Necro-Logistics: Burn Pits and the Waste of American War-Making

• In Event: STS and Security Studies: Expertise, Infrastructures and Practices - III

Abstract

Over the past 15 years, American military installations in Iraq and Afghanistan routinely disposed of everyday waste by burning it in open-air pits. Everything from plastic water bottles and uniforms to batteries and medical waste was disposed of this way, potentially exposing over three million American personnel and uncounted local civilians and foreign contractors to particulate matter, volatile organic compounds, and other pathogenic substances in the resulting plumes. Exposure has been strongly associated with a range of fatal cancers, respiratory conditions, and neurological and immune diseases, though the Defense Department has refused to acknowledge harm from the pits and many veteran patients struggle with the Veterans Health Administration for recognition and compensation.
Burn pits are a product of peculiar logistics of post-9/11 American war-making (Cowen 2014), in which the sustainment of military lives “temporarily” at home for years in war zones demands both the mass movement of material supports and the toxic, necropolitical excess of their disposal. As part of a broader ethnographic project on burn pit illnesses, this paper draws on firsthand military accounts of war-zone waste management to theorize waste infrastructure as a crucial site of war-related human and environmental harms. It builds on recent work at the intersection of STS and security studies highlighting the privileged biopolitical care of military bodies (Terry 2017), but asks how those same bodies can help illuminate the necro-logistics of American war—the expenditure, relegation, and literal waste that attend the US’s imperial geopolitics.

Author

• Kenneth MacLeish, Center for Medicine, Health and Society, Vanderbilt University