Military Waste. Joshua O. Reno
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grew alongside a military base outside Tucson, Arizona. Unlike Lockheed employees, who actively seek out military connections, some of the curators and artists involved in remaking and preserving military planes struggle to distance their activities from their militaristic origins. Such distance is not merely aspirational for the entrepreneurs and divers in Key West, Florida, who are the subject of chapter 3. While they are still concerned with clearly militarized objects, such as warships mothballed and scrapped as wrecks or recyclable metal, some are engaged in a more radical rethinking of ships as homes for marine life and a cure for an ailing ocean.
If the second and third chapters involve attempts by civilians to demilitarize what are clearly military objects, the final three chapters involve by-products that few would claim have military origins at all. The first is orbital space debris, the topic of chapter 4. This would appear to be completely distant, symbolically and geographically, from any formal military base or actor. Moreover, space debris is often regarded as a problem for civilian science or private industry, yet I argue it is a by-product inseparable from the militarization of space. This view is supported by the fact that many of the agencies aiming to solve the space debris problem are directly connected to defense, especially the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). These agencies also tend to share a commitment to techno-solutionism, a conviction that technical mastery can solve the problem of space debris, despite the fact that such an ethos created the debris problem in the first place.
There are many ways that the excesses of war preparation become part of lives and communities nowhere close to a military testing ground or base, a museum or wreck. Chapter 5 focuses on the object of guns and, more specifically, the problem of mass shootings with which they are ideologically and practically related. Like orbital space debris, mass shootings are normally discussed apart from the American military altogether. Yet, mass shooters have been made possible by the militarization of the small arms industry, which also has its historical origins in white supremacy and settler colonialism. More broadly, mass shooters can be characterized as the unexpected by-product of a culture of militarism that disseminates prominent narratives about white men regaining honor through violence. In this way, militarized and militaristic storytelling shapes the motivations of would-be murderers, public representations of their acts of violence, and proposals for preventing more deaths in the future. Moreover, by denying alternative ways of framing these events, narratives of guns “in the right hands” or “in the wrong hands” limit how these problems are imagined and helps replicate circuits of violence again and again. As new relationships between the permanent war-readiness and civilian life become visible, so do new projects of demilitarization.9
Chapter 6 also complicates the recognized scope of American militarization and militarism, like the previous two, in this case by examining the environmental devastation that imperils the small outlying islands and atolls incorporated as part of US territory. Expanding what counts as “home front,” the chapter explores hazards that threaten marine environments, in response to which the United States has deployed a global marine conservation strategy, a strategy that also serves longstanding imperial interests in converting islands to wasteland. In this way, various sites and subjects become newly visible as by-products of a history of a geographically unbounded American empire that stretches back before the Cold War.10 If the first chapter shows how military wastes can be domesticated and made meaningful by weapons manufacturers, by the final chapter the ocean-in-itself cannot be reduced in such a way, threatening to unmake American empire.
With each chapter, personal relationships to the American military appear more and more distant from explicitly militarized domains, telescoping out to include new problems and places. War manufacturers (chapter 1), businesses alongside military bases (chapter 2), and businessmen using military material (chapter 3) all maintain some literal connection to military microworlds, even though with each successive chapter that connection is more and more indirect. Consequently, in those latter two chapters I describe social actors occasionally trying to demilitarize military products, that is, trying to reuse and represent them in such a way that they have different associations.
Very different is orbital space debris (chapter 4), which is not typically characterized as a symptom of defense objectives and agencies, any more than is space exploration generally. Mass shootings (chapter 5) would seem even harder to relate to the military, as if they were entirely a problem of civil society: gun ownership, vulnerable institutions, or health care provision. In these cases, there is a sense in which various problems are already demilitarized in the interpretive domains of public discourse. In these final two chapters I highlight the widespread influence of militarization and militarism in order to demonstrate how the civilian science of space exploration and the civil rights debate around guns, respectively, are continuous with histories of permanent war preparation. In the last chapter, the very boundaries of the American home front become indistinct from its empire overseas. Most Americans are not aware of the country’s historical relationship with its Minor and Outlying Islands, let alone that they have been represented and treated as critical waste over successive phases of American empire (chapter 6). This telescoping structure is meant to deliberately challenge assumptions about the scope of war preparation and its costs, whom it impacts, and what it entails.11
In the same way that this book attempts to complicate the meaning of military waste by exploring intersections between seemingly distinct military and civilian worlds, it is equally experimental with the idea of military waste. Approaching the significance of the American military through its waste may seem like an unusual analytic strategy, yet reference to money and lives wasted is actually a fairly common trope in public discourse around the costs of war. There is a long tradition of characterizing both war and war preparation as wasteful in the United States, and accusations of unnecessary spending and misspent funds have dogged the American war economy (see chapter 1). Waste, in this sense, refers to something lost or misused, as in a waste of money or time.
For many in the field and practice of environmental justice, the idea of military waste would understandably conjure visions of the toxic remnants of war. This is an important dimension of military waste and one that will come up in the chapters that follow. But toxicity is not the only quality associated with waste, at least not the only one that matters to people in a given place and time (see Millar 2018, 32). Following Michael Thompson ([1979] 2017), when objects are discarded as rubbish they do not necessarily lose value, but may acquire a quality of indeterminacy, or what Kathleen Millar calls “plasticity.” By this I do not mean that their material qualities are unknowable, but that there is often more than one thing that can be done with them. As a consequence, rubbish can be revalued, sometimes as more valuable, or differently valuable, than it was in its initial use. Thompson’s work was an early contribution to what later became known as material culture studies (Appadurai 1986; Miller 1987, 2005, 2010) and investigations of materiality more broadly (Munn 1986; Ingold 2000, 2011; Keane 2003; Latour 2005; Harman 2009; Bennett 2009). But, for Thompson, rubbish is not just one material like any other, but a distinct kind that represents the limit point of valuation, where one group of people stop caring about something and allow it to become something else entirely.
Wasted warcraft are littered throughout the world as rubbish, left behind with little or no commemoration and unclear possibilities for reuse. Characteristic in this regard is the SS Richard Montgomery, which crashed into a sandbank on the Thames River while delivering munitions in 1944.12 It has remained there ever since, but recent plans to build a nearby airport have raised concerns about the entombed explosives. Rather than something to memorialize or mitigate, the Montgomery is an unpredictable hazard. Rubbish such as this can be found not just in current and former war zones, but in sites of war preparation. This insight resonates with ethnographic studies of memory politics (Navaro-Yashin 2012; Yoneyama 2016) as well as the archaeology of the contemporary (Buchli 1999; Gustafsson et al. 2017), both of which excavate leftover traces of war and war preparation as productive even in their present absence.
The massive arsenal built for a third world war that never happened met with a very different fate. New treaties, especially the Strategic