Magical Thinking

Costs of War co-founder Catherine Lutz on our military bases and their blowback.

With this interview, we continue our look at “war” — its implications both at home and abroad. Perhaps there is no one better to speak to on these topics than Catherine Lutz, an American anthropologist, Thomas J. Watson Jr. Family Professor of Anthropology and International Studies at Brown University, and director of the Costs of War project (which she co-founded with previous frank expert — Neta Crawford). We spoke with her about different types of costs of war, what she calls “magical thinking”, and Venezuela. For background, we recommend watching this video from 2010 where she speaks about her research.

This interview was conducted by franknews and condensed for clarity. franknews is committed to bringing quality information to the public — and remaining independent, ad-free, and accessible to everyone. To support us, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This interview was condensed for clarity.

Do you mind introducing yourself and your background a bit.

I’m Catherine Lutz, a cultural anthropologist who’s worked extensively on questions of war and militarism. I’m co-founder of the Costs of War at Brown University, where I taught for many years. What Costs of War does is organize research around the many and various impacts, but especially the human impact, of the US post-9/11 wars, which are still ongoing in many ways. More generally, we are trying to inform the public and policymakers about those costs in order to create a more informed debate around questions of war and peace.

I want to start broadly and talk about the idea of the “cost of war.” I’m curious how you came to this concept.

Neta Crawford and I were both teaching at the Watson Institute at Brown and had both already been working on military questions and questions of war. We just were really frustrated by how poorly the mainstream media had been covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Us and Oil

And in the lead-up to the 10th anniversary of 9/11, we said, you know, there’s going to be a lot of media coverage. We need to intervene in a way that allows a much more accurate and full picture of those wars to be portrayed in those retrospectives. I mean, the war then continued on for another ten years, but that was the impetus. We were just seeing these ‘infokibbles’ that the media were providing about the war. There was heavy reliance on the Pentagon’s version of events, a focus on injured soldiers and vets rather than on the larger scale of death and injury, which was vast, to civilians and contractors and others who were pretty much disappeared from a lot of coverage.

And this doesn’t even consider opportunity cost - basically all the things our country could be spending money on and investing in instead. How do you make that clear to people?

Well, that’s been the main argument that activists have been making for years about the US military budget, beginning back in the 1950s, when Dwight Eisenhower also began to talk about distortions in the federal budget in terms of trade-offs between domestic needs and military spending.

When Martin Luther King Jr. and those who followed him began discussing the costs in terms of American poverty, that moral and sociological perspective gained momentum—and it’s powerfully articulated today through Reverend Barber and the Poor People’s Campaign. They frame the federal budget as a moral document. This moral argument has gained increasing visibility beyond just being the debate about priorities.

There are really three types of arguments against militarism: moral, socioeconomic, and geostrategic. Given the Washington consensus that you can never have too much military spending and can’t alienate corporate donors in the military-industrial complex, only the geostrategic argument gains any traction there. That’s unfortunate. But even within that framework, there’s a compelling case that our current approach is geostrategically counterproductive. We’re weakening ourselves as a nation by spending money on overseas bases and weapons that create tremendous amounts of blowback in the form of both resentment of our military presence in peacetime and disgust at our constant war-making around the world. The U.S. is the world’s largest arms dealer. Geostrategically, we’re undermining our own national interests as well as our internal domestic vitality and our moral standing in the world.

One report finds that we spend $55 billion to maintain our bases across the world. For that much money, I am curious how effective they are. What do you find?

I think they’re incredibly counterproductive. The motive for them is the idea that America should dominate the world militarily, economically, politically. Those bases are meant to reach directly into and hold onto each of these places and allow the US to have eyes on everything, and to represent itself as all-powerful. And American exceptionalism as an idea system supports that. There’s also a “carry-on imperative” to it —once the military has sustained a footprint somewhere, they are extremely loath to give it up. But those bases represent a significant illusion. US bases on Guam, for example, which cover one-third of the island, make that island not safer, as the US claims, but a prime target, even the prime target of any attack that a hostile power in the Asia-Pacific might want to make on the US.

We’ve also seen that all of those bases did not prevent the US from losing the war in Vietnam, losing the war in Iraq, or losing the war in Afghanistan.

Is there strong data on how that affects the local population’s perception of the US around these bases internationally?

Well there is an argument that they are protecting the host nation, and that argument has purchase with a lot of people, right? Local people have been told that year after year, that these bases are for them. That they are a gift. Here come all these Americans and all this equipment, and they’re standing up against whatever the purported enemy is in the region. So the US promotion of that idea – a very well-funded PR machine – has created some significant cultural support in some places alongside the resistance.

But there are also the people who are directly and contemporarily harmed by these bases, who see the prostitution, see the drugs, see the violence that accompanies the bases. Folks in South Korea and Guam and elsewhere have for years been very focused on all of the ways the US military bases there put all sorts of toxins from jet fuel to PFOS into the environment. People on the ground in those places can often see that quite dramatically. There’s a whole village in the Philippines of deeply disabled children, now adults, whose mothers, while they were pregnant, were drinking water that was contaminated with jet fuel from a US Air Force Base in the Philippines. Of course, we know that happens in the United States as well. Camp Lejeune finally got some relief, but…

Yeah I am curious to hear your perspective on bases domestically as well?

Well, Fayetteville is a great example, because again, Fort Bragg is a giant US Army base. It can be seen from space. I wrote a book, Homefront, which is a historic and contemporary look at Fayetteville, North Carolina, and how Fort Bragg, which emerged around World War One, has been intertwined with the fate of the city, which has not been as strong and vibrant in certain ways as virtually any other city in North Carolina. In other words, the base had a negative impact on their economic development as well as the kinds of environmental impacts just mentioned.

In terms of environmental impacts — a lot of those arms and toxic materials and toxic spills are happening overseas, but they’re also happening domestically. We have obviously stronger environmental laws, but there are some areas that are so damaged, so expensive or impossible to clean up, that they have been termed “national sacrifice zones” by the military. At some point they said, “We—this place is so toxic we can’t even clean it up. We’re going to just wall it off.” And a lot of the environmental damage is invisible until it’s studied or it comes out in the form of cancers or other problems. The causes are notoriously difficult to establish when there’s resistance on the part of the institution that’s being pointed at as the cause. It is the same with the burn pits in Iraq, which vets have struggled mightily to have recognized as the cause of many of their serious health issues.

And many of these problems of the bases, domestically and overseas, are connected to how wealthy the military is. It’s one of the problems of affluence, right? We, in a civilian world, are now choking on plastic. We’re choking on the things we consume. The military has been consuming things at a much faster rate than any other, certainly government agency, but also just any other institution in our society. The trillion dollar military budget enables a huge material flow of weapons, uniforms, MREs, exercise equipment, the list goes on. The excess becomes waste, often quite toxic. The military often gets more money than it even says it needs and there are parts of the budgets where they struggle to even spend it. There are stories from Iraq of, you know, getting to the end of a fiscal year and base commanders having to suddenly buy, you know, 10 extra large flat-screen TVs for soldiers there, just to use up the R&R budget.

It seems that we have implicitly made this trade off as a society, we will sacrifice the environment, money, etc in the name of safety. But the idea of safety is hinged on this idea that we have not been attacked because of current practices – you call this in your writing “magical thinking.” What do you make of that and what have you seen is an effective argument to sort of get people out of this habit of magical thinking?

Well, we think about that all the time at Costs of War. We think about how to convince people of the reality of the situation, and one of the ways we do that is by thinking about what are the pillars of belief that support the idea of the “military normal” – that this is just the way things are, and it’s a good thing.

One of the things I think is important to think about is why this happens under an all-volunteer force, as opposed to under a drafted force. I think our culture is making a deal that most of us won’t have our children drafted, if some other people’s children are joining the military. We won’t complain about spending a lot on our military, as long as we can keep our children safe and home and assure ourselves that we are protecting those who do enlist. And from that, among other things, emerges the idea of the soldier as a super-citizen – that sort of cultural valorization becomes the trade-off. And certainly the people whose children go into the military, who celebrate them and want them to be provided with the best equipment, believe this, that is, that every dollar spent on the military budget appears to be going to the benefit and safety of their children. But most of it goes into the pockets of the military corporations, not soldiers’ salaries.

Yeah we have been thinking a lot about this during this issue. Economic opportunity is the number one reason people join the military, and it is interesting in a moment where it feels like there’s a lack of places for young people to find purpose, gainful employment, and a clear path for advancement, young men, in particular, might find the military’s structure more and more attractive. If our culture can’t offer alternatives, that’s where they’ll seek purpose and fulfillment — it feels like another cultural trade off.

Right – the sources of cultural approval or cultural support for people in the working class or the poor. I mean, the poor actually often fail recruitment criteria because of health issues or because of educational issues, which are themselves the result of our failure as a society to invest adequately in the health and education of all of our young people.

I think that’s also very important to recognize how attractive the military looks to someone for whom all those other sources of security are so difficult to attain. For someone for whom it is harder to find cultural approval in having a college degree or a white-collar job.

Shifting a bit – what do you make of Venezuela?

Well, the US was evicted from Latin America over the course of many years, after again, this sort of popular sentiment said, “We don’t want US military bases and US interventionism here.” Like the people of Belau who once campaigned against US bases on their island in the Pacific by noting their experience with Japanese bases before World War II: “When soldiers come, war follows.” US interventionism was a constant in Latin America for many years and over time US bases were evicted from the region. This sudden obsession Donald Trump has with military action in the Caribbean and Latin America is a return to that past.

So on Venezuela, I think what we have to say is that we have a very unstable commander-in-chief who is delighted with, and wants to use, any and all sources of power he can gather. The military is the ultimate source of power. And despite the fact that he campaigned as the anti-war candidate, it was because he sees US military engagement with the world as a gift, as just noted, and as such something that is too expensive and gains him/us nothing. Nonetheless, he still loves the idea of exercising power, or the threats of using military force.

But most importantly, all of his efforts to use the weapons of war in that area, to claim the right to invade Venezuela, or to be shooting drug dealers defined by him as terrorists out of the water, or to use the military to fight crime in Portland and Chicago and LA – all of this is highly illegal. Only Congress can declare war. And war cannot be declared on residents of the United States.

And to me there is an important issue here also on how fundamentally this is going to shift the way in which Americans see the military. If the military doesn’t follow the law itself and chooses to follow these clearly illegal orders – if soldiers are not seen as our protectors, but as these bandits and thugs who are being deployed by the President against them, then I think popular views of the military are going to erode fairly quickly.

I implicitly assume that underneath all these sort of military moves or regime overthrows, there are business or like geopolitical strategic interests that are maybe not “moral”, but at least might be strategic. But in this case, when reports come out that Madura was ready to make concessions and give up oil – is this literally just for power, the projection of power?

Yes, a projection of power. That’s what his ballroom is as well. They are of a piece. Each is a display, a spectacle of the grandiosity of this man’s sense of what it is to be president of the United States.

Its hard to really comprehend that.

Well, there’s more behind it, if to the extent that the military gets used, it requires more equipment, more spending so there is support in those military corporations whose stock prices took off with the Trump inauguration.

It’s just so feels futile —

I don’t feel the efforts of people who fight militarism are futile at all. You know, the movement against genocide has been a monumental and ongoing effort that may have determined the outcome of this last election but also shaped public opinion in a fundamental way, demanding we look at what our weapons and political support of Israel have done to the people of Gaza. Although it’s hard to imagine things could have been worse, they could have been.

You mentioned earlier the popular view of the military. Does the popular view of the military matter? Can that change things?

Absolutely. I mean, people make history. We’ve made it in some unfortunate ways, in the whole Cold War period by being readily afraid, being readily made afraid, readily buying into the idea of America as the number one power in the world that must control events at all times, in all places.

But I think there’s many opportunities for people to remake the history of our military. All the different ways in which the people of the United States have started to take responsibility, for example, with this sort of massive uprising around Gaza, that’s an example. I think people are going to start to say that that system that was already so diseased in a very fundamental way, so much an anti-human, amoral and immoral system, to see it get even more skewed by having the Air Force illegally bomb small boats in international waters, the National Guard used to protect federal agents who are kidnapping Americans off the streets and facilitating them being sent to overseas gulags – this provides an open invitation to question the “military normal” that we’ve lived with all these years.