by more years.
Louis explained mission creep to me while we sat in the children’s section of a Borders bookstore, where he liked to go with his grandchildren sometimes, and the occasional child or toddler wandered in and out of our peripheral vision. He refused to discuss specifics, unsure of what would constitute treason, but he could tell me that mission creep could waste time, money, and effort. Manufacturers might even be aware of this, but be unable to resist the requests of their primary client. Both the manufacturer and the client might invest more than necessary in the development of a product that would never see the light of day, or would be purchased but end up with unnecessary multifunctionality simply because of the caprice of “military planners.”
The military spending cuts of the 1990s meant fewer companies but also fewer big-budget projects to go around. Sometimes budgets were cut on ongoing projects. But there are strategies for dealing with this as well. As Louis explained:
Usually the response to having your budget cut is you tell the contractor, “Well, instead of delivering twenty-five vehicles this year, and fifty the next year, I want you to deliver ten vehicles this year and fifteen vehicles the next year.” And then the contractor goes crazy! Or you say “Well, we changed their mind [i.e., the DoD], instead of having capability to do X, Y, Z, let’s just do X and Y, forget about Z, and reduce the quantities.” Or come back and say “Well, instead of having them ready by 2017, we’ll stretch it out to 2019, can you live with that?”
From Louis’s perspective as a former agent of the DCMA dedicated to overseeing and monitoring military contracts on behalf of the DoD, Lockheed Martin was not necessarily to blame for any wasted time, money, or resources in the process, “My personal experience with Lockheed Martin was they’re fairly responsible. There are other military contractors that don’t necessarily have the best track record.” He then paused and added, “Reasonably responsible,” perhaps thinking of instances where Lockheed crossed the line into wasteful irresponsibility.15
Routine aspects of contract negotiation, like mission creep, are not entirely reducible to ordinary market logic, which pits buyers and sellers with their competing interests against each other. Rather, they are also a product of social relations between people who know each other well. For employees at the DCMA, military industry is not a collection of faceless corporations, but people with whom they share a community. In this community, I have known DCMA and Lockheed employees who continue to socialize and volunteer together after retirement—including at the Kopernik Observatory. They tinker with machines together, teach young people about the value of science and technology together, go camping together, run charity events together, get to know one another’s families, health concerns, and passions. Perhaps because of this social intimacy, no one described the relationship between Lockheed and the DCMA as oppositional or combative.
Even so, as representatives of buyer and seller, respectively, there can be disagreements and misunderstandings. As Hugh Gusterson observed of nuclear weapons scientists at Livermore National Laboratory, many work-related stories by weapons designers “involve a sequence of events in which scientists fear that machines will not behave as predicted but, after a period of painful anxiety, learn that humans can predict and control the behavior of technology” (1996, 159). In the stories I heard, people were as much a source of anxiety, and people also needed to be predicted and controlled to have successful outcomes. One current Lockheed engineer described how this could happen in the bidding process for a new contract:
When we’re in the bidding process to get a job. . .we’ll go in and. . .we’ll do our first estimate of what we think it’s gonna take to do this job. And then in our reviews we’ll say, “Aww, that’s gonna cost too much money, our inside information says the customer only has this amount of money and they won’t go over that, so, get it down!” So you get it down. And then when you win the job and you’re actually performing the job, you realize that the first number you put out was the real number. That happens an awful lot.
He went on to tell me a story:
One project I was involved in, we had a supplier who was providing the software, and they went bankrupt in the middle of what we were doing. So there was a lot of internal hand-wringing: ‘What are we gonna do about it? Are we gonna do the work ourselves? Are we gonna farm it out to yet another company?” And I was the one that had to do the analysis of what we were going to do and say, could we do it, and said “Yeah, we could do it,” and decision was we would do it, which was the decision I hoped we weren’t going to do, because it was a lot of pressure, both schedule and cost. It was unanticipated cost because we had given money to this company and expected fully that they would deliver us a product and now they weren’t there, so we were gonna have to do it. And it’s something that we had no expertise in at all, so we had to learn fast. And we had to have it done in six months.
When producers bid for projects, they present an initial price for meeting customer demands. When the cost of a project goes up, they risk being blamed by the client or the general public for wasting government dollars or jeopardizing defense needs. Yet, this example shows a simple contingency that can set production back (a supplier who unexpectedly goes bankrupt). If wasted money and time are avoided in this instance, it will come from manufacturers with “no expertise” working hard to deliver on their company’s promises. And, if they do not, they may be blamed by others but will not blame themselves. It is a failure to predict the actions of other people that is held responsible, as if they too should behave as reliably as machines.
Simon explained other specific examples where projects could live or die as a result of social relations maintained with the clients, who might disappoint or frustrate producers:
I was also on a couple top-secret projects. . . We were making brand-new aircraft for DARPA. It was called UCAR [unmanned combat armed rotorcraft protocol]. DARPA has their own internal engineers, the customer was the Army, and the Army would have their own staff of engineers. . . We’d show up for a meeting and there’d be DARPA engineers and there’d be generals. . . We were in a four-company contest to make this UCAR.
The UCAR was considered a small project for Lockheed at the time, but still an important contract to get.
We were down-selected from four to three and three to two. So we were at one of these presentations where the generals and colonels and DARPA. . . We were making our presentations, and typically it’s death by PowerPoint slide. Over two days, over six hundred PowerPoint slides. So these poor generals and DARPA people, they know what’s coming. So during the first presentation, the lead engineer from weapons and fire control in Orlando, Florida, was making his presentation about his wonderful weapons, and a general said, “Well what about that?” And he said, “Be quiet, I’m not done talking yet.” He said that to a general! So we walked out of that meeting red. Green is approved, yellow is caution, red is you’re gonna fail. So we plied him with beer and cigars all night. “I know I’m right, the general’s wrong, he just didn’t understand me. . .” You don’t talk to a general that way! So right about midnight I called his VP, I said “This guy isn’t getting it, can you talk to him?” So he went in the next day and apologized to the general. So we survived that.
And what is the point of the story? For Simon: “The customer is always right.” And yet, after all that, “The Army canceled the program eventually because they needed armor for the Humvees. So the ten billion dollars went for armor plating under the Humvees rather than our aircraft, but they’re still building robots.”
In fact, Simon ended up with two patents for his robotic copter, which he was issued in 2010 and 2011; they are proudly displayed on the wall near the entrance to his house. Which is to say: the design still proved valuable. From a more critical standpoint, this is private enrichment from public investment—Lockheed and its employees benefited from merely being considered for the contract anyhow. Yet, what can be lost from such a critique is that this preference for high-end military manufacturing also can be associated with higher moral ends and public goods. Simon can tell himself he did what he could for his country and for the future of robotics. This is not to divide moral from economic considerations; they are in fact thoroughly interwoven. Some forms of “waste” are related to building relations of trust and dependability, or a moral economy of customer ties between military manufacturers and the defense establishment. While this benefits the company, of course, it is also seen by many as part of satisfying the defense needs of the country. Any designs or efforts sacrificed in the process are worth the waste if the client—in this case, the defense establishment—is satisfied. For the DoD and Lockheed employees I spoke with, blameworthy wastefulness was something that occurred when deliberate moral choices were made to take advantage of the government, acts which they claim not to have witnessed or committed. Being responsible might mean spending time and resources that never materialize into a finished product, but as long as this was not deliberate, done in the interests of maintaining ties with capricious officers and politicians, then contractors did not blame themselves.
TECHNOLOGICAL DIMENSIONS: QUALITY CONTROL AS AN IMMANENT POETICS OF WASTE
The rhetoric of wastefulness is not merely an external critique brought to bear on military industry, but is also immanent to the production process: for those involved in military production, it is waste elimination rather than wanton wasting that is taken to be ideal.
One of the engineers from Lockheed Martin I spoke with, who went by “Bork,” had lived his whole life in the Southern Tier. He began as a temporary worker (known in Lockheed as the workforce extension program, or WFE, pronounced “Wiffy”). Soon he was promoted to a permanent employee (though not before suffering cutbacks in benefits, and not without surviving multiple waves of layoffs). For most of his time at Lockheed he has worked on software: “We were putting together a new graphics card and. . .we were using at the time a 3D labs graphics chip. . .for a helicopter. So it would be in the cockpit, drives the panels that the crew are looking at.”
Early on in our conversation, the corporate risk of investing in military equipment came up. According to Bork, this graphics chip, one of the first projects he worked on, could only be sold to the US government:
No one was gonna pay that kinda money for something like that, yeah. The power of the graphics card that you have in your laptop there [gesturing to the interviewer’s computer], we work with things that are comparable to that, but, your laptop doesn’t have to work at minus forty degrees Celsius or plus fifty degrees Celsius, so part of our value add is testing this hardware at extremes of temperature, extremes of vibration. . .so that there is assurance that it’s going to work in all sorts of environments.
In this sense, what Baran and Sweezy (1966) call a “mythical risk factor” is taken for granted within military manufacturing. The benefits of testing are not reducible to economic interest alone, but also include personal and social investment in one’s labor. Much like nuclear weapons scientists, “by means of this lived journey from anxiety to confidence, structured by the rhythms of the testing process itself, scientists learn that weapons behave, more or less, predictably, and they learn to associate safety and well-being with the performed proof of technical predictability” (Gusterson 2004, 160). Bork added that very few consumer products require testing at similar industrial temperatures (garage doors in temperate zones, for instance), but that military equipment “is built to be more durable. It’s built to be more rugged.” He went on:
Reliability of the equipment is. . .very important, we are still running equipment that was built twenty years ago or so, and even those cards that. . .I came in twelve years ago. . .they’re still in service, still pumping along. I think one of my favorite stories was that. . .a test engineer had accidentally left a. . .blanket on top of one of the mission computers, and the blanket got sucked into the air inlets of the computer. . . Now, the computer’s a pretty big box, it has lots of cards in it, and it’s got a big fan on the back that screams, I mean, the fan is so loud and it eats into your brain, and so he had this blanket on top of it to kind of quiet it down, and he kinda forgot about it, and the blanket got sucked into the inlets and it generated so much heat that the material that got sucked into the inlets actually starting shooting out as flames outside the back of the thing. During this whole process of flames shooting out this computer, it was still running! It was still running its tests and passing! So. . .we absolutely do value making a quality product.
From the perspective of military manufacturers, more money is paid for what they do because they invest additional resources in producing durable, military-grade products—i.e., things that will resist falling into transience and disuse. In fact, many of those I spoke with seemed proud of the fact that military equipment remained usable for generations. It was as if the reliability of products, proved through testing, reaffirmed the reliability of the engineers and managers tasked with designing them. They were proud of what they had done, in other words, precisely because they could see how waste, as inevitable entropic decline, had been anticipated and avoided. Taking satisfaction in one’s work often meant defeating waste.16
In a way that might seem paradoxical, these discussions of prized durability were never far from examples of failure and obsolescence. Rather than treating durability and transience as opposing qualities, engineers connected them as the product of one’s labor and the background conditions against which one struggles, respectively. Insuring quality meant careful attention to every product’s slow descent into waste and worthlessness, formally assessed as mean time before failure (MTBF). This required extensive testing, as Simon explained:
Every single piece of equipment on the helicopter and all of its support equipment is analyzed by logistics to mean time to failure. So we know that of a thousand pieces for five hundred helicopters so many are gonna fail per year, so that’s how many you keep in the spare parts inventory. And it’s just failure—they’re in the ocean, salt water is spraying on them, could be in the Arctic, very adverse circumstances.
The Seahawk helicopter that Simon worked the most on was intended for the Navy for purposes of doing search and rescue. And this could include the open water or downed pilots in Afghanistan, where all components needed to work to guarantee both safety and mission success (and, by extension, the presumed public goods associated with military strength).
People have been building these parts for fifty years, similar parts. And you do stress tests: for every part it has to go through an air-worthiness test and an environmental test. Environmental test puts it through cycles of heat and cold and banging around and dropping and being exploded.
This is still about preserving customer ties. According to Simon, the DoD representatives “either witness the tests or see the results.” When the Seahawk was in development the Navy sent its own engineers, mostly former pilots: “There would be all these very strong tests. Plus you would have the history of very similar built equipment, and they would all be built to military specification standards. Some of them are very old.”
Tests during product design and development also include models for the eventual breakdown of military products. As Simon pointed out, this means:
Life cycle. . .cost analysis. . .including disposition of all parts and of the military craft itself. . .decommissioned and everything. . . Typically you do a war game and you say how many are to be destroyed in battle, how many are left on the battlefield, after twenty or thirty years of useful life, how many have to be decommissioned, and the costs for that, and the expected disposal and reuse. All that’s calculated for every military program. . . Typically you end up using the Army or the Air Force or the Navy [method of life cycle analysis] but you still gotta use your company’s, so I’m familiar with Lockheed Martin where they have what they call logistics. . . . Analysis of every part and every military aircraft or ship or whatever and they’ll say over the twenty-five-year life you need to have so many spare parts stored in the US, near the battlefield, close to the battlefield, so that they can be taken care of during battle and during battle damage and during normal wear and tear. . .and then they do a disposal cost for each one of those.
In other words, every product’s inevitable entropic decline into waste is incorporated into its design and sale to the DoD. Like neurotic subjects who seek out that which fills them with dread, Lockheed personnel keep waste in abeyance and carefully account for it. When accused of being “wasteful” by presidents, Marxists, or anthropologists, this is what industry engineers will be quick to point out. They are not disappointed or dispirited by the descent of even the most durable of products into disuse, as far I could detect, because they spend a great deal of energy imagining such failures and planning for them.
Bork balked at the notion that the production process might be wasteful. For him, as for many engineers, “waste” meant wasted time and effort. They associated it with products that did not work, that failed or broke down, and served no purpose for the customer. This is precisely what they tried to avoid through good customer relations and extensive product testing and design. The primary goal of production was to reduce such waste, both in the product produced and in the production process itself:
Whenever something fails, the first person that gets called is the software engineer to explain what the failure is, and why it failed. And I still do that today, I get calls, “We got a failure in the lab, can you explain what this is?”. . . We’ve got one group that does all sorts of testing, so that’s the diagnostics group, that’s the group I’m in. And so, when we’re doing these environmental tests, we’re the ones that write the tests and then interpret the failures. . .writing software that tells you why it failed is much more expensive than writing software that tells you, “It failed.”
The former is known as mean time before failure (or MTBF) in engineering parlance. Knowing that something failed, that it is not meeting criteria promised to the client, is not enough to ensure that it does not fail again. One must know why, and for this the interviewee offered two options: either they, the software engineers, are called upon to explain why something fails, or a “more expensive” form of software is developed to tell them why. This means that their efforts on behalf of a better product avoid waste in two senses. First, a product that might otherwise turn out to be waste is engineered to last (that is, to function with a more acceptable MTBF). Second, there is a savings implied when an engineer does the work that expensive software might otherwise have to do. The value of the product is saved, and the company—and potentially the client—save money.
The military and manufacturers also employ additional analysis of their products to maximize utility and minimize waste. At the same time, the pursuit of quality could itself be regarded as wasteful if it meant being noncompetitive. IBM had a reputation for perfectionism going back many years. According to Bork:
IBM had a big stick up its butt for the longest time. They always had this Thomas Watson Calvinist engineering approach. You could even see that in the tail end of the IBM commercial products. Before they got out of their desktop PC. Their equipment was always overdesigned and overbuilt, I mean you could drive a car over them and barely dent it. It was the corporate culture, was one of exacting quality. To a point of not being competitive. If you were getting some knockoff place in Taiwan making cheap PCs, how can you compete with that?
The cost of “overbuilding” products was not just a loss in corporate profit, but could be seen everywhere in the community, where global competition (with Taiwan for instance) is blamed for loss of jobs and local decline more broadly. Sometimes creating a quality product could waste time and resources as manufacturers encountered technical problems. Louis said that the DCMA regularly encountered this phenomenon:
You can also have technical problems come out in the course of development work. And I’ve seen where the contractors will come back to the military and say, “You know, we don’t have a really good fix for this. We can’t do what you want to do. We really need to. . .” what’s called rescope, that is, change the scope of requirements: “These things that you’ve asked us to do, we cannot do. We need to delete them or substitute other things.”
“Rescoping” is also known as “requirements turn,” since it involves modifying the requirements as one develops a product, which can lead to dramatic scheduling and cost changes. Unlike mission creep, rescoping involves manufacturers having to admit to the client that they need to alter the initial contract. This is the least desirable of all options and can therefore make working conditions and social relations difficult, even “hostile” at the plant. Several of the men I interviewed partly blamed this for a high turnover rate among young engineers.
Finally, some product designs inevitably become obsolete, even before they are supplied to the military, simply because of the nature of contemporary war-readiness. This cannot be explained by decisions or difficulties on the part of either client or manufacturer. It represents, rather, the inescapability of entropic loss as a general principle in the material world. This in theory presents problems to any creator of any product, but is amplified in the context of a permanent war economy that demands continual improvements and updates. Simon first explained this to me:
Another aspect. . .is that this helicopter is flying with six million lines of code or so, because each box is a computer, the radar is a computer, the torpedo is a computer, the bombs are computers, the sonal buoys are computers, and they all have to work together. And a lot of that equipment is obsolete. When the aircraft first gets accepted by the Navy, the computers on board are usually ten years obsolete.
According to Simon, it is code that goes obsolete the quickest. This would appear to be akin to unplanned obsolescence, assuming producers did not intend for this to happen and that changes in computing are at least somewhat unpredictable. Ironically, creating a product that is already useless waste can occur precisely by attempting to avoid this possibility in pursuit of quality:
That is because of all this testing, and manufacture. It starts obsolete. When you plan for the aircraft, ship or whatever, you plan for it starting obsolete, and that’s why they have a phase one, a phase two, a phase three of upgrading it. And that’s where you make the money, is in the upgrades. There are classified war games, computer simulations, that you go through. And you know the computer systems of your opponents.
Simon depicted military equipment that was obsolete as soon as it was sold, a perfect illustration of the dynamics of endless innovation that Baran and Sweezy warned of more than half a century ago. But firms were aware of this: it meant constantly tending to products after they were sold, endlessly producing them in a creative process that never ends until they are decommissioned, destroyed, or both. For this reason, good management, for Eddy (an engineer retired eleven years), meant recognizing that military production is “managing change,” constantly adjusting as products evolve, and as costs and schedules change along with them. Whether the demand to change emerges through interactions with people, process, or product, managing it means trying to avoid waste in its various guises and to preserve value, relationships, and community more broadly.
Faced with change and uncertainty in their work process, the engineers and accountants I spoke with took pride in their own effort and expertise, first and foremost. That a project might fail to materialize, might be obsolete upon release, or might cost more than initially projected were out of their control by comparison.
ETHICAL DIMENSIONS: RISK AND BLAME
Experiences of responsibility or blameworthiness arise through social interaction, because ordinarily people only think to provide explicit justifications for what they do when impelled to do so by others (Keane 2016, 78–79). And distinct social situations can direct and deflect blame as a result. Inside the microworld of arms manufacturing and military contract procurement, for instance, one is more likely to be called upon to explain one’s work performance in certain ways and not others. As mentioned, in public discussions of the permanent war economy, blame is normally assigned on the basis of perceived self-interest—politicians want reelection, military personnel want more power, and corporations want more money. But in military production, blame is determined internally through product testing and audit.17 Put differently, testing products is a reflexive practice with greater social implications, beyond customer ties alone. That is because, in addition to demonstrating technical reliability that workers may take pleasure in, testing is an ethical activity that offers preemptive defense against blameworthiness, an alibi that allows engineers to manufacture products with a belief that they did the best they could.
Generally speaking, corporations in a neoliberal era use auditing practices to reduce various risks to the durability and reliability of their products by increasing the predictability of their processes, including employee performance (see Shore and Wright 2000, 85). What this means for Lockheed employees is that at various stages in the design of a product they must reflect on product success in specific ways even before they pitch a project to the military. The more important the product, the more that is invested in predicting and preventing (or rather delaying) the product’s failure and therefore mitigating any person’s sense of accountability. More scrutiny with safety-critical products means more testing of software itself, but not necessarily more environmental testing. Simon explained this to me in detail:
There’s a formal thing called a risk analysis, and you do a twenty-year risk analysis. This is a brand-new aircraft, brand new radios, brand new mechanical, computer brain that’s gonna be self-aware. What are going to be the technical challenges? All these things either won’t be built, can’t be built. . . what’s the plan? So you do a formal risk analysis and say, “At this point in time if we don’t have this design mature enough, we have to go to plan B or plan C.” And this formal risk analysis is approved.
Here, formal risk analyses translate “waste” into a series of tests and procedures that arguably deflect responsibility by distributing the labor involved in creating instruments of violence. Testing and auditing also mean inviting other people into the product assessment process:
Another thing Lockheed Martin does (and I assume other companies do) is, you present your design to an internal panel of what’s called “Wise Old Owls.” These are old scientists and engineers that have been through all of it before, and you first do a red team and a black team and they can shut down the Lockheed Martin effort and fire all us engineers if they don’t think we’re gonna win.
These internal “gatekeepers” monitor and assess projects and can have them thrown out for technical reasons, but Simon did not seem concerned about the human or financial cost, likening it to a form of blind peer review (perhaps because I was his interlocutor, and he was searching for an analogous domain of socially mediated audit).
If internal competition and risk analysis can lay waste to projects, in anticipation of their presentation to the client, this is actually meant to save time and money in the long run. If a project is committed to for twenty years, then even more capital, human and financial, is at stake. But too much process analysis can also be wasteful, from the perspective of Lockheed workers. The new face of manufacturing is not about being productive, Bork told me, but predictive. He said a lot of time and resources are now invested in cultivating reflexive attention to processes. What does this look like in practice? As Bork put it:
So that you have a set of rules that will always give you an expected result coming out. “I have this much time to develop this, and based on my processes, I know I need this many people, this amount of time and this amount of money, and in the end I’ll have what I’m asking for.” So it gives you predictability, that’s the big thing.
If a process was supposed to take you an hour but actually takes much longer, you want not only to shorten the amount of time it takes, but also to understand why you had it wrong the first time. This means asking not only what happened, but also how one can improve in the future. This is not bad, necessarily, but since new approaches are rarely implemented uniformly or perfectly, it ends up taking even longer to do one’s work. It is easy to get cynical about predictive management for this reason:
You’ve got the new darling method of development that’s making the rounds right now: Agile. This is the latest round of Kool-Aid. Every six or seven years, there’s some new paradigm of how to develop software that makes the rounds, and it’s gonna be the savior of everything and everybody, and it’s gonna make us so much more productive. The DoD has actually asked for more programs to be Agile. And they’re the main client, so everyone says “Yes, we’re Agile!”
Agile is a project management method that attempts to divide up tasks into small, two- to four-week bursts of activity, or “chunks.” Bork is of the opinion that it doesn’t actually accomplish anything and is almost a complete waste of time and effort. Agile represents additional auditing that the customer asks for, but according to those I’ve spoken with, Lockheed is just as capable of chasing the latest pointless craze as the DoD. Even this can come down to customer ties. Sometimes, as Bork joked, the method they end up using might just come down to some salesman who had “a really really good golf game!” Here, Bork can be seen as implicitly blaming the capriciousness of sales and marketing personnel for wasting his time, those who he suggests deliberately engage in leisure activities and pretend it is work.
Adding more time to any process typically gets more expensive, sometimes for the company and not only the customer. If you bid a “firm fixed price” on a contract, for instance, then any additional cost from extra testing is not covered, which means managers get nervous and executives get upset. This can be remedied if the process and product are of high enough quality that they draw the customer back again. But since this is no guarantee, it can create pressures to hurry up and finish things by scheduling deadlines and cost limitations.
In some instances, however, wasted money and time are equated with doing things right and achieving greater public goods—durable products, predictable processes—even if they come at the sacrifice of private profit. If additional testing and risk analysis can waste money and time, some of my informants also associated it with higher moral ends, especially saving lives and the national defense. I should note that none of my informants offered this naturally in our conversations, but only after I asked more probing questions, arguably shifting their familiar way of assessing accountability and blame.18 But they did have responses. As Bork put it:
You have lives of your countrymen that are reliant on what you’re doing. Just as if you were writing software or doing something with a jet airliner, you’ve got lives on the line of the people that are up in the air. So, depending on what you’re writing the software for, there can be a high degree of scrutiny on what you do. And the levels of testing get extremely expensive to guarantee as much as possible the reliability of that product.
Bork said that the fact that lives depended on safety-critical products was not explicitly discussed often, but generally understood by all those at Lockheed. He added that this might be easy to forget because of a division of labor where they might only be testing a particular widget that goes in another machine. This not only means that more people in more states and more congressional districts have jobs (thereby making the military industrial complex possible); it also means that the product that will be consumed—and its potential destructiveness—is also removed from view. The symbolic distance between war front and home front is bolstered through a literal spatio-temporal difference, one that serves to alienate military manufacturers from the consequences of their actions. Instead, they are consumed with reflexive attention to their work performance.
Bork said that engineers generally knew if some feature was safety-critical (e.g., for engine control), because it changed quality-testing standards during product development:
If you have something that’s safety-critical, that word itself implies that people are going to die. So if you’re working on a product that’s safety-critical, then you’re going to have the highest level of scrutiny. If you have something that’s mission-critical, you know that if it fails, “Okay, so they didn’t drop the bomb on this little village, they have to fly back.” So there’s less scrutiny. So where you would tend to let something slide is when you’d have some minor annoyance, something that would bother the operator, but that did not affect the operation, then you’d let it go by with agreement from the customer.
What further distances manufacturers from actual service members (“operators”) is the customer (the DoD), who stands in between them. The gap between safety-critical and minor annoyance is not absolutely and purely technical, but is at least partly mediated through social negotiation between manufacturer and client. As long at the DoD mediates on their behalf, the people using these weapons and the people they are used on are not the responsibility of the manufacturers. Better said, the potential consumption of weapons in war is not legible within the testing and experimenting that manufacturers perform with products, no matter how extensive, except as abstract operators and targets.
When he was younger, Bork worked with his father’s company, which was contracted to do work on military projects by GE. He remembers his father telling him as a young man just out of college, “Remember, whatever you do, somebody’s life is depending on what you do.” “I always think about that,” Bork says. Lockheed engineers I have spoken to are more likely to raise moral concerns when it comes to “safety-critical” products, that is, those that are necessary for the safe deployment and return of service members. The thought of making a mistake with safety-critical implications was deeply unsettling, whereas mission-critical ones (“making sure a bomb is dropped in the right place,” as one informant put it) provoked less of an ethical response. Simon did not seem to reflect much about the implications of the UCAR for which he owns patents. He mostly thought of it as a challenge to overcome, like others he had encountered previously in his career:
This was to be a completely robotic helicopter—could think for itself, could arm itself, could fly back to base and rearm without humans, could go out and task and kill without human intervention. . . I was the communications engineer, and I was making a self-aware radio system. Never been done before. If you have a team of four of them flying and they’re gonna go around a mountain and fly low. . .they would lose communications as they flew around the mountain, so my self-aware radio would tell my mission planner, “Hey, in five miles we’re gonna lose radio communications; fly over the mountain so we can keep radio communications.”
For Simon, a UCAR that could task and kill without human intervention was a technical challenge, not a moral or ethical one. Put differently, their reflections upon technical challenges, audits, risk analyses, and tests are where their ethical focus lies. After all, life-and-death decisions are ultimately offloaded to the client. Social relations with distant combatants that one never meets face-to-face are arguably more difficult to maintain than those with customers and coworkers with whom one directly interacts, depends upon, and is accountable to. Here Marxian analyses again provide insight. If classic commodity fetishism obscures the production of a commodity in the moment of exchange, then arguably the market in military products serves to obfuscate their consumption in violence.
WHOSE MILITARY? WHOSE WASTE?
To conclude this chapter, I want to consider a seemingly simple question: who really owns America’s enormous arsenal of warcraft? Answering this question can help clarify who benefits from permanent war-readiness and, looking ahead at the next several chapters, what ought to be done with its remains. If it is possible to establish to whom military weapons belong, this might help determine responsibility for what becomes of them when they fall out of use. As this chapter has shown, responsibility is no simple matter.
Let us start with an individual plane or ship. When it is undergoing design and testing, prior to sale, in a sense it is owned by the manufacturer, its team of engineers, accountants, managers and, ultimately, its shareholders. To the extent that it belongs to the manufacturer, the manufacturer can profit from or be blamed for its creation (i.e., if it is overpriced or worth the cost, malfunctions or performs properly, breaks down or is durable, etc.). And yet, if certain designs are not purchased by the DoD, in theory the manufacturer may not be allowed to sell them to other countries or the private sector, although they might not always follow these rules in practice. This is part of the risk taken on by military manufacturers. Therefore, manufacturers do not have total ownership—they cannot do whatever they please with their designs and products.
So, in some sense, even before the DoD’s purchase, warcraft belong to the department and, ultimately, the federal government, because they are the ones who can decide whether it can be sold and to whom, just as it was their decision whether it was to be used and on whom. To the extent that it is the DoD’s, the DoD also decides whether it is turned to scrap, sold, or loaned for an exhibit. As I will discuss further in chapters 2 and 3, the military might therefore be blamed when it chooses to scrap what could be considered important historical artifacts or reusable assets. And yet, in theory these government entities are legally and morally bound to work on behalf of the American people, whether or not they always do so in practice. This is why the representatives of the government and military are blamed for making what some consider unnecessary or insufficient purchases. Once again, this is not total ownership—they are accountable to someone else.
One of the more common-sense ideas implied in debates about government spending is that wars and the military exist because of the American people. This can be taken in at least two ways. On the one hand, it is meant to be for their sake that national defense exists in the first place—“freedom isn’t free,” as the familiar adage goes. On the other hand, it is generally thought that the taxes of ordinary Americans finance the military. Many people interviewed for this book characterized old warcraft waste as belonging in some sense to “the American taxpayer” for this reason. Legislation on the disposal of naval ships, for example, asserts that their fate should be decided according to what is best for the taxpayer. If this were true, it would only be appropriate that ordinary citizens reuse and reimagine old warcraft as they see fit, thereby reclaiming what was always already “theirs” to begin with.
And yet, things are not so simple. To begin with, there is not always a clear relationship between the things that the military does and the needs of ordinary Americans. This is common knowledge, even if it sounds like conspiracy theory. Depending on who is in office, a large fraction of Americans will readily claim that an act of war is not really about their concerns, but oil, foreign allies, poll numbers, special interests, and so on. They might not always be right, but they are correct to assume that everything the US military does is not about the needs and interests of the general public.
Moreover, it is not the case that American taxpayers exclusively finance American war-readiness. Taxes have steadily gone down over the last several decades, in countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada, while public spending—measured against inflation—typically rose.19 Changes in fiscal and monetary policies, beginning in the late 1970s, essentially transferred the cost of public spending from the ordinary taxpayer to financial elites and ordinary investors all over the world. All of this was deliberate. The Vietnam War was both very unpopular and very expensive. Political elites found two ways to reduce the impact of the costs of war on the voting public: ordinary citizens would no longer be directly conscripted to serve in the military and ordinary taxpayers would no longer exclusively finance it (though they might do so indirectly, through personal investments, retirement funds, or by having their social services sacrificially slashed to “balance the budget”). The massive American budget, including its costly military, is in effect financed through loans from the global financial sector to the government. This includes regular people who invest in government bonds for their retirement, but it also includes sovereign wealth funds from the Middle East and investors from China. What all of this means is that international financial institutions, other countries, and investors who buy bonds are helping finance military capitalization in a way that extends far beyond what could be supported by taxpaying citizens alone.
It makes sense that more of the world would have a stake in financing the American military given the global projects the latter has been engaged in. As David Graeber puts it:
The essence of U.S. military predominance in the world is, ultimately, the fact that it can, at will, drop bombs, with only a few hours’ notice, at absolutely any point on the surface of the planet. No other government has ever had anything remotely like this sort of capability. In fact, a case could well be made that it is this very power that holds the entire world monetary system, organized around the dollar, together. (2011, 365–66)20
This ability to mete out destructive violence, anytime, anywhere, instantly, is about more than defending ordinary Americans, in other words. It is also (or, maybe entirely) about keeping the world economy together in its current form, which revolves around the dollar as a default global standard of value. What this means is that, around the world, material goods and whole countries can be appraised in terms of dollars. And if the world economy runs in some sense on the American economy, it is just that much more appealing to invest in.
If Americans have long criticized wasteful military expenditures, what has changed is that contemporary debates tend to focus on whether particular machines are necessary, not whether a permanent war economy is. In a time of otherwise intense political polarization in US public culture, it is rarely acknowledged that cutting military waste is one issue that can create unity across political parties. But a critique of military expenditure is easily paired with a call for the preservation of the military from the influence of greedy politicians and businesses. In an executive order signed on March 14, President Trump proposed eliminating wasteful spending at the Department of Defense (DoD) and Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), asking that the Office of Management and Budget involve the public in finding ways to “improve the efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability of that agency.” Yet, just two days later Trump asked Congress to approve a $54 billion hike in military spending, a portion of which was meant to pay for the proposed border wall with Mexico. These requests can be reconciled as part of the twin pillars of contemporary American political discourse, which blames the nanny state for misusing public money and insists on an ever-deepening commitment to military Keynesianism.21
My point is not to challenge these critiques of wastefulness but, rather, to argue that they do not go far enough. From the point of view of the military manufacturing industry, they already think of themselves as doing a lot to trim waste and improve efficiency. They are motivated, moreover, not only by profit motive (although this is clearly central), but by a variety of commitments to making quality, durable products, to solving problems and fixing errors, to improving ties with the service members and government agents whom they deal with on a regular basis. One could reduce these motivations to economic or class self-interest—as in critiques of the military industrial complex—except that does not explain why these men continue to associate with one another doing volunteer and charity work after they have ostensibly retired. It does not explain why they devote their time to technical problem-solving at the local observatory or maker-spaces, except that they enjoy it. One could add that they enjoy not only the technical labor itself, but the social microworld that it entails and its familiar ethic of responsibility. One engineer, Eddy, claims that retirees like volunteering for these charities because the work resembles what their job used to entail. Eddy is even “managed” at a maker-space and living museum, TechWorks, by the same man who once managed him during his time at Lockheed!
However waste is understood, based on the experiences of military manufacturers, that waste arises from military production whether or not weapons are ever finished, whether or not they are ever purchased, whether or not they ever leave the factory floor. Most people typically do not see unfinished, unsold, or unusable warcraft. It is far more common to encounter warcraft when they are deployed in military operations, before they can be used or after they have fallen out of use. This arguably reflects a deliberate defense strategy: commissioned and active warcraft are icons of military strength, meant to frighten potential enemies, comfort allies, and attract buyers on the international arms market. They serve this purpose better by looking new and capable, not ineffective, incomplete, old, and worn. But waste is part of military industry whether every dollar is accounted for or not. The GAO will continue to point out where money was misspent and funds wasted. And Trump, like Obama, now promises to eliminate waste. But accuse military manufacturers of being wasteful, and they can easily document in painstaking detail exactly how much more they have thought about waste than one can imagine—perhaps even too much in some cases, where quality controls and risk analyses run rampant and slow work down, wasting money and time. Another strategy might connect the work of Lockheed Martin or other manufacturers to destruction around the world, but this can also be easily justified in terms of familiar public goods, such as national security, especially when civilians and military manufacturers are distanced from the “consumption” of military products in war.
A different approach is to argue that America’s massive military is not only poorly financed and organized, but has never been necessary at all, not now and not during the Cold War. For most of the twentieth century, the United States possessed far more nuclear weapons than the Soviet Union, but justified the necessity of amassing this excessive arsenal by claiming the very opposite (Masco 2014, 127). American military historian Paul A. C. Koistinen applies this same criticism to conventional weaponry: “In its ongoing quest for higher-performing aircraft, missiles, ships, tanks, and the like, America competed with itself, not with either its enemies or its allies” (2012, 168). While it is important to criticize policymakers and businesses for egregious expenditures, it is also important to note that even if this money were used with maximum efficiency, the US military would likely remain the biggest in the world and the nation’s greatest expense, no matter how efficiently the Pentagon spends “its” money.
One final problem with the idea of the military industrial complex is that it can conjure images of military, political, and economic elites working behind the scenes, in darkened halls of power, as if they were completely detached from ordinary people and communities.22 As if we have to compel them to act if we want to change how things are, with the implication that “we” have no real agency. For the remainder of this book, I focus more on how military waste can be made productive in the hands and imaginations of civilians.
