Abstract

In this episode, Dr Joshua Reno discusses how the pressure of constant war-readiness produces military waste which in turn animates places and people far from the battlegrounds. He argues that rejected designs, outdated planes, scrapped ships and space debris should be central to calculations of social, political, and economic costs of war.

This podcast series is presented by Dr Alessandro Arduino, Principal Research Fellow and Dr Ameem Lutfi, Research Fellow, at the Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore.

Listen to the full podcast here:

Full Transcript:

[Ameem Lutfi]: Welcome to the 14^th episode of the National University of Singapore–Middle East Institute’s podcast series Boots Off the Ground: Security in Transition in the Middle East and Beyond. In this series, we look at the future of warfare which will see uniform soldiers or “boots on the ground” being replaced by private military companies, autonomous weapons systems and cyber weapons. My name is Ameem Lutfi and I am the co-host for this series along with my colleague, Alessandro Arduino.

We’re glad to have you with us today, Dr Joshua Reno from Binghamton University in New York. Dr Reno is a socio-cultural anthropologist and his work, more broadly, explores the centrality of waste in shaping everyday economic social and political life but his latest book called Military Waste: The Unexpected Consequences of Permanent War Readiness (2020), extends this unique framing into ways of understanding the uncanny afterlife of military waste such as bloated contracts, outdated planes, rusting ships, space debris and even leftover guns. Through a discussion on the many lives of waste, we open into our podcast a new line of inquiry into what happens when the boots actually start to move off the ground – what happens with the waste that is left behind?

[Alessandro Arduino]: Joshua, thank you for joining us today. To begin our discussion, I was hoping that you could give our listeners a brief overview of your central argument: Why is it important to think about waste in understanding the broader consequence of war build-up? Most people rarely think about waste in a systemic way especially in the military field. It is just the excess leftover and discardable material or in your work as you brilliantly suggest, there is a political, economic and even social integral part in war-making. Why is that?

[Joshua Reno]: Thank you, Alex. First, thank you for having me on your podcast; it’s a very interesting and important topic, so it’s a pleasure to be here.

I would say that the central argument of my book is twofold: One, as you have already pointed to very well is that to use waste as a central trope to think about war and war-making differently. The other part of the book, I would say, is trying to encourage us to wonder about the military when boots are on the ground and when war is happening. When war is happening, the destruction is quite obvious – that’s what war is; it’s destructive and that’s one of its objectives. In order to win, you not only have to destroy the enemy but their environment and the conditions that allow them to make war also. That’s been understood for some time as part of modern warfare. What I think is interesting is that there’s plenty of destruction waste, if you like, that happens simply being ready for war. Whether or not you’re fighting, whether or not war is ongoing, if war is over, there’s toxic legacies to worry about but even if you haven’t fought a war yet, you’re wasting resources, materials and even lives being ready for war. That’s the crux of the book – on the one hand, thinking about war in terms of waste and on the other, in terms of war readiness or war preparation as something significant in and of itself, apart from war alone.

[Ameem Lutfi]: Thank you. If I could go to one very interesting argument that you make, that is we normally think of military contracts or the firms that produce military goods as charging excess and that there is greed built into the military industrial complex – you have a slightly different perspective and suggested that it’s not exactly all greed but it’s the nature of the contracts. For example, if a screw normally goes for a dollar, in a military contract you would get it for a thousand dollars. You said part of that extra cost is for all the research and design that never actually see the light of the day and because they’re military materials, it’s hard for them to do anything else with it. I’m wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about the nature of these different contracts because you sketch out some of them in your work.

[Joshua Reno]: First, I think it’s helpful to understand the historical background.  For about a century, military producers and manufacturers-going back to the First World War here-could say to the government when they were accused of war profiteering: “Look, we’re taking on risk when we are building new weapons so that you’re ready for war; we don’t know if they’re going to sell, we don’t know if they’re going to be what you want and we’re taking on this risk for the nation to be ready to fight so you have to give us more leverage in the contract situation than you normally would give if it was a free market.”

If it’s a free market situation, that’s not the concern of the buyer but because of that close relationship that is a century in the making, the military industrial complex can ensure higher pay for products and services than would normally be expected. I mentioned that because, in isolation, it’s easy for a senator or a president in the United States to complain that you’re charging 100 times more for this screw or question why it’s so expensive. One senator, 10 years ago, famously said “I’ll just go to Walmart, buy a bunch of pistols, give them to my troops and it’ll be cheaper than what you’re doing.” What they miss is the historical and economic contexts which are  important.

The other side of it, which I think you were alluding to, is the social relationship involved in contracts. It’s not abstract entities separated from one another; it is neighbours, old friends – they have relationships. If they, for example, represent the Department of Defence (DOD) or Lockheed Martin, they go way back – they golf together, their children camp together, they go to the same schools and so on. It’s not like that everywhere but that’s the social context that’s often important for relationships that shape an ongoing connection between a company and the United States military or any other military for that matter.

I mention that because I’m an anthropologist and we’re more attentive to the kind of nuances of social relationships but I also mention it because I think it does challenge, as you mentioned, the assumption that everyone is motivated only by greed. It’s more complicated than that, historically and in actual practice.  What I tried to do with some of my research was to get into the communities of military contracts and find out about the relationships behind some of these contracts instead of purely following the money. It’s not based on corruption; it’s based on handshake agreements and good faith partnerships that go back a long time.

Another thing I’d point out is that, you have whole communities that are dependent on these military contracts and if they lose them [the contracts], the communities will go into economic decline so the stakes are even greater than making a profit. It’s also about keeping people at work and those are the kinds of additional variables that I think people miss when they critique the military industrial complex –  it is important to critique but it also simplifies the reality of the situation on the ground.

[Alessandro Arduino]: Joshua, your work also greatly expanded our understanding of different ways in which military waste is circulated. We see planes being turned into art, sunken ships made into artificial reefs and even space debris being used as strategic military asset. I was very intrigued by the space part. If you can talk about this category of military waste – space debris – what produced this waste and what are the consequences? Also, looking at the Middle East, for a smaller country like the Emirates that just entered the space race, how is the situation going to change?

[Joshua Reno]: It’s very interesting because space is a finite resource and that sounds absurd because we think space is very big but the orbital environment–one that satellites circulate within–is filling up not only with working machines (satellites, usually) but is also filling up with space debris. At the moment, there’s about half a million pieces of space debris floating around and they aren’t floating around harmlessly.  They are moving quite fast at certain altitudes and going about as quickly as speeding bullets so you have this crowded orbital environment with these bullets flying around in a cloud.  When a new country like the UAE wants to enter the space race, they’re entering a crowded field, literally and figuratively. Figuratively because there is already the US, Russia, France, China and other countries that have gotten there first but also literally because there’s less space to put materials into without risking them getting hurt – so it’s important to understand that space is crowded but people don’t usually think of it that way.

The other thing that’s important is how this pertains to the future of warfare. The future of warfare is going to mean the same as it has for a long time – disrupting the communications infrastructure of your enemy and the internet is also something that is highly dependent on this outer space environment in various ways. Disrupting communication satellites, shutting down people’s cable access or shutting down their internet access or their communications abilities is going to be an important first step in the beginning of an all-out war with any modern country.  Part of that is having opportunities to defend your communication infrastructure in space and part of it is to learn how to attack your enemies’ infrastructure in space. A real problem right now, which has been such for a while now, is that the crowded atmosphere of space debris is getting worse because all the countries I named–certainly China, Russia and the US–are experimenting with shooting down satellites with anti-satellite weaponry and they’re doing that because they’re practicing for the future of war. When they do that, they create more space debris; the amount of space debris up there multiplies exponentially because those pieces fall into other pieces which smash into one another etc. The reason they’re doing that is because they have to experiment with how to take down other satellites and defend their own. The other side of that, which you alluded to with your question, is that it’s in the interest of a country like the UAE to be able to tell the difference between its satellite breaking down because it was randomly hit by a space debris iceberg or it was shot down by its enemy. I usually liken it to the early 20^th century where submarines were invented and if a ship were to crash, a country would wonder if it crashed because sometimes ships sink or did it sink because a German U-boat shot it down. It’s the same in space now – how can you tell if your satellite came down because of a deliberate attack or was it because of an accident? If you’re the UAE entering this crowded atmosphere, you have to learn how to tell the difference between space debris and what’s not and to do that, you need on-the-ground set of astronomical networks that are keeping track of space debris  by counting the pieces, noting their movements, figuring out their trajectories and planning for possibly removing that litter from the orbital environment.

It’s a two-pronged approach if you’re the UAE: Yes, you want to launch things but you also need to watch the skies more carefully to figure out what’s happening [there] to understand the political context of orbital space.

[Ameem Lutfi]: Are some countries keeping track of debris and so on?

[Joshua Reno]: They’ve been doing it since Sputnik. Sputnik was launched in 1957 and it scares Americans and Westerners hugely – they’re terrified that this Russian satellite is flying over their heads so the US government realises they need to start having people watching the skies and they call them “death watchers”. They’re tasked with tracking Sputnik to figure out where it’s going to crash because if it crashes in the US, they can grab it and study it and also because they want to know what it’s going to do – Is it dangerous? Is it collecting sensitive data?

Since then, the US government has been recruiting people to track space. The latest example of this, which I mentioned in the book, is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which about a decade ago, started trying to recruit amateur astronomers to help them track space debris partly because they need regular civilians’ eyes on space even though space is crowded – I don’t know if either of you have ever tried astronomy-but it’s hard to find stuff. If you’re with your kid with a little telescope, it’s hard to figure out what it is and it’s also hard to track all of those little pieces of space debris so it’s an advantage if you can get regular civilians working with you. I don’t think DARPA has been hugely successful at that but that’s their ambition –  create a network of sky watchers, previously known as “death watchers”, to help them track space debris.

[Ameem Lutfi]: It’s interesting that you mention these amateur people who are being recruited for militaristic purposes because the 20^th century is being seen as one of professional soldiers.  With that, I want to ask you about the kind of waste that you allude to in your work but doesn’t really come to the surface is the animated ways of veterans – retired surplus human military instrument, let’s say. If they can be put in the same category or the same frameworks can be used–because in our podcast, one of the themes that we’ve been looking at is how militaries often don’t take into consideration these retired soldiers joining criminal organisations or private military companies–would you see these retired soldiers as waste or if you can’t see them as waste?

[Joshua Reno]: It’s a really interesting question and you’re right, it isn’t something that I developed that much in the book but what I do talk a bit about in the later chapters is on mass shootings as a bizarre, unexpected outcome of a heavily militarised society. Unexpected because the DOD, when it has a massive budget, doesn’t think it’s going to create mass shooters but one of the first documented mass shootings is the one that happened in Texas University (with the clock tower) that many people refer to and say that was the first shooting as it happened in the 60s. The idea there is that mass shootings are public events that mostly involve white people as victims, which is one of the reasons why it’s questionable if it’s the first mass shooting because there are mass shootings of native Americans and slaves going back centuries. In this shooting in Texas, the shooter was a retired sniper from the military and the reason he was good at shooting people from that clock tower is because he was military-trained. There have been other shootings since then – not all of them and not most of them – but there have been some shootings over the course of the long 20^th century and early 21^st, where shooters were trained with military training and used that to attack civilians in a mass shooting episode. That’s the most obvious example of what you’re talking about but there are less obvious forms too and veterans’ organisations will point to the mental impact or the mental toll taken on these men and women and the vast majority of them are not a danger to anyone; they’re a danger to themselves because they’re at high risk of suicide, drug and alcohol abuse.

The real waste, if you like, of the military personnel is that they are let loose or cut off and aren’t given benefits and support–as veterans’ aid organisations will tell you–the risk is to their families and their lives.  You’re not wrong that a portion of people who can’t get work or who can get better pay working in a criminal,   security or a hybrid organisation like military security , they are going to be an asset in the global marketplace if you have too many people produced with those skills and they can end up “leaking out” from regular military actions like a “pollutant” in a waste-like sense and infecting other social systems. I think that’s a fair way of describing it because most people would say it is a destructive force when people who are very good at killing, are put in positions in the black market or in criminal networks.

I certainly would agree that is a way you could look at it and critically look again at the waste of the military industrial complex.  However, I think an even more common dimension is not those private contracted military workers, it would be people whose personal lives suffered deeply because of what they were exposed to and were left behind by underfunded veterans or the VA (Veterans Affairs) being poorly run. I think that’s a perfectly reasonable way to extend the model of military waste that I offer.

[Alessandro Arduino]: I want to ask you about another argument integral to your book, that is permanent readiness. You suggest that preparing for war, even when in peace especially in the 20^th century, had led to excess build-up and waste due to constant upgrade. With the Cold War over now and the rise of a more dispersed neoliberal age, do you think that this whole idea of war-readiness and constant upgrade is changing? One example in the area of drones just came to mind:  There is the German army which recently decommissioned a Global Hawk. We are talking $800,000 for this drone; they were not able to make it fly with the civil aviation and they just bought it and after a few months, put it in a museum. Now, instead of having a stockpile of disposable weapon of their own, we can see states that are going to look at a just-in-time approach to procure arms – private military companies or when they need 3D printing, additive manufacturing comes to my mind. If so, how will this more flexible age change how waste circulate?

[Joshua Reno]: That’s a great question and I think this is more speculative on my part but based on some of those changes–the just-in-time manufacturing and the kind of growth of post-Fordist manufacturing principles–some people argue that those did not affect military manufacturers for a while. It affected manufacturers in many sectors but the military was somewhat protected from that. Based on my research, they started being held more accountable after the end of the Cold War and during the beginning of the war on terror in President George W Bush’s administration. The idea of instituting post-Fordist manufacturing principles in some of these sectors is associated with the post-Cold War drop in funding which led to hundreds of bases closing, thousands of jobs lost and companies consolidating and then when budgets started increasing with the war on terror, there was a kind of new approach that the DOD started taking, certainly in many sectors, that fits with this post-Fordist way of thinking.

That being said, this is not the only change that’s happened over the last 20 years. Another change is the global arms sales increasingly having an effect so the example I would give is new military planes, that Lockheed Martin produced, being seen as useless and unhelpful in war – they’re Cold War planes essentially – but they ended up being bought and sold anyway. I think President Obama wanted to eliminate that programme but he wasn’t successful; President Trump wanted to do that too and he wasn’t successful also because both of their administrations said this is a wasteful programme and yet, Lockheed still made billions of dollars.  The reason they did, in part, is because they’re selling them to Saudi Arabia and they’re potentially selling them to Israel and England so there’s a global arms sale that is more robust in the age of the war on terror than it was 30 years ago.

While it’s true that just-in-time economic practices have shifted things, I think that there’s not enough attention to global arms sales shifting the centre of gravity away from places like Washington, so that you can buy, sell and plan to pitch your weapons to more countries on a broader scale. I would say one bit of possible evidence for what you’re describing would be that China just recently overtook the US in producing the most ships – the biggest navy in the world now and that would have been unthinkable 20 years ago. I mean, for years, the US has dwarfed every other country in the number of ships it has but one of the things that’s happened is that they are scrapping their excess military ships and eliminating this wastage – they’re trying to.  As they eliminate their mothballed navy– known as the “ghost ships” that are sort of on standby in case they’re needed but they’re just leaking oil into the Virginia River–those ships are being sunk, turned into artificial reefs and made into scrap metal to sell on the global scrap market so we are losing some of those excess ships in places like the US and moving to more flexible production.

Then you have China which does not have those pressures – it’s incentivised to over-produce and overpay for having the bragging rights of the world’s biggest navy. I think that is an example of what you’re describing. What happens when you move slowly, lurch towards a flexible production model in the case of the US, is that you lose the bragging rights of the biggest military but you can claim – perhaps dubiously – that it’s at least the cheapest big military. I don’t know if that’s true and I don’t know – even if it is true – if that’s something to be proud of but that surely is evidence to what you’re describing.

[Ameem Lutfi]: If I could pick up on this point that you made about being more dispersed with arms sales and sinking into Saudi Arabia, Iraq or Afghanistan, I want to ask about the two approaches to managing war waste: One that was implemented in Iraq and the other that was advocated but never really actualised in Afghanistan.  With Iraq, I’m thinking about these burn pits and I was reading about them recently, about how there’s medical issues that arise. Burn pits are when they dig a big pit and stuff all sorts of war materials of various kinds and shut it down and it’s creating all these health, human costs and so on. The other programme in Afghanistan was of a gun buyback programme. Had the US instituted some type of gun buyback programme after the US-Soviet war, how would that have changed the insurgence of Taliban and the whole war in Afghanistan? I’m wondering if you could just say a little bit about these two approaches – gun buyback programme and the burn pits.

[Joshua Reno]: I think that’s an interesting model–those two approaches–because in a way, that runs through different chapters of my book about whether you should destroy military objects or you should, if you like, “recycle” them by recirculating them or recreating them in some way. I would say, first, that I appreciate the distinction you made – it’s a meaningful one. I would say that they, of course, have things they’re burning in Afghanistan and there are sites where, for example, they have a helicopter or a bit of military technology that they don’t want to risk falling into Taliban hands so they blow it up in situ because it’s cheaper than shipping it off of Afghanistan.

I think that the environmental and health consequences of leaving behind those toxic burn pits or those leftover materials by letting them rot or by destroying them are so severe and are misunderstood. I guess a better way of putting it is that they have deliberately not been well-investigated – we need more research on those toxic legacies of burn pits and their effects on veterans and it hasn’t been in the interest of, for example, the DOD to own up to those environmental and health consequences. I think typically, the risks associated with the buyback programmes or broadly speaking, recirculating weapons in the places you’re leaving behind when the battle is over or is no longer popular with voters, the risks there would be that small arms or other weapons are going to fuel and intensify various divisions that lead to further civil war or instability wherever you are.

I would say those risks are there but I would rather the buyback programme because one, you don’t have the health and environmental consequences and, two, if the government and the military are doing something, at least it can create public conversation and deliberation about the effects of it. If you’re circulating those weapons and selling them off or finding people to send them to, you might be increasing instability but the fact is, if you don’t do it, they’re going to get it through the black market or they’re going to get it through legitimate private arm sales of other companies. Having governments involved in it, at least, allows citizens to make them accountable to someone and they can have a debate over the policy side of it. That’s lost entirely if you just destroy those weapons where no one ends up being accountable for typically, or if you leave it to private or black market agents to supply weapons to a place.

It sounds counter-intuitive because it doesn’t sound like a good idea to give back weapons to people in places we think are in danger and at war but at least it allows for a conversation to be had and I would always rather there be more democracy than less in these discussions – if that makes sense.

[Alessandro Arduino]: You point out something very important  –  accountability and transparency. Just when you were talking about this kind of waste, something popped in my mind about the former Yugoslavia conflict.  The role of depleted uranium bullets that were used to destroy tanks and then they keep these tanks alive as a potential threat not only for the soldiers operating in the area but for the civilian population also.  There are a lot of studies that are still controversial and that it still poses a risk of leukaemia for the people and so on.

Now I want to discuss another part of your book, which is how the US expanded by making an island of waste like Diego Garcia. I was wondering how that compared with the relationship between US and all the nations that are critical for their military, like Bahrain or even here in Singapore? How does the American military’s waste circulate in these places and especially in the surrounding ocean?

[Joshua Reno]: I’d like to mention first, though, when you brought up the uranium munitions in former Yugoslavia, for example – this is a real problem and again, is an instance of understudied toxic legacies that we were talking about earlier. For a time, they switched from uranium munitions to tungsten ones because they thought the latter would be a better metal to use and then studies emerged that tungsten could be carcinogenic so they withdrew it from use. There’s this ongoing fear about the uncertainties of these toxic legacies that munitions can leave behind and again, you don’t have to be at war to have those legacies. You can just be ready for a war and you leave uranium or tungsten legacies behind in the ground, which becomes radioactive because you did target practice for 10 years – that happened in Vieques in Puerto Rico. This is again my point about not needing to be at war for these legacies to exist.

Moving on to your other question, David Vine is an anthropologist who has a book I relied on heavily for the chapter on waste island strategy that you were mentioning and he has an amazing book called Island of Shame where he goes into the history of the process whereby they chose Diego Garcia and an island strategy for their next military base. My memory from Vine’s book is that the navy actually used the Middle East and places like Bahrain and the navies there to help them strategise that approach because in the Middle East– I don’t know about Southeast Asia–they were used to using islands or offshore sites for military operations so they extended that into the Indian Ocean with Diego Garcia since that model made sense for them in the Middle East. Also, in the Middle East, they had a partnership with the United Kingdom which was helping them in many ways to transition places like Israel and others into new forms of post-colonial or neo-colonial arrangements. That similarly was essential for the creation of Diego Garcia which involved the Royal British Military forcing out the Chagossians, a native population from Diego Garcia, so that they could install the US military there.

Singapore is complicated because it’s already an overcrowded island city and it would be hard to have a military base on top of the existing city but I do think it raises an interesting point, which is thinking about island strategies, if you like, for military control. I think the US is not an island; it is this big continent but in the late 19^th century, it became obsessed with using islands to govern the oceans and  military operations.  I think there’s an elective affinity, a connection between the kinds of strategies in Southeast Asia that have been employed by China and some of the things the US has done historically, where you’re trying to gain influence without doing what Japan did. You’re not trying to dominate and invade every island; you’re trying to influence every island by having nearby bases. We hear about it all the time that North Korea or China or the US  having operations in the South China Sea and how tense it is there.

That goes to your point about how sensitive island-hopping and “islands as military strategy” are right now and yet, how central they are for war-planning and war preparation. If a war is going to start, it’s probably so because there’s some ship in the South China Sea that signals the wrong threat and gets shot down or blown up and it escalates from there but that’s partly because at this point, a century and a half of the UK and the US military occupation and global hegemony. My point is that this is going to continue – island strategies and the wasting of islands as military assets have been integral for the US to allow for that [their] global strategy. The “wasting of islands” that I’m describing in the book is not only about occupying islands for military bases which again, if you have uranium munitions, they are going to become a toxic legacy but also because it’s islands in the pacific where the US buried nuclear and radioactive materials or where they practiced the hydrogen bomb on these different island populations – humans and non-humans.

There’s  massive literature on the toxic legacy that the US  has left behind by playing with islands and again, I think that those legacies we’re seeing continue to this day but it’s also going to be interesting to see how countries like China,  which is similar to the US in some ways–massive land-based continent that wants to control  the oceanic area around its borders–it’s going to be interesting to see those island strategies play out as they remain critical.

[Ameem Lutfi]: Thank you. This has been a fascinating conversation and to end this interview, I want to ask a question and ask you to do something anthropologists don’t usually do, which is to prophesise about the future. We’ve been asking this question to all of our guests whom we’ve had – In your opinion, what will the future of military base look like 30 years down the line?

[Joshua Reno]: That’s a complicated question. I think that one thing we’ve already touched on is the way in which space war is going to be part of war in a major way in the next 30 years. It’s not going to be Star Wars; it’s going to be people shutting down each other’s internets. I mean, that’s what I would expect.

The other thing is what the Air Force is trying to do and what DARPA wants to do and the things they want to do are, for example, to have destruction without a toxic legacy.  How do you destroy a city without a toxic legacy? Well, you can’t use atomic weapons because you’ll end up with radioactive after-effects so one of the examples they have been pursuing is this notion I mentioned in the book of “rods from god” – the idea of having a large telephone-pole sized rod of tungsten  dangling from a satellite that you can drop in a precise way so that it’s going through the near-earth orbit and dropping thousands  of feet until it lands in a city.  It would destroy that city surely, as you know an atomic bomb would because of how far it’s dropping from but it would not have a toxic legacy because there wouldn’t be radioactivity. The toxic legacy would be toxic matter that is already in that city.  Those are the kind of things they’re dreaming of because they don’t like that nuclear war involves radioactivity; they don’t like those environmental legacies so I would expect such things.

Something else that’s obvious, I suppose, is drones increasingly becoming part of everyday life. The US has an ongoing unresolved problem of police killing civilians. I don’t think it’s that hard to imagine shifting policing in the US more towards drones so that you can’t blame police officers anymore. Cities are being sued for millions of dollars by families of people who are wrongfully killed – typically, as you know, young black boys and men who are unarmed and doing nothing and end up being murdered.  I would expect drones to enter civilian policing eventually down the line and I would see people celebrating it and saying we’re defunding the police.  The police are no longer doing the shooting now that we have drones but I also think that that could be dangerous and a frightening reality but that might be, of course, where things are headed.  I use the example of Israel, where essentially, they’ve been using drones longer than the US  to control their own cities and close borders – not sending them to Afghanistan but using drones locally. I would expect that too.

The last thing that I would expect is that more Americans, for example but also citizens of any country, to be unsure whether they’re at war or not. I think the uncertainty of whether war is happening is going to continue because with the war on terror, governments – certainly the US, Israel, Britain and a number of more or less western societies – have learned it’s not popular to be at war constantly. Even Putin was not always popular when he was engaging in certain military activities when it was perceived to be ongoing (never going to end like in Chechnya) so it’s in their interest to make the public confused about whether war is happening or not. Which is why President Biden, who has been in office for a short time,  has already engaged in a military attack in Syria which many people saw as essentially an implicit attack on Iran; President Trump assassinated an Iranian military leader and occasionally, Iran attacks something that is somewhat indirectly connected to the US. Are we at war with Iran? In a hundred years, they might say we were at war with Iran or there was a Cold War with Iran but as far as the general public’s concerned, no, we’re not.  War is changing as it becomes more technical and distributed and because it becomes as flexible and “just-on-time” as war products, it’s harder to know if we’re at war or not. I think that is so helpful for political elites and the military establishment that they’re going to continue to make us confused about that – call it a postmodern war, if you like.

[Alessandro Arduino]: Joshua, thank you very much again for this very interesting insight. When you mentioned about drones, it is an important component of our podcast where we look at the drone swarm in the Middle East battlefield – refurbished drones for civilian use becoming a terrorist bomb from ISIS. As you just mentioned, in the US I think the debate has started in New York, looking at Boston Dynamics drones that have been recently leased to the police and the people are opposing. Even if it’s non-lethal, it is still creating some friction especially with the collective imagination that we have on drones.

Again, Joshua, it has been great listening to your insights and to conclude this podcast, please allow me to thank MEI – without whom this podcast could never be possible. Also, a very big and special thanks to all of our listeners!