Abstract

In this episode, Dr Adam Moore discusses his latest book Empire’s Labor: The Global Army that Supports U.S. Wars. He draws on his research with Filipino and Bosnian migrant labour to sketch out the vast transnational logistical infrastructure employed in running day-to-day US military affairs around the world.

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:

[Dr Ameem Lutfi]: Welcome to the 17th episode of the National University of Singapore-Middle East Institute’s podcast series Boots Off the Ground: Security and Transition in the Middle East and Beyond. In this series, we look at the future of warfare which will see uniformed 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.

[Dr Alessandro Arduino]: Thank you everyone for joining us.  We are extremely delighted to have with us, today, Dr Adam Moore. Dr Moore is an Associate Professor in the geography department at UCLA. His work broadly revolved around political and geographical dynamics of war, militaries, peace or geography of conflict.  He has also written extensively on the issue of ethnic conflict, nationalism, interstate war, post-war peace building, Southeast European politics, military labour, military contracting and the militarisation of US foreign policy. Today, I would love for him to focus our discussion on his most recent book published in 2019 — Empire’s Labor: The Global Army that Supports U.S. Wars.

[Dr Ameem Lutfi]: Again, thank you so much for being with us here today, Dr Moore.  I would like to kickstart our discussion with a broad question asking what really motivated you to produce the Empire’s Labor. Specifically, why do you think that this dispersed and transnational military recruitment system – which forms the heart of the book — provides us with an ideal vantage point for tracing the contours of the American empire as you argue; or to put it in other words, what does the practice of military labour recruitment really tell us about the nature of America’s foreign presence; the nature of American empire?

[Dr Adam Moore]: First off, thank you both for having me on this podcast. I’m not entirely sure if military labour is an ideal vantage point for understanding American empire but it is certainly an important, if not underappreciated one, I think. One point I would make is that the empires have always depended on foreign labour to sustain their overseas power, whether this involves obtaining and maintaining control over colonial possessions or supporting the largest global network of military bases the world has ever seen and conducting decades-long military operations in multiple countries.  Thus, I think this book allows us to apprehend certain parallels between the imperial presence and its antecedents. Second, I think military labour contracting is useful for tracing the effects of empire beyond bases and battlefields in ways that are not always visible through other lenses – from changes in the economic and social status of people living in poor barangays along the outskirts of Manila to post-war fortunes, de-industrialised towns in Bosnia, to impacts on international and domestic politics in countries like Nepal. These various space-spanning entanglements affecting countries and communities with seemingly no connection to the US’ “foreverwars” are really made visible through the analytical focus this book takes.

As for motivation, I would say one reason for writing this book was the general annoyance with how much attention has been given to mercenaries that they make up only a fraction of the military contractor workforce. Indeed, I don’t really engage with these writings at all in this book; instead, one of my main aims is to give voice to the agency, the aspirations and experiences of the majority of labourers who perform logistics work which may not be appealing to most observers but is far more important in sustaining the US’ overseas forces.

[Dr Alessandro Arduino]: You just mentioned that when looking at the beginning of the research of your book, you realise that the focus is on the military part of a private military company and we also already discovered previously, that there is a perception that private military just consists of people with fancy dresses and guns. However, in your book, you mentioned that only about eight percent of military contractors are directly involved in soldiering and the rest are hired for various other tasks ranging from cooking to construction and transportation etc. Also, if we look at the past, historically, militaries around the world have often fulfilled this service in the market in some way or another.

But then, if we look – as you suggest – at the establishment of the Logistics Civil Augmentation Programme (LOGCAP) in 1985, the nature and degree of contracting has changed. In your opinion, what exactly changed with LOGCAP and how so?

[Dr Adam Moore]: As you point out, contracting out logistics support is not a new phenomenon but I think what’s changed is the scale and scope of contracting, which is unprecedented, at least in US history. For example, if you step back and examine contractor-to-troop ratios, estimated contractor-to-troop ratios from the American revolution to the first Gulf War — the picture we see is fairly consistent but not overwhelming reliance on civilian support with contracted personnel constituting usually between five and twenty percent of troop levels. In contrast, in the three largest overseas operations in the past 25 years, — the peacekeeping missions in the Balkans and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — the number of contractors has been roughly been equal to or greater than the number of uniformed personnel in theaters of operation.

I think LOGCAP is important for understanding this shift, specifically following changes to the programme in 1992 because it created a comprehensive logistics contracting framework whereby prime contractors are now linked to specific geographical combatant commands and they offer them logistics services across the world. This contract support is now institutionalised within the military and built into operational plans from the beginning rather than being conducted on an ad-hoc basis.  Moreover, under LOGCAP, there is little that the military does not outsource to contractors from base support activities such as laundry, food, building and facilities management, waste and service disposal and power generation to things like materials management, transportation construction and even mortuary-related support.

[Dr Ameem Lutfi]: You mentioned that the ratio of contractors-to-uniformed soldiers has really changed in the last three conflicts — now we know or have heard, at least, about Iraq and Afghanistan but the third one we know much less about. I’m wondering if you could expand a little on peace operationalisation in Bosnia and how this elaborate infrastructure of contracting built in the Balkans really laid the grounds for post-9/11 contracting as well.  Something mentioned in your book which I found very intriguing is that when the Americans left Bosnia, the Bosnians followed Americans; so how does that work? How did Bosnia come to be so central to the history of military contracting?

[Dr Adam Moore]:  After the reforms to LOGCAP in 1992, the first time it was utilised on a large scale was for the peacekeeping operations in Bosnia.  There were about 25,000 troops at the peak of the mission in 1996 and this was   followed by peacekeeping operations in Kosovo in 1999 so essentially, these operations serve as a proving ground for LOGCAP contracting and contracting registered contractors more generally.  These were prior to the invasion of Iraq and it was expected that most logistics support would be contracted out. However, Iraq was a much different scale of operations and unlike in Bosnia, the prime LOGCAP contractor Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) was not able to use local labour. Therefore, it turned to subcontractors mostly from the Gulf states and Turkey to amass the massive pool of foreign labour required to fulfil its contractual obligations – this pool of labour was drawn heavily from Philippines, India, Sri Lanka etc. KBR also started hiring Bosnians, Macedonians, coastal Albanians who had worked for the company in the Balkans.  These missions were drawing down at the same time of the Iraq war and as the occupation was ramping up there, Bosnians were no longer needed in the Balkans and they were then moved to Iraq and Afghanistan to work for KBR. In some cases, this occurred as KBR managers shifted from Bosnia to Iraq and brought along their favourite local employees but the company also set up recruitment offices run out of hotels in Sarajevo and Tusla in the 1990s and early 2000s, recruiting Bosnians who hadn’t worked for it. This practice was continued by Fluor and DynCorp after they received the LOGCAP contracts for Afghanistan in 2008 so in some ways, there’s kind of a path dependency that takes place — you start out by bringing Bosnians, Macedonians, coastal Albanians over in the early 2000s and then the companies just keep going back there to recruit even more in the 2000s and early 2010s.

[Dr Alessandro Arduino]: Now, as you mentioned, during the war in the former Yugoslavia, there was also someone else looking at hiring personnel and I just remembered the case of Muammar Gaddafi who recruited Serb snipers and mercenaries for protection — it didn’t work out well, I recall. On a related note, as the US completes its troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, as we are witnessing on a daily basis — and also in some respect from Iraq — we will see Iraqi and Afghans following the US in its war elsewhere or more broadly, how do you think the military contractors are preparing for the end of the war in the Middle East?

[Dr Adam Moore]:  Answering the first part of your question about Iraqis and Afghans – I don’t think we’ll ever see this because in part, they were rarely hired by LOGCAP contractors and played a small role in offering base support services.  At the beginning of the Iraq war, for example, the company was not allowed to hire Iraqis – most Iraqis and Afghans who were hired under LOGCAP business logistics contracts were hired for  smaller duties that were oftentimes more of a mix of off-base support but also, another reason you won’t see this is due to the fact that there’s  such a large pool of experienced labour from around the world to draw on now as operations shift elsewhere.

For instance, several Bosnians and Filipinos I interviewed are now working on bases in Africa for Fluor, the prime logistics contractor for Africa command and I know of several more that are actively looking for such work –  there’s this drawdown and many people  have done this job for years or decades even. This has essentially become a profession and they’re somewhat desperately applying for the dwindling number of jobs – it might be in the Philippines but most of the growth in recent years has been in Africa so that’s really how they’re preparing for it. Some are shifting to other industries but there’s certainly a desire for many people that I’ve talked to and kept in touch with to continue this sort of work.

[Dr Ameem Lutfi]: One interesting thing about the book is that you suggest that the shift in contracting has taken place not just over time but also the fact that contracting looks different in different places. So, if we look at Iraq and Afghanistan, even though they were happening around the same time, the steps involved in contracting look somewhat different and I wonder if you could expand on that – maybe elaborate on what ways the experience of soldiers or military contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan differ from one another. You mentioned is that when a contractor arrives in Iraq, they’re guided throughout by an American military convoy but in Afghanistan, they’re left to themselves and more independent, which comes with a precarity of the possibility of some kind of side venture and so on so how would you compare Iraq and Afghanistan in terms of the nature of military contracting?

[Dr Adam Moore]:  I’ll start with the convoy escort question because I think it’s a really interesting case.  In 2004, insurgents began targeting truck convoys carrying food, fuel and materials from Kuwait and Turkey to US bases in Iraq and as these attacks and hostage-taking of foreign drivers mounted, India and the Philippines declared travel bans to Iraq for their citizens, causing the military to panic as hundreds of supply trucks were stuck at the border since Indians and Filipinos formed majority of drivers at that time.  At one point that summer in 2004, the military estimated that it had less than a week’s supply of food and water for troops remaining in the country. To resolve the issue, the military first improved security measures for convoys which included an increase in military escort vehicles so this is where there was a need for heavily-armed military escorts and they policy of having military escorts for convoys in Iraq. Then, through the State Department, the US government strong-armed Kuwait to ignore the travel bans on border crossings so by the end of 2004, some of these issues had lessened and the policy of having armed escorts for convoys was implemented.

The problem for the military was that providing armed escorts is an incredibly deadly job and in fact, according to a study done in 2011, at that point, approximately 1,000 troops had been killed while providing convoy escorts and that was roughly one quarter of the total casualties then. So, as operations in Afghanistan ramped up in the late 2000s, the military decided not to provide escorts for most transportation convoys in the country but instead, they made transportation contractors responsible for their own security. Now, in practice, this meant hiring private security companies which are often just paying protection money to local warlords — and the Taliban actually — in exchange for them refraining from attacking trucks that transit territories the prive security companies control. It’s also true thatmost of the transport convoys and the truckers were Afghan so that is local labour and different compared to Iraq, which was more of foreign labour and third country national labour.

I think another difference between Iraq and Afghanistan — it’s interesting but I don’t really go much into this in the book — is that in Afghanistan, a significant number of third country national labourers have lived and worked off-base, especially around Kandahar and Kabul.  However, in Iraq, this was very rare – almost every contractor — well, at least the foreign ones — lived within the compound and confines of the base. I think Noah Coburn’s book Under Contract: The Invisible Workers of America’s Global War does an excellent job exploring the experiences of these workers, many of whom came from Nepal. Some of the people I interviewed who would work in both Iraq and Afghanistan or work only in Afghanistan, had, at various points, done jobs that were off-base as most were working on base.  If you worked off-base, you typically weren’t working under a LOGCAP contract even though sometimes subcontractors were located off-base but that would actually be one of the biggest differences and as I said, Noah’s book really captures the experience of living in a guest house in Kabul in a way that you wouldn’t see in Iraq.

[Dr Alessandro Arduino]: Yes, our previous podcast episode focused on talking about the dark world of subcontracting involving the Nepalese Gurkhas.  As you just mentioned, we’re now moving from primary contracting to subcontracting. Another key difference that you write about in your book is that of the type of contracting and company recruiting processes – there is a huge difference between prime contractor and subcontractor and this drastically impacts the war experience. Can you present our listeners with some of the main differences between sub and primary contractors and how they shape the nature of work?

[Dr Adam Moore]: Prime contractors tend to be American or international companies that receive a direct military contract – examples would be KBR, or Fluor, DynCorp, Louis Berger etc. — in the wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan. Prime contractors, in turn, have relied heavily upon subcontractors who usually come from the Gulf countries or Turkey. Subcontractors recruit the bulk of the foreign labour force and then they oftentimes manage the military bases.  One reason why I decided to interview Bosnians and look at Filipinos is because they really ended up in different areas of this contracting ecosystem, with Bosnians typically hired by prime contractors who recruited them directly from Bosnia and in contrast, Filipinos and most workers from other South and Southeast Asian countries working for subcontractors and hired through recruiting agencies that specialise in labour export.  Perhaps, the most important determinant of your experience as a foreign labour in US military bases and war zones was whether you worked for a prime or a subcontractor and this is especially the case when it comes to pay, base privileges and living conditions.

If you worked for a prime contractor in Iraq, you usually had a wide range of base privileges — eating in the same dining halls as troops, shopping in the same stores, using the same gyms or other recreational facilities, had similar standards of accommodation as American contractors and bases and also given paid leave multiple times a year like American contractors. Subcontractors however, usually had none of these privileges and they often lived in company-controlled hostels that had substandard food and living accommodations.  In Afghanistan — well, sometimes the accommodations ended up being more brought together – if you worked for a prime contractor as a warehouseman, you might be paid between thirty to fifty thousand dollars a year, while the same job performed by an employee of the subcontractor might only earn eight to ten thousand dollars a year. So, considering just some of these disparities, especially in pay and privileges, you can understand why moving from a subcontractor to a prime contracting firm would be so attractive to workers despite the risks that this entails.

[Dr Ameem Lutfi]: Going from one job to another, maybe subcontractor to a prime contractor, we would normally think that that’s just how it works but you suggest that in the world of contracting, this needs to be considered as an act of resistance.  This casts the spotlight on an issue that seldom gets talked about in writings on military contracting — pushback or the demand for better working conditions or more rights. You suggest that one of the reasons it gets overlooked is because resistance doesn’t look like what we expect it to be. It doesn’t look like people coming out on the streets but it’s often these acts like people going from one job to another or making complaints about food and living conditions – what might otherwise be considered small or petty.  I’m wondering if you could elaborate on some of some examples of these pushbacks and acts of resistance? What do they actually look like on the ground?

[Dr Adam Moore]:  I think one of the major reasons why you don’t see much written about this is because reporters don’t have access to military bases.  Protests about food and living conditions and strikes — they could oftentimes be quite large and visible and in some cases violent but you just wouldn’t really see or read about them because the information wouldn’t get out. There are some exceptions to this though — Sarah Stillman wrote a great article in the New Yorker a few years back that discusses it. Strikes, especially in the early years in Iraq, could be quite large but in my favourite example of this, the strike was a smaller one – it was a threat and strike by eighteen firefighters in Kandahar a few years back. They basically had been asking this contractor for firefighting rescue support services for an increase in wages; they’d been sending letters to the Chief Executive Officerfor a year but everything was ignored. The officer came to Kandahar to check on company operations and they all decided they were going to threaten a strike en masse. They packed the boulder bags, dropped them on the tarmac and said they’re walking off  unless their requests are met. This was fascinating because if they’d gone through with their threat, they would have crippled flight operations at the airport due to a resulting decrease in firefighting and rescue capabilities and lowered the airport’s international civil aviation organisation rating below what’s required to handle large transport planes. There have been massive fines against the contractor for breaching a contract so the company and the manager folded on the spot, doubling the firefighter salaries from a thousand to two thousand a month. When it came to a strike, if it really was to be successful, it required leverage like that. Dining facilities or operations is another where you saw successful strikes – protests tended to be more around living accommodations, food or delays in salary payment.

Now, moving from one company to another usually occurred because people want better pay or base privileges and the move would usually be from a subcontractor to a prime contractor. This move was done by individuals and it’s not on the sly; they’re kind of hiding this from their employer because if the employer caught them before all the paperwork was completed, they would inform the military that they are to no longer consider them an employee authorised to accompany the force and the letter of authorisation allowing them to be on the base will be revoked. When this happens, the worker is immediately deported from the base and sent home so the right to work on bases in is short and dependent on the good graces of one’s employer. You can then see how it would be if they can successfully switch — this kind of threatens this iron-fisted control that employers have over labour force rights and you can see this in terms of how companies responded to this job switching. Subcontractors would go to great lengths to prevent this practice — from threats of large fines and legal proceedings against workers back home, to increased surveillance and restrictive curfews on bases, to informal agreements not to hire other companies’ employees on a particular base and essentially, anti-labour collusion would take place.

[Dr Alessandro Arduino]: Adam, you mentioned the strike from firefighters – I wonder when armoured contractors get on strike. Not long ago, there was a case  on a floating armoury — a  barge in the middle of international waters that is full of automatic weapons, even RPGs that are rented to private security contractors, aboard the ship and there was a case of this guard who was stuck on it for a really long time due to Covid-19, probably not paid and then he took his grievance into his own hands with an automatic rifle. It didn’t end very well, I have to say.

But back to what you just mentioned – them moving jobs despite the risk that work entails — that really strikes me. In my personal opinion, one of the aspects that sets your book apart is that your discussion on the impact of military contracting does not stop with labourers going back home. We have to take into consideration the trauma, social relations, disruption of the social relations, the capital accumulated doing the work, that travel back with labourers and back with the worker at home. So, could you highlight some of the ways in which labourers remake their home society after returning from war zones? Moreover, how does this result in what is being called the “everywhere of war”?

[Dr Adam Moore]: One of the more interesting things I discovered while conducting interviews is that it’s not just how capital, these altered social relations and trauma travel back home; what’s important is that the labourers discuss how this work has changed their lives. Their perspective is also profoundly shaped by their understanding of the society they live in and the potential opportunities available when they come back home. Many Filipinos I talk with, for example, emphasise positive outcomes of their experiences. They particularly told me that the money they earned would afford a better future for their families, especially if they’re sending their children to private schools and universities.

Thus, the economic capital would be translated into educational and social capital and it would give their children a better chance of moving to upper or middle class. In contrast, a significant number of Bosnians felt their experience had done little to fundamentally improve their lives beyond a temporary boost in income and I thought that was somewhat surprising because their pay and working conditions were usually much better than Filipinos due to the fact that most of them work for prime contractors. Bosnians being equivocal about military work has to do with the condition of precarity in post-war Bosnia — this ranges from high unemployment and economic insecurity to corruption and divisive ethnic nationalist politics and struggles to regain a sense of normalcy in the aftermath of war and displacement in the 1990s. There was this phrase “facing the reality of this life here” which was a common expression that people mentioned and I think that captures the disillusion and pessimism. Therefore, I think when we look at the effects of “everywhere of war” —I mean the various social economic and political entanglements produced by US military contracting that extend across the globe — they’re really diverse and shaped as much by workers’ life back home as their experiences in the war zones.

[Dr Ameem Lutfi]:  If I could bring you to a discussion that has been ongoing in this podcast series from the start – i the issue of regulation and setting the rules of the game for the private military industry. So, often, based on the discussions that we’ve had with practitioners and academics, a problem is that while greater or tighter regulations look great on paper, when they come into effect on the ground they often only end up pushing the market into the grey area or pushing contractors into more opaque spaces that end up producing more problems than positive outcomes. You kind of mentioned that as well earlier, how India and the Philippines placed that travel ban, leading to workers having to take more precarious routes or they had to go through more underground channels.  Is there any way out of this dilemma? Are we really stuck with this issue of the market going underground if we go for increased regulations?

[Dr Adam Moore]: That’s a good question.  I’ll speak about the case of US military contracting – in particular, logistics contracting. I’ll keep my comments focused on this and this is what I have to say: I don’t think there really is a way out of this dilemma if we don’t start recognising the key role that the military and the US government, more generally, play in allowing labour exploitation to exist and persist. I don’t think this is really a story of unscrupulous contractors but to me, what really stands out is the inability and unwillingness of the military to provide effective oversight of contractors, especially subcontractors. So, there’s oversight with regard to treatment of workers and this is despite the fact that these workers’ employment is entirely a consequence of the military’s contracting needs. Instead, what it has done is continuously try to minimise responsibility for trafficking and other labour abuses committed by its contractors.It’s really striking  how it uses these legalistic arguments to justify or explain lack of oversight responsibility by defining its authority and jurisdictional powers in the narrowest possible terms when it comes to cases of exploitation; essentially it really only places what’s going on within the walls of the base and the wires.  In this, I think the military’s actions are similar to large corporations which have extended offshore supply chains in which they try to evade responsibility for substandard labour conditions suffered by those at the end of these chains.  I don’t think it’s really a question of new regulations when we’re looking at some of the labour exploitation practices but rather, if the military was actually willing to aggressively investigate and punish its subcontractors who commit labour abuses and facilitate human trafficking, we would see changes in the industry’s behaviour. I think if this is absent, nothing will really change.

[Dr Alessandro Arduino]: You also draw some very interesting parallels between military recruitment and the kafala system standard in the Persian Gulf. Can you expand on this parallel and especially explain why foreign labour recruitment in the Gulf may be a good place to start thinking about military contracting?

[Dr Adam Moore]: I think one clear parallel is the recruiting process for people from South and Southeast Asian countries who are employed by military subcontractors. For most workers from countries like India, Nepal or the Philippines, the recruiting process from the role of local agents to fees in terms of contracts to experiences of labour trafficking and particularly, debt bondage, does have shared characteristics with the broader recruiting assemblage that facilitates this massive labour import-export regime between wealthy Gulf petrostates and poor labour exporting countries. A second parallel I think concerns the dependence of workers on their employers to maintain their work status; so just as migrant labourers have the right to live and work in countries with kafala, labour laws are controlled by their employer or sponsor and third country nationals working on military bases do not have alternative work options if their employer informs the military they’re rescinding their sponsorship –  they are then sent  home.

The third point I would highlight is that military workers employed by subcontractors have endured a host of these abuses that really parallel experiences of many labour migrants in the Gulf – from confiscation of passports which make it impossible to move from one firm to another to wage matters to excessive recruiting fees to substandard living conditions and occasionally, trafficking. I would say that, really, none of these parallels are that surprising perhaps when you consider that the largest military subcontractors in Iraq and Afghanistan tend to be firms from the Gulf and also Turkey but the result we see is that the military has imported these exploitative labour practices and the parallel conditions experienced by labour migrants elsewhere into the region.  It has imported these practices while at the same time, deliberately exercising minimal oversight responsibility.

[Dr Ameem Lutfi]: If I could shift the discussion a little bit from the Middle East to Singapore, where the Middle East Institute is in – even if Singapore is not directly involved in the war itself, it remains important to the global military labour logistics and migration infrastructure as a transition hub for labourers either looking to get into into military work or get out of it. I’m wondering if you could elaborate for our listeners on what role small countries like Singapore being transit places play in this broader infrastructure.

[Dr Adam Moore]: I don’t know if I can really speak too much of this question, and I think it’s in part really kind of based on where I did interviews. I can’t really say much for this question but I think Singapore was important for some Filipino labourers who were evading travel bans to Iraq and Afghanistan. After these travel bans were put in place, the recruiting industry really went underground so you still had recruiting agencies in Manila trying to assemble pools of labour for these subcontracting countries and sending them abroad, surreptitiously. What took place was that actually, sometimes, these newly recruited workers are those who had actually already been in Iraq and Afghanistan and returning home to visit their families for a period of time. Rather than flying directly to the UAE, they would first get a flight to Singapore and then go to the UAE from Singapore.  They did this to evade officials at Manila’s airport who were carefully scrutinising travellers who were flying directly to the Gulf. This is one way in which Singapore came up in some of these stories; I don’t know if I can really speak about this much more broadly though. Again, I think it might be a different story if we looked at other kinds of labour flows.

[Dr Alessandro Arduino]: Adam, I would like to end our discussion with the million-dollar question that we ask all our guests and they have, just as you do, a few minutes to answer it: What would warfare look like in the coming 30 years –  in what ways especially do you think our future will be shaped by what you call a “forever war” and “everywhere war”?

[Dr Adam Moore]: That’s an interesting question. I don’t know if I have a good answer for you; I’m not really a warfare futurist but I think military contracting, especially in the realm of logistics has certainly been critical for maintaining the “forever war” mindset in the US and this is because it plays an important risk transfer role by shifting the composition of military labour from uniformed and American to civilian and foreign. This said, I think there are some signs of this “foreverwar” mindset that’s starting to be questioned by policymakers in Washington which I find hopeful. So, for a question like this, I hope we might be seeing a shift in how the US thinks about war and its interventions abroad. More generally, I think the technological changes, including automation and autonomous warfare, are likely to be increasingly important in future decades. Some people say this would be the end of military labour; a shift from military labour to military technology.

But I think when it comes to labour, new technologies often distribute and reconfigure it in different ways rather than doing away with it. With drones, you really reconfigure the labour or network that’s required to support a drone; you have people sitting in air-conditioned containers in Las Vegas or New Mexico; you have people flying the dronesand you have people analysing imagery in Virginia. I think with technology, we’ll certainly see a redistribution and reconfiguration of some of the necessary labour and how labour networks look. I think that military contracting will continue to play a prominent role in warfare when countries want to project forces outside their borders and this probably won’t just be the US –  we see how Russia,  for example, relies heavily on Wagner and other contractors that  are influenced by conflicts in Syria, Libya, Central African Republic etc. so I don’t know if that really answers your question well but I’ll end here with these thoughts.

[Dr Ameem Lutfi]: It does. Adam, it’s been absolute pleasure having you here with us. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and really opening a new window into this dispersed and massive global military labour logistics infrastructure that the entire post-9/11 wars might not have been possible without. Thank you for being here today and joining us.  Thank you to all our listeners as well – we hope to be back with you very soon with a new episode.

[Dr Adam Moore]: Thank you both for having me.