Military Waste. Joshua O. Reno
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and still-employable people were left behind when businesses like IBM abandoned the city and military contracts went elsewhere. And as has happened in many other places, other service industries (hospitals, colleges) and their employees have benefited from this absent presence.
The Binghamton area is not unique, nor is my professional situation. There are many places undergoing similar processes of de- and reindustrialization throughout the United States (Walley 2013) and the world, and many of them have been deeply tied to permanent war preparation and its cycles of investment and divestiture. But that does not change the fact that at least part of the reason I am now here, and why I had the opportunity to meet the people I have for this book, is that military-civilian relationships were here first. And that is why I met members of the military industrial complex when I joined a local astronomy club. I was right to suspect that they knew many things about war manufacturing that I did not. My mistake was misrecognizing the forces that had drawn us to this part of the world in the first place, which made our eventual association much more likely. They had ended up in the Binghamton area to take up those jobs in military manufacturing that still remain; I ended up in Binghamton as part of an effort to regrow the community through its postmilitary dependence on the growing university.
Many more people are implicated in permanent war preparation than we might usually assume. I am, at least indirectly, whether one considers my employment or my research opportunities, both of which owe something to the abandonment and reclamation of a formerly militarized region. I am not relieving companies like IBM and Lockheed Martin of their responsibility, or holding those who benefited from their war profits directly or indirectly equally accountable for their actions. Complicity means being somehow involved in wrongdoing, but makes no necessary distinction between a person’s relative level of involvement. It is worth pointing out, first, that warring groups do not always make this distinction. In fact, for military strategists, any harm that comes to those who live near a military manufacturing facility might be considered acceptable if it can bring war to a swifter conclusion or prevent one from starting. It is for this reason that the US Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) considered the people of New York’s Southern Tier as likely targets during the Cold War. Two maps were created by the FCDA as part of a simulated nuclear attack exercise that was conducted in 1955. One can plainly see that the Binghamton area is very close to a “Critical Target Area” in the first map and directly under “Other Targets Bombed” in the second map.31
The global empire does not respect divides between home front and war front. If any critique of the military is to have any impact, it is imperative to document the ways many lives are implicated in one of the largest and most expensive militaries ever assembled.
CHAPTER 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