Military Waste. Joshua O. Reno
the many, many planes. It is easy to imagine the Boneyard as a kind of dystopian wasteland, and many filmmakers have chosen it as a location for precisely this reason, including for the Transformers and Terminator franchises.
In theory, rubbish potential is amplified in situations where seemingly durable items, like planes, are initially forgotten, only to be resurrected in new forms. Central to my argument in this chapter is the idea, common in studies of materiality and familiar to anyone engaged in repair or reuse, that things like war planes are never just weapons, even for the armed services—they are also material objects. When Priscilla Bennett went to the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, a volunteer docent reprimanded her for touching the rivets on an airplane wing (even though visitors are explicitly invited to touch). He compared it to the skin of Bennett’s grandmother, arguing that one should not be too rough with something so aged and fragile.
Like a living thing, planes possess qualities that require care and attention but also offer affordances, or alternative and open-ended opportunities. An affordance can be understood to usher from materials themselves (Ingold 2000) or more from ethical attunement to their semiotic potential (Keane 2016). Regardless, the key aspect of an affordance is that interactions with things in the world are not decided in advance and can lead one in new and unexpected directions: “The idea of affordance usefully draws us away from treating material forms as wholly transparent” (Keane 2016, 30).2 This sense of affordance fits well with the literature on repair and reuse. Every act of repair is simultaneously an act of discovery and a learning process. The role of the unknown endemic to repair leads to various tensions: between design and repurposing (Houston et al. 2017), between stability and breakdown more generally (Graham and Thrift 2007), or as part of distributed expertise associated with “enacting the object” through “regimes of maintenance” (Denis and Pontille 2017; Houston 2017). In this sense, an exploration of exceptional moments of repair exposes the underlying politics of remaking. Connecting these ideas, what Thompson considers rubbish arguably offers exceptional affordances for new uses, while also exposing political and moral tensions associated with remaking and enacting objects.
I combine these literatures to explore the re-creation of aircraft around the Boneyard, especially the tensions evoked by nonstandard uses of military craft. Airplane rubbish can be examined in at least two ways. One is exemplified by the Boneyard. As an active part of a permanent, global, and airborne military, the Boneyard is also a locally circumscribed place that releases materials over time into the hands of civilians in the surrounding area—by donating them to the collection of museums or scrapyards, for instance. This chapter begins by examining what becomes of rubbish planes, how they are assessed, remade, and displayed, and to what ends. I argue that reusing planes around the Boneyard tends to involve a tension between their technically and aesthetically valued capacity for flight and their ability to serve as signs of military history and national identity. Based on interviews with civilians working and tinkering around the Boneyard (some retired service members, some not), I find that repurposing these artifacts can involve struggles over their historical and ideological relevance.
The Pima Air and Space Museum, which has developed around the repair-scape of the Boneyard, exemplifies this tension between fight and flight. Museums are intriguing institutions because they are not monolithic, but lie at the intersection of a variety of interests, publics, and values.3 The different actors involved in museums may not all agree on what specific exhibits to display and how, what kinds of crowds should be sought after and appealed to, and which outside parties to partner with to accomplish these goals. And the clash and commingling of these different positions are evident in the semiotic labor of display. Presented with the display of any object, one can ask how it is meant to resemble other forms it is more or less similar to, how it is meant to point to its history of relations with other contexts and entities, how it is meant to represent more general values and shared understandings. As Terrence Deacon (2012) argues, furthermore, different ways of signifying often work together as we think, thereby forming a semiotic scaffold between the first thought and the next. In this way, deeper symbolic meanings can be propped up by the more direct associations our minds tend to make. Direct associations include materially perceptible qualities that underlie interpretation of a more conventional sort, including forms of patriotic reverence or war memorialization. When a restored plane points to historical relations or resembles an acknowledged prototype, these associations become part of the semiotic grounds of a struggle that is at once about what is present and what is absent, about the material and the immaterial.4 In the case of Pima, according to its director, there is a competing focus between displaying planes for military commemoration and displaying them as tokens of aeronautic history. In other words, it is not necessary that the restoration and exhibition of a flying machine glorify warfare and war preparation—other ways of interpreting planes are possible and always have been.
At the same time, this distinction between the Boneyard and its civilian surroundings threatens to reaffirm a divide between militarization and militarism, or between the material project of war (at bases and in battles, in the hands of pilots) and its cultural and ideological reckoning (at museums and in public storytelling about warriors and warfare, in the hands of civilians). In order to challenge this categorical separation between war’s conduct and its representation, I also consider how reusing and aesthetically decorating planes has been part of competing interpretations and uses of them since their earliest involvement in warfare. Here I draw inspiration from Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptual distinction between states and nomadic war machines, respectively, where the latter tend toward an anarchic aesthetics of singular decoration (1987, 395–403), meaning weapons are affordances that suggest open-ended uses that go beyond their designated state function (Adkins 2015, 203–10). The war machine and the state have become mutually dependent over the course of history, yet the “exteriority” of the former (its “capture” by the latter) is evident in tensions around the use and reuse of planes. The “minor art” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 401) of weapon decoration that I highlight is the frequently observed practice of nose art, where squadrons and pilots decorate their planes with iconography irreducible to mass-produced warfare and the interests of the state, which has inspired other artists affiliated with the Pima.
VARIETIES OF REUSE
What does it mean for something to be repaired or restored? This question helps to address the distinction between what goes on in the Boneyard and what goes on at Pima and related enterprises surrounding the base. Minimally, repair means that there is something broken that is being returned to a previous state of usefulness or wholeness. That previous state, which the damaged thing differs from, can be thought of as a prototype, an idea of what the thing was meant to be, or once was and could be again. A brand-new plane is not broken and in need of repair, but neither is one that has been broken down into metal scrap—the former is too close to the prototype to seem broken and the other is too far gone to be acknowledged as reparable. In its most basic sense, “Repair restores degrees of past capacity for present and future use,” in Lara Houston’s words (2017, 51). A broken thing is fixed to the extent that it more closely resembles this ideal type in the mind of the repairer, in the diagrams and instructions they refer to, according to aesthetic or functional standards they apply and so on. In practice, there can be extreme differences in degrees of repair in relation to the prototype. For example, with the new F-35, all of the components are so expensive that if a maintainer drops a tool on the wing and dings it, it has to be reported as a Class C mishap. By contrast, on an F-5 or F-18, if some component gets bent and can be pounded out it is not even reportable.
Rather than a place where disused machines are permanently dumped, the Boneyard is the open-air garage of the US military, where machines from the Air Force and all other branches are set aside, tinkered with, stripped for parts, and occasionally scrapped. These decisions ultimately depend on how the material qualities of planes are assessed and creatively manipulated. Paraphrasing Stephen Graham and Nigel Thrift, the repair and maintenance that goes on in the Boneyard is not incidental, rather it is part of what we might call the “engine room” (2007, 19) of permanent war-readiness. With low humidity, little rainfall, and high altitude, the site is ideal for preventing rust and corrosion. Of course, in the Arizona sun, paint peals and interiors steadily deteriorate, but this still has the desired effect of limiting the range of “different rhythms and durations of breakdown and repair