The metabolism of militarism: The us military, agent orange, and metabolic rifts

Drawing on analyses of the social drivers of environmental change, this paper theorizes and explores the historically specific and complex dialectical relationship between militarism, political economy, and ecological transformation through a historical case study of the herbicide campaign during the American War in Vietnam. This article synthesizes theories of the military-environment relationship with metabolic analysis by conceptualizing the military as a second-order mediation emerging from, and interacting with, capital's social metabolism. Militaries as second-order mediations influence the reproduction of capital's social metabolic order in two ways: they appropriate resources from commercial producers for destructive purposes and exercise power over how those resources are used. By analyzing archival material—official reports and declassified documents—and secondary sources, this study demonstrates how the US military's use of herbicides was shaped by the logic of the rational management of war and its need for quantifiable and calculable data. As a result, the US military imposed a state-spatial rationality on the land and generated unique metabolic rifts in multiple Vietnamese ecosystems. This article broadens our understanding of the social drivers of environmental change by integrating two distinct theoretical traditions, underlining the importance of studying the military-economy-environment nexus and serving as a foundation for understanding ecological degradation and crisis.