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When did you become passionate about the conversion project, from a military to civilian economy?
Around 1980 or so, a number of colleagues and I decided that the militarization of the economy was going full tilt, and that it was going to create very great difficulties for people finishing with military service. People who were spending their lives in military production were in for a very big letdown with the end of the war in Vietnam. And so, a group of us decided that we ought to form a National Commission For Economic Conversion and Disarmament. While it’s obviously true that pieces of technology, like ball and roller bearings, are going to be used not only in military technologies but in civilian stuff as well, the fact is that major new technologies were not foreseeable as having the property of being useful for both military and civil society. As a war economy deinindustrializes, part of the work goes into more military stuff, but the major part of the deindustrialization is simply the shutdown of civilian work in this country and its transfer elsewhere - mainly to countries that pay low wages and, very importantly, discourage the formation and operation of trade unions. The militarization of the economy then has two sides: the continuation and the expansion of the militarization in the U.S. and the cessation of all manner of civilian work and its transfer of the investments for this work, especially to China.

What does it mean to be in a permanent war economy?
The economy that served the military was large, diverse, elaborately equipped, well financed, and was being made a continuing part of the American economy, and a continuing interest of the federal government. The military economy has become a very durable part of the economy of the United States. But I wonder these days if it ever can be truly permanent. In a book I’m writing now (Wars Unlimited), I give special attention to the idea of previously understood durability of the war economy. I don’t think it’s going to be that durable. I think it’s going to be forced to give way.

Why was it conventional wisdom at one time that military spending was good for the economy?
This idea has its origin in the middle of the first Roosevelt administration. The history was approximately as follows. Roosevelt entered the White House in 1933. That was clearly at the bottom of the Great Depression. There were about ten million unemployed. There were bread lines in every major city. The Roosevelt administration tried a series of civilian public works, some of them emergency measures. The emergency measures started with food distribution, but it extended on to devices like the Civilian Conservation Corps, which invited young men to show up for an enlistment, so to speak, and were put to work on environmental conservation jobs, that were organized in detail by the Army. But these previously unemployed young men were suddenly full-time occupied and the military made available decent food and clothing. So the work in combination with the food and clothing and medical care that became available was a big boost in the level of living for hundreds of thousands of young men who were enlisted. As you reach the end of the 1930s, starting with late 1937 and then into 1938, there was a heating up of the military political temperatures, notably in Europe. One of the earliest things that was undertaken were programs to expand the U.S. Navy. As this was done, the economists in the United States seemed to make a discovery. The discovery was that the U.S. economy could make considerable expenditures, certainly enlarging the expenditures for the military, and it didn’t detract from anything else. (more…)

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In Tomorrow Now, you travel through Shakespeare’s “seven stages of man” - from As You Like It - as a way of navigating the next fifty years. Why?
Tomorrow Now is a book about nearly everything. But you can’t simply write a book about every aspect of the future because it’s like writing a book about every aspect of the present. So the framework I decided to use was the human body. This book is very body-centric and I try to make human flesh and a human sensorium into a sort of key that opens the future. That’s our real encounter with the future; it’s not these abstract notions of drivers or changes, but the fact that time flows through your body and you can’t really live unless you’re moving into the future at the rate of one second per second.

You say genetic engineering is in its infancy. How is this new baby, so to speak, shaking up our global household?
Genetic engineering is barely getting anywhere and it’s already subject to a great deal of controversy. If you look at what genetic engineering really does, as opposed to the things that it gets headlines for, it seems likely that it’s going to get as close to the DNA as it can and as far away from the products of DNA as it can. The sorts of images we have of genetic engineering are the Frankenstein baby, Dolly the clone, and weird, monstrous, animals. But when you look at what DNA is good for, it doesn’t make sense to put it into humans or animals. It takes too long. DNA moves fast and the best way to carry it is in a microorganism. Let’s say you decide to create a super-baby next month using whatever techniques you found in Craig Venter’s DNA lab. By the time this super-baby is an adult in the year 2024, there will have been another 20 years of further advancement in the field. So why would you make a baby with today’s technology knowing it’s going to be twenty years out of date when it’s grown up and can actually vote?

Moving on to The Soldier now, can you explain the stylistic differences between the military and the paramilitary?
It’s taking people a surprising amount of time to get their head around the idea that the bipolar world of communist/capitalist confrontation is over and we now have a confrontation between New World Order and New World Disorder. In other words, people don’t get it that lawless narco-terrorism actually makes a lot of money and is a newfangled kind of mountain banditry. I mean, terrorism is not terror. When you’re talking about a war on terror, that’s like a war on technique. It’s like having a war on Blitzkrieg when the Germans would suddenly come over the Belgian border in tanks. What we really have is a serious disorder problem. We’ve got breakdowns in the Westphalian nation-state system because governments just can’t control these huge living streams of illicit revenue from narcotics, arms smuggling, human smuggling and so forth. It’s not too hard for the U.S. to bomb anything from orbit. We can send over a B1 bomber from the heartland of the United States and have it literally circumnavigate the planet and drop munitions with absolute precision anywhere. But it turns out to be extremely difficult for the U.S. to walk block to block with military police trying to enforce order on people who really don’t want any aliens around. So if you’re in Serbia you’re in big trouble - sort of - if the U.S. decides to take it upon itself to smash your government. They can smash all the government buildings and knock down the bridges and telecom centers, and so you have a hard time getting around. But if you’re Somalia and there’s nothing left to smash, the U.S. has got a problem. The secret of the struggle between the New World Order and the New World Disorder is that they feed on one another. It’s our own appetite for destruction that underwrites this warlord activity. (more…)

Make peace, not war: With the world now spending one million million dollars on the military per year and fifty-four percent of peace agreements breaking down within five years of signature, can we say with sincerity that we’re committed to peace?

From Swords to Plowshares
Since the late 1960s, Seymour Melman, professor emeritus at Columbia University, has championed the conversion project ® from a military to civilian economy ® and has deliberated on the public good we could achieve for the money we spend on the military.

Technological enhancements to conventional weaponry may be redundant in a world with nuclear arms, but there’s no denying that the civilian sector has absorbed military-derived innovation over the years.

We are all part of military culture, at times of war and peace. Whether we know it or not, we incriminate ourselves every time we use technological innovations known as “spin-offs,�? which have arisen from military-sponsored research and later get adopted by civil society. Since Napoleon, the long line of spin-offs have included canned foods, plastics, microwave technology, radar, lasers, the Internet, night vision, jet engines, cell phones, GPS systems, Gore-Tex, frozen foods, and power bars. (more…)

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What does it mean that war is now mediated through technology?
Today not only the act of war itself, but also the perception of war is a technological event. In a significant way, there are always two theatres of war: actual battlefields with real casualties and immense suffering, and hyperreal battlefields where the ultimate objective of the war machine is to conquer public opinion and manipulate human imagination. Particularly since 9/11 and the prosecution of the so-called “war on terrorism,” we live in a media environment which is aimed at the total mobilization of the population for warfare. For example, in the American “homeland,” mobilization of the population is psychologically conditioned by an image matrix, fostering deep feelings of fear and insecurity. This is reinforced daily by the mass media operating as a repetition-machine: repeating, that is, the message of the threatening “terrorist” Other. For those living in the increasingly armed bunker of North America and Europe, we don’t experience wars in any way except through the psychological control of perception through mass media, particularly television. The delivery of weapons - themselves intensely sophisticated forms of technology - are part of the same system. So tech-mediated war is the total mobilization for warfare with us as its primary subjects and targets.

What is the effect of our seeing from the bomb’s eye view?
Perhaps human vision itself has now been literally harvested by the war machine. When we see the unfolding world from the bomb’s eye view, this would mean that what we traditionally have meant by human perception - vision, insight, ethical judgment, discriminating between reality and illusion - has been effectively shut down, almost surgically replaced by the virtual vision machine of the militarized imagination. We are suddenly rendered vulnerable to the new virtual myths about the supposedly hygienic character of post-human warfare. For instance, the spectacle of the bomb’s eye view supports the illusion of war as being about so-called “smart” bombs, which are hyped as controllable in their targeting trajectories, with few civilian casualties. The audience becomes a spectator of this act, but it’s a complete fabrication. Only long after the first Iraq war was it revealed that many of the cruise missile shots, which were supposed to be precise in their “target acquisitions,” may have been staged video shots. The reality of that war had to do with massive bombing raids and anti-personnel cluster weapons, all of which were deliberately aimed at civilian populations. (more…)