we were doing. So there was a lot of internal hand-wringing: ‘What are we gonna do about it? Are we gonna do the work ourselves? Are we gonna farm it out to yet another company?” And I was the one that had to do the analysis of what we were going to do and say, could we do it, and said “Yeah, we could do it,” and decision was we would do it, which was the decision I hoped we weren’t going to do, because it was a lot of pressure, both schedule and cost. It was unanticipated cost because we had given money to this company and expected fully that they would deliver us a product and now they weren’t there, so we were gonna have to do it. And it’s something that we had no expertise in at all, so we had to learn fast. And we had to have it done in six months.
When producers bid for projects, they present an initial price for meeting customer demands. When the cost of a project goes up, they risk being blamed by the client or the general public for wasting government dollars or jeopardizing defense needs. Yet, this example shows a simple contingency that can set production back (a supplier who unexpectedly goes bankrupt). If wasted money and time are avoided in this instance, it will come from manufacturers with “no expertise” working hard to deliver on their company’s promises. And, if they do not, they may be blamed by others but will not blame themselves. It is a failure to predict the actions of other people that is held responsible, as if they too should behave as reliably as machines.
Simon explained other specific examples where projects could live or die as a result of social relations maintained with the clients, who might disappoint or frustrate producers:
I was also on a couple top-secret projects. . . We were making brand-new aircraft for DARPA. It was called UCAR [unmanned combat armed rotorcraft protocol]. DARPA has their own internal engineers, the customer was the Army, and the Army would have their own staff of engineers. . . We’d show up for a meeting and there’d be DARPA engineers and there’d be generals. . . We were in a four-company contest to make this UCAR.
The UCAR was considered a small project for Lockheed at the time, but still an important contract to get.
We were down-selected from four to three and three to two. So we were at one of these presentations where the generals and colonels and DARPA. . . We were making our presentations, and typically it’s death by PowerPoint slide. Over two days, over six hundred PowerPoint slides. So these poor generals and DARPA people, they know what’s coming. So during the first presentation, the lead engineer from weapons and fire control in Orlando, Florida, was making his presentation about his wonderful weapons, and a general said, “Well what about that?” And he said, “Be quiet, I’m not done talking yet.” He said that to a general! So we walked out of that meeting red. Green is approved, yellow is caution, red is you’re gonna fail. So we plied him with beer and cigars all night. “I know I’m right, the general’s wrong, he just didn’t understand me. . .” You don’t talk to a general that way! So right about midnight I called his VP, I said “This guy isn’t getting it, can you talk to him?” So he went in the next day and apologized to the general. So we survived that.
And what is the point of the story? For Simon: “The customer is always right.” And yet, after all that, “The Army canceled the program eventually because they needed armor for the Humvees. So the ten billion dollars went for armor plating under the Humvees rather than our aircraft, but they’re still building robots.”
In fact, Simon ended up with two patents for his robotic copter, which he was issued in 2010 and 2011; they are proudly displayed on the wall near the entrance to his house. Which is to say: the design still proved valuable. From a more critical standpoint, this is private enrichment from public investment—Lockheed and its employees benefited from merely being considered for the contract anyhow. Yet, what can be lost from such a critique is that this preference for high-end military manufacturing also can be associated with higher moral ends and public goods. Simon can tell himself he did what he could for his country and for the future of robotics. This is not to divide moral from economic considerations; they are in fact thoroughly interwoven. Some forms of “waste” are related to building relations of trust and dependability, or a moral economy of customer ties between military manufacturers and the defense establishment. While this benefits the company, of course, it is also seen by many as part of satisfying the defense needs of the country. Any designs or efforts sacrificed in the process are worth the waste if the client—in this case, the defense establishment—is satisfied. For the DoD and Lockheed employees I spoke with, blameworthy wastefulness was something that occurred when deliberate moral choices were made to take advantage of the government, acts which they claim not to have witnessed or committed. Being responsible might mean spending time and resources that never materialize into a finished product, but as long as this was not deliberate, done in the interests of maintaining ties with capricious officers and politicians, then contractors did not blame themselves.
TECHNOLOGICAL DIMENSIONS: QUALITY CONTROL AS AN IMMANENT POETICS OF WASTE
The rhetoric of wastefulness is not merely an external critique brought to bear on military industry, but is also immanent to the production process: for those involved in military production, it is waste elimination rather than wanton wasting that is taken to be ideal.
One of the engineers from Lockheed Martin I spoke with, who went by “Bork,” had lived his whole life in the Southern Tier. He began as a temporary worker (known in Lockheed as the workforce extension program, or WFE, pronounced “Wiffy”). Soon he was promoted to a permanent employee (though not before suffering cutbacks in benefits, and not without surviving multiple waves of layoffs). For most of his time at Lockheed he has worked on software: “We were putting together a new graphics card and. . .we were using at the time a 3D labs graphics chip. . .for a helicopter. So it would be in the cockpit, drives the panels that the crew are looking at.”
Early on in our conversation, the corporate risk of investing in military equipment came up. According to Bork, this graphics chip, one of the first projects he worked on, could only be sold to the US government:
No one was gonna pay that kinda money for something like that, yeah. The power of the graphics card that you have in your laptop there [gesturing to the interviewer’s computer], we work with things that are comparable to that, but, your laptop doesn’t have to work at minus forty degrees Celsius or plus fifty degrees Celsius, so part of our value add is testing this hardware at extremes of temperature, extremes of vibration. . .so that there is assurance that it’s going to work in all sorts of environments.
In this sense, what Baran and Sweezy (1966) call a “mythical risk factor” is taken for granted within military manufacturing. The benefits of testing are not reducible to economic interest alone, but also include personal and social investment in one’s labor. Much like nuclear weapons scientists, “by means of this lived journey from anxiety to confidence, structured by the rhythms of the testing process itself, scientists learn that weapons behave, more or less, predictably, and they learn to associate safety and well-being with the performed proof of technical predictability” (Gusterson 2004, 160). Bork added that very few consumer products require testing at similar industrial temperatures (garage doors in temperate zones, for instance), but that military equipment “is built to be more durable. It’s built to be more rugged.” He went on:
Reliability of the equipment is. . .very important, we are still running equipment that was built twenty years ago or so, and even those cards that. . .I came in twelve years ago. . .they’re still in service, still pumping along. I think one of my favorite stories was that. . .a test engineer had accidentally left a. . .blanket on top of one of the mission computers, and the blanket got sucked into the air inlets of the computer. . . Now, the computer’s a pretty big box, it has lots of cards in it, and it’s got a big fan on the back that screams, I mean, the fan is so loud and it eats into your brain, and so he had this blanket on top of it to kind of quiet it down, and he kinda forgot about it, and the blanket got sucked into the inlets and it generated so much heat that the material that got sucked into the inlets actually starting shooting out
