Architects of Empire: The Military-Strategic Studies Complex and the Scripting of US National Security

Abstract

: This paper considers a key academic support of US geopolitics overseas, which I term the “military–strategic studies complex”. The paper begins by outlining the development of Strategic Studies in the US since the early 1980s. It then uses the example of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments to work through a discussion of the palpable agency of the military–strategic studies complex in advancing a dual military–economic securitization strategy for what it calls the contemporary American “leasehold empire”. This strategy is focused especially on the Persian Gulf and involves both an enduring US military presence and long‐term neoliberal designs for the region. Finally, consideration is given to alternative military–strategic visions before attention is turned to the task of Geography in countering US geopolitical and geoeconomic scriptings of the Middle East, all expedited under a vernacular of “national security”.

Living Beirut's Security Zones: An Investigation of the Modalities and Practice of Urban Security

“…Scholars have approached the question of security in relation to “terror” from a variety of angles. At a global scale, important questions have been raised on cross‐national securitization, especially about the impacts of the United States' global strategies to secure resources and curtail so‐called global terrorism (Cowen and Smith 2009; Morissey 2011). At a micro‐scale, others have looked at the influence of the terror threat on the daily lives of city dwellers, how it transforms their experiences of the city, and the extent to which security can restore practices and help residents deal with potential signs of danger that they detect in their daily activities (Borell 2008).…”

Closing the Neoliberal Gap: Risk and Regulation in the Long War of Securitization

“…The Commission went on to cite the example of “Operation Vigilant Warrior” in 1994 (“to respond to renewed Iraqi aggression against Kuwait”) and “Operation Iraqi Freedom” in 2003 (“to secure Iraq's oil fields”) to expound the vital importance of “maintaining a forward presence” for CENTCOM's geopolitical and geoeconomic mission (2005:G2). And this military‐economic securitization discourse has been echoed relentlessly in US strategic studies by an influential assemblage of foreign policy institutes, defense think‐tanks and specialist university and college departments (Morrissey forthcoming a); what Bradley Klein (1988) calls Washington's “strategic culture”. A year before the war in Iraq was launched, Sami Hajjar at the Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, scripted the following aleatory scenario for the Persian Gulf and the subsequent necessity of permanent US military intervention:…”

“…In critiquing the essentialist and frequently dangerous "geographical formulations" of geopolitics, geographers have been especially keen to highlight how, as Simon Dalby so usefully puts it, "the invocation of supposed geographical verities" is used to "denigrate other peoples" and "justify violence" (Dalby 2009). To this end, many have underlined the geoeconomic calculation at the heart of contemporary US foreign policy and traced its historical gestation to the current war on terrorism (Cowen and Smith 2009;Harvey 2003;Kearns 2006;Morrissey 2009b). And others have revealed the violent geographies of the US-led occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and drawn attention too to the exceptional legal and biopolitical governmentalities of the broader war on terror (Flint 2005;Gregory 2006;Gregory and Pred 2007;Morrissey forthcoming b).…”

“…The aleatory nature of the Middle East's future has long been a key discursive touchstone of CENTCOM geopolitical discourse. Since its initiation in the early 1980s, the command's strategy papers, mission statements and reports to Senate and House Armed Services Committees have implicitly touted it as the fundamental reason for its existence (Morrissey 2009b). In effect, it signed an aleatory contract to securitize the Middle East, and that contract has been legitimized at regular intervals by the discursive production of politically charged senses of risk, precarity and fear.…”

“…Epstein was not alone in his scripting of US “vital” interests in the “volatile” region of the Middle East in the early 1980s. By then, leading protagonists in IR and Strategic Studies across the United States were increasingly positing the securitization of the Persian Gulf as the necessary endgame of a refocused US geopolitics in the region (Morrissey 2011a). Such an emboldened geopolitics involved from the outset a discursive production of both contemporary and future danger and, by extension, a “long war” of securitization.…”