Engineering Military Rubbish: The Ethics of Waste in and around a Lockheed Martin Facility in New York State

ABSTRACT

In critiques of the American Military Industrial Complex, social actors in the weapons industry are often depicted as wasteful. For many years, and across the political spectrum, it has been common to accuse those who profit from war of wasting government investment or building useless weapons. Based on interviews with engineers and accountants at a Lockheed Martin facility in Upstate New York, I argue that representing and avoiding waste is actually a central dimension of creating weapons. Through environmental testing and risk analysis, those involved in military procurement and production actually use representations of waste as a way to legitimise and enjoy their labour.

KEYWORDS:

• Waste
• military
• United States
• blame
• representation

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I discuss the controversy surrounding these contracts, for a new generation of warplanes, the F-22 and the F-35, at the end of this article.

2 Already by 1968, in an issue of The Washington Post, an article on military procurement reported: ‘much of the $45 billion spending buys nothing’ (quoted in Melman 1970: 181).

3 For a succinct overview of wasteful spending during the early years of the War on Terror, see Turse 2008: 83–87. Accounting irregularities in the Department of Defense have become such a concern over the decades, that Congress has required that they be prepared to undergo an audit by September of 2017. As recently as August 2016, however, there were reports from the Defense Department’s Inspector General that the U.S. Army had made $2.8 Trillion dollars worth of improper accounting adjustments to make their books appear balanced.

4 This is part of a broader argument that military waste deserves a place alongside the discards that receive greater attention in public debate and scholarly discourse, from waste pickers to dumps, landfills, electronic and electrical waste and ocean plastics. My primary inspiration for this claim comes from the book Questioning Global Militarism (2005) by Peter Custers. Extending the insights of Marx’s second volume of Capital, Custers (2005) uses the toxicity and destructiveness of nuclear weapons production to characterize all of war preparation as a form of social waste – a loss of valuable capital, labour and life.

5 In a polemic against an intellectual rival who supported militarization, Luxemburg argued that military contracts were especially beneficial to industrial manufacturers (1971: 141–142, see also Baran and Sweezy 1966: 207–8 and Custers 2005: 67–69). Military investment represented an artificial injection of state surplus into the economy (Kidron 1967, 1977). Following these Marxian theorists, all product research, design, development and testing operations of manufacturers would be among the wasted and un-recouped expenditures associated with military production. This is so, as Veblen also argued, because a product that is tested and not procured by the defence establishment is a loss of capital investment rather than a source of new capital in the form of profit.

6 In complementary ways, Rebecca Thorpe (2014) and Jonathan Caverley (2014) argue that aggressive democratic militarism, in the US in particular, is made possible as a result of the shift from state reliance on social mobilization to military capitalization. With greater dependency on military capitalization, military buildup is increasingly deliberated in public venues as if it were primarily about prudent financial decision-making, as occurred with discussions of the controversial Lockheed Martin jet fighters.

7 According to Patrick Vitale (2011), a sense of contribution to the war effort and nationalist pride can serve as an ideological ‘wage’ among military manufacturers, especially in times of economic precariousness.

8 As Catherine Lutz (2001) argues, moreover, part of the destructive impact on these communities comes from the fact that they were not directed toward more ‘productive’ industrial ends to begin with, expertise that has developed partly in places that the US has continued to support with overseas bases, like Japan and Germany, which then compete with US non-military manufacturing sectors. This harkens back to Veblen’s argument mentioned at the start. Thank you to Catherine Alexander for bringing this to my attention.

9 In some ways, the cuts in military spending only exacerbated shifts that were decades in the making (see Baran and Sweezy 1966). Arguably, rising unemployment and precarity represent a form of human waste disposed of by the logic of military capital (Bauman 2004, Yates 2011).

10 Some blame the company for mishandling the project to build a presidential helicopter, for instance, which was cancelled by the Obama administration during their push for budget-cuts in his first term. The Owego plant was blamed for this loss, employees tell me, which was subsequently ‘punished’ by being placed beneath another division within Lockheed.

11 A very different question concerns the waste practices of ‘the troops’. As one former marine told me, actual soldiers may intentionally break equipment if they find it unnecessary or burdensome.