Military Waste. Joshua O. Reno
four thousand aircraft are stored in these conditions and cared for, making the Boneyard the largest aircraft storage facility in the world, which is only appropriate for the largest airborne military in world history. Visitors to the Boneyard can take bus tours around the base, after showing an ID and getting past the gate attendant. And as one learns on the bus tour, they have the necessary tools for every aircraft present, in case they are put back into production. This is ultimately a cost-saving measure, allowing them to supply repaired and retooled planes on behalf of other bases and global military operations. The Boneyard is thus a repair-scape, meaning that this site and the people who work there are engaged in an ongoing process of differentiating objects, or determining the fates of their various material components in an open-ended fashion. This means saving some things, extending their usability for the time being, as well as routinely dismissing and disposing of other things.5
When done intensively, differentiation at a repair facility can beget all new forms of differentiation. Put differently, sorting and re-sorting objects can allow new qualities and new concerns to come to the fore. Shortly after World War II concluded, as a permanent war economy was being established, one notable entrepreneur in Tucson began acquiring surplus planes from the General Services Administration and melting them down. At the time, smelters were benefiting from the high price of aluminum. But sometime in the early 1950s, that operation also began restoring and collecting planes for display and sale. That business eventually became Aircraft Restoration and Marketing (ARM). ARM still exists today beside the Boneyard, with decades of accumulated knowledge related to repairing and rebuilding various aircraft. A number of other operations grew around the Boneyard, involved in experimental and virtual reuses of the landscape, whether to store objects or simulate interactions. Heading toward Phoenix, as you approach the county line, there is another site that stores commercial airplanes and airliner components. Out there in the desert Federal Law Enforcement agents train with tribal police, practicing maneuvers with cars. To the north is where scientists set up the Biosphere II initiative; after its conclusion, some recall an art display took its place: Native American “tribal masks” made from the distinct casings and flanges of nuclear weapons.
While many disused planes were ultimately scrapped for raw material, the military also practiced some preservation. Near the Boneyard, on the west side of the airport, there are still two wooden hangars left from World War II, which also used to serve as a bomb shelter during the Cold War. That the Air Force also began to preserve planes nearby is not surprising since preservation and restoration are arguably just more exaggerated forms of repair, involving further acts of differentiation. If all repair refers to some aspirational state, restoration suggests more careful standards regarding how this is to be accomplished. According to Elizabeth Spelman, “In its service to the past and the preexistent we find reasons to distinguish repairing something from creating it or replacing it, and in the conservative commitment of repair to continuity we note its difference from destruction” (2003, 126). With restoration, there is some sense that continuity itself is valuable, almost as an end in itself, an aesthetic quality quite apart from the ideal prototype associated with repair. Saying “this is a restored mansion” says as much about the virtues of restoration, of respect for aesthetic standards of design and construction for instance, as it does about the building itself. Unlike a repaired thing, however, when something is described as “restored,” this does not necessarily mean it can be used as it once was.
Some of the Pima museums planes are reclaimed by others and fly again. This is because museum objects are not deprived of use value or authenticity, but somehow saved and redeemed from a rubbish state.6 When staff at the Pima museum “restore” a plane for display, this does not necessarily mean that it is capable of flight, however, only that it looks like it did when it could fly. This is what ultimately divides the Boneyard from neighboring preservation and restoration operations. According to a brief, unpublished history written by James, director of collections and aircraft restoration at Pima:
The concept for the Pima Air & Space Museum began in 1966 during the celebration of the 25th Anniversary of the creation of the United States Air Force. Earlier the commanders of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base and. . .MASDC. . .recognized that the historic World War II and 1950s era aircraft stored on the base were rapidly disappearing into smelters and that the flames were consuming not just metal, but the aviation heritage of the country. On their own initiative base officials began to set aside examples of the many types of aircraft stored in MASDC’s yards. These planes were placed along the base’s fence line so that the public could see them through the fence.
Unlike formal restoration, as done by (some) museums, repair and maintenance are common and critical elements of our material environments.7 The choice between repairing and restoring is not absolute, moreover, but is a matter of practical decision-making as actors engage with materials at hand, with different categories of utility at issue, and with different sets of skills and resources at their disposal. There are, in fact, operations in between restoration and repair, more similar to ARM—salvaging, scraping, and making things capable of flight—and others more similar to the Pima—preserving, restoring, and displaying objects.
The Cold War introduced world-picturing and world-destroying planes and satellites circling overhead, which were a source of both dread and fascination.8 By the 1960s, people would reportedly line up along the Air Force fence to see what had been saved. In other words, this act of preservation became a public display of the sheer variety of aircraft that had been employed by the growing American empire. Inspired in part by the public reaction, the base commander of the Boneyard worked with local veterans to create the nongovernmental Pima Air Museum (named after the county whose land they ultimately rent). They also began to acquire additional aircraft from abroad, including the last Consolidated B-24 Liberator in the world, donated by the Republic of India in 1969. The museum opened officially in 1976, and was initially hard to distinguish from the surrounding Boneyard, to which it was also indebted for its collection. As James describes it,
In the beginning the museum was little more than a fenced in field with airplanes parked on it and a small, white, trailer to serve as ticket booth and administrative office. By early the next year further small improvements to the museum’s infrastructure were put in place. The museum acquired several surplus storage buildings and erected a small, open-sided shelter for aircraft undergoing restoration in 1978. The dedicated staff and volunteers made the best of the primitive conditions and slowly the museum’s aircraft began to be reassembled, repaired, and repainted. In the early years the museum could be easily mistaken for a part of MASDC, or one of the numerous scrap yards in the area.
By the 1980s, the museum grew to include several hangars, a gift shop, and more professional museum displays. In 1982, the Tucson museum community approached the Air Force about preserving missile silos that were being retired along with the Titan II ICBM system. According to James, these silos too were part of “aviation history.” Even so, as a relic of the Cold War, it required international cooperation to verify that this was, in fact, no longer a useful and repaired artifact, but a useless and restored one,9 complicating varieties of reuse as they apply to military waste:
After much negotiation both within the U.S. government and with the Soviet Union it was agreed that one silo would be preserved for use as a museum. . .and after Soviet satellites were given time to verify that both the silo and the missile that would go in it had been rendered harmless, work began to set up a visitor center at the formerly highly guarded site.
The Titan Missile Museum eventually opened in 1986, “offering a rare look, both above and below ground, at the top-secret world of a nuclear missile silo.” James credits the addition of the silo with the beginning of a new direction for Pima, because “the original museum and foundation names no longer represented the true scope of the institution.” Pima stopped being primarily a military aircraft museum in the 1990s, when it was officially rebranded with a general aeronautics focus, “from balloons to outer space,” as James puts it. In 1992 the museum’s name officially changed to the Pima Air & Space Museum and the foundation became the Arizona Aerospace Foundation. In 1999, Pima opened a new space gallery, to further this larger aerospace focus (although James bemoaned the fact that it has not been sufficiently updated since that time).
If Pima began due to