before the DoD’s purchase, warcraft belong to the department and, ultimately, the federal government, because they are the ones who can decide whether it can be sold and to whom, just as it was their decision whether it was to be used and on whom. To the extent that it is the DoD’s, the DoD also decides whether it is turned to scrap, sold, or loaned for an exhibit. As I will discuss further in chapters 2 and 3, the military might therefore be blamed when it chooses to scrap what could be considered important historical artifacts or reusable assets. And yet, in theory these government entities are legally and morally bound to work on behalf of the American people, whether or not they always do so in practice. This is why the representatives of the government and military are blamed for making what some consider unnecessary or insufficient purchases. Once again, this is not total ownership—they are accountable to someone else.
One of the more common-sense ideas implied in debates about government spending is that wars and the military exist because of the American people. This can be taken in at least two ways. On the one hand, it is meant to be for their sake that national defense exists in the first place—“freedom isn’t free,” as the familiar adage goes. On the other hand, it is generally thought that the taxes of ordinary Americans finance the military. Many people interviewed for this book characterized old warcraft waste as belonging in some sense to “the American taxpayer” for this reason. Legislation on the disposal of naval ships, for example, asserts that their fate should be decided according to what is best for the taxpayer. If this were true, it would only be appropriate that ordinary citizens reuse and reimagine old warcraft as they see fit, thereby reclaiming what was always already “theirs” to begin with.
And yet, things are not so simple. To begin with, there is not always a clear relationship between the things that the military does and the needs of ordinary Americans. This is common knowledge, even if it sounds like conspiracy theory. Depending on who is in office, a large fraction of Americans will readily claim that an act of war is not really about their concerns, but oil, foreign allies, poll numbers, special interests, and so on. They might not always be right, but they are correct to assume that everything the US military does is not about the needs and interests of the general public.
Moreover, it is not the case that American taxpayers exclusively finance American war-readiness. Taxes have steadily gone down over the last several decades, in countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada, while public spending—measured against inflation—typically rose.19 Changes in fiscal and monetary policies, beginning in the late 1970s, essentially transferred the cost of public spending from the ordinary taxpayer to financial elites and ordinary investors all over the world. All of this was deliberate. The Vietnam War was both very unpopular and very expensive. Political elites found two ways to reduce the impact of the costs of war on the voting public: ordinary citizens would no longer be directly conscripted to serve in the military and ordinary taxpayers would no longer exclusively finance it (though they might do so indirectly, through personal investments, retirement funds, or by having their social services sacrificially slashed to “balance the budget”). The massive American budget, including its costly military, is in effect financed through loans from the global financial sector to the government. This includes regular people who invest in government bonds for their retirement, but it also includes sovereign wealth funds from the Middle East and investors from China. What all of this means is that international financial institutions, other countries, and investors who buy bonds are helping finance military capitalization in a way that extends far beyond what could be supported by taxpaying citizens alone.
It makes sense that more of the world would have a stake in financing the American military given the global projects the latter has been engaged in. As David Graeber puts it:
The essence of U.S. military predominance in the world is, ultimately, the fact that it can, at will, drop bombs, with only a few hours’ notice, at absolutely any point on the surface of the planet. No other government has ever had anything remotely like this sort of capability. In fact, a case could well be made that it is this very power that holds the entire world monetary system, organized around the dollar, together. (2011, 365–66)20
This ability to mete out destructive violence, anytime, anywhere, instantly, is about more than defending ordinary Americans, in other words. It is also (or, maybe entirely) about keeping the world economy together in its current form, which revolves around the dollar as a default global standard of value. What this means is that, around the world, material goods and whole countries can be appraised in terms of dollars. And if the world economy runs in some sense on the American economy, it is just that much more appealing to invest in.
If Americans have long criticized wasteful military expenditures, what has changed is that contemporary debates tend to focus on whether particular machines are necessary, not whether a permanent war economy is. In a time of otherwise intense political polarization in US public culture, it is rarely acknowledged that cutting military waste is one issue that can create unity across political parties. But a critique of military expenditure is easily paired with a call for the preservation of the military from the influence of greedy politicians and businesses. In an executive order signed on March 14, President Trump proposed eliminating wasteful spending at the Department of Defense (DoD) and Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), asking that the Office of Management and Budget involve the public in finding ways to “improve the efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability of that agency.” Yet, just two days later Trump asked Congress to approve a $54 billion hike in military spending, a portion of which was meant to pay for the proposed border wall with Mexico. These requests can be reconciled as part of the twin pillars of contemporary American political discourse, which blames the nanny state for misusing public money and insists on an ever-deepening commitment to military Keynesianism.21
My point is not to challenge these critiques of wastefulness but, rather, to argue that they do not go far enough. From the point of view of the military manufacturing industry, they already think of themselves as doing a lot to trim waste and improve efficiency. They are motivated, moreover, not only by profit motive (although this is clearly central), but by a variety of commitments to making quality, durable products, to solving problems and fixing errors, to improving ties with the service members and government agents whom they deal with on a regular basis. One could reduce these motivations to economic or class self-interest—as in critiques of the military industrial complex—except that does not explain why these men continue to associate with one another doing volunteer and charity work after they have ostensibly retired. It does not explain why they devote their time to technical problem-solving at the local observatory or maker-spaces, except that they enjoy it. One could add that they enjoy not only the technical labor itself, but the social microworld that it entails and its familiar ethic of responsibility. One engineer, Eddy, claims that retirees like volunteering for these charities because the work resembles what their job used to entail. Eddy is even “managed” at a maker-space and living museum, TechWorks, by the same man who once managed him during his time at Lockheed!
However waste is understood, based on the experiences of military manufacturers, that waste arises from military production whether or not weapons are ever finished, whether or not they are ever purchased, whether or not they ever leave the factory floor. Most people typically do not see unfinished, unsold, or unusable warcraft. It is far more common to encounter warcraft when they are deployed in military operations, before they can be used or after they have fallen out of use. This arguably reflects a deliberate defense strategy: commissioned and active warcraft are icons of military strength, meant to frighten potential enemies, comfort allies, and attract buyers on the international arms market. They serve this purpose better by looking new and capable, not ineffective, incomplete, old, and worn. But waste is part of military industry whether every dollar is accounted for or not. The GAO will continue to point out where money was misspent and funds wasted. And Trump, like Obama, now promises to eliminate waste. But accuse military manufacturers of being wasteful, and they can easily document in painstaking detail exactly how much more they have thought about waste than one can imagine—perhaps
