Spazio recommends: Ecologies of power

Pierre Bélanger and Alexander Arroyo. Ecologies of Power. Countermapping the Logistical Landscapes & Military Geographies di the U.S. DOD. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016.

Pierre Bélanger and Alexander Arroyo chose a scary and difficult topic: the logistical landscapes and military geographies of the U.S. Department of Defence. The research they present in this book is very compelling, especially that of the first three chapters.

Taking as an example the Diego Garcia atoll, the first chapter shows how logistics islands can reconfigure the Strategic Islands Concept. Logistical islands cannot remain isolated and this is ensured by a massive maritime logistical apparatus. "77 percent of international trade moves via container ship [...] perhaps more importantly, more than three-quarters of this daily maritime traffic, including half of petroleum and crude oil imports and exports, is squeezed through a handful of manufactured and highly maintained waterways surveilled and managed by military engineers like USACE, and security forces like the Coast Guard. [...] It is precisely the addition of an information stratum woven into the topologics of force projection that allows for the unprecedented flexibility, precision, and coordination of logistical operations."

The second chapter deals with Improvised Explosive Devices (IED), the perfect asymmetric weapon, in relation to the urban field and its infrastructure. "The weaponization of the road, both topologically and materially, suggests an open relation between power and infrastructure that may be appropriated through antagonistic organizational structures, strategies of domination, and tactics of seizure." 

The third chapter is to me the most interesting, perhaps because of its historical precedents: "An army marches on its stomach," remarked Napoleon. "To successfully feed the hundred of thousands of troops and personnel at hundreds of bases around the world, around the clock, 365 days a year, the logistical operations and systems supplying high quality provisions in such high quantity are not merely technical affairs, but an integral part of a national culture of defence." Modern methods of food preservation (canning and refrigeration) are analyzed and compared to contemporary nutritional politics and economies. The authors show how milk and dairy products "prove as thick as blood and oil in determining processes of territorialization, patterns of occupation, and flows of resources and populations through the emergent ecological and economic matrices of the modern food regime entwined with contemporary projections and counter-practices of power."

Finally, allow me to go back to the Introduction's first sentence. It is a disclaimer which I find quite problematic: "This book is not about war, nor a history of war." The note explains it a bit better. It is a book about the process and logistics of militarization and militarism. Infrastructure as the equipment and expression of power is its underlying foundation. "Without advocating or admonishing the practice of war or military operations, [...] this book avoids the common, mid- to late-century views that conflate and confuse the necessity of war for economic development, growth, and industrial progress, which have shaped further opposition across the divide between left wing and right wing views." As I said, the research the authors have presented is compelling but somehow I wish their take on it was more clear and explicit, not so neutral. Can we assume that the final pages, titled Residuum, are a first step in this direction?