Military Waste. Joshua O. Reno
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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