The infrastructural power of the military: The geoeconomic role of the US Army Corps of Engineers in the Arabian Peninsula

Abstract

In analysing the role of the United States in the global expansion of capitalist relations, most critical accounts see the US military's invasion and conquest of various states as paving the way for the arrival of US businesses and capitalist relations. However, beyond this somewhat simplified image, and even in peacetime, the US military has been a major geoeconomic actor who has wielded its infrastructural power, via its US Army Corps of Engineers' overseas activities. The transformation of global economies in the twentieth century has depended on the capitalisation of the newly independent states and the consolidation of liberal capitalist relations in the subsequent decades. The US Army Corps of Engineers has not only extended lucrative contracts to private firms (based not only in the US and host country, but also geopolitically allied states), but perhaps most important, the Corps itself has established a grammar of capitalist relations. It has done so by forging both physical infrastructures (roads, ports, utilities and telecommunications infrastructures) and virtual capitalist infrastructures through its practices of contracting, purchasing, design, accounting, regulatory processes and specific regimes of labour and private property ownership. Keywordsinfrastructural power, geoeconomics, armed forces, capitalisation, grammar of capitalism, US Army Corps of Engineers, Saudi Arabia, Middle East What is the relationship between the United States military and the capitalisation of economies in the Global South? In the aftermath of the US War on Terror, an oft-heard argument saw the US military's invasion of Iraq as either a war for oil, or as a means of facilitating the entry of US businesses into Iraq. While it is easy to find arguments about how the US pacification of intransigent peoples overseas has paved the way for the entry of US businesses, this scholarship does not necessarily attend to the deliberate and systematic way that the US military has acted in peacetime to construct new economic infrastructures that incorporated the pacified countries into the global capitalist economy. The main contention of this article is that the US military has used infrastructural power as a primary modality of establishing liberal capitalist relations in countries in transition and in times of global political and economic transformation. This argument requires us to take seriously the importance both of the peacetime work of US military institution in advancing global capitalism, as well as the importance of forms of power that do not easily fit within the rubric of economic or military. Rather, through both forceful and hegemonic means, US military institutions have forged the necessary scaffolding for a capitalist 1 Corresponding author: Laleh Khalili, Department of Politics and International Studies, SOAS, University of London, London WC1H 0XG, UK. Email: LK4@soas.ac.uk This is the accepted version of an article published by Sage in European Journal of International Relations. Published version availa...

Logistical geographies

“…Chung (2019) profiles how during the Korean and Vietnam wars containerization and other logistical technologies-along with nefarious and racialised labour management practices-were transferred by the US military to foreign contractors in order to run an efficient war machine, thereby playing a key and under-appreciated role in the subsequent emergence of the global trading system. Khalili (2018) argues that logistics can be central to the "work of conquest" in peacetime as much as during war, pointing to the exercising of "infrastructural power" by the US Army Corps of Engineers in the Arabian Peninsula over several decades with the aim of spreading capitalist relations. Similarly, USAID's promotion of a "development-humanitarianism-security nexus" in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan also enabled the transfer of logistical knowledge between the US government and military, and private sector actors in both the US and Afghanistan (Attewell, 2018).…”

Hidden carbon costs of the “everywhere war”: Logistics, geopolitical ecology, and the carbon boot‐print of the US military

“…Global supply chains and institutional logistics, as well as the organised spaces produced by corporate managerial logics and techniques, have lately come under critical scrutiny in a move to interrogate the material infrastructure of global capitalism (Bonacich & Wilson, ; LeCavalier, ; Neilson, ; Toscano & Kinkle, ). However, with few notable exceptions (Cowen, ; Crampton et al., ; Gregory, ; Khalili, ), there has been relatively little written on the role of supply chains in contemporary US military practices, not to mention the role of supply chains in contributing to climate change more generally (Bergmann, ; Bergmann & Holmberg, ; Carse & Lewis, ). This is surprising given that, from a historical perspective, logistics and supply chains, as a way of organising the movement of goods and services, are fundamentally a military technology.…”

“…“This is a matter,” Cowen writes, “not only [of] military forces clearing the way for corporate trade but corporations actively supporting militaries as well … The entanglement of military and corporate logics may be deepening and changing form, but logistics was never a stranger to the world of warfare” (, p. 4). For this reason, Khalili stresses the role of the US military as “a wielder of capitalist infrastructural power” (, p. 2; original emphasis):

This role includes not only the US military's provision of large contracts to private businesses, but also especially the construction of the physical and virtual infrastructures that underlie the emergence of liberal capitalism overseas. Nor is this activity limited to wartime.

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“…In fact, it is in moments of global economic and political transition, and in ostensible peacetime, that the US military's infrastructural power has been a dispositif central to the task of disseminating liberal capitalism. (Khalili, , p. 2)…”

“…We address this gap by bringing to the fore the hydrocarbon logistical infrastructure that makes US imperialism possible. Geopolitical ecology provides a framework to pull together vital work around energy geographies and civilian path dependencies (Bouzarovski & Haarstad, ; Huber, ; Lyall & Valdivia, ; Mulvaney, ), critical logistics (Cowen, ; Khalili, ), and political ecology (Benjaminsen et al., ), in particular, how infrastructure, institutions, nature, and path dependencies intersect for the service of US imperialism. We can now begin to focus on turning down the furnace by cranking up the heat on the US military's war machine.…”