Counter mapping the Logistical Landscapes & Military Geographies of the U.S. Department Defense

Response Paper to ECOLOGIES OF POWER: Counter mapping the Logistical Landscapes & Military Geographies of the U.S. Department Defense
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Summary
In this book, Pierre Belanger and Alexander Arroyo focus on the discernible and productive features of the Department of Defense’s (DOD) operations. In a critical cartographic volume, the two counter map the geospatial footprint of the DOD beyond the battleground and reveal a wide and dynamic army logistical landscape that is restructuring infrastructures and environments in all measures. The authors move past the conventional military geographies of battlefields to look into the forces and forms of the landscapes from the molecular and metabolic to the dogmatic and worldly thus presenting a fresh facet to the common military milieu of land, air, and sea. By doing this, they draw a developing assembly of logistically connected “operational environments,” in which armed, demilitarized and non-militarized settings are more intertwined than ever. It is from this assembly where they draw out the developing ecologies of power in play in the construction and reconstruction of functioning environments across current, emergent and future horizons.[Belanger, Pierre and Arroyo, Alexander "Ecologies of power: countermapping the logistical landscapes & military geographies of the US department of defense." (2017): 328-330.]
Response
In this book, Belanger and Arroyo, a landscape designer and a critical geographer, primarily focus on how the global logistical chain of the United States of America military, and the operational style it supports which is heavily reliant on technology, create spaces: the different ways in which the parcels of the world are defined and differentiated. They steer away from delving much into warfare, instead choosing to look into the political, economic and material factors that amalgamate to develop the conditions under which modern warfare takes place and shape the form it takes; combat, together with other socio-political aspects of the world, are the result of complex, intertwined ecologies.[Belanger and Arroyo, 328]
This foundation, which is a complex coalescent of both material and social factors, gives birth to both the operational considerations of contemporary war as well as the threats that mark it (Waldheim, 2012). Although the design of the book is intended to provoke a reflection on how conflict is a constituent of itself, steering away from providing the ultimate closure of an argument, the agenda set by the authors is quite ambitious. Belanger and Arroyo accomplish their objective of provoking readers to question why both the DOD and the enemies approach modern warfare the way they do. Their argument is however not the most effective as the book lacks engagement with the literature.[Ibid]
The key shortcoming of the book is its lack of a definite definition of war, although disrupting the contemporary understandings of combat is one of its key features. The problem I find is that the text attempts to assert, without any elaboration, that our contemporary understandings of warfare lack certain types of nuance. It is a genre element, a series of critical works seeking to unsettle notions about compl...