By Dean Spade & Sarah Lazare
Originally published in In These Times, reprinted in Jacobin. Reposted with permission.
Women now shape the American war machine at its highest levels. That’s nothing to celebrate.
Major media outlets are fawning over the fact that women are taking over top positions in the country’s largest weapons companies and in US defense and intelligence agencies.From MSNBC to Politico to NowThis, a number of prominent publications are framing this ascent as an indicator of overall progress for women — and of increased equity in the organizations they are now leading.Women are now the CEOs of four out of the country’s five biggest military contractors, writes Politico reporter David Brown, noting that, “across the negotiating table, the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer and the chief overseer of the nation’s nuclear stockpile now join other women in some of the most influential national security posts.” Brown hails the developments as a “watershed” moment, citing Kathleen Hicks, senior vice-president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank whose top corporate funders are weapons contractors, as asserting that “the national security community” is more of a meritocracy than other fields.Throughout the article, the women leading these organizations proclaim that women can make it to the top if they believe in themselves. They call on well-worn gender stereotypes to assert that women have something special to offer because of their unique talent at negotiating, their fierce protectiveness as mothers, and their “different perspective” on problem solving. The article even includes patronizing praise of how women’s leadership in the military can result in innovative solutions like wrapping sensitive equipment in pantyhose to keep out sand.
Yet, feminists should not view this “rise” of women as a win. Feminism, as the most recent wave of imperial-feminist articles shows, is increasingly being co-opted to promote and sell the US military-industrial complex: a profoundly violent institution that will never bring liberation to women — whether they are within its own ranks or in the countries bearing the greatest brunt of its brutality. As Noura Erakat, a human rights attorney and assistant professor at George Mason University, put it in an interview with In These Times, women’s inclusion in US military institutions “makes the system subjugating us stronger and more difficult to fight. Our historical exclusion makes it [appear] desirable to achieve [inclusion] but that’s a lack of imagination. Our historical exclusion should push us to imagine a better system and another world that’s possible.”
This pro-military media spin is no accident: Weapons contractors are working hard to sell a progressive, pro-women brand to the public. Raytheon and other firms spend millions on public relations painting themselves as noble empowerers of women and girls in the sciences. Raytheon champions its partnership with Girl Scouts of the USA. “Through a multiyear commitment from Raytheon, Girl Scouts will launch its first national computer science program and Cyber Challenge for middle and high school girls,” states a promotional page. A high-dollar promotional video quotes Rebecca Rhoads, president of Raytheon’s global business services, as stating, “Raytheon’s vision about making the world a safer place and the girl scouts’ vision of making the world a better place couldn’t be more well-suited as partners.” Such a claim is particularly brazen, coming from a company that supplies a steady stream of bombs for the US-Saudi war in Yemen, which has unleashed a famine that has killed an estimated 85,000 Yemeni children under the age of five.
Lockheed Martin, by far the biggest arms producer in the world with $44.9 billion in arms sales in 2017, manufactured the 500-pound laser-guided MK 82 bomb that struck a Yemeni school bus last August, killing fifty-four people (forty-four of them children). But that doesn’t stop the company from presenting itself as a progressive organization that recruits — and supports — women scientists. A page on its website quotes the Langston Hughes poem, “A Dream Deferred,” to make the case that the company helps girls achieve their dreams. “This poem was one of my favorites from my high school English class, but, now, as I consider my Community Service and Engagement with the Lockheed Martin community, I personally know what can happen to a dream deferred, when many say no, but I say, ‘Yes you can,’” the page states. In her speech at the 2015 World Assembly for Women in Tokyo, the company’s chairperson, president and CEO Marillyn A. Hewson said that “it is just as important to support women as they work to lift themselves up and raise up each other. Because taking responsibility for our own careers is empowering in and of itself.”
Faux-feminist PR is not just for private corporations — it is also being used to sell woman-led CIA torture. Gina Haspel, who once oversaw torture at a black site in Thailand, now runs the CIA, and the Trump administration defended her from critics of torture by pointing out the fact that she is a woman. “Any Democrat who claims to support women’s empowerment and our national security but opposes her nomination is a total hypocrite,” said Press Sec. Sarah Sanders on Twitter.
Yet, Erakat asks, “How are you going to celebrate women in high military ranks as an achievement when all they do is fulfill an agenda that was never created through a feminist framework? Haspel was an architect of our torture regime. Why would I celebrate her?”
Meanwhile, the war criminals of yesteryear are being rehabilitated by this “girl-power” coverage. Last April, the Washington Post ran a story with the eyebrow-raising headline, “‘The kids, they love Madeleine Albright’: How a veteran diplomat got turned into a girl-power icon.” In 1996, Albright, the then-US ambassador to the United Nations, told 60 Minutesthat the half-million Iraqi children killed by the US sanctions regime were “worth” it.
“It’s a very white, imperialist, liberal understanding of feminism to think that the promotion of women at the top of militarization and militarism is advancing women,” says Kara Ellerby, author of No Shortcut to Change, who derides what she calls the “add-women-and-stir” approach. “Sure, it’s great that you have a woman at the head of Raytheon, but what about the women who those bombs are being dropped on?” Ellerby emphasizes to In These Times. “From a global perspective, putting women in charge of US military dominance is not remotely feminist: It’s imperialist.”
Feminist scholar and author Cynthia Enloe echoes this concern, suggesting that women’s leadership in these organizations does not change what the organizations do to the rest of the world. “There is no evidence that I’ve seen — of the CIA, defense department, or other institutions where only a few women are rising to the top — that they challenge the mission of the company or the organization,” she tells In These Times.
US military intervention is particularly bad for women: It remains deeply interconnected to sexual and gender violence, for people in the military, for military spouses, and for people living in or near the estimated 1,000 US military bases around the world or where US military actions occur. From Japan to the Philippines, local populations have long protested the presence of the US military — and the environmental destruction and sexual violence it brings.
The impacts of war — such as reduction in basic services, electricity, and access to food and water, loss of family members, and increased rates of illness and disability — all increase women’s vulnerability to assault and worsen the conditions of women’s labor. Women are predominantly responsible for caring for sick and disabled people, children, and elders — and the conditions for doing that work worsen severely in war conditions. The US military is also the largest polluter in the world. It is difficult to argue that its activities are “good for women” when it contributes to climate change and the poisoning of air, water, and land that endangers all people.
The US military is also profoundly violent towards women within its own ranks. According to Veterans Affairs records, 1,307,781outpatient visits took place at the VA for Military Sexual Trauma (MST)-related care in 2015. Approximately 38 percent of female and 4 percent of male military personnel and veterans have experienced Military Sexual Trauma — a euphemism for rape or sexual assault. Research reveals that 40 percent of women homeless veterans have experienced sexual assault in the military. (Far less is known or publicly reported about the US military’s sexual violence against occupied peoples.)
Service members are punished for speaking out. A report from the Department of Defense finds 58 percent of women and 60 percent of men who report sexual assault face retaliation. And 77 percent of retaliation reports alleged that retaliators were in the reporter’s chain of command. A third of victims are discharged after reporting, typically within seven months of making a report. A report from Harvard Law School’s Veterans’ clinic finds sexual assault victims receive harsher discharges from the military, with 24 percent separated under less than fully honorable conditions, compared to 15 percent of all service members.
Women who drop out of the military because they have been sexually assaulted cannot rise through the ranks. The media portrayal of the women who have climbed to the top of the military and intelligence apparatuses, however, relies on bootstrap tough-it-up narratives that implicitly victim-shame women, often framing failure to achieve what they did in terms of women’s lack of confidence that creates obstacles to their success. Lynn Dugle, CEO of Englity and former CEO of Raytheon, tells Politico, “One of my biggest challenges has been resisting the temptation to tell myself I couldn’t do something. I didn’t think I was ready to be president of a multibillion-dollar business at Raytheon when I was offered the role. I continually remind myself to have courage and confidence.”
These narratives about “progress” through inclusion of underrepresented groups in dominant institutions (in this case women), actually follow a well-worn pattern in US politics. Whether it is police departments championing “diversity” while perpetuating targeted harm against marginalized populations, or oil companies portraying themselves as “green,” the drive to be associated with a (watered-down) progressivism or inclusivity is one of the most common PR strategies at work for the world’s most harmful institutions.
The idea that the US military-industrial complex can be pro-women is not just an internal rebranding exercise: It is used to justify disastrous US military interventions around the world. In his book Ideal Illusions, historian James Peck shows how this is part of a larger trend that developed during the Cold War when, as an anticommunist strategy, the United States revamped its image as the human rights protector of the world to justify its military empire. The US claim that it uniquely protects women’s rights was part of this larger picture.
The George W. Bush administration famously justified the war in Afghanistan by arguing that it would rescue women from the Taliban. On Nov. 17, 2001, Laura Bush gave the president’s weekly radio address, proclaiming, “Afghan women know, through hard experience, what the rest of the world is discovering: the brutal oppression of women is a central goal of the terrorists.” Media outlets dutifully followed suit: In 2010, Time ran a cover showing “Bibi Aisha” with her nose cut off, with the headline, “What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan.” Of course, the protracted US occupation has only further entrenched the Taliban, which now controls more territory than at any point in the past seventeen years. Meanwhile, civilian deaths are climbing. Yet none of the politicians or pundits who popularized the rhetoric of “saving women” are forced to answer to how this war has actually harmed — and killed — women in Afghanistan.
The 2011 bombing of Libya was cheered as the first US war led by women, as noted by the Daily Beast, which reported that “[t]he Libyan airstrikes mark the first time in U.S. history that a female-dominated diplomatic team has urged military action.” The fact that command of the Libya air strategy was given to a woman officer was also celebrated in theGuardian as “a boost to women in the US military who complain daily about discrimination.” Are these celebrated woman architects of war required to answer to today’s nightmarish conditions in Libya where black people are now bought and sold in open-air slave markets? Do cheerleaders of the intervention actually examine whether US military intervention in Libya, or anywhere, leads to improved conditions for women?
Narratives about saving women are also prevalent in the US war on ISIS. While there is no doubt that women face horrific treatment at the hands of ISIS, rape, enslavement, and abuse has been used to justify a brutal US bombing campaign that has caused 2,780 civilian casualty incidents in Syria and Iraq and relaxed standards for killing civilians in both countries — opening the door to more civilian deaths. Meanwhile, atrocities against women perpetrated by US ally Saudi Arabia go unpunished, revealing that the need to protect women is contingent on US geopolitical interests.
These tropes are not new. They come from the playbook of US and Western European colonization, in which colonizers argue that their presence helps women, and their exit would do them grave harm. In just one example, Lord Cromer, who was the British consul general in Egypt from 1883 to 1907, cited the veil — and women’s well-being — to argue Egyptians should be forcibly civilized. “The position of women in Egypt, and Mohammedan countries generally, is, therefore a fatal obstacle to the attainment of that elevation of thought and character which should accompany the introduction of Western civilisation,” he once declared. Yet, as feminist scholar Leila Ahmed has pointed out, at the same time Cromer was railing against the veil, he was agitating in favor of the subordination of women in England, as a leader of the Men’s League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage.
In her work, “A vocabulary for feminist praxis: on war and radical critique,” feminist, activist, writer, and scholar Angela Davis articulates a bold vision for feminism. “This more radical feminism is a feminism that does not capitulate to possessive individualism,” she writes, “a feminism that does not assume that democracy requires capitalism, a feminism that is bold and willing to take risks, a feminism that fights for women’s rights while simultaneously recognizing the pitfalls of the formal ‘rights’ structure of capitalist democracy.”
According to Christine Ahn, the founder of Women Cross DMZ, a global network of women mobilizing to end the Korean War, “Celebrating the rise of women in these institutions of domination, whether Pentagon contractors like Lockheed Martin or the CIA (which has been responsible for secret torture programs and covert overthrows of democratic regimes worldwide), distracts from the point at hand, which is that we need to be minimizing the power and reach of these institutions.”
Workers in food service, maintenance, clerical and technical services are central to the university, but occupy lowest the rungs of the university, often paid a low hourly wage, or with salaries that top out below $50,000 in most cases. This inadequate pay is most felt during the summer breaks as many nonprofessional employees have to find another job in the summertime when campus operations are significantly scaled back. In recent years, outsourcing and subcontracting food services and maintenance have exacerbated these poor conditions. A 2014 study showed that the substantial reduction in wages caused by outsourcing and contracting exacerbates both the gender and race pay gaps. On the clerical and technical side, a model of “shared services” is used to cut costs by centralizing business and IT offices. This practice often results in layoffs of workers and more work for the same pay for those who are left to work in the shared services centers.
As on the academic side, labor in university-hospitals is hierarchically structured and locates women of color in marginalized positions where they do much of the daily care work. Among Registered Nurses, which tend to be the most professionalized care workers, are 91% women, 79% are white, 11% are black, 8% are Asian and 5% Latina. Their average pay is about $71,000/year. In contrast, among “nursing, psychiatric, and home health aides” are 54% white, 37% black, 13% Latina, 5% Asian, and 87% women. These positions tend to pay in the range of $10-12 an hour. The stratified nature of healthcare has proven a difficult place to organize workers and the absence of broad based union drives (as is the case on the academic side) tend to diminish the power of organized labor.
As college and university becomes increasingly unaffordable, work-study programs through which students meet their “student income contribution” are central to financing higher education. For universities, relying on student workers is often a source of casualized labor. For instance, students working in UCLA Dining Halls make $10.50 while the starting wage for full-time workers is $16.32. At wealthier schools with large endowments, student workers have argued that the student income contribution reproduces class inequalities among students as wealthier students do not have to work. In addition to work-study, student athletes also share the conditions of other campus workers. From the contracts they sign before attending the recruiting university to the 50-60 hours of training and game time a week and the profits their sportsmanship brings, there is little difference between college and professional athletes who are understood as workers and unionized in the NFL and NBA.
Almost three quarters of the faculty are currently contingent workers with no access to tenure, a disproportionate number of whom are women and people of color. Women now constitute 51-61% of contingent faculty, a stark contrast to their continued underrepresentation among the ranks of tenured and tenure-track faculty. Underrepresented groups also continue to see increased representation in contingent academic jobs with the pay disparity to match. For instance, part-time black faculty earn significantly less than other racial and ethnic groups. The growing rates of contingent workers along with the central role graduate students play in the work of teaching demonstrates a move towards cheaper sources of instructional labor.
Given the connections between militarism and higher education discussed above, the “global turn” in universities and colleges has largely followed US strategic interests with universities prioritizing the Middle East and China in particular as sites for intellectual exchange and collaboration. In keeping with the marginalization of the African and African Diasporic world in the Americas in US foreign policy, these areas have seen comparatively little engagement from US universities. The global university thus remains only partially global and the consequences of this partiality can be seen in curriculum, faculty hires, and the distribution of resources.
There are over 150 military-educational institutions and according to the American Association of University Professors and hundreds of colleges and universities receive Pentagon funding for research, provide classes to military personnel, create special programs designed to lead to employment in defense industries and support military operations. In the context of limited funding resources, the Pentagon and Department of Defense have stepped up research support and their relationships to Universities now extend to the social sciences and humanities. For example, the Pentagon’s controversial “Human Terrain System” recruited anthropologist and Middle East experts to “decipher” Iraqi and Afghani society at the height of US’s wars in these countries. At times these relationship with the military-industrial complex are parasitic on universities’ rhetoric of diversity, equity, and inclusion. For example, a leaked memorandum of understanding (MOU) between Baruch College-CUNY and the Central Intelligence Agency reveals that the CIA has sought recruitment relationships with colleges and universities that have a diverse student body.
As the University physically expands across the world, the creation of new campuses and degree-granting programs has created opportunities for intellectual engagement and interaction, but has also raised a number of ethical questions. For instance, faculty and students criticized Yale’s creation of a liberal arts program in collaboration with National University of Singapore both because of concerns about freedom of speech at the campus and because the decision to create a campus, the costs involved, the nature of the partnership were not subject to faculty oversight, review and/or approval. More recently, an investigation into labor practices during the construction of NYU’s Abu Dhabi campus found that almost 10, 000 workers were not protected by the university’s labor guidelines that set standards for fair wages, hours and living conditions.
Since the calls for divestment from apartheid South Africa in the late 1970s and 1980s, student activists have highlighted the deep interconnections between university endowments and systems of injustice and exploitation at home and abroad. Most prominently, campaigns to divest from private prisons and fossil fuels demonstrate the ways that universities investments reproduce logics of inequality and help to bolster an unsustainable economy. These divestment campaigns often face an uphill battle as the structure of investments are often mediated through complex financial arrangements and lack transparency.
Given the racialized disparities in inherited wealth, a history of discrimination by lending agencies and higher borrowing, the dependence on debt to finance higher education places distinctive burdens on students of color and particularly black students. According to Demos, “While less than two-thirds (63%) of white graduates from public schools borrow, four-in-five (81%) of Black graduates do so. Latinx graduates borrow at similar rates and slightly lower amounts than white students.” The same study finds that black and Latinx students are dropping out with debt at higher rates than white students. Moreover students of color are more likely to be delinquent on loan repayments. A study by the economists Marshall Steinbaum and Kavya Vaghul found that zip codes with a high concentration of black and Latinx residents had far higher delinquency rates.
While the expansion of universities is often presented a jobs-creation program, but often the opportunities afforded to residents are low wage jobs with few protections. Due to the monopoly on the surrounding labor market that universities often enjoy, they exploit the labor of neighboring residents, resist the demands of campus-based labor unions, and depress wages. For more information on the labor see the University as Employer section.
With increasing expansion, universities perpetuate and reinforce the criminalization of black and Latinx communities. Urban universities maintain large police and security forces and lobby for city police forces to increase their presence in surrounding neighborhoods. Communities of color near universities are thus subject to the overlapping jurisdictions of university and city police forces, which reinforces the over-policing and surveillance of communities of color. While claiming to be working in service of protecting university property and affiliates, police on campuses have also directed violence towards Black staff, faculty, and students, with little or no recourse for violating their rights.
Private, resource heavy universities engage in a form of hyper-gentrification by using local ordinances, capitalizing on their tax-exempt status, and benefitting from state and federal dollars as well as from private sector partnerships to reshape communities. Through these institutional and financial advantages, universities have widened their neighbor footprints by aggressively purchasing properties in predominantly poor and working class black neighborhoods. Moreover, universities fail to intervene when their students perpetuate housing inequality. In many of the neighborhoods adjacent to urban universities, and within the walls of the amenity-rich, planned apartment communities in smaller college towns, students can often afford to pay higher rents than locals. Landlords seeking to profit from the steady stream of student renters become motivated to push out locals, who increasingly will not be able to afford rising rents. Rarely do residents have the political or economic capital to confront and resist this type of gentrification, and universities have little incentive to stop it, particularly if the private rental market fulfills their student housing short falls.