Military Waste. Joshua O. Reno
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in terms of money, moreover, they tend to frame waste in terms of engineering practices, which—far from being purely technical—may alternatively depoliticize and de-moralize the waste of the American military, or identify altogether new targets for public scorn.
My goal is not to trivialize the very real dangers that the military industrial complex poses, but rather to make it easier to relate to the permanent war economy, which can otherwise appear governed by impersonal entities (the DoD, Lockheed) and irresistible forces (greed, corruption). Talking about human stories and motivation scales such phenomena down to size and makes the abstract complex a matter of ordinary people struggling for themselves and their communities. The point is not only to make it easier to understand those making a living off of an entrenched system, in this case the permanent war economy, but also to sharpen our ability to critique and rethink that system in response.
IBMERS
The Owego Lockheed Martin plant began as an IBM facility, and locals still refer to all those who work or worked there as “IBMers.” The plant supplied high-end electronic equipment to the US military since the time of the Second World War. IBM was especially critical in the development of the Cold War continental surveillance system, Semi-Atomic Ground Environment (SAGE), “the single most important computer project of the postwar decade” (Edwards 1997, 75). IBM gained its reputation for computing as a result of its work on SAGE for the Air Force and would continue this relationship with the military for the rest of the twentieth century. The IBM facility in Owego was built as part of a general shift toward high-tech military weaponry. Part of IBM’s Federal Systems Division, the Owego plant helped to develop technology for government censuses, satellite programs, and other high-tech equipment. IBM was attracted to the area because of the existing manufacturing base, established by the Endicott-Johnson Shoe Company (known as EJ), which had flourished from its own military contracts, producing boots for infantry until as late as the Vietnam War. EJ is credited with building up the tri-city area, from parks and carousels to residential areas and large factories.10
The end of the Cold War meant a radical reduction in military production all over the world, the effects of which are also debated. After military buildup in the 1980s, US defense budgets fell by nearly 30 percent, more than two million service members and civilians lost their jobs, and over a hundred military bases closed. Though military spending increased in the early twenty-first century with the new War on Terror, the impact of spending cuts was felt throughout the country. The results were uneven—just as military buildup impacted different regions in different ways, so too did the radical reduction and restructuring of defense spending that followed the end of the Cold War.11
IBM eventually sold off the military division during the post–Cold War spending cuts of the 1990s, leaving the area almost entirely not long after. When EJ and IBM eventually sold off their local capital and shuttered their doors, the local community was devastated, leaving very few still employed in manufacturing. If one goes by voting results, locals tended to believe Hillary Clinton in 2006 when she ran for her New York seat in the US Senate and promised to bring work back to the Southern Tier. They also supported Governor Cuomo when he said the same thing in 2010, and some blamed him when, for example, Restore New York grants from Albany failed to support local initiatives. On the same day that Albany announced it would not support a local bid to develop two casinos, in 2015, the state government also issued a ban on fracking to extract energy from the gas-rich Marcellus Shale, which includes all of New York’s Southern Tier region (as well as neighboring Pennsylvania, where the practice is allowed). This was enough for various towns across the Southern Tier to begin talk of seceding from the state to gain the attention of lawmakers (Susman 2015). It is no accident, therefore, that most voters in this area did not support Clinton’s presidential run in 2016 or Cuomo’s reelection for governor in 2018. When Southern Tier voters changed allegiances and overwhelmingly voted for Trump, unlike New York State as a whole, it was in part because he claimed he would bring back American manufacturing.
On the one hand, these losses, hopes, and disappointments are a familiar part of the gradual process of deindustrialization affecting the whole country and many parts of the world. Christine Walley (2013) points out that this is more aptly characterized as reindustrialization, or accumulation by dispossession, as global markets are used as an excuse to introduce more flexible and profitable arrangements (i.e. reduced wages and benefits) and overall “leaner” workforces. On the other hand, for military manufacturers, the gradual disappearance of military contracts from the area is part of a general geographical shift. The economic effects of permanent war preparation have never been uniform, throughout either the United States or the world. The Cold War ushered in the growth of an American gun belt, stretching from the Pacific and Mountain regions across the South Atlantic and into New England (Markusen et al. 1991). As the gun belt grew, people suffered in those regions historically dependent on manufacturing, including the Midwest, Northeast, and Mid-Atlantic, leaving a rust belt behind.
In an online discussion forum known as City-Data Forum, a thread was created in 2009 titled “is binghamton, ny really that bad . . .?” One person, self-identifying as a lifelong resident, summarized the city’s history in this way:
Once upon a time, the entire Southern Tier was a great place to live and then one by one, the factories and big-businesses moved out. Some of the most important to the area: Endicott-Johnson Shoe Factory closed it’s [sic] doors, IBM-Endicott closed their doors; NYSEG downsized and laid-off, Frito-Lay has downsized and laid-off, basically over the years business has declined or moved. Now, Binghamton has a large population of senior citizens and students and an even larger population of people who are “stuck.” This area is a vacuum it sucks you in and you can’t get out because you never have the available resources.12
What is stuck in the tri-city area is not only people, but buildings. Much of the previous gun belt has begun to rust. Urban spelunkers record their journeys into old EJ factories with Go-Pro cameras mounted to their heads, posting them on YouTube or bragging about them on Reddit. Some of this old capital—which might have been maintained through corporate or state investment—is now being scrapped and remade into a pharmacy school by Binghamton University with a grant from the state, and members of the Environmental Studies department giddily imagine how to reuse these materials as “green infrastructure” to create living buildings in situ. An Upstate Revitalization Initiative is providing half a billion dollars over five years, which may finally lead to demolishing and refurbishing properties long thought too cost-prohibitive to restore (Platsky 2016). Meanwhile, at TechWorks, a local museum and hands-on educational workshop, retired and employed IBMers work with local college students tinkering with salvaged products created by local industries, from space-simulators produced for NASA to typewriters, printers, and old IBM computers. The archaeologist who runs TechWorks and her volunteers are trying not just to preserve the area’s material history but to show it off and make it sing.
If all this abandoned capital is waste—and I suggest we call it that—it is not just the waste of industry, but of the uneven investment cycles characteristic of the permanent war economy. The sale of the Federal Systems Division, followed by the departure of IBM, led to massive layoffs from which the area has not recovered. The old IBM, people like to say, really cared about its people and the community, but all that unexpectedly changed in the 1990s. Implicitly, that means they blame the new IBM, first and foremost, for what has happened since. In 1996, the former IBM facility was purchased by Lockheed Martin, a California-based aeronautics company that was nearly sold off to a scrapyard during the Depression, but was now leading the corporate consolidation of the post–Cold War era, along with the other big military manufacturers. Eddy, a former employee, told me that people who split off from IBM along with the Federal Systems Division managed to survive the layoffs that came later, though no one in the area was completely immune. Consolidation and plant closings furthered this transformation into a more post-Fordist production regime, which American military manufacturers were arguably shielded from during the 1970s and 1980s.13
POLITICAL DIMENSIONS: CULTIVATING CUSTOMER TIES
As Walley (2013) argues of industrial Chicago, industry has not entirely disappeared from the Southern Tier. Lockheed is still operating out of the Owego plant. But recent changes have created greater competition among the remaining