This book is not about war, nor is it a history of war. Avoiding theshock and awe of wartime images, it explores the contemporary spatial configurationsof power camouflaged in the infrastructures, environments, and scales of militaryoperations. Instead of wartime highs, this book starts with drawdown lows, whendemobilization and decommissioning morph into realignment and prepositioning. It isin this transitional milieu that the full material magnitudes and geographicentanglements of contemporary militarism are laid bare. Through this perpetual cycleof build up and breakdown, the U.S. Department of Defense----the single largestdeveloper, landowner, equipment contractor, and energy consumer in the world----hasengineered a planetary assemblage of "operational environments" in whichmilitarized, demilitarized, and non-militarized landscapes are increasinglyinextricable. In a series of critical cartographic essays, PierreBélanger and Alexander Arroyo trace this footprint far beyond the battlefield,countermapping the geographies of U.S. militarism across five of the most importantand embattled operational environments: the ocean, the atmosphere, the highway, thecity, and the desert. From the Indian Ocean atoll of Diego Garcia to thedefense-contractor archipelago around Washington, D.C.; from the A01 Highwaycircling Afghanistan's high-altitude steppe to surveillance satellites pinging theplanet from low-earth orbit; and from the vast cold chain conveying militaryperishables worldwide to the global constellation of military dumps, sinks, andscrapyards, the book unearths the logistical infrastructures and residual landscapesthat render strategy spatial, militarism material, and power operational. In sodoing, Bélanger and Arroyo reveal unseen ecologies of power at work in the makingand unmaking of environments -- operational, built, and otherwise -- tocome.

Pierre Belanger is Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. Alexander Arroyo is a doctoral student in Geography at the University of California, Berkeley.

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