12
The Militarization of US Communications
Introduction
Cavernous knowledge gaps disfigure communications study. Owing to persistent efforts by resolute scholars, the long-neglected but foundational role of labor in communications now claims at least some visibility. For all the noise about globalization, on the other hand, the field continues mostly to neglect the ways in which the “space of flows” is actually organized, so that communications may be incorporated – previously around private line circuits, now also around virtual private networks – as an enabling infrastructure for the transnationalization of capitalist production. And what of the vast and continuing process of commodification, that is, the takeover of other forms of cultural-informational production and distribution by for-profit employers of waged labor? A central vector of communications history, commodification is apprehended by mainstream study as, at most, a sideshow. Taken together, these marginalized subjects would go far to constitute an alternative basis for the entire discipline. As it happens, however, still another knowledge gap is even more urgent.
At the height of the US war on Vietnam, Herbert I. Schiller (1969) pointed to the formative linkages between electronic communications and the US military; yet, nearly two decades later, Mosco (1986, 76) observed that “With few exceptions, communications research has ignored the role of the military in media and information systems.” Another 20 years have passed, and yet this verdict remains valid. Although some attention has been paid to war-inflected processes of ideological construction (Herman and Chomsky 2002, Andersen 2006), and – a welcome portent – a scholarly journal has been established to engage the theme of “media, war and conflict,” the militarization of communications as a dynamic political economic project continues to be lost in obscurity: how militarization calls forth innovations in information and communications technology (ICT), structures the institutions of communications system development, and helps set communications policy priorities. What are the historical origins and shaping forces behind the militarization of communications? What are its principal features today? In what follows, I offer an initial assessment.
From Continental Conquest to Global Power
Communications and military purpose have been entangled throughout all of US history. Their relationship has been basic and enduring rather than haphazard: a major facet of what the great historian William Appleman Williams (1980) called “empire as a way of life.” Throughout the nation’s first century, military force constituted an essential basis for continental occupation – and a process into which US communications system resources were deeply integrated. Initially enlisted was the Post Office. Six of the twelve US postmasters general who served between 1789 and 1845 had been high-ranking army officers; and, according to Richard John (1995, 133–4), the early Post Office was organized on a “military model.” The first US mail to be carried overland from the Pacific to the Atlantic coast was borne by Kit Carson in 1848, as an explicit military operation. In 1855, looking to populate the newly bicoastal country with newcomers, California Senator Weller underlined the close identity between Post Office and Army: “by the establishment of a mail route with little posts every ten miles you will have in fact military posts all along that road. In this way you will give protection to your emigrants” (Hafen 1969/1926, 86). Through the era of Manifest Destiny and on to the 1870s, such interlocks sustained the takeover of a continent, at the expense both of its prior inhabitants and designing European rivals. During the late nineteenth century, however, the militarization process shot beyond continental boundaries even as it also incorporated new communications technologies.
Disparate historical actors and structural forces contributed to the rise of the US as an international power. Christian missionaries and admirals, Boy Scouts and Wall Street financiers, leaders of corporations and executive branch agencies, and Hollywood moguls: all made distinctive contributions. Yet, in addition to the contributions made by its burgeoning export–import trade, the US ascendancy was vitally reliant on rapidly expanding foreign direct investment. United States capital’s bid for a larger share of the international market beginning in the late nineteenth century called forth a concurrent demand to safeguard the economic fruits of that enterprise. Efforts to protect US foreign investments in factories, mines, plantations, and infrastructures became as expansive as the desires of the hard-eyed men whose profits were at stake, as far-ranging and open-ended as their fears. As foreign direct investment and in some cases a full-blown imperialism stimulated recourse to force of arms, a politically connected industry of war supply grew prominent. The secular build-up of US hard power targeted both indigenous radical movements and rival great powers.
By the 1880s, Congress was authorizing construction of the first US battleships, the globally mobile assault force of that day. United States international communications likewise began to project into the Pacific and the Caribbean. In a message to Congress in 1899, President McKinley underlined the strategic significance of international communications in the context of territories the US had recently wrested, some as spoils from the interimperialist conflict known as the Spanish–American War:
The United States will come into possession of the Philippine Islands on the farther shore of the Pacific. The Hawaiian Islands and Guam becoming US territory, and forming convenient landing places on the way across the sea, the necessity for cable communication between the United States and all these Pacific Islands has become imperative. Such communication should be established in such a way as to be wholly under the control of the United States whether in time of peace or in war. (McKinley 1899, 1712)
From McKinley forward, US leaders struggled to establish an independent and comprehensive American system of extraterritorial communications. Jostling with one another as they pursued competing extraterritorial visions, corporate executives, civilian political leaders, and military officers undertook expansionary system development initiatives. “Among naval and military authorities,” wrote communications expert Walter S. Rogers in 1922 (146), “there is a growing appreciation of the communications factor.” Military demand and strategic potential weighed heavily in the innovation of new communications technologies, from naval radio to radar and beyond. “Chosen instrument” organizations attempting to join corporate capital to military requirements comprised exemplars of a multifaceted attempt to project US power. This model, forged around RCA in radio (1919), carried forward – despite reverses and contingencies – to Comsat in satellite communications (1962).
A watershed was reached during the aftermath of World War II, when the nation’s political economy was rebuilt as an armamentarium with communications at its center. This was not a smooth, one-way process, but its basic contour lines may be simply traced. Initiated as a countermovement against the welfare-state reforms of the New Deal, a big-business-led mobilization created some of the crucial domestic and international institutions for the global Pax Americana that was crafted after World War II. From the late 1940s forward, US leaders worked to reorganize the domestic political economy to prepare for permanent war. The principal strategic goal was to combat socialism, although this was often euphemistically called “containment.” The Soviet Union comprised the primary target. However, the US strategy was worldwide in scope. Neither European states nor Japan was in a position to prevent scores of countries throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America – a collectivity that began to be called the “Third World” – from embracing a political project of national self-determination. Under this rubric, leading Third World countries, such as India and Brazil, initiated import-substitution and related policies aimed at achieving a greater measure of economic self-reliance as well as growth. Others, such as China in 1949 and Cuba a decade later, undertook revolutionary withdrawals from the capitalist world market. In this environment, the US-led Cold War quickly became a contest for the dispensation of the world’s peoples, states, and resources.
To place its strategic net (often called an umbrella) over Western Europe, the US helped partition Germany, anchored troops there, and erected the North Atlantic Treaty Organization; in Japan and the Republic of Korea, camping out on the eastern flanks of the Soviet Union and China, the US garrisoned tens of thousands of additional soldiers. Throughout the poor world, in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, US authorities repeatedly supported kleptocratic dictators, and unseated popular, sometimes democratically elected, leaders. From Iran to Guatemala, from Chile to Indonesia, and from the Congo to Vietnam, the United States relied on military intervention, either covert or overt, small or large scale, directly or by proxy. United States government propaganda campaigns directed against the American people presented these campaigns as the defense of democracy (Osgood 2006, Wilford 2008). Corporate media complicity aimed to ensure that, whether led by Democrats or Republicans, the war party might prevail.
United States efforts to dominate a restored world market system were predicated on the establishment of a perilously encompassing institutional circuitry at home. During the late 1940s, the Defense Department was set up to unify control over previously separate military services. The National Security Council was created, as a superexecutive department that would foreground strategic issues. The CIA and other intelligence agencies were brought to life. For the first time in US history, the military establishment was turned into a permanent force, hugely overrunning its earlier, more limited, channels. Under the aegis of little-known agencies – the Inter-Department Radio Advisory Committee and the National Security Agency – what had been civilian functions, including spectrum allocation for government users and management of the government’s own communication system, became subject to substantial military/intelligence agency control. In tandem with the reorganization of the state came a radical reorganization of corporate America. From the 1940s onward, its strategic priorities combined unremitting high-tech military innovation and procurement with the supply of consumer goods and services. Companies developing every conceivable kind of communications and information hardware and software were showered with military contracts.
War industry constituted an enormous, multifaceted, and highly profitable endeavor – with communications at its center. At the peak of US involvement in World War I, as AT&T CEO Walter Gifford (1937) recalled in a speech to the Army Industrial College, “over 90 per cent of the activity of the research and development departments of the Bell System was on war work”; Bell employees sufficient to staff 14 Signal Corps battalions built a European telephone network during the war consisting of 100,000 miles of wire, around 100 switchboards, and 3,000 local stations (Sterling 2008, 21). Only during and after World War II, however, did the military hook permanently into the nation’s science infrastructure, focusing it on weapons systems incorporating advanced communications and on upgraded and modernized communications to enhance the traditional military functions of command, control, and intelligence. This prodigious military research effort spun out microelectronics, digital computing, software advances, and foundational network technologies growing out of the Distant Early Warning line and IBM’s Semi-Automated Ground Environment. Throughout the new information and communications technology’s formative decades, “the armed forces of the United States were the single most important driver of digital computer development” (Edwards 1996, 43). During the 1960s, as the US war on Vietnam was escalated by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, communications gained additional prominence via emerging concepts of an “electronic battlefield” (Klare 1972); fantasies of automating the killing function circulated as a deadly serious strategy among military leaders (Edwards 1996).
The reorganization of the political economy was not free of conflict and contingency; and it engendered some disparate outcomes, for example, in regard to AT&T – the corporate manager of the nation’s telecommunications infrastructure. On one hand, the Department of Defense (DoD) in 1949 initiated a special contract with AT&T to manage the Sandia Laboratory, perhaps the nation’s pre-eminent nuclear weapons facility. The relationship burgeoned and blossomed: AT&T ranked as the nation’s eighth largest recipient of prime military contracts between 1960 and 1967, garnering a total of $4 billion (Leslie 1993, 293). Following a seven-year antitrust prosecution by the Justice Department, on the other hand, in 1956 AT&T was compelled to open up its unrivaled trove of patents to other corporate military contractors and to limit its own operations to regulated telecommunications (Schiller 2007). Not for the first time and, as we shall see, not for the last, state intervention resulted in a rearrangement of the monopoly carrier’s accumulation strategy and, ultimately, in a more encompassing system of military-industrial profit making. But this result was a complex eventuality, rather than a mechanical reflex of corporate aspiration.
System Stress and Elite Response
Beginning during the late 1960s, destabilizing stress factors started to loom large. Because of Vietnam War spending, a fiscal crisis encumbered the state; owing to intensifying international market rivalries, during the 1970s US capital faced a protracted profit squeeze. Policy makers responded with alacrity to craft measures aimed at restoring profitable capital accumulation. First, they began to cut the limited social welfare programs, which had been established by the New Deal and further expanded by President Johnson’s “Great Society.” Second, they targeted information and communications as a prospective new pole of rejuvenating – that is, profitable – market growth, among other means through the Reagan Administration’s huge boosts to military spending. These two trends have persisted. Even though with the defeat of the Third World’s bid for national self-determination (Prashad 2007) and the collapse of Soviet socialism, US military spending momentarily declined and major military contractors were encouraged to consolidate, no real change was wrought in the nation’s social direction or in its production system. The “peace dividend,” such as it was, did nothing to disestablish either the war economy or the national security state at its helm. During the 1980s, therefore, Mosco (2005) aptly conceived of the United States as a “militarized information society.” This conception is, if anything, still more apt today. Within the context of this overarching historical continuity, however, significant changes continued to emerge, and so we may ask: how has the militarization of communications evolved throughout its most recent phase?
Several trends merit discussion. First, the policy decision to liberalize telecommunications markets destabilized existing arrangements for joint military-corporate co-ordination of network infrastructures; new mechanisms pivoted not around a single monopoly network operator, but around an enlarged and increasingly transnational set of corporate actors. Second, as capital investment and government subsidy continued to flow into information and communications, the beltway of military-industrial innovation provided a widening array of networked weapons – to which civil society was rendered increasingly vulnerable. Third, while net-centric weaponry became the central component of military contracting, combat and intelligence functions that had previously been performed directly by government became centers of profit-making private business. Fourth, while the theater of US military operations remained global, as new adversaries swam into view the orientation of forces underwent strategic shifts. Last but hardly least, processes of ideological construction continued to be closed to meaningful discussion of the basics of US foreign policy: war continued to be presented as a needful defensive measure. The remainder of the discussion considers these axes of development.
Co-ordination of Network Infrastructure
Historically, the US telecommunications infrastructure has created a problem of control for the military in that planning and mobilization require co-ordination with private carriers. A workable accommodation has long since been reached. But the issue acquired fresh urgency as policy makers liberalized access to and use of telecommunications.
Throughout the 1970s, the US Department of Defense adamantly opposed decisions taken by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) (notably, the Second Computer Inquiry) to open US telecommunications markets to competition (Temin with Galambos 1987, 223–9). To be sure, this ascending policy of liberalization succeeded in engendering a host of new ICT suppliers, and these companies in turn contracted with military agencies to produce dazzling new weapons, intelligence, and command and control systems. But the same liberalization process also rendered problematic the intimate relationship that DoD had contrived to enjoy with AT&T – the vertically integrated company that acted as the de facto network manager of the nation’s telecommunications infrastructure. A telling limit on military policy-making power appeared when, despite its best efforts, DoD failed to avert the break-up of AT&T as a result of a new Justice Department antitrust suit. This signified that, once again, the accumulation strategies of the capitalist class overall held higher priority than those of any single corporation – even the largest one in the world.
The 1982 divestiture “poses a special problem for the Department of Defense,” declared Lieutenant General Richard D. Lawrence, because the military “has relied for decades on AT&T’s integrated management and unified network.” Lawrence, President of the National Defense University, spelled out the decisive issue: the sudden “lack of end-to-end control by a single organization jeopardizes effectiveness” (1983, xi). This fragmentation of the national network infrastructure, and the authorization of competing carriers and opening up markets for network equipment, as Colonel George H. Bolling observed, made it necessary to create alternative means by which “to reintegrate the separated components into an instantaneously responsive, reliable whole” (1983, 2). How might such a new co-ordinating mechanism be established?
The Reagan Administration engaged this issue from the moment when AT&T was ordered to break itself up (in 1982), initially by creating a National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee to advise the president on telecommunication issues relating to emergency preparedness. NSTAC, which continues to function, affords high-level interchange between the military and intelligence agencies and a changing matrix of executives representing the nation’s principal telecommunications, computing, and information-processing companies. “Establishment of the NSTAC,” explained a military analyst (Bolling 1983, 12), “gave the industrial captains” of an enlarged sector “a share of the responsibility for preserving capabilities.” Top-down planning for crisis management in a newly liberalized market environment also occasioned changes on the government side.
Military dominance in overseeing nationwide network security had been formalized in the National Communications System, established by President Kennedy. This system was broadened by President Reagan in 1984, and then relocated in 2003 to the Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection Directorate of the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Meanwhile, co-ordination and oversight were additionally strengthened during the 1990s, when President Clinton issued Executive Order 13010 and Presidential Decision Directive 63, mandating policy for “Critical Infrastructure Protection.” Under President George W. Bush, similarly, the Homeland Security Act of 2002 and related federal policy made the DHS, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (2005, 19, 22), “the focal point” for coordinating activities to protect the computer systems that support the country’s “critical infrastructures.” The mission of DHS itself was likewise to help institute “an effective relationship between the public and private sectors” (Auerswald et al. 2006, xv). Behind these bland formulations lay a more directed and pervasive coupling of the repressive apparatus of the state with the corporate economy, as we will see momentarily.
The effect of the post-9/11 mobilization was to expedite and enlarge the trend to top-down coordination within the seemingly disparate, decentralized context of an Internet-based infrastructure. A group of 160 CEOs representing the top echelons of corporate America (Business Roundtable 2006) called on government to “fortify the Internet and the infrastructure that supports Internet health.” The vulnerability of US companies was a function not only of terrorists, but also of any number of other threats, from outages and hackers to disgruntled employees. In February 2006, the Department of Homeland Security, joined by seven other cabinet level departments alongside Intel, Microsoft, Symantec, Verisign, and other companies, as well as representatives of the governments of the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, staged the first “full-scale cyber security exercise” – “Cyber Storm” – to test response mechanisms to a simulated cyber attack; a second such effort followed (U.S. Government Accountability Office 2008). The military aspect of such measures is presented as purely defensive in nature. This impression is profoundly misleading.
Networks: Society as Target
During the Reagan military build-up, an analyst influenced by the thinking of economist John Kenneth Galbraith called the US Department of Defense “an immense planning system that is larger than any other single economic entity in the noncommunist world” (Tirman 1984, 4). DoD’s effectiveness as a planning agency is debatable, but the demise of the Soviet Union did not alter its crucial economic function: to boost demand by shoring up profits, output, and employment – in that order. Since 9/11, the scale of US military expenditure has massively increased; in 2005, the US spent as much on its military as the next 14 countries combined. Put differently, as Ian Roxborough observes, “Each of America’s four military services is more powerful than the armed forces of any other country” (Roxborough 2007, 123). Weapons spending has risen even faster than total Pentagon outlays.
The George W. Bush administrations formalized US reliance on a military doctrine, foregrounding what is called “force transformation,” so that – in theory – weapons systems and intelligence sensors are reorganized and melded into a single system built around the emerging precepts of network-centric warfare. “Boiled down to its essentials,” explains Shorrock (2008, 162), “network centric warfare means two things: harnessing information technology to maximize the power and accuracy of weapons; and using computer networks to instantly link ships, planes, satellites, and ground forces into a single, integrated unit connecting every player in the military chain of command, from the highest-ranking general to the lowliest war-fighter on the ground.” To preside over this process, putatively on behalf of the commonweal, there is an Assistant Secretary of Defense for Networks and Information Integration and the Defense Information Systems Agency. Responsibility for combat using US network capabilities is vested in a descendant of the Strategic Air Command known as STRATCOM – which, in a significant expression of the continuing US weaponization of space (Moltz 2008, Moore 2008), was merged in 2002 with the Space Command. STRATCOM (as distinct from the now-defunct Strategic Communications Command, which was confusingly also known as STRATCOM) pursues four key tasks: global strike; missile defense integration; information operations; and global command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (U.S. House of Representatives Armed Services Committee 2007a). General James E. Cartwright, director of STRATCOM, testified forthrightly before Congress about these functions, expressing what had been at least a decade-long gestation process:
Cyberspace has emerged as a war-fighting domain not unlike land, sea, and air … The National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace describes cyberspace as the nervous system of our country and as such, essential to our economy and national security. It describes a role for all federal departments and agencies, state and local government, private companies and organizations, and individual Americans in improving cyber-security … Fundamental to this approach is the integration of cyberspace capabilities across the full range of military operations … Strategic Command is charged with planning and directing cyber defense within DoD and conducting cyber attack in support of assigned missions … History teaches us that a purely defensive posture poses significant risks; the “Maginot Line” model of terminal defense will ultimately fail without a more aggressive offshore strategy … If we apply the principles of warfare to the cyber domain, as we do to sea, air, and land, we realize the defense of the nation is better served by capabilities enabling us to take the fight to our adversaries, when necessary to deter actions detrimental to our interests. (U.S. House of Representatives Armed Services Committee 2007b, 11–12)
An offensive arsenal is being fashioned around and through networks. A New York Times account, after emphasizing that “both China and Russia have offensive information warfare programs,” concedes seemingly as an afterthought that “The United States is also said to have begun a cyberwarfare effort” (Landler and Markoff 2007, A1, C7). A scholarly study is more straightforward: “The military vision is that by the application of millions of dollars and hundreds of people … viruses, suitable as weapons in military conflicts, can be developed” (Diffie and Landau 2007, 114). Other exotic cyber-weapons are also being fashioned. The BBC (Brookes 2006) publicized a declassified, heavily redacted 2003 Defense Department document – a so-called “Information Operations Roadmap” – which, it related, revealed that “The US military seeks the capability to knock out every telephone, every networked computer, every radar system on the planet.” Of course, such a capability remains easier to imagine than to actualize.
The development of these new US weapons has been only guardedly acknowledged in public, and considerable effort has been taken to vest them with a defensive function. Recurrent linkages in the news to incursions on US military computer networks by China (Mallet 2008, 9) and North Korea (Gorman and Ramstad 2009, A1, A4) are one shielding measure. Bland reassurances suggesting that their devastating potential will be handled with prudence and due caution are another: “U.S. Weighs Risks of Civilian Harm in Cyberwarfare” ran one headline (Markoff and Shanker 2009, A1). General Cartwright (U.S. House of Representatives Armed Services Committee 2007b, 11) acknowledges, moreover, that the US role in cyberwar is already extraterritorial: “we are engaged in a less visible, but none-the-less critical battle against sophisticated cyberspace attacks. We are engaging these cyberspace attacks offshore, as they seek to probe military, civil, and commercial systems, and consistent with principles of self defense, defend the DoD portion of the Global Information Grid (GIG) at home.” (The GIG will be discussed further below.)
Not surprisingly, the prospect of netwar looks considerably different when approached from the target side. As network infrastructures are hardwired into social and political life, society as a whole is rendered vulnerable. Banks, schools, traffic flows, power plants, municipal offices, libraries, supermarkets, hospitals: the operations of each and every network-enabled organization and activity stand to be lethally undermined. Well-informed observers have long comprehended that – as Anthony G. Oettinger (1980, 197) once put it – “The line between the civilian and the military seems to have grown thin.” Less well-acknowledged is that, by systematically blurring the distinction between civilian and military domains, netwar promises again to extend this horrific trend line in modern warfare. A foretaste of what may be in store came via the closely watched denial-of-service attacks staged against Estonia for a period of weeks during 2007, which disrupted government agencies, banks, and media – but which offered valuable real-world object lessons to US cyber-warriors (Marsan 2007).
Contracting for Net-Centric War
The symbiotic relationship that existed between corporate contractors and top military and intelligence officials engendered not only the new strategy of force transformation for net-centric war, but also a corresponding reshaping and reorientation of the industry of war supply. Activities that had long been seen as inherent government functions, including both intelligence collection and analysis and offensive combat operations, were opened widely to corporate contractors. Capital’s accentuated need for new sources of accumulation in an age of overproduction and escalating competition was, of course, a major motivation. Other countries, from Britain and Australia to France and Russia, shared this concern and participated in the trend, but the US was its undoubted leader.
One resulting market segment gained at least some notoriety. In early modern Europe, mercenary forces were gradually supplanted by citizen recruits motivated – or beguiled – by state-sanctioned patriotism rather than by the expectation of profit. During the late twentieth century, this trend reversed, but on a dramatically altered institutional basis. What its leading chronicler (Singer 2003) has called “corporate warriors,” depending on huge contracts from the military and intelligence agencies of government, transformed net-centric war-making operations into a profitable endeavor. Military recruitment uncertainties that stemmed from the absence of a draft and the unwillingness of many families to send their children to die for the state were certainly one inducement for this privatization process. At the point of the US spear were shadowy, unaccountable corporations like Blackwater (renamed Xe) and CACI (some of whose operatives were parties to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq), which employed ex-military personnel to take over war-making functions on a cost-plus basis. As late as mid-2009, 32 corporate contractors – 11 based in the United States – employed 132,000 foreign nationals and 36,000 Iraqis to perform military and military-related services in Iraq (Hastings 2009). This was merely the tip of a much larger iceberg.
Net-centric war supply proffered many new and tempting market segments. Overall, however, its development comprised an extension of 60 years of fraternal ties between the military and the members of the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association; thus it drew in different ways not only on specialized newcomers, but also on the corporate titans of military contracting: Lockheed Martin (ranked number one on a tally of 2008’s top 100 government information technology contractors), Boeing (2), Northrup Grumman (3), Raytheon (4), General Dynamics (6), and the like. Long-standing computer and telecommunications suppliers were also well-represented: Dell (15), IBM (16), Verizon (18), Sprint Nextel (25), AT&T (38), and Qwest (51). However, an array of companies not hitherto much associated with military markets, or simply less familiar, also assumed major roles in the business of net-war: Science Applications International Corporation (5), L-3 Communications (8), Computer Sciences Corporation (9), EDS (10), Booz Allen Hamilton (11) (Top 100 Government IT Contractors 2008; Shinjoung Yeo in an unpublished manuscript on the cyber-warfare industry).
Emergent US strategy and the industry of war supply established a new congruence through a specialized organization, formed by some of the chief purveyors to the new market: the Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium. The 28 founding members of this group included not only some of the companies just listed, but also Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, and Cisco – and a scattering of corporations based in the United Kingdom, Israel, Sweden, and Germany (Shorrock 2008, 164–5).
The involvement of foreign corporate suppliers points to an especially delicate feature of the altering political economy of war-making. Military contractors continue to claim a unique national strategic importance (and are much given to flights of nationalistic rhetoric); yet, akin to other industries and for the same sorts of reasons, they are also transnationalizing their markets and their supply chains. How was the much-vaunted need to retain national control of strategic war industries to be reconciled with the exigencies of cross-border corporates? How were foreign-based and US military companies to undertake mergers and acquisitions; to engage in joint-ventures aimed at new markets; to contract and subcontract with one another in order to serve specific program goals? These became especially sensitive issues as the balance of global political-economic power continued to veer away from the United States and a more multipolar world economy began to take form (Wallerstein 2006, National Intelligence Council 2008, xi).
US military procurement indeed was undergoing a transnationalization process, but this process was extensively channeled through the executive branch. On one hand, it occurred within, or at least in light of, the dense matrix of military treaties binding allied nations to US strategy. Danish and Australian contractors participated on a team to develop the F-35 Lightning II fighter, for example, in a trend that helped sustain international sales of major US military companies such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing (Cole 2008). Especially notable were the unusually tight and extensive linkages developing between US and UK-based companies, no doubt an expression of the decades-long alliance between the two countries and their long-time sharing of strategic planning and intelligence operations. In 2008, UK-based BAE (the erstwhile British Aerospace) was the 12th largest supplier of information technology to the US Government; 24th on the list was QinetiQ, a British military and intelligence research company formed through the privatization of Britain’s Defense Evaluation Research Agency and controlled between 2003 and 2007 by the US Carlyle Group private equity fund before being spun off (Shorrock 2008, 128, Top 100 Government IT Contractors 2008). On the other hand, the US began to make wider use of its secretive Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States in order to vet international corporate transactions possessing ostensive impact on national security and, where deemed desirable, to place limits and conditions on foreign purchases of sensitive US assets.
Moves to privatize, or outsource, intelligence gathering and infowar made discernible contributions to the overall trend toward net-centric war-making. Procurement by the nation’s 16 major federal intelligence agencies amounted to a $40 billion annual inflow to business – having undergone sharp acceleration during the Clinton and George W. Bush Administrations. By 2006, almost three-quarters of the US intelligence budget was spent on contracts (Shorrock 2008, 13, 368). Long narrowing, the distinction between inherently governmental functions and corporate supply chains was virtually erased, as executives shuffled back and forth between corporate and governmental offices and companies assumed responsibilities that brought them into the chain of command but simultaneously removed them from public oversight or accountability (Shorrock 2008).
Strategic International Communications
The theater of US military operations has long been extraterritorial, but its strategic objectives and the geopolitical orientation they express are undergoing a dramatic shift. Forty years ago, the United States already maintained hundreds of major military bases in dozens of countries; and this, according to DoD (U.S. Department of Defense 2007), remains true today. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the rise of threats associated with Mid-East oil, China, and Russia, however, bases have begun to be relocated from Western Europe (and perhaps elsewhere) to Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia (Johnson 2006, 171–206). The Bush Administration (U.S. Office of Management and Budget 2007) assured that “This new basing strategy will provide the United States with rapid access to areas where we are likely to be engaged, but where a large permanent presence is not needed.” Military supremacy continued to play a crucial role in enabling the US to monitor and shape the ever-changing world market, but this imperative vied with another: the need to combat challenges to US system dominance by would-be rival powers.
To unify its dispersed operations, the US has built and rebuilt globe-straddling communications systems for command, control, communications, and intelligence. In addition to STRATCOM, these are managed and co-ordinated by the different services – Army, Navy, Air Force; by intelligence agencies; and by DISA, the Defense Information Systems Agency. DISA, created in 1991, is the successor to the Defense Communications Agency (established 1960); DISA has 7,000–8,000 employees spread across 27 offices worldwide, compared with the 1,850 employees of the Federal Communications Commission (Mayer 2007). Within DISA are nested layers of subagencies: the mission of the Strategic Planning Office, housed within DISA’s Defense Spectrum Organization (U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency 2008) “is to maximize global spectrum access for US forces both now and for the future.” This innocuous-sounding goal is actually a paramount strategic necessity. The US military long has been the largest spectrum user on the planet; and DoD acknowledges that its ability to operate large weapons systems and satellites “depends on international agreements with other countries that allow DOD to use certain frequencies within other countries’ borders.” Moreover, military spectrum usage “has grown exponentially since Desert Storm in 1991” and, “since September 11th, DoD’s spectrum needs have further increased” (U.S. Government Accountability Office 2003, 30). Presumably, the Strategic Planning Office works with European allies via the little-known NATO Frequency Authority (successor to the even more obscure Allied Radio Frequency Association), which organizes spectrum access in that region within the context of the NATO Communications and Information Systems Agency (Johnson 2008).
Building on a Distributed Common Ground System of internetworking designed for the Air Force by Raytheon, the so-called Global Information Grid (GIG) is slated to be a 20-year endeavor; investment commenced in 1999. Organizationally, the effort encompasses DISA, STRATCOM, and other DoD offices, as well as the military and intelligence services. The goals to be served by the GIG encapsulate the evolving information technology-based framework for war: it “is intended to integrate virtually all of DoD’s information systems, services, and applications into one seamless, reliable, and secure network,” and thereby “to facilitate DoD’s effort to transform to a more network-based, or ‘netcentric,’ way of fighting wars and achieving information superiority over adversaries” (U.S. Government Accountability Office 2004). Many weapons systems and sensors under contract in turn are “critically dependent” on this still-unrealized and perhaps unrealistic program for development, which seeks to unify the full range of intelligence data into combat operations in real time.
To succeed, the GIG not only will have to overcome organizational rivalries, but also bind together several next-generation communications technologies, each of which presents considerable technical and operational problems: extremely high frequency communications satellites, software-defined radios, an enhanced ground-based optical network using upgraded routers and switches, improved cryptography. In 2004, the Government Accountability Office underscored that the effort to build the GIG poses “enormous challenges and risks” and, two years later, it produced an even more critical assessment (U.S. Government Accountability Office 2006). However, the GIG’s spectacular price tag – which has risen from a 2004 estimate of $21 billion (through fiscal 2010), to a 2006 estimate of $34 billion (through 2011) – ensures that whether or not it accomplishes its military objectives, it will help generate a new wave of ICT innovation based on Internet technology. Once again, accumulation is being tightly linked to repression. The DoD boasted in 2006 that just one component of the GIG, its Navy Marine Corps Intranet, constitutes “the largest corporate intranet in the world” serving 550 locations and hundreds of thousands of users. The experience gained by building and managing this multibillion dollar intranet affords Electronic Data Systems, its prime contractor, lessons it can apply in nontax-subsidized customer contexts. In an interlocking initiative, commencing in 2008, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced plans for a multibillion dollar National Cyber [warfare] Range, where experiments with newly created forms of electronic combat can be undertaken and assessed (U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency 2008).
Vast though they may be, the GIG and the National Cyber Range do not exhaust the role of information and communications in today’s transnational US military and intelligence complex. Satellite-based, the Global Positioning System continues to be integrated into US weapons systems and electronic warfare strategies. An additional fleet of perhaps as many as 100 specialized satellites, anchored by down-link listening posts in Europe, Japan, Australia, Cyprus, Ascension, and the United States, delivers streams of data drawn from every corner of the globe; over the last 40 years, the US has spent an estimated $200 billion on spy satellites (Keefe 2006, 72, Graham and Hansen 2007, Bamford 2008). The Armed Forces Network, run by the American Forces Radio and Television Service out of Alexandria, Virginia, maintains nine television channels, and broadcasts to all overseas military installations – located in 177 countries – as well as to Navy ships (Phillips 2007). Such is the dependence on satellites of the US force structure, both operational and prospective, that any hint of threat to these assets itself engenders additional rounds of US space militarization (Moltz 2008).
Empire as American Ideology
Although its killing power is overwhelming, the US military is paradoxically far from omnipotent. Major wars in Vietnam and Iraq have underscored that it is poorly matched strategically against some foes. The military’s capacity to produce what US leaders regard as politically favorable outcomes therefore is variable. It may become powerfully constrained not only abroad, moreover, but also at home – above all, when US casualties escalate. This vulnerability prompts efforts to shape and maintain a supportive public opinion. War-related processes of ideological construction have helped sustain policies hurtful not only to their immediate targets, but also to the interests of the great majority of the US population. During the 2000s, efforts to spin news coverage in support of the “War on Terror” testified to a pervasive institutional corruption of the commercial media system, bearing witness in about equal proportion to corporate contractors’ accumulation strategies and official manipulation (Barstow 2008, Kumar 2006).
To their credit, leading academic journals of communication have accorded some attention to the mechanics of war-related ideological construction. Most of the work of documenting and explicating propaganda has been performed by radical scholars writing not for specialized academic fields, but for the overall citizenry; in this connection, the tireless Edward Herman merits special mention. Understandably, and perhaps deservedly, analysts have granted the press pride of place; yet not only the corporate press, but also television drama, Hollywood film, and new media such as video games also have been recruited for active duty as promoters of militarism and “citizen-soldiers.” Indeed, in the post 9/11 United States, as David L. Altheide (2006, 2) recounts – not for the first time in US history – “fear as entertainment informs the production of popular culture and news, generates profits, and enables political decision makers to control audiences through propaganda.”
This repressive ideological formation is not simply a function of representational strategies in a narrow sense, but of more comprehensive political-economic control. The opaquely named Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (CALEA), for example, makes a discernible contribution. CALEA, as interpreted by the Federal Communications Commission, ensures that surveillance capabilities may be built lawfully into all US network infrastructures including the Internet. Monitoring of international communications has occurred since World War II, while warrantless eavesdropping on domestic US calls by the National Security Agency has also been documented – though only after the New York Times’s management sat on the story for a year, allowing its release only well after the 2004 election.
Long noted by critics, the military’s hooks into the nation’s schools and colleges morphed into a permanent fixture. On one side, to ensure that strategy, language training, logistics, procurement, and every other requirement of the modern major-generals are continually refreshed, the Pentagon “has an entire system of education and training institutions of its own … totaling approximately 150 military-educational institutions” (Turse 2008, 33). On the other side, the war-making function also pervades the nation’s civilian educational institutions. In 2002, nearly 350 US colleges and universities conducted research for the Pentagon, and the military accounted for 60 percent of all federal funding for electrical engineering and 55 percent for the computer sciences (Turse 2008, 35). Novel academic specializations, such as “terrorism informatics,” attained an immediate legitimacy.
The most basic and enduring element in attempts to channel and color public opinion was an unquestioning support for US global dominance. More than a quarter of a century ago, William Appleman Williams wrote that “The State used its extensive control of information, and its ability to make major decisions in the name of security, to create an ideology ever more defined in content as well as rhetoric as an imperial way of life” (1980, 197). Absolutely off-limits for discussion, now as then, was the supposed necessity – indeed, the essential rectitude – of deploying US military power to reshape other economies and cultures.
The militarization of US communications, we have seen, is both deep-seated and multifaceted. Notwithstanding that the arc of American power continues to trend downward (Wallerstein, 2006), unless and until the people of the United States decide to engage politically with this imperial legacy, the road to democratic reconstruction will remain closed. Research into the political economic roots of militarized communications makes a modest contribution to that objective.
References
Altheide, D. L. (2002) Terrorism and the Politics of Fear. AltaMira Press, Lanham, MD.
Andersen, R. (2006) A Century of Media, A Century of War. Peter Lang, New York.
Auerswald, P. E., Branscomb, L. M., La Porte, T. M., and Michel-Kerjan, E. O. (eds) (2006) Seeds of Disaster, Roots of Response: How Private Action Can Reduce Public Vulnerability. Cambridge University Press, New York.
Bamford, J. (2008) The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America. Doubleday, New York.
Barstow, D. (2008) One man’s military-industrial-media complex. New York Times, 30 November, 1, 26.
Bolling, G. H. (1983) AT&T Aftermath of Antitrust: Preserving Positive Command and Control. National Defense University Press, Washington, DC.
Brookes, A. (2006) US plans to ‘fight the net’ revealed. BBC News, 27 January. Online at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4655196.stm (accessed February 1, 2006).
Business Roundtable (2006) Essential steps to strengthen America’s cyber terrorism preparedness. Online at http://www.businessroundtable.org/sites/default/files/20060622002CyberReconFinal6106.pdf (accessed October 6, 2010).
Cole, A. (2008) Boeing looks to foreign buyers to boost its military sales. Wall Street Journal, July 17, B5.
Diffie, W. and Landau, S. (2007) Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption, updated and expanded edn. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Edwards, P. N. (1996) The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Gifford, W. S. (1937) Address before the Army War College. Washington DC. In: Addresses, Papers and Interviews by Walter S. Gifford, vol. 2, October 13, 1928 – December 2, 1937. Compiled by the Information Department of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, December, 203.
Gorman, S. and Ramstad, E. (2009) Cyber blitz hits U.S., Korea. Wall Street Journal, July 9, A1, A4.
Graham, Jr., T., and Hansen, K.A. (2007) Spy Satellites and Other Intelligence Technologies That Changed History. University of Washington Press, Seattle.
Hafen, Leroy R. (1969/1926) The Overland Mail 1849-1869: Promoter of Settlement, Precursor of Railroads. AMS Press, New York.
Hastings, M. (2009) Soldiers of fortune cannot remain outside the law. Financial Times, August 14, 7.
Herman, E. S. and Chomsky, N. (2002) Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Pantheon, New York.
John, R. (1995) Spreading The News: The American Postal System From Franklin To Morse. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
Johnson, C. (2006) Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. Metropolitan Books, New York.
Johnson, D. (2008) North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Communications and Information Systems Agency. In: Sterling, C. H. (ed.), Military Communications: From Ancient Times to 21st Century. ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara, CA, pp. 338–9.
Keefe, P. R. (2006) Chatter: Uncovering the Echelon Surveillance Network and the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping. Random House, New York.
Klare, M. T. (1972) War Without End: American Planning for the Next Vietnam. Vintage, New York.
Kumar, D. (2006) Media, war, and propaganda: Strategies of information management during the 2003 Iraq War. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 3(1, March), 48–69.
Landler, M. and Markoff, J. (2007) After computer siege in Estonia, war fears turn to cyberspace. New York Times, May 29, 1.
Lawrence, R. D. (1983) Preface. In: Bolling, G. H., AT&T Aftermath of Antitrust: Preserving Positive Command and Control. National Defense University Press, Washington, DC.
Leslie, S. W. (1993) The Cold War and American Science. Columbia University Press, New York.
Mallet, V. (2008) Mutually assured destruction in cyberspace. Financial Times, August 21, 9.
Markoff, J. and Shanker, T. (2009) U.S. weighs risks of civilian harm in cyberwarfare. New York Times, August 2, A1, A9.
Marsan, C. D. (2007) How close is World War 3.0? Network World, 24(33), August 27, 1, 22–5.
Mayer, L. R. (2007) Wired. CapitalEye, January 7. Online at http://www.capitaleye.org/inside.asp?ID=242(Accessed April 21, 2007).
McKinley, President W. (1899) Islands. Congressional Record, U.S. Congress, House, 5th Cong, 3rd Sess. February 10. GPO, Washington, DC.
Moltz, J. C. (2008) The Politics of Space Security. Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA.
Moore, M. (2008) Twilight War: The Folly of U.S. Space Dominance. Independent Institute, Oakland.
Mosco, V. (1986) New technology and space warfare. In: Becker, J., Hedebro, G., and Paldan, L. (eds), Communication and Domination: Essays to Honor Herbert I. Schiller. Ablex, Norwood, NJ, pp. 76–83.
Mosco, V. (2005) The Pay-Per Society. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
National Intelligence Council (2008) Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World. GPO, Washington, DC. Online at www.dni.gov/nic/NIC_2025_project.html (accessed December 1, 2008).
Oettinger, A. G. (1980) Information resources: Knowledge and power in the 21st century. Science, New Series, 209, 191–8.
Osgood, K. (2006) Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad. University Press of Kansas, Lawrence.
Phillips, M. M. (2007) Soldiers, beware: Going to the mall might be risky. Wall Street Journal, April 3, A1, A12.
Prashad, V. (2007) The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World. New Press, New York.
Rogers, W. S. (1922) International electrical communications. Foreign Affairs, 1(2), December.
Roxborough, I. (2007) Weary titan, assertive hegemon: Military strategy, globalization, and U.S. preponderance. In: Mazlish, B., Chanda, N., and Weisbode, K. (eds), The Paradox of a Global USA. Stanford University Press, Palo Alto, CA, pp. 122–47.
Schiller, D. (2007) The hidden history of U.S. public service telecommunications, 1919–1956. Info 2/3, 17–28.
Schiller, H. (1969) Mass Communications and American Empire. Augustus M. Kelley, New York.
Shorrock, T. (2008) Spies For Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing. Simon & Schuster, New York.
Singer, P. W. (2003) Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY.
Sterling, C.H. (2008) Military Communications: From Ancient Times to the 21st Century. ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara, CA.
Temin, P. with Galambos, L. (1987) The Fall of the Bell System. Cambridge University Press, New York.
Tirman, J. (1984) The defense-economy debate. In: Tirman, J. (ed.), The Militarization of High Technology. Ballinger, Cambridge. MA, pp. 1–32.
Top 100 Government IT Contractors (2008) Online at http://washingtontechnology.com/toplists/top-100-lists/2008.aspx (accessed October 6, 2010).
Turse, N. (2008) The Complex: How The Military Invades Our Everyday Lives. Metropolitan Books, New York.
U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (2008) Broad Agency Announcement National Cyber Range. DARPA-BAA-08-43. 5 May.
U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency (2008) Strategic Planning Office (SPO). Online at http://www.disa.mil/dso/spo/index.html (accessed October 25, 2008).
U.S. Department of Defense (2007) Base Structure Report Fiscal Year 2007 Baseline. Online at http://www.defense.gov/pubs/bsr_2007_baseline.pdf (accessed October 6, 2010).
U.S. Government Accountability Office (2003) Telecommunications: Comprehensive Review Of U.S. Spectrum Management With Broad Stakeholder Involvement Is Needed. GAO-03-277.
U.S. Government Accountability Office (2004) Defense Acquisitions: The Global Information Grid and Challenges Facing Its Implementation. GAO-04-858.
U.S. Government Accountability Office (2005) Critical Infrastructure Protection: Department of Homeland Security Faces Challenges in Fulfilling Cybersecurity Responsibilities. GAO-05- 434.
U.S. Government Accountability Office (2006) DOD Management Approach and Processes Not Well-Suited to Support Development of Global Information Grid. GAO-06-211.
U.S. Government Accountability Office (2008) Critical Infrastructure Protection: DHS Needs to Fully Address Lessons Learned from Its First Cyber Storm Exercise. GAO-08-825.
U.S. House of Representatives, Armed Services Committee (2007a) Subcommittee Chair Ellen Tauscher Strategic Forces Subcommittee FY08 Posture Hearing for U.S. Strategic Command. March 8. Online at http://armedservices.house.gov/apps/list/speech/armedsvc_dem/tauscher_opening030807.shtml (accessed October 25, 2010).
U.S. House of Representatives, Armed Services Committee (2007b) Statement of General James E. Cartwright Commander United States Strategic Command Before The Strategic Forces Subcommittee On United States Strategic Command. March 8. Online at http://www.armedservices.house.gov/pdfs/Strat030807/Cartwright_Testimony030807.pdf (accessed October 25, 2008].
U.S. Office of Management and Budget (2007) Department of Defense. Online at www.ombwatch.org/files/budget/defense.pdf (accessed October 10, 2010).
Wallerstein, I. (2006) The curve of American power. New Left Review 40, July/August, 77–94.
Wilford, H. (2008) The Mighty Wurlitzer: How The CIA Played America. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
Williams, W. A. (1980) Empire as a Way of Life. Oxford University Press, New York.