A decade ago, in response to the bizarre spectacle of this nation going to war while living at peace, even if in a spasmodic state of collective national fear, I did something I hardly understood at the time. I launched a nameless listserv of collected articles and my own expanding commentary that ran against the common wisdom of that October moment when our second Afghan War was just beginning. A little more than a year later, thanks to the Nation Institute, it became a website with the name TomDispatch.com. And because our leaders swore we were “a nation at war,” because we were in fact killing people in quantity in distant lands, because the power of the state at home was being strengthened in startling ways, while everything still open about our society seemed to be shutting down, even as the military was being pumped up to Schwarzeneggerian dimensions, I started writing about war.
At some level, I can’t tell you how ridiculous that was. After all, I’m the most civilian and peaceable of guys. I’ve never even been in the military. I was, however, upset with the Bush administration, the connect-no-dots media coverage of that moment, and the repeated 9/11 rites that proclaimed us the planet’s greatest victim, survivor, and dominator, leaving only one role, greatest Evildoer, open for the rest of the planet (and you know who auditioned for, and won, that part hands down).
Things That Go Boom in the Night
I won’t say, however, that I had no expertise whatsoever with a permanent state of war and a permanent war state, only that the expertise I had was available to anyone who had lived through the post–World War II era. I was reminded of this on a recent glorious Sunday when, from the foot of Manhattan, I set out, for the first time in more than half a century, on a brief ferry ride that proved, for me, as effective a time machine as anything H. G. Wells had ever imagined. That ferry was not, of course, taking me to a future civilization at the edge of time, but to Governor’s Island, now a park and national monument in the eddying waters of New York harbor and to the rubble of a gas station my father, a World War II veteran, ran there in the early 1950s when the island was still a major U.S. Army base.
On many mornings in those years, I accompanied him on that short ride across the East River and found myself amid buzzing jeeps and drilling soldiers in a world of army kids with, among other wonders, access to giant swimming pools and kiddie-matinee Westerns. As a dyed-in-the-wool city boy, it was my only real exposure to the suburbs, and it proved an edenic one that also caught something of the exotically militarized mood of that Korean War moment.
As on that island, as for most Americans then, the worlds of the warrior and of abundance were no more antithetical than they were to the corporate executives, university research scientists, and military officers using a rising military budget and the fear of communism to create a new national security economy. An alliance between big industry, big science, and the military had been forged during World War II that blurred the boundaries between the military and the civilian by fusing together a double set of desires: for technological breakthroughs leading to ever more efficient weapons of destruction and to ever easier living. The arms race—the race, that is, for future “good wars”—and the race for the good life were being put on the same “war” footing.
In the 1950s, a military Keynesianism was already driving the U.S. economy toward a consumerism in which desire for the ever larger car
More than half a century later, the Pentagon is still living a life of abundance—despite one less-than- victorious, less-then-good war after another—while we, increasingly, are not. In the years in between, the developing national security state of my childhood just kept growing, and in the process the country militarized in the strangest of ways.
Only once in that period did a sense of actual war seem to hover over the nation. That was, of course, in the Vietnam years of the 1960s and early 1970s, when the draft brought a dirty war up close and personal, driving it into American homes and out onto the streets, when a kind of intermittent warfare seemed to break out in this country’s cities and ghettos, and when impending defeat drove the military itself to the edge of revolt and collapse.
From the 1970s until 2001, as that military rebuilt itself as an all-volunteer force and finally went back to war in distant lands, it seemed to disappear from everyday life. There were no soldiers in sight, nothing we would consider commonplace today—from uniforms and guns in train stations to military flyovers at football games, and the repeated rites of praise for American troops that are now everyday fare in a world where, otherwise, we largely ignore our wars.
In 1989, for instance, in the
America that conforms to no notions we hold of militarism…. Militarization is, of course, commonly associated with uniformed, usually exalted troops in evidence and a dictatorship, possibly military, in power. The United States, by such standards, still has the look of a civilian society. Our military is, if anything, less visible in our lives than it was a decade ago: No uniforms in the streets, seldom even for our traditional parades; a civilian- elected government; weaponry out of sight… the draft and the idea of a civilian army a thing of the past.
In the Reagan-Bush era, the military has gone undercover in the world that we see, though not in the world that sees us. For if it is absent from our everyday culture, its influence is omnipresent in corporate America, that world beyond our politics and out of our control—the world which, nonetheless, plans our high-tech future of work and consumption. There, the militarization of the economy and the corporatization of the military are processes so far gone that it seems reasonable to ask whether the United States can even be said to have a civilian economy.
Little did I know. Today, it seems, our country is triumphant in producing only things that go boom in the night: we have a near monopoly on the global weapons market and on the global movie market, where in the dark we’re experts on explosions of every sort. When I wrote in 1989 that the process was “so far gone,” I had no idea how far we still had to go. I had no idea, for instance, how far a single administration could push us when it came to war. Still, one thing that does remain reasonably constant about America’s now perpetual state of war is how little we—the 99 percent of us who don’t belong to the military or fight—actually see of it, even though it is, in a sense, all around us.
Warscapes
From a remarkable array of possibilities, here are just a few warscapes—think of them as landscapes, only deadlier—that might help make more visible an American world of, and way of, war that we normally spend little time discussing, debating, or doing anything about.
As a start, let me try to conjure up a map of what “defense,” as imagined by the Pentagon and the U.S. military, actually looks like. For a second just imagine a world map laid flat before you. Now divide it, the whole globe, like so many ill-shaped pieces of cobbler, into six servings—you can be as messy as you want, it’s not an exact science—and label them the U.S. European Command or Eucom (for Europe and Russia), the U.S. Pacific Command or Pacom (Asia), Centcom (the Greater Middle East and a touch of North Africa), Northcom (North America), Southcom (South America and most of the Caribbean), and Africom (almost all of Africa). Those are the “areas of responsibility” of the six U.S. military commands.
In case you hadn’t noticed, that takes care of just about every inch of the planet, but—I hasten to add—not every bit of imaginable space. For that, if you were a clever cartographer, you would somehow need to include
