I. Introduction

The US Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, updated in 2007, makes the bold claim that “Money is ammunition”, a statement that is repeated in the above epigraph by former US Military General David Petraeus (US Army 2007, 49; Petraeus 2006, 4). This is not a metaphorical statement. For Petraeus, money is not only a weapon, but “depending on the situation, money can be more important than real ammunition” (Petraeus 2006, 4; emphasis added). Along these lines, the US army has set out guidelines on how to deploy money in its Commander’s Guide to Money as a Weapons System: Tactics, Techniques and Procedures (commonly referred to as MAAWS by the military). Money is touted as a “non-kinetic force” that can win the hearts and minds of the local population by stimulating the economy through infrastructure development, job creation, and business stimulation. While the US has taken the lead in this monetary turn, the British Army Field Manual on Countering Insurgency also identifies a central role for money (MOD 2009). A sub-section of chapter 8, entitled “Using money on the battlefield”, focuses on creating opportunities for employment and short-term projects (with an eye to longer term economic security). The allusion to weaponry is less strong, but money is nonetheless described “as a much needed economy of force measure” that is at least as effective as physical force (8-3). Indeed, the field manual affirms that “[c]areful target selection for the use of money may prove as important as targeting for kinetic operations” (8-10).

In this paper, I suggest that the characterization of money as a “weapons system” denotes a different kind of warfare. It is not that the relationship between militaries and money is new. Indeed, militaries have always been deeply enmeshed in markets and economies, both domestically and in conflict scenarios. As Erica Schoenberger (2008) illustrates, the emergence of market economies is directly linked to territorial expansion and war fighting, and can be traced back at least to ancient Greece. Armed forces have regularly been deployed to protect economic interests and secure access to resources, usually in opposition to the local population. Colonial occupation has relied on political and economic intervention supported by military power. In post-conflict scenarios, soldiers have been engaged with development and reconstruction, e.g. in the occupations of Germany and Japan after WWII. Moreover, militaries are productive of markets, in times of war and peace, and gain influence through their commissioning and contracting. The rising economic clout of the armed forces was precisely what US President Eisenhower cautioned against in his Farewell Address in 1961, which noted the encroaching military–industrial complex.

Yet there is clearly something distinctive about the weaponization of money with respect to how war is being fought. As US Lieutenant Colonel Mark Martins suggests, the use of money by soldiers denotes a dramatic change from the traditional “cash-free or cash-starved” battlefield (Martins 2004, 12). Militaries are not simply securing state access to resources. Nor is it about providing logistical support to post-conflict reconstruction. Rather, soldiers are taking on direct control of economic initiatives as a core part of their warfare strategy. Wielding money is seen as crucial to combat. Counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine, for example, sets out protocol for direct military spending across a wide array of development-style projects, including school-building, infrastructure development (roads, electricity, pipelines, etc.), and agricultural support. Department of Defense (DoD) monies are even being used to support microfinance schemes, a point which I will return to below. Furthermore, military operations now embrace the remaking of economies and populations along the lines of neoliberal economics in ways that support liberalization, deregulation, privatization, and entrepreneurialism. Export-oriented markets are to be stimulated, international business opportunities encouraged, and links with Western corporations forged, all in the name of waging and winning war.

While considerable criticism has been levied at the primitive accumulation and neoliberal reconstruction that has been undertaken in the name of the “war on terror” – especially in Iraq (e.g. Klein 2004; Lafer 2004; Martin 2007; Schwartz 2007) – this work largely does not attend to the specific role played by the armed forces in this reconstruction, nor the doctrinal changes that have facilitated it. Another considerable body of work on COIN, much of it drawing upon the writings of Michel Foucault on governmentality, has critically examined how the military has refocused its efforts onto governing through the population (e.g. Reid 2006; Gregory 2008; Dillon and Reid 2009; Anderson 2011; Khalili 2013; Owens 2013). This literature has demonstrated how the population is targeted as an asset to be nurtured through enacting good governance, the rule of law, policing, social programmes, psychological actions, etc. Particular attention has been addressed to the military’s covetous acquisition of social and cultural knowledge – e.g. military–civilian partnerships such as the Human Terrain System – so as to win the “hearts and minds” of the population (e.g. Gregory 2008; Owens 2013). Little of this work, however, directly addresses the economic dimensions of COIN, or its appeal to money as a tool for warfighting.

This paper draws upon these critical works, but expands their analysis to examine the use of money as a weapons system. Further, it resonates with Randy Martin’s careful excavation of the dovetailing of military and financial logics in the “war on terror” (Martin 2007). Yet whereas Martin focuses on the rationales and logics of war, the focus of this paper is on tactics and strategies. I focus on US military doctrine and the way it reveals a turn towards the economic, including the COIN manual, the MAAWS handbook (and its particular iterations for Iraq and Afghanistan), the guidebook for the Commander’s Emergency Response Program, and the Stability Operations manual. This analysis is supplemented by a wide range of military and government reviews of these programmes, as well as papers issued by public policy institutes and non-governmental organizations, United States Agency for International Development (USAID) documents, and the reports of investigative journalists, to illustrate how these policies have been put into practice. The specific focus of the paper is on the US, but as I have already intimated with the reference to the British counterinsurgency manual (MOD 2009), the weaponization of money is more widespread.

Two underlying questions weave throughout this paper: how is the US military using money as a weapon as part of its combat activities? And what are the implications of the military’s use of money as a weapon? To address these questions, I begin in the following section with an overview of how money is characterized as a “weapons system”. Drawing upon the critical work on the rise of “non-lethal weapons”, I suggest that the turn to money, while characterized as non-violent, nonetheless brings about its own kinds of violence. I then examine the development-style projects that have become core to counterinsurgency projects, with particular attention on the use of micro-loans, which have been paid for through the Commander’s Emergency Response Program. Subsequently, I extend this analysis to the Task Force on Business and Stability Operations to illustrate how the military has become closely entangled in business creation and entrepreneurialism in ways that exceed the turn to COIN. In the final section of the paper, I consider some of the problematic implications that arise from this retooling of money as core to combat activities, and the ways that money is mobilized as both military strategy and tactic.

II. Money as a weapons system

The Commander’s Guide to Money as a Weapons System: Tactics, Techniques and Procedures (MAAWS) was issued in April 2009. As its title suggests, the handbook provides guidelines on how and why money is to be deployed in the field. The rationale for the weaponization of money is captured as follows: “Warfighters at brigade, battalion, and company level in a counterinsurgency (COIN) environment employ money as a weapons system to win the hearts and minds of the indigenous population to facilitate defeating the insurgents” (US Army 2009, 1; emphasis added). “Warfighters” deploy funding on the battlefield so that they “can influence the outcome of operations with both temporary and, hopefully, permanent results” (US Army 2009, 3). As the emphasis on “warfighters” suggests, and as Colonel T.A. Clay clearly states in his forward to the handbook: “Money and contracting are vital elements of combat power” (US Army 2009, 1; emphasis added). Two crucial points rise to the surface in these statements. First, the explicit objective of military spending is laid bare: it is to win the hearts and minds of the population so as to win the war. Second, money is positioned as part of warfare, not extraneous to it. Money is a tool of combat.

Money is to be spent on “high payoff projects/purchases and ha[s] proven to be an excellent enabler for winning the ‘hearts and minds’ of the Iraqi people” (MAAWS 2010, 16). The MAAWS handbook notes in several places that monies can be used to motivate “antigovernment forces to cease lethal and nonlethal operations, by creating and providing jobs along with other forms of financial assistance to the indigenous population, and by restoring or creating vital infrastructure” (MAAWS 2009, i). Money is therefore being used to invest in the population, or its “logistical life”, so as to provide short-term relief, but also to instill “a belief in the future – the belief that things will get better” (Anderson 2011, 218). As Ben Anderson has remarked, this intervention in the future is used “to prevent the formation or appearance of future insurgents”, or at least to dissuade some from joining the insurgency (Anderson 2011, 208). Along with other aspects of COIN, it denotes a dramatic reshaping of war in that the population is the target of support and investment. It is an example, as many scholars have already noted, of a military turn to biopower – the administration of life – alongside its traditional role as a harbinger of death (e.g. Reid 2006; Gregory 2008; Khalili 2013; Owens 2013).

But if money is being used to target civilian life with investment, it is also – as its characterization as a weapon makes clear – being used as an instrument of security and protection for the invading troops. Indeed, money is described as a “force multiplier” that can reduce the number of deaths of the international forces (Bronowski and Fisher 2010). A correlation was first observed with the monies that US troops distributed to the Iraqi people in the months after the invasion. These were the confiscated monies and assets from the government of Iraq President Saddam Hussein, e.g. the bundles of money found hidden in the homes of officials that were “returned” to the population with the aim of providing emergency relief and reconstruction (Petraeus 2006, 5). Anecdotal evidence at the time indicated that as these monies ran out, the deaths of soldiers rose steeply: in November 2003 – when cash payments from Hussein’s funds stopped being made – the number of dead US soldiers rose to 81 (compared to 31 in September 2003, and 42 in October 2003). While the correlative evidence was weak, it was used to support the idea that the deployment of money is a “force multiplier” and leads to enhanced combat capacity.

The “found” money thus appealed to the US military because it was ready cash that could be wielded with little oversight, and appeared to have immediate results, both in reducing military deaths and in fostering relations with the local population. Once it was depleted, the military advocated for regularizing a source of ready cash. This was realized with the Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP) which was introduced in Iraq in 2003 and extended to Afghanistan in 2004. CERP is the largest source of discretionary funding for commanders in the field – and will be discussed in more detail in the following section. But it is important to note that it is only one of a dozen funding programmes identified by MAAWS, each of which has different mandates, such as the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program for contracting military services, the Iraqi and Afghan Security Forces Funds, and the very ambiguously titled catch-all “Other People’s Money”. Seven general guidelines are set out for these many funds, construed as a clever acrostic poem:

At each step in the process, a multitude of forms need to be submitted, and while the Commander’s Guide opines that this may be “extremely burdensome” in a combat environment, it is “necessary for good stewardship” (US Army 2009, i). Yet although the internal bureaucracy is high, there is almost no accountability for the ways that money is spent. Indeed, the only cautionary note in the handbook is that all spending must “stand up to a Congressional inquiry and must not cause embarrassment to the Department of Defense” (US Army 2009, 3). This lack of oversight will be returned to below.

As with any other weapons system, specialized training is provided to the cadre of soldiers who will deploy money in the field, which includes paying agents (PAs), project purchasing officers (PPOs), and field ordering officers (FOOs) (US Army 2009: 19–21). As with any other weapon, military training exercises are to completed before field operations: “Training developers, trainers, and observer/controllers should incorporate money as a weapons system scenarios into mission rehearsal exercises with resource management subject matter experts/mentors who coach PAs, FOOs, and PPOs on likely situations they will encounter while deployed” (US Army 2009, 65). Some legal review is provided by judge advocates whose role it is to assess whether a proposed military-funded project meets the MAAWS guidelines. The ultimate responsibility, however, lies with senior command, who have significant discretionary control over the considerable monies available to them. In Iraq, brigade commanders can approve projects up to US $50,000, while the threshold for division commanders is $100,000. In Afghanistan, projects are generally to be less than US $50,000, and all require a legal review (although this may be informal for projects under $25,000). Projects are meant to be capped at US $2 million, but this can be waived, with the approval of US Central Command (CENTCOM) or the Secretary of Defense (US Army 2009, 18). For example, US $33 million was (controversially) put towards a “hotel, office and retail complex at Baghdad International Airport” (Hedgpeth and Cohen 2008).

There have been mounting questions within and outside the military regarding how money has been spent – as with the case of the Baghdad International Airport. But the use of money as weapon, both offensively and defensively, is undeniable. Yet if money is presented as a weapon, it is a certain kind: it is a “non-lethal weapon” that can be deployed “without creating collateral damage” (US Army 2009, 1). It thus sits alongside a rising arsenal of “non-lethal weapons” such as stun guns, rubber bullets, and tear gas that are being used across security services such as the military and the police. These weapons, Seantel Anaïs suggests, are aligned with discourses of “benign intervention” that project war as humane, ethical, and righteous (Anaïs 2011, 539). Yet as Anaïs and others have shown, non-lethal weapons are neither benign nor virtuous. They might not be intended to cause injury or death, but they can incur their own form of violence, just as tear gas can cause permanent damage, or tasers can, and do, kill (Roberts, Secor, and Sparke 2003). They are invariably used alongside other weapons that are designed to harm or to kill (Davison 2009), although how soldiers are to navigate between deploying money and deploying conventional weapons is left unsaid – a point that I will return to below. Finally, despite the allusion to non-violence, these weapons enact their own kind of harm in the ways that they seek to force compliance from a population that is deemed to be “‘threatening’ and therefore in need of control” (Anaïs 2011, 547). Poverty, unemployment, and other forms of human insecurity are constituted as grounds for economic intervention, rather than understood as human vulnerability – a vulnerability enacted in large part because of military and foreign actions (Anaïs 2011, 548–9).

In the remainder of this paper, I will examine how the weaponization of money is coercive and compels compliance, by turning to two ways military spending is unfolding. The first is the development-style spending authorized through CERP, and the second is the Task Force on Business and Stability Operations, which is used to forge partnerships with Western companies to stimulate economies. Among other things, these programmes emphasize the importance of implanting an entrepreneurial economy that will promote global trade and open markets. I thus suggest that, as with other technological innovations, the weaponization of money is reshaping the staging and waging of war in new – and problematic – ways. Yet, as Vikkel Rasmussen argues, what is interesting about the introduction of new technologies is not so much their newness – for they are never entirely new anyway, as we will see with respect to money – but how they become the fulcrum for “a redefinition of political goals” (2009, 44). It is this redefinition of political goals that I will emphasize in the conclusion as I reflect on the ways that money is being mobilized to secure a particular kind of economic “freedom” – that is, neoliberal entrepreneurialism and marketization – as a core military principle, overshadowing more conventional rhetoric around political freedoms – e.g. peace, democracy, and emancipation.

III. The Commander’s Emergency Response Program

The Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP) is the largest source of funding available to the military. In alignment with MAAWS, its stated objective is to “shape the battlefield by funding projects that provide immediate, tangible relief to the indigenous populations, as well as inject money into the local economies by providing jobs to the unemployed” (US Army 2008a, 6). Between 2003 and 2015, over US $8 billion was allocated through CERP to warfighters (Belasco 2014, 53). While CERP is used for a range of projects, such as emergency relief or victim compensation (Gilbert 2015), it mainly funds development-style initiatives that include building sewage plants, hospitals, schools and community centres; reconstructing telecommunications and irrigation systems; developing food and agricultural projects; and repairing battle damage. “Best practices” and “lessons learned” are drawn from the development community as soldiers take on the responsibilities usually associated with foreign providers (US Army 2008a, 25). As the handbook notes, with CERP commanders have “a means to conduct multiple stability tasks that have traditionally been performed by US, foreign, or indigenous professional civilian personnel or agencies” (US Army 2009, i).

With CERP, the military is thus staging itself as an institution ready, able, and necessary to the implementation of development strategies. Indeed, whereas foreign aid was previously configured as an alternative to military engagement, what we see happening today is that economic development is being restructured as constitutive of warfare – not just as a post-conflict military operation. This denotes a dramatic change since the US Foreign Assistance Act was introduced by President John F. Kennedy in 1961. In the wake of enormous post-WWII military expansion, one aim of the Act was to limit military power by differentiating between military and non-military aid. It created USAID as a separate agency responsible for international development, which would be independent from the State Department (Essex 2013). At the same time, the DoD would be limited to administering security and military assistance, e.g. “transfers of US military weapons, equipment, and training to recipient governments” (Mott 2002, 4). Attempts were thus made to remove the military from aid that was not directly related to security needs.

As scholars such as Mark Duffield and Jamey Essex have deftly illustrated, however, this distinction has always been blurred: development has always been securitized (e.g. Duffield 2007, 2014; Essex 2013). Yet, less attention has been addressed to the ways that the military has taken up development practices. The military-development nexus is not new, but as the weaponization of money suggests, it is taking new shape in the “war on terror”. It draws from histories of military colonial intervention, as the COIN handbook makes clear, from the French Army’s experiences in Algeria, to British imperial policing in Malaya and Kenya, to US interventions in Latin America (US Army 2007, xxiv; see also Gregory 2008; Khalili 2013). It has also been informed by the “pacification” strategy in Vietnam, and the deepened forms of civil-military alliance through programmes such as Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support also informs COIN operations (US Army 2007, 73–4). But since the 1990s, and the end of the Cold War, a number of other changes have unfolded which have made the military-development nexus more pronounced. The military began branching out into a whole-of-government or nation-building approach, with a formal recognition of “operations other than war”, such as peacekeeping, arms control, and anti-drug operations, which were seen as supplementary to combat activity. The Kosovo War, however, was a turning point. First, the war was waged in the name of humanitarianism, with human vulnerability being made a pretext for military intervention (e.g. Chomsky 1999). Second, troops in Kosovo were instrumental in providing direct relief – and not just logistical support – to the thousands of refugees in camps in Macedonia (Lischer 2007). As Toby Porter explains, the military actions went well beyond the role they played in other disaster relief scenarios: “In addition to [their] traditional tasks, the military designed and built refugee camps, and, in some cases, took on responsibility for providing direct services to refugees” (Porter 2000). The role of aid agencies was usurped, as the military orchestrated the humanitarian response. The direct refugee assistance provided by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces was seen as crucial to the military’s ability to secure the region – described as a “force multiplier” by then-US Secretary of State Colin Powell (Lischer 2007, 99).

While the military expansive role was not without its critics, within and outside the armed forces, it was a precursor to the affirmation of development as one of the three prongs of national security, alongside diplomacy and defence, in the 2002 US National Security Strategy. The military’s influence in development-style programmes has since increased exponentially. More and more foreign aid is being siphoned through the DoD. As Stewart Patrick and Kaysie Brown have documented, “between 2002 and 2005, the share of US official development assistance (ODA) channeled through the Pentagon budget surged from 5.6 percent to 21.7 percent, rising to $5.5 billion” (Patrick and Brown 2007, 1). This increase can be traced to the deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the amount has continued to increase into the twenty-first century. By fiscal year 2012, the aid budget of the US Pentagon rose to US $17 billion, and thus exceeded the aid budget of the US State Department by about $10 billion, for the second year in a row (Anon 2011).¹ Yet, it is not simply the amount of money in the hands of the armed forces, but the kinds of activities that it is taking up that reflect its more expansive role. This is perhaps nowhere more clear than with the provision of micro-loans. Under CERP, military commanders are authorized to provide individuals with up to US $2500 to fund an appropriately submitted business proposal. These “low- or fixed-interest loans” are intended “to encourage entrepreneurial investment and host-nation enterprise creation” (US Army 2008a, 5–7; see also 2009, 7). This affirmation of entrepreneurialism is also stressed in each of the MAAWS manuals prepared for Iraq and Afghanistan (see MAAWS 2009, 15, 45, 2010, B-2-1).

Micro-loans are a favoured instrument of the neoconservative development community for whom they have become “the panacea of choice” (Roy 2010, 22). As Ananya Roy has noted, they are a “highly popular poverty intervention” that encourage market-based solutions to “underdevelopment” so that impoverished peoples can transform “themselves into self-sufficient microentrepreneurs” (Roy 2012, 132, 134). They are used to discipline the population, and to make it compliant by promoting a certain kind of financial subject who becomes, literally, indebted to the liberal way of life (Martin 2007, 36; Langley 2008, 34). Populations are surveilled, assessed, regulated, and managed with respect to how decisions about entrepreneurial potential are determined. CERP micro-grants have been “given primarily to business owners” which one former PRT member describes as “creat[ing] the perception within the community that our only interest was ‘making the rich richer’” (Stone 2010, 156). Whereas in other places (especially in South Asia), it has been the “Third World” woman who animates financialization (Roy 2010, 144), in Iraq and Afghanistan, the subjects of micro-finance have largely been young, unemployed men. This gendered difference arises because of the pervasive narratives of failed states in the “war on terror”, with disenfranchised young men seen as particularly prone to violence and disruption, and hence as a proxy symptom for impending state collapse (USAID 2006). Micro-loans feed into an “anxious discourse” that has been generated “about youth and terrorism, as if the choices facing young men (and women) in the Middle East are clearly defined: be an entrepreneur and sell falafel or become a suicide bomber” (Roy 2010, 147).

There is a violence to this divide: only some lives are optimized, while the rest are left behind as surplus populations who lack the same protections and entitlements – or the same encouragement to be entrepreneurs (Duffield 2007, 10; Dillon and Reid 2009). Furthermore, micro-loans reinforce a more insidious narrative that projects the military as benevolent (or, at best, benign), while casting loanees as “hapless and generally passive recipients of aid” – who ought to be grateful for the heroic support that they are provided (Christie 2012, 62; see also Razack 2004, 10; Fluri 2012). Money as a “non-lethal” weapon is thus both being wielded as a tool of coercion, and being used to affirm the military’s goodwill. At the same time, traditional violence continues to unfold, for as Ryerson Christie notes, “combat and development roles are aspects of the same intervention” (Christie 2012, 60). The deployment of money is not being framed as a supplement to regular soldiering, but as constitutive of it, alongside traditional forms of fighting and traditional weapons.

Yet, as Jonathan Gilmore reminds us, “how soldiers trained and equipped primarily for high-impact war-fighting will, in practice, switch fluidly from one posture to another” between non-lethal and kinetic weapons is not explained (Gilmore 2011, 27; see also Christie 2012). This prompts important questions as to whether economic spending is an appropriate mission for soldiers, whose primary task continues to be combat. While non-government and state aid agencies are not without their problems (e.g. Fluri 2012), particular issues arise when this kind of development is delivered through the armed forces. As Duffield notes, militaries and aid organizations fundamentally differ with respect to their “organisation, structure and purpose” (Duffield 2014, 60). The ways that they define the problem, and the solutions they concoct, invariably reflect these differences. Whereas development organizations tend to be focused on the long term, with an eye to a project’s sustainability, military monies likely need to be spent within the fiscal year, or within the cycle of a unit’s tour (Stone 2010, 154). The speed of projects means that consultations with the community are rare, and local authorities are sidestepped, which can create bad will (Stone 2010; Fishstein and Wilder 2012, 23). Where projects are located has also been criticized because military monies are focused on security hotspots – where the armed forces are located and where they are vulnerable – which means that more peaceful areas are being penalized for being more secure (Wilder and Gordon 2009; see also USGAO 2008, 36). Finally, as the distinctions between humanitarian and military personnel have become more blurred, this has endangered the lives of aid workers, and has compromised their traditional principles of neutrality, impartiality, and independence (Christie 2012, 63, 65; Weizman 2011, 52; Lischer 2007, 101).

These criticisms all raise important issues regarding how and where military money is spent. Particularly troubling is the lack of oversight, assessment, and transparency, which even commanders in the field have complained about (Bowen and Collier 2013). The US Government Accountability Office has identified a lack of monitoring and of performance metrics, but also a lack of personnel with adequate training in either management or project assessment skills (e.g. USGAO 2008, 2009). Schools are built, but with no provisions for hiring and retaining teachers (Fishstein and Wilder 2012, 48). More egregious instances of inappropriate spending were documented in a Washington Post investigative report that examined 26,000 documents made available through freedom of information legislation. It found a number of odd expenses, including about US $100,000 worth of dolls and $500,000 for action figures made to look like Iraqi Security Forces, with another $14,250 spent on “I Love Iraq” t-shirts (Hedgpeth and Cohen 2008).

Despite all the problems identified with CERP, it persists. Millions of dollars continue to be approved on a yearly basis by US Congress, to be paid out of taxpayer monies. The fund has also been extended; in 2008, for example, Operation Enduring Freedom-Philippines gained access to CERP. Thus, the military continues to stage itself as an institution ready, able, and necessary to implement economic development. Soldiers are increasingly being expected to make decisions about spending on the battlefield, with respect to both large projects and individual loans. This is being folded in as part of combat duties, alongside the violence of conventional weapons. As Ryerson Christie reminds us, now “combat and development roles are aspects of the same intervention” (Christie 2012, 60). Yet, as the examples above suggest, while money is presented as a non-lethal weapon, it still enacts its own kinds of violence of coercion and compliance. Some members of the population are being targeted for investment, as potential entrepreneurs, while others are excluded. Monies are being spent without consultation with the community, and reflect the military’s own interests in winning “hearts and minds”. At the same time, there is very little oversight as to how decisions are made, how money is being spent and whether it is effective. Yet, if the weaponization of money has intensified with the rapprochement between military and development initiatives, this is only one part of the story. Using money as a “weapons system” is also about instituting full-scale economic reform. It is to this that we turn in the following section.

IV. The Task Force for Business and Stability Operations

One little-discussed aspect of COIN is its emphasis on economic transformation. Yet COIN is replete with allusions to market reform, free trade, banking, and entrepreneurialism. The COIN manual carves out a military role for implementing “support for a free market economy”, which is oriented to commodification, international trade, and entrepreneurialism (US Army 2007, 156). Soldiers must work to “stimulat[e] indigenous, robust, and broad economic activity” through both short- and long-term interventions in the micro- and macro-economy to promote businesses so that they can “thrive”, to reduce unemployment, and to ensure access to banking (US Army 2007, 171–3). Economic intervention is thus not just about bringing about traditional development-style initiatives and economic stability, but imposing models of growth that will bring about structural adjustments to the economy.

The clearest example of the military’s economic imprint is in Iraq, where, as many critics have already noted, a laissez-faire, “neocon utopia” has been ushered in through a suite of transformations, among them the privatization of state-owned enterprises and the encouragement of foreign ownership (Klein 2004; see also Lafer 2004; Martin 2007; Schwartz 2007). Government representatives, aid agencies, and private companies have all played a role in neoliberal marketization, but so too has the military. DoD monies have been used “to encourage Iraqi workers and businesses to engage in self-sustaining market-based economic activities” (Bronowski and Fisher 2010, 50). This includes events such as the Conference of the Entrepreneur Business Professionals of Iraq, hosted by the 354th Civil Affairs Brigade in the Fall of 2003, attended by more than 200 young business professionals between the ages of 21 and 35 who listened to talks on how to create and manage business in a global economy (Petraeus 2006, 5). There was also the multi-million dollar (and aptly named) Operation Adam Smith, led by the First Cavalry Division, whose mission was to “revitalize Baghdad’s commercial districts and eventually build a business incubator at Baghdad University” (Gajilan 2004). It was tasked with “setting up local chambers of commerce, providing Iraqi entrepreneurs with small business loans, and teaching them important skills like accounting, marketing and writing business plans” (Stevenson 2005). While these plans were not fully implemented, they are indicative of the expansion of military actions well beyond its usual involvement in development or “humanitarian” missions, from building financial infrastructure to imparting economic literacy.

In Afghanistan, the military’s economic imprint has been focused more along the lines of “modernization” rather than dramatic neoliberalization (Nawa 2006; Suhrke 2007). This has included innovations such as the Provincial Reconstruction Teams (which were later expanded to Iraq), and Military Agribusiness Teams, founded in 2008, to impart US knowledge and skills to Afghan farmers, with the aim of transitioning from subsistence farming to a profit-oriented and export-market economy. Also at work is the military’s Task Force for Business and Stability Operations (TFBSO), which has been used to forge private-sector partnerships with US businesses. Introduced in Iraq in 2006, and then expanded to Afghanistan in 2010, its mandate has been to work directly with local government to advance economic interests in “alignment to theater commanders’ goals for reconstruction and economic development” (Berteau et al. 2010, 9). Addressing unemployment is a core objective, as are leveraging private-sector development and negotiating partnerships with international business interests.

The reach of the TFBSO has been broad. A 2009 assessment by the Center for Strategic and International Studies listed its successes in Iraq as follows:

In Afghanistan – where efforts have been redirected as military operations have wound down in Iraq – the Task Force has focused more on agriculture and communications technology, with mineral development an emergent area, including the gem industry (USGAO 2011, 3).² At the same time, US business interests have been encouraged to set up shop in Afghanistan, with visits organized for representatives of CitiBank, IBM, Sweet Dried Fruit, and the fashion company Kate Spade, among others (USGAO 2011; Kelly 2011). A particular example of TFBSO activity in Afghanistan is the building of “a raisin processing facility in Kandahar to process raisins for export. [The TFBSO] also facilitated meetings for Sweet Dried Fruit, the largest US importer of raisins, to purchase Afghan raisins for the US market” (USGAO 2011, 6).

As one senior military general noted, “The Task Force brought the private sector to the battlefield, and they are to be credited with bringing that tool of US power to bear” (Berteau et al. 2010, 55). The profiteering attached to US contracting, especially companies such as Bechtel, Halliburton, and the Carlyle Group in Iraq, has already been well documented, and vehemently criticized (e.g. Klein 2004; Lafer 2004; Schwartz 2007). What is different with respect to the TFBSO is the role of the military in facilitating this corporate contracting. This relationship is not happenstance, as was made clear in the debates that arose in 2011 when it was proposed that the TFBSO be reallocated to USAID. Paul A. Brinkley, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense, who headed the TFBSO first in Iraq and then in Afghanistan, argued vehemently against this transition. He argued: “We do capitalism. We’re about helping companies make money…. That mind-set cannot exist in a humanitarian organization. It’s like asking General Motors to make potato chips” (Chandrasekaran 2011). For Brinkley, the humanitarian mandate of USAID – with its concern for infrastructure (health clinics, power plants) and effective regulatory policy – was presented as anathema to good business (USGAO 2011, 6). Conversely, he argued that the military is able to “make potato chips”. It is not hamstrung by bureaucratic oversight, for even though internal accounting can be quite onerous, as a military agency the TFBSO stands outside the usual oversight required of development initiatives – much as CERP has been criticized for its lack of civilian oversight. Moreover, the hierarchical chain of command with its clear lines of authority enables quick decision-making, in contrast to the slow speed of democratic process and consultation of other units. Finally, the military can move freely, even in high-security zones, which is seen to provide it with a competitive advantage compared to aid agencies (USGAO 2011, n.p.).³

The TFBSO is slated for closure in March 2015, yet some of its objectives linger in the broader military doctrine on Stability Operations, which was made a “core US military mission” in 2005.⁴ There is not the same twinned focus on “Business and Stability Operations” as there is with the Task Force, but Stability Operations contains within it a focus on economic transformation – along with a range of other objectives such as good governance, the rule of law, social welfare and policing. A subsection of the 2008 field manual, FM 3-07: Stability Operations, is even entitled “Support Economic Generation and Enterprise Creation”. The manual stresses the importance of developing entrepreneurial economies and tasks the military with the creation of a “viable market economy”. This includes “infusing monetary resources into the local economy, stimulating market activity, fostering recovery through microeconomics, and supporting the restoration of physical infrastructure” (US Army 2008b, 3.15). Military responsibilities encompass job creation development and reconstruction projects, but also the provision of “start-up capital for small businesses through small-scale enterprise grants”, encouraging the development of lending and other financial institutions, including a central bank and the national treasury, and “provid[ing] investors with protection and incentives” (US Army 2008b, 3.16–7).

Jennifer Taw has characterized Stability Operations as “the armed forces’ most fundamental adjustment since the establishment of the Department of Defence in 1947” (Taw 2012, 2). While military efforts to enact structural change in populations have a long history – from actions against domestic populations (e.g. against indigenous peoples and Mormons) to foreign missions (e.g. during WWII, and in Lebanon and Vietnam) – what is different with Stability Operations is that this interventionism has come to be been positioned as core to combat activities, not as incidental to conventional warfare. As with the principle of “money as a weapons system”, economic transformation is to be deployed by ‘warfighters’ as part of warfare. Furthermore, “phase-zero” or “shaping operations”, as they are called, are being mobilized in non-conflict or pre-conflict scenarios to avert future conflict. This is in evidence with the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM), which, since its creation in 2008, has extended whole-of-government activities across the continent, including counterterrorism initiatives, but also “preventative involvement in issues of health, infrastructure and governance” (Bachmann 2014, 120). These operations have been directed towards the fear of an emergent threat, rather than against an identifiable imminent attack. Marketization is not foregrounded, but making Africa safe for markets is clearly part of AFRICOM’s agenda. And, perhaps especially problematically, as with other examples of the weaponization of money, these interventions are happening alongside conventional forms of kinetic power even though there has been no formal declaration of war (Turse 2014).⁵

For Roger Mac Ginty, the rise of Stability Operations is indicative that the value of peace has been “side-lined” in favour of “stabilization” and “security”, both of which are “concepts that are based on ideas of control” rather than principles of “emancipation, autonomy, and dissent” (Mac Ginty 2012, 20). He suggests that this “is an attempt to create compliant, market-friendly any-states that do not threaten the international order” which “often privileges some groups and systems of governance over others, and creates a political economy of prestige and resources around the newly built or reformed state” (Mac Ginty 2012, 28). The parallels with CERP and MAAWS are clear. Rather than bottom-up solutions that attend to the real needs and interests of local populations, the emphasis on international trade, entrepreneurialism and private-sector partnerships reflects the interests of investors, and their military intermediaries. Just as private forms of aid are usually donor-driven, rather than locally determined, the military response is likely to be selective and unevenly distributed (Duffield 2014). In this sense, the militarized liberalization of the economy runs counter to the principles of representation, equality, and redistribution that COIN and Stability Operations both ostensibly appeal to in their emphasis on good governance. Furthermore, these operations, when housed under military purview, lack democratic oversight. Yet perhaps most problematic – and the most damning – is that none of these efforts have been successful in bringing about either economic growth or the end to conflict. In fact, economic instability has increased in both Iraq and Afghanistan, which has fomented armed resistance and insurgency against the international troops – exactly the opposite of the military’s stated goals (Weggeland 2011; Schwartz 2007; Abboud 2009). And yet, calls for military entrepreneurialism persist, as we shall see in the following section.

V. The entrepreneurial way of war

The turn to the economic shows no signs of abating. Writing in 2010 in Foreign Affairs, a bellwether journal on US foreign policy, Carl J. Schramm makes an argument for a new military strategy of “expeditionary economics”. Echoing the turn to development, he urges that “postconflict economic reconstruction must become a core competence of the US military” – a third prong alongside invasion and stabilization (Schramm 2010, 90). More specifically, Schramm, who was then President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, proposed that military reconstruction should be organized around entrepreneurialism, with an emphasis on creating high-growth small- and medium-sized businesses that can generate innovative and dynamic approaches to economic viability. Venture-capital capital financing, or grants along the lines of the United States’ Small Business Innovation Research Program, were presented as viable frameworks for investment to be initiated by the armed forces. Echoing many of the debates that have been rehearsed above, Schramm argued that the military is the most appropriate vehicle to bring about entrepreneurialism because aid agencies have been ineffective at economic reconstruction and don’t have the speed and flexibility of the military. Soldiers are well positioned to implement economic transformation, he argued, because they are located in areas of conflict, focused on limited and short-term actions, and have a wide range of financial and other resources at their command. They can be trained to “facilitate economic growth by helping to identify the entrepreneurial aspirations of certain individuals” (Schramm 2010, 94). To this end, he proposed revitalizing the US Army School of Government – which was tasked in the Cold War with training US personnel to govern occupied territories – and renaming it the “Military Economic Analysis Institute”, which would focus on training for military-driven economic reconstruction (Schramm 2010, 36).

While the concept of “expeditionary economics” has not been explicitly adopted by the military, as we have seen throughout this paper, entrepreneurialism is already a core economic concept being mobilized by the armed forces, and commanders are already making decisions about how money is to be spent. Indeed, Schramm makes his proposals precisely to formalize the more ad hoc initiatives that are already underway. Writing in 1990, Edward Luttwak already noted the ways that conflict was being waged through economic tools. He identified a shift in foreign policy whereby more importance was being ascribed to geoeconomics, with its “admixture of the logic of conflict and the methods of commerce” (Luttwak 1990, 17–9). His celebratory affirmation of the power of commerce has been roundly critiqued, e.g. for its universalism, ahistoricism, and imperialism. Deborah Cowen and Neil Smith, for example, unfurl a much longer history of geoeconomic domination by the US that is located in the early decades of the twentieth century, not at its end. They detail the ongoing “accumulation of wealth through market control” that runs from the Open Door trade policy, to the Bretton Woods institutions, to the World Trade Organization, to name but a few examples (Cowen and Smith 2009, 42). For all the validity of these criticisms, however, Luttwak made an important point with his assertion that “in the new ‘geo-economic’ era not only the causes but also the instruments of conflict must be economic” (Luttwak 1990, 21; emphasis in the original). Writing in the shadow of the fall of the Berlin Wall, when capitalism appeared to be ascendant, Luttwak identified trade restrictions, subsidies, and social and business investment as examples of how geoeconomic conflict was being waged. The deployment of money on the battlefield thus sits alongside a diverse set of economic instruments that are being mobilized to impose geoeconomic strategies, but are indicative of the ways that these instruments are shaping military tactics and combat roles.

These transformations also resonate with the ways that the military itself has sought to become more entrepreneurial in its structure. As then-US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld pronounced in 2002, the military

This has been realized, in part, with the turn to “network centric warfare”, which has emerged alongside economic and technological change. This “may be summed up by the idea that networked relationships become more critical to military flexibility, adaptability and multitasking than the traditional vision of ‘silos’ of military might and firepower” and with the turn to the “network centric warrior” who “is required to a far greater extent to be innovative, flexible and to act as an informed decision maker” (O’Malley 2013, 190; see also Martin 2007). Military entrepreneurialism can also be seen with the ways that the military is adopting core business values and shifting to a competitive model of outsourcing war to private military contractors (Snukal and Gilbert forthcoming).

Thus, despite the persistent criticism of CERP, the fact that the TFBSO is slated for closure, the ways that COIN appears to be falling out of favour (e.g. Kaplan 2013), and the shift away from “prolonged stability operations” by the Obama government (USDOD 2012, 6; emphasis in the original), the military’s affirmation of money as a tool, and entrepreneurialism as an outcome are firmly entrenched. To bring this discussion to a conclusion, I want to suggest that the military embrace of the economic with respect to its organization, strategies, tactics, and rationale has at least three troubling implications: (1) it reinforces marketization and entrepreneurialism as military objectives; (2) it undermines the role of the state without introducing alternative forms of governance; and (3) it advances a concept of security that is defined in terms of secure markets rather than human security. First, the military is using money as a tactic to instil economic change, as well as positing the imposition of an export-oriented economy as its long-term strategy. This is not only about the armed forces playing a role in “augmenting” neoliberal economics (Roberts, Secor, and Sparke 2003, 887), but also about entrenching military capacity to implement marketization and entrepreneurialism. While, as noted in the Introduction, militaries have always been called upon to support and facilitate accumulation, the turn to money as a weapon denotes a different kind of war being waged. Money is being wielded not only as a weapon with which to bring about change, but as emblematic of the very (market-based) changes that the military seeks to implement. As I have sought to show throughout this paper, this has resulted in a wide range of problems, from misspent money, to lack of oversight, to the endangerment of the lives of foreign aid workers, to the cultivation of private-sector interests. None of this has resulted in the end of conflict, or stronger economic outcomes for the general population.

Second, the military’s role in economic intervention is also changing the role of governance. This can be seen with respect to military objectives. As Cowen and Smith have noted, in the “war on terror” we have seen the ways that “market logic supplants the geopolitical logic of state territoriality” (Cowen and Smith 2009, 148). War is less about staking territorial claims than about securing access to market expansion. The weaponization of money is an example of this geoeconomic logic in that it is being used to open up foreign markets to Western investment. At the same time, there is a circumvention of local and indigenous governance in that the soldiers are tasked with managing and regulating the population through non-kinetic means by providing infrastructure, generating employment, and making micro-loans. While COIN ostensibly seeks to foster local governance, the armed forces are taking direct control of nation-building and economic development, and acting as intermediaries to private investment. Although the military is an arm of the state, its economic role in combat has been expanded precisely because it is able to leverage its “exceptionality” vis-à-vis sovereignty, territoriality, and the rule of law to implement market capitalism. Thus, even though military operations continue to be justified in terms of democratization, humanitarianism, and the rule of (Western) law, military practice undermines these state-oriented principles in favour of a militarized neoliberalism where military might is right.

Finally, with the weaponization of money, security is being recalibrated in terms of securing access to markets, rather than human security, and of safeguarding free markets rather than political or legal freedoms. The deployment of money, as a “non-lethal weapon”, is presented as a more humane and benevolent way to wage war, without recognition of the forms of coercion that are enacted through economic transformation. The targeted entrepreneurialism that it authorizes enforces a violent divide between those who are deemed able to self-manage and self-regulate, and those who are seen to be lacking these capacities. Moreover, the burden of economic risk is being offset onto individuals who are then managed through this very same risk (Martin 2007). Risk has not been mitigated; it has only been displaced. Indeed, conventional forms of kinetic violence continue to be deployed, with high casualty rates among both soldiers and civilians, and human insecurity perpetuated through damage to infrastructure.

The weaponization of money thus denotes significant and highly problematic changes with respect to how Western war is being waged through money and markets, as well as the kinds of entrepreneurial and marketized outcomes that are being imagined. These nuanced changes may be less obvious to those who endure the blunt instruments of war on the ground. For them, violence persists, regardless. Where the implications may be more palpable is with respect to the ways that war is politically legitimized in a globalizing, neoliberal world. Despite Luttwak’s insights regarding the economic instruments of conflict back in 1990, his prognosis that this would result in a weakening of the military is incorrect. The military is becoming more – not less – pervasive. Rather than be sidelined by geoeconomics, the military has folded economic practices into its own mandate. The weaponization of money works to ensure the legitimization of both militaries and markets, and secures a more central role for the military in society, and in international relations. While the distinction between war and peace has always been more blurry than either concept allows (e.g. Dillon and Reid 2009; Gregory 2011; Neocleous 2010), the weaponization of money prompts us to again rethink the ways we define our terms. For if war is economics, and the economy is war, where do war and peace begin and end? Where is the battlespace in “the everywhere war” that is unfolding (Gregory 2011)? And who is the target? In an effort to begin to address these questions, this paper has sought to shed light on the kinds of structural violences that are being enacted through the deployment of money as a weapon, which is being used not (only) to secure a “liberal peace” between states and within civil society – which has become the common justification for war in the late modern era (Neocleous 2010) – but to extend a rapacious neoliberal marketization.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.