risk analyses run rampant and slow work down, wasting money and time. Another strategy might connect the work of Lockheed Martin or other manufacturers to destruction around the world, but this can also be easily justified in terms of familiar public goods, such as national security, especially when civilians and military manufacturers are distanced from the “consumption” of military products in war.
A different approach is to argue that America’s massive military is not only poorly financed and organized, but has never been necessary at all, not now and not during the Cold War. For most of the twentieth century, the United States possessed far more nuclear weapons than the Soviet Union, but justified the necessity of amassing this excessive arsenal by claiming the very opposite (Masco 2014, 127). American military historian Paul A. C. Koistinen applies this same criticism to conventional weaponry: “In its ongoing quest for higher-performing aircraft, missiles, ships, tanks, and the like, America competed with itself, not with either its enemies or its allies” (2012, 168). While it is important to criticize policymakers and businesses for egregious expenditures, it is also important to note that even if this money were used with maximum efficiency, the US military would likely remain the biggest in the world and the nation’s greatest expense, no matter how efficiently the Pentagon spends “its” money.
One final problem with the idea of the military industrial complex is that it can conjure images of military, political, and economic elites working behind the scenes, in darkened halls of power, as if they were completely detached from ordinary people and communities.22 As if we have to compel them to act if we want to change how things are, with the implication that “we” have no real agency. For the remainder of this book, I focus more on how military waste can be made productive in the hands and imaginations of civilians.
CHAPTER 2
Flight or Fight
COAUTHORED WITH PRISCILLA BENNETT
The permanent war economy of the United States has produced the world’s most powerful and destructive airborne fleet. According to the CIA, the United States has over thirteen thousand military aircraft in operation today, while its nearest competitors, Russia and China, have about half as many combined. But planes do not remain combat-ready indefinitely. In this chapter, I follow military aircraft as they are transformed through reuse, preservation, and memorialization, each of which involves tensions over what can be done with them and what they mean.1 In some cases, people attempt to rethink planes beyond their application in war, or to demilitarize them. In each case, the possible affordances of planes, as material objects, complicate the view that they are nothing but tools of violence or propaganda to justify permanent war-readiness.
Whatever the tactical benefit of having a permanent supply of destructive aircraft, the enormity of the American fleet creates no shortage of logistical problems. The United States needs more space to keep and store planes, spare parts, tools, and repair staff. No object remains the same over time without constant attention. This effectively means that aircraft are perpetually re-created as they are fixed, improved, updated, and cared for. As discussed in the previous chapter, this is a key part of how materials are designed, tested, and retrofitted by military manufacturers like Lockheed Martin, even after they are sold.
When planes outlive their usefulness, they usually go to the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base outside Tucson in Arizona. Davis-Monthan is one of the largest areas in the US Air Combat Command. Due to its size, the dry desert climate (which helps avoid corrosion), and depopulated surroundings, it became the base of operations for the Military Aircraft Storage and Disposition Center (MASDC). This became the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Center (AMARC), popularly known as “the Boneyard.” According to Michael Thompson ([1979] 2017), it is precisely when things are intentionally forgotten and ignored—when they become set aside as what he calls “rubbish”—that they are capable of the most radical shifts in meaning and worth. On a tour of the Boneyard, a visitor is just as likely to spot a coyote as a person wandering amid the many, many planes. It is easy to imagine the Boneyard as a kind of dystopian wasteland, and many filmmakers have chosen it as a location for precisely this reason, including for the Transformers and Terminator franchises.
In theory, rubbish potential is amplified in situations where seemingly durable items, like planes, are initially forgotten, only to be resurrected in new forms. Central to my argument in this chapter is the idea, common in studies of materiality and familiar to anyone engaged in repair or reuse, that things like war planes are never just weapons, even for the armed services—they are also material objects. When Priscilla Bennett went to the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, a volunteer docent reprimanded her for touching the rivets on an airplane wing (even though visitors are explicitly invited to touch). He compared it to the skin of Bennett’s grandmother, arguing that one should not be too rough with something so aged and fragile.
Like a living thing, planes possess qualities that require care and attention but also offer affordances, or alternative and open-ended opportunities. An affordance can be understood to usher from materials themselves (Ingold 2000) or more from ethical attunement to their semiotic potential (Keane 2016). Regardless, the key aspect of an affordance is that interactions with things in the world are not decided in advance and can lead one in new and unexpected directions: “The idea of affordance usefully draws us away from treating material forms as wholly transparent” (Keane 2016, 30).2 This sense of affordance fits well with the literature on repair and reuse. Every act of repair is simultaneously an act of discovery and a learning process. The role of the unknown endemic to repair leads to various tensions: between design and repurposing (Houston et al. 2017), between stability and breakdown more generally (Graham and Thrift 2007), or as part of distributed expertise associated with “enacting the object” through “regimes of maintenance” (Denis and Pontille 2017; Houston 2017). In this sense, an exploration of exceptional moments of repair exposes the underlying politics of remaking. Connecting these ideas, what Thompson considers rubbish arguably offers exceptional affordances for new uses, while also exposing political and moral tensions associated with remaking and enacting objects.
I combine these literatures to explore the re-creation of aircraft around the Boneyard, especially the tensions evoked by nonstandard uses of military craft. Airplane rubbish can be examined in at least two ways. One is exemplified by the Boneyard. As an active part of a permanent, global, and airborne military, the Boneyard is also a locally circumscribed place that releases materials over time into the hands of civilians in the surrounding area—by donating them to the collection of museums or scrapyards, for instance. This chapter begins by examining what becomes of rubbish planes, how they are assessed, remade, and displayed, and to what ends. I argue that reusing planes around the Boneyard tends to involve a tension between their technically and aesthetically valued capacity for flight and their ability to serve as signs of military history and national identity. Based on interviews with civilians working and tinkering around the Boneyard (some retired service members, some not), I find that repurposing these artifacts can involve struggles over their historical and ideological relevance.
The Pima Air and Space Museum, which has developed around the repair-scape of the Boneyard, exemplifies this tension between fight and flight. Museums are intriguing institutions because they are not monolithic, but lie at the intersection of a variety of interests, publics, and values.3 The different actors involved in museums may not all agree on what specific exhibits to display and how, what kinds of crowds should be sought after and appealed to, and which outside parties to partner with to accomplish these goals. And the clash and commingling of these different positions are evident in the semiotic labor of display. Presented with the display of any object, one can ask how it is meant to resemble other forms it is more or less similar to, how it is meant to point to its history of relations with other contexts and entities, how it is meant to represent more general values and shared understandings. As Terrence Deacon (2012) argues, furthermore, different ways of signifying often work together as we think, thereby forming a semiotic scaffold between the first thought and the next. In this way, deeper symbolic meanings can be propped
