The DoD has actually asked for more programs to be Agile. And they’re the main client, so everyone says “Yes, we’re Agile!”
Agile is a project management method that attempts to divide up tasks into small, two- to four-week bursts of activity, or “chunks.” Bork is of the opinion that it doesn’t actually accomplish anything and is almost a complete waste of time and effort. Agile represents additional auditing that the customer asks for, but according to those I’ve spoken with, Lockheed is just as capable of chasing the latest pointless craze as the DoD. Even this can come down to customer ties. Sometimes, as Bork joked, the method they end up using might just come down to some salesman who had “a really really good golf game!” Here, Bork can be seen as implicitly blaming the capriciousness of sales and marketing personnel for wasting his time, those who he suggests deliberately engage in leisure activities and pretend it is work.
Adding more time to any process typically gets more expensive, sometimes for the company and not only the customer. If you bid a “firm fixed price” on a contract, for instance, then any additional cost from extra testing is not covered, which means managers get nervous and executives get upset. This can be remedied if the process and product are of high enough quality that they draw the customer back again. But since this is no guarantee, it can create pressures to hurry up and finish things by scheduling deadlines and cost limitations.
In some instances, however, wasted money and time are equated with doing things right and achieving greater public goods—durable products, predictable processes—even if they come at the sacrifice of private profit. If additional testing and risk analysis can waste money and time, some of my informants also associated it with higher moral ends, especially saving lives and the national defense. I should note that none of my informants offered this naturally in our conversations, but only after I asked more probing questions, arguably shifting their familiar way of assessing accountability and blame.18 But they did have responses. As Bork put it:
You have lives of your countrymen that are reliant on what you’re doing. Just as if you were writing software or doing something with a jet airliner, you’ve got lives on the line of the people that are up in the air. So, depending on what you’re writing the software for, there can be a high degree of scrutiny on what you do. And the levels of testing get extremely expensive to guarantee as much as possible the reliability of that product.
Bork said that the fact that lives depended on safety-critical products was not explicitly discussed often, but generally understood by all those at Lockheed. He added that this might be easy to forget because of a division of labor where they might only be testing a particular widget that goes in another machine. This not only means that more people in more states and more congressional districts have jobs (thereby making the military industrial complex possible); it also means that the product that will be consumed—and its potential destructiveness—is also removed from view. The symbolic distance between war front and home front is bolstered through a literal spatio-temporal difference, one that serves to alienate military manufacturers from the consequences of their actions. Instead, they are consumed with reflexive attention to their work performance.
Bork said that engineers generally knew if some feature was safety-critical (e.g., for engine control), because it changed quality-testing standards during product development:
If you have something that’s safety-critical, that word itself implies that people are going to die. So if you’re working on a product that’s safety-critical, then you’re going to have the highest level of scrutiny. If you have something that’s mission-critical, you know that if it fails, “Okay, so they didn’t drop the bomb on this little village, they have to fly back.” So there’s less scrutiny. So where you would tend to let something slide is when you’d have some minor annoyance, something that would bother the operator, but that did not affect the operation, then you’d let it go by with agreement from the customer.
What further distances manufacturers from actual service members (“operators”) is the customer (the DoD), who stands in between them. The gap between safety-critical and minor annoyance is not absolutely and purely technical, but is at least partly mediated through social negotiation between manufacturer and client. As long at the DoD mediates on their behalf, the people using these weapons and the people they are used on are not the responsibility of the manufacturers. Better said, the potential consumption of weapons in war is not legible within the testing and experimenting that manufacturers perform with products, no matter how extensive, except as abstract operators and targets.
When he was younger, Bork worked with his father’s company, which was contracted to do work on military projects by GE. He remembers his father telling him as a young man just out of college, “Remember, whatever you do, somebody’s life is depending on what you do.” “I always think about that,” Bork says. Lockheed engineers I have spoken to are more likely to raise moral concerns when it comes to “safety-critical” products, that is, those that are necessary for the safe deployment and return of service members. The thought of making a mistake with safety-critical implications was deeply unsettling, whereas mission-critical ones (“making sure a bomb is dropped in the right place,” as one informant put it) provoked less of an ethical response. Simon did not seem to reflect much about the implications of the UCAR for which he owns patents. He mostly thought of it as a challenge to overcome, like others he had encountered previously in his career:
This was to be a completely robotic helicopter—could think for itself, could arm itself, could fly back to base and rearm without humans, could go out and task and kill without human intervention. . . I was the communications engineer, and I was making a self-aware radio system. Never been done before. If you have a team of four of them flying and they’re gonna go around a mountain and fly low. . .they would lose communications as they flew around the mountain, so my self-aware radio would tell my mission planner, “Hey, in five miles we’re gonna lose radio communications; fly over the mountain so we can keep radio communications.”
For Simon, a UCAR that could task and kill without human intervention was a technical challenge, not a moral or ethical one. Put differently, their reflections upon technical challenges, audits, risk analyses, and tests are where their ethical focus lies. After all, life-and-death decisions are ultimately offloaded to the client. Social relations with distant combatants that one never meets face-to-face are arguably more difficult to maintain than those with customers and coworkers with whom one directly interacts, depends upon, and is accountable to. Here Marxian analyses again provide insight. If classic commodity fetishism obscures the production of a commodity in the moment of exchange, then arguably the market in military products serves to obfuscate their consumption in violence.
WHOSE MILITARY? WHOSE WASTE?
To conclude this chapter, I want to consider a seemingly simple question: who really owns America’s enormous arsenal of warcraft? Answering this question can help clarify who benefits from permanent war-readiness and, looking ahead at the next several chapters, what ought to be done with its remains. If it is possible to establish to whom military weapons belong, this might help determine responsibility for what becomes of them when they fall out of use. As this chapter has shown, responsibility is no simple matter.
Let us start with an individual plane or ship. When it is undergoing design and testing, prior to sale, in a sense it is owned by the manufacturer, its team of engineers, accountants, managers and, ultimately, its shareholders. To the extent that it belongs to the manufacturer, the manufacturer can profit from or be blamed for its creation (i.e., if it is overpriced or worth the cost, malfunctions or performs properly, breaks down or is durable, etc.). And yet, if certain designs are not purchased by the DoD, in theory the manufacturer may not be allowed to sell them to other countries or the private sector, although they might not always follow these rules in practice. This is part of the risk taken on by military manufacturers. Therefore, manufacturers do not have total ownership—they cannot do whatever they please with their designs and products.
So,
