do something similarly worthwhile, even if I know I’m bound to fail.
This book is dedicated to my parents, Jim and Barb Reno. Anyone can give life; not everyone teaches you right from wrong and the moves to the Time Warp.
Introduction
Wars are wasteful. They lay waste to landscapes and lives and leave destructive traces behind in the pain of personal loss, injury, and trauma, the hazard of hidden and unexploded ordnance, and the slow violence of toxic contamination. But preparing for a war you never fight is also wasteful. Even if shots are never fired, bombs never dropped, permanent preparation for war diverts natural resources, productive forces, and political focus away from other pressing concerns. It can also be just as destructive for human health and the environment. World War III never happened, and yet material evidence of this contest is strewn everywhere: resting at the bottom of the ocean, rusting in deserts, floating in near-Earth orbit, circulating in radioactive bloodstreams.1
The United States is permanently ready for large-scale wars that may never come. This may one day end, meaning it was not really permanent but temporary. By saying it is permanent, I am not making a prediction about the future, but calling attention to the present state of American industry, politics, and the military, and how they related in the past. Despite occasional reductions in spending, since the world wars American defense spending has tended to steadily increase. And yet, it was not only with the national security state established during the Cold War that war preparation became a permanent investment, seemingly detached from whether the nation was actually at war or not. Permanent war-readiness was realized one piece at a time, not all at once: from the nation’s very first navy, built just after the Revolution (chapter 3), to the reconstitution of the military after the Civil War (chapter 5), to the first planes used in combat in World War I (chapter 2), to the creation of a civilian space agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), alongside its counterparts in the Department of Defense (DoD), the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) (chapter 4). At the same time, a belief in permanent war-readiness was never guaranteed and never universally supported. Moments of collective opposition to unchecked military growth represent an ironic consequence of this history. In fact, there have been many unintended consequences of America’s unprecedented military buildup, including antiwar and environmentalist resistance, as many civilians used the threat of apocalyptic conflagration and the knowledge it generated to create transnational countermovements.2 Other consequences have received far less attention. In the chapters that follow, I document American civilians confronted with by-products of exponential military growth, unexpectedly and accidentally, outside the designs of the US defense establishment. Unlike the wastes of actual warfare, these obstacles and opportunities would present themselves whether or not any specific war ever took place.
Waste is a very flexible term with moral, economic, and ecological dimensions to it.3 It may refer to a lost and irredeemable expenditure, one that is the opposite of economic productivity or biological fecundity. This sense of the term is in tension with another, which depicts waste instead as a productive ingredient to ecologies and economies—as a necessary element of capitalism, for instance (see Gidwani and Reddy 2011; Yates 2011; Gidwani 2013). In this book I draw on both meanings of waste in order to capture some of the many ways in which people interact with America’s permanent war apparatus. Pursuing military waste in this way leads to experiences and stories far from official military actions, involving people who struggle to represent and reimagine fragments of the military they have come across. These fragments are sometimes literal objects, whether humble devices, hulks of warcraft, or bits of debris. But I also find surprising by-products of permanent war preparation elsewhere, like mass shootings and small islands converted into wilderness areas. Each chapter takes on distinct objects with more or less distance from clearly militarized sites or actors. The overall goal of the book, and its structure, is to reveal lines of continuity between American life and the military, to trace connections even where none are apparent.4
My argument is based on ethnographic and archival research undertaken from 2015–18, with the exception of chapter 5, which was completed from 2001–2. My research assistant Dr. Priscilla Bennett and I got to know civilians throughout the United States who work and live with different forms of military waste. Following Hugh Gusterson, each chapter considers a microworld of distinct actors and wastes, offering an anthropological investigation into “the ways in which these worlds clash and fit together” (2004, xxi). While most have not experienced war directly for themselves, their lives have been impacted in some way by permanent war preparation. By examining how civilians manage and imagine relations with permanent war-readiness, this book follows others that challenge the presumed purification of military from civilian worlds.5
While virtual, the separation between military and civilian life in the United States is not merely symbolic. Imagine an alien anthropologist landing in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and taking it to be representative of American society. The visitor would see people with government-issued clothes, haircuts, food, weapons, housing, education, and health care, following a strictly hierarchical division of duties with little room for questioning authority, let alone disobeying orders. What would our alien conclude about this society’s system of government or mode of production? Nothing remotely resembling how Americans tend to think of themselves, their values, and institutions. It would be as if an authoritarian and communist subculture were subsisting within and generously and enthusiastically supported by a society celebrated for its alleged democratic and market freedoms. As Kenneth MacLeish argues, “The military is frequently figured from both within and without as an institution apart from the nation as a whole, existing to protect the public yet exceeding it in discipline, virtue and moral authority” (2013, 188; cf. Mills 1956, 175–76). This virtual divide arguably has further expression in the analytical distinction between militarism and militarization, where the former may suggest the discourse, ideology, or culture associated with being a nation at war and the latter the more practical and material considerations of actual, state-based warfare.6
Such compartmentalization is never complete, however, and military and civilian worlds inevitably leak into and shape one another.7 Unintended and unruly by-products, or wastes, make permanent war preparation visible in new ways, introducing microworlds of social action where these simple binaries collapse. Exploring diverse interactions with and conceptions of military waste challenge divides between civilian and the military (and the others they might presuppose and reinforce, like “ideal” and “material”). As a result, more people, places, stories, and histories are implicated in permanent war preparation than we might tend to imagine. This book’s distinct structure, which I discuss for the remainder of the introduction, aims to challenge this virtual separation by focusing on people who make sense of and make do with military waste outside of formal war zones.
This book focuses on people who do not experience the direct consequences of war, people who are not among the official combatants engaged in conflict or the many civilians killed, displaced, and dispossessed as a result. The experiences and struggles of people implicated directly in military violence are deserving of attention, but the acts of production and creative destruction that make such violence possible implicate and impact even more people and places whose stories are rarely told. There are many examples of people in the United States impacted by the permanent war economy, but not by war directly. For instance, consider the numerous base closures that followed the conclusion of the Cold War and the military boomtowns that eventually went into decline after they lost critical defense contracts. In April of 2018, the Pentagon released a report stating that 401 active and Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) installations had reports of toxic perflourinated compounds being released, 126 of which involved water contamination.8
The ethnographic context for two of the chapters, chapter 1 and chapter 5, is the Southern Tier of New York State, a region that has suffered from loss of the defense industry that
