Military Waste. Joshua O. Reno
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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:
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