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Abstract
In this article, I argue that an important yet understudied consequence of the Vietnam War was an imperial turn toward modern logistics management. Drawing on archival documents collected from the National Archives and Records Administration, I track how the U.S. military and the U.S. Agency for International Development increasingly championed logistics management as a way of solving some of the “frictional” supply problems that threatened to paralyze the transnational war effort in South Vietnam. As part of this process, imperial agents cobbled together various infrastructures of supply and provision into a broader, more complex system for managing the transpacific flow of life-sustaining and life-eliminating commodities between the United States and South Vietnam. In this way, the Vietnam War served the U.S. empire-state as an experimental laboratory for repurposing logistics from a capitalist science of economic management into an imperial technology of rule and pacification.
本文认为, 越战的一个重要但鲜有研究的后果是向现代化后勤管理的帝国转变。通过美国国家档案局的档案文献, 作者研究了美国军方和美国国际开发署, 如何利用后勤管理, 去解决威胁到跨国战争行动的某些“摩擦“供给问题。在此过程中, 帝国各部门共同搭建了供给和给养的基础设施, 创建了一个更广泛和复杂的系统, 用于管理美国和南越之间跨太平洋的支撑生命和消灭生命的物资流动。越战为美国提供了一个实验室, 将后勤从经济管理的资本主义科学, 转变为用于统治和调解的帝国技术。
En este artículo sostengo que una consecuencia importante, aunque poco estudiada, de la Guerra de Vietnam fue el giro imperial hacia el manejo moderno de la logística. A partir de documentos de archivo encontrados en la Administración de los Archivos y Registros Nacionales, rastreo el modo como los militares de los EE.UU. y la Agencia Americana para el Desarrollo Internacional crecientemente abogaron por el manejo logístico como la manera de solucionar algunos de los problemas “de fricción” en los suministros, que amenazaban con paralizar el esfuerzo bélico transnacional en Vietnam del Sur. Como parte de ese proceso, los agentes imperiales juntaron varias de las infraestructuras de suministro y aprovisionamiento para disponer de un sistema mucho más amplio y complejo con el cual manejar el flujo transpacífico de mercaderías, tanto de naturaleza vital como deletérea, entre Estados Unidos y Vietnam del Sur. De esa manera, la Guerra de Vietnam sirvió al estado imperial norteamericano como laboratorio experimental para replantear la logística de una ciencia capitalista de administración económica a una tecnología imperial de orden y pacificación.
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to Matthew Farish, Emily Gilbert, Martin Danyluk, and Rich Nisa for patiently reading some of the earliest drafts of this article. It also benefited enormously from the generous engagement of Thuy Linh Tu, Nikhil Pal Singh, Monica Kim, Linda Luu, Emma Shaw Crane, Tareq Radi, and the other members of the Intimacies and Infrastructures of Empire reading group at New York University. Their comments and suggestions were the building blocks of the revised version of this article that I presented at the 2020 UCI Global Studies Conference, where Victoria Reyes and Andy Scott Chang served as thoughtful discussants. Finally, I wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers and Nik Heynen for all of their hard editorial work during the (re)submission process. All remaining errors and omissions are my own.
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Wesley Attewell
WESLEY ATTEWELL was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Asian/Pacific/American Studies in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, New York, NY 10003, when the research for this article was conducted. He is currently a Visiting Scholar in the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University. E-mail: [email protected]. He works at the intersection of geography, Asian/Pacific/American studies, and history to map the spatial dimensions of U.S. empire building from the Cold War onward.