Military Waste. Joshua O. Reno
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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