Locating the American Military-Industrial Complex: An Introduction

In February 2010 President Barack Obama proposed that Congress provide the Department of Defense with over $700 billion in fiscal year 2011. Given that not all defence-related expenditures flow through the Pentagon, this staggering figure—which includes both a “base budget” and “supplemental” funding for the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan—is hardly conclusive, and the total tally likely exceeds $1 trillion (see Higgs 2007). Gently critiquing Obama's request, the New York Times (4 February 2010:A26) editorialized that the budget “makes some tough choices—but not enough”, and suggested that Congress should review the proposal “with another post-cold-war notion: the country cannot afford to write the Pentagon a blank check.” Such sluggish pleas are hardly unique to the Times. While banal, they are significant, because they set the promise of a more prudent present against the apparently acceptable military budgets of the Cold War. But in establishing this historical distinction and then suggesting wearily that it has not held, the editorial also hints at the inexorable continuation of an American era, now in its eighth decade, characterized by extraordinary defence spending that has been profoundly difficult to challenge. As Catherine Lutz has noted, while the United States was “born through violence … it was founded on a suspicion of standing armies, and with civilian leadership ensured by Constitutional frameworks”. It was the Second World War that “set in motion a process of militarization that has waxed and waned but never truly flagged.” The result is a “massively entangled system” or what she calls “the military normal” (Lutz 2009:27–29). Carefully untangling the innumerable threads of this system is an urgent, if daunting task. Even a quick glance at the US defence budget, and the various documents that nurture the numbers, reveals the profound entrenchment of “the labor and resources allocated to military purposes, including the shaping of other institutions in synchrony with military goals” (Lutz 2002:723). This organization of society “for the production of violence”, as Michael Geyer (1989) famously defined militarization, is in distinct but related ways the central concern of all four essays collected here. Reflecting on this journal's 40th anniversary, Noel Castree and Melissa Wright note that Antipode was “very much a product of its time”. It was a period, in their words, that “pitched the forces of a youthful, non-institutionalised Left against the forces of what C. Wright Mills famously called ‘the military–industrial complex’” (Castree and Wright 2009:3–4). Identified by Mills in his 1956 classic The Power Elite, and formally named by American President Dwight Eisenhower in his 1961 farewell address, the “complex” was a subject of feverish discussion during Antipode's early years.1 A raft of studies, some polemical, others more analytical, tracked Eisenhower's warning through a decade of what Seymour Melman called “Pentagon capitalism”, as the “state-management” typified by the actions of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara drew an ever-tighter loop around economic, military, and political authority (Melman 1970; Roland 2001, 2007:350). Very little of this scholarship was produced by geographers—despite their involvement in the social movements of the period. One notable exception was the work of Yves Lacoste, who supplemented a remarkable 1972 report in The Nation (expanded for Antipode in 1973) on the bombing of North Vietnamese dikes with the famous claim, made a few years later, that “the purpose of geography is, above all, the making of war” (Claval 2000:245; Lacoste 1972, 1973). Lacoste's dictum was a reminder that despite its entrenchment over the previous century as a field of academic study, geography had a much longer relationship with acts of organized violence, and moreover, that it was still primarily a military idea and tool. In the first half of an exchange with Michel Foucault, Lacoste—as part of the editorial board of the journal Hérodote—repeated that “geography grew up in the shadow of the military”, and linked key geographic terms such as region, province, and field to their use in strategic discourse (Foucault 1980:69). The interview was published in 1976, the year Foucault's lectures at the Collège de France turned to the genealogy of war (Foucault 2003). Since Lacoste's rather lonely interventions, geographers have turned—first slowly, and with great vigor of late—to what he called geographic warfare, and to the linking of “geographical discourse … with practical (political and military) interests” (Lacoste 1973:2). In broad terms, this work has gravitated to two historical periods: the era of imperial rivalry, state-building, and geopolitics roughly bounded by the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the last decade—the era of the interminable American “war on terror”. Connections between these two periods, of course, can be found in the vocabulary of a “colonial present” (Gregory 2004). The intensity of this interest is such that it has been noted and mapped in several useful review essays, surveys which also tend to proffer paths for future research. For instance, while lauding the richness of recent geographic scholarship on militarization, Richelle Bernazzoli and Colin Flint argue that it has yet to adequately account for “the contingency of place”. This leads them to emphasize military communities, setting aside “the phenomenon of the military–industrial complex” in favour of place-based “militaristic cultural hegemony” (Bernazzoli and Flint 2009:394). As the essays gathered here suggest, this distinction is not necessarily so sharp. Nor is the military–industrial complex a mere “phenomenon”—something that Bernazzoli and Flint recognize in their references to works such as The Rise of the Gunbelt (Markusen et al 1991). While Bernazzoli and Flint's emphasis is loosely contemporary, The Rise of the Gunbelt traces a historical geography, a “remapping” that calls out for additional, and alternate, interpretations of the “military” and “industry” nexus—a combination that should not be interpreted only in the language of “economic mechanisms” (Bernazzoli and Flint 2009:399). As Nick Turse's disturbing tour through “the complex” suggests, it is effectively impossible to sever the presence of the Pentagon from innumerable American lives and landscapes, and of course countless additional people and places as well (Turse 2008). This pervasiveness is a product of, and a companion to, the longstanding presence of war and national security as “consuming anxieties”, providing “the memories, models, and metaphors that shaped broad areas of national life” (Sherry 1995:xi). But militarization is also a profoundly geographic phenomenon. And the search for its American spaces must travel beyond the hundreds of bases and installations established across the United States and around the globe since 1941, beyond the research laboratories and plants dependent on defence spending, and even beyond the myriad towns and cities whose fortunes rise and fall with this spending. It must consider what C. Wright Mills recognized as a “military definition of the situation”—that Americans, in the words of Catherine Lutz, “all inhabit an army camp, mobilized to lend support to the permanent state of war readiness that has been with us since World War II” (Lutz 2001:3). This historical-geographic condition has had tremendous implications for intellectual inquiry. In the decade following the Second World War, the Department of Defense became the largest single patron of American scientific research, but it also funded the human sciences lavishly and took a vigorous interest in cultural and social themes (Barnes 2008; Cloud 2000; Herman 1995; Isaac 2007; Leslie 1993; Robin 2001). Meanwhile, working alongside ostensibly non-military initiatives such as civil defence, which positioned the homes of nuclear families as institutions that could shoulder a burden of survival in partnership with the armed forces, students of disasters argued that every city, and every home, was a potential target, and advocated responses that would contain panic and chaos to certain areas in the event of an atomic attack (Davis 2007; Farish 2010; McEnaney 2000). And the proximity of the academy to the military–industrial complex has persisted beyond the close associations solidified during the middle of the twentieth century, even through a series of intense debates accompanying the Vietnam War (Solovey 2001; Wolf and Jorgensen 1970). From the broad appeals of Henry Giroux (2007) to the more specific stands of groups such as the Network of Concerned Anthropologists (2009), dissident scholars are recognizing and struggling against the impingement of military demands on universities, disciplines and educators. One need not travel beyond the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers—or at least certain sessions of that meeting—to witness the persistence of Yves Lacoste's allegations. The papers collected here approach “the complex”, quite rightly, from a variety of angles, and are situated in various moments stretching back to the Second World War. They have been arranged in rough historical sequence not out of a sense of resigned inevitability, but rather to set out a rich, layered terrain of analysis, productively juxtaposing scales from the body to the nation-state and beyond. Patrick Vitale's paper burrows productively into the Second World War records of the Westinghouse Electric Company, a legendary defence contractor, to reconstruct the creation of a “war wage” that intentionally blurred the spaces of industry and war, home and battlefield. Building on histories of Cold War social science and civil defence, Alasdair Pinkerton, Stephen Young, and Klaus Dodds examine Project Revere, an exercise in leafleting and rumor that enrolled residents of the American West (and academics) in a domestic “psykewar” experiment during the 1950s—an operation that invites searching questions about citizenship in an era of total war. The dangerous distinctions between home and front, as well as the scholarly divide between spaces and processes of militarization, are taken up by Jenna Loyd, who uses the affiliations forged between anti-war and civil rights activists in the 1960s and 1970s to challenge what she calls militarized domesticities. Loyd concludes impressively by shifting from this historical case to a consideration of contemporary anti-war organization, emphasizing in particular the entrenched gendered and racialized elements of militarization. Such contemporary resistance must also confront the shifting trajectories of war; as John Morrissey reminds us, over the last three decades militarization has also earned a new language of justification, namely a discourse of “insurance-risk securitization” brought to bear in particular on a “Middle East” region literally overseen by the US Central Command (CENTCOM). As his careful explication of this scripting suggests, locating the US military–industrial complex ultimately requires that we integrate geographies of production, deployment and destruction, but also the development and use of both weapons and ideas. Finally, this special issue of Antipode concludes with a searching reflection on the four essays by Catherine Lutz, an anthropologist who over the past decade has published some of the most important, and grounded, work on American militarization. Her presence here—and her willingness to participate—indicates the utility of alliances across constituencies concerned with the many troubling geographies of the military–industrial complex. We thank the authors for their enthusiasm and patience, Wendy Larner for her support and guidance, and Andrew Kent for his fine editorial assistance.

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