One of the nice things about being out of the academy is that I no longer have to pretend to like over-theorized claptrap. Cowen aims at a critical history of global logistics as an applied discipline which has reconfigured shipping, production, cities, and the political economy of modern empire. She uses Marx, Foucault, cybernetics, and Queer theory to attack her subject. The end result is banal, preferring digressions on theory to discussion of the actual evidence, and overall a work which mistakes invective for criticism.

First, traditional logistics. Armies have always needed supplies, and an overwhelming concern of competent commanders is ensuring those supplies. Cowen gestures at Martin Van Crevald as one of the few historians of logistics (true), but she doesn't actually discuss military logistics. Since details matter, my own capsule summary, with what Cowen touches on in bold.

In pre-industrial times, this meant wagons and pack trains, and also since military supplies were much the same as civilian supplies, ensuring that an army moved and stayed in hostile territory, since that meant the enemy's population fed your troops. Railroads enabled strategic land logistic, and campaigns from the American Civil War to the Second World War were centered around railroads. The Second World War also saw the development of motorized blitzkrieg tactics. Motorized armies had tactical mobility greater than ever before, but required constant inputs of fuel, parts, and ammunition. Even a casual survey of WW2 shows that the key driver of Allied victory was the ability to produce more war material and deliver it to the battlefield. As Axis troops starved on Guadalcanal and froze outside Moscow, Allied forces were building strength for a series of counter-offensives which won the war. Subsequent to WW2, the American military industrial complex sponsored a series of R&D projects on improving logistics, which resulted in the development of the standardized military CONEX and civilian 20' & 40' cargo container in the 1960s. Cold War planning assumed that a war would progress too quickly to move armored divisions across the Atlantic, so REFORGER plans had pre-positioned tanks which would be united with crews flown in on chartered airliners. While REFORGER was never activated, the mobilization of forces in Desert Storm demonstrated the capability of the United States to mass overwhelming force anywhere on the planet on short notice. The key feature of the American empire since 1991 has been this overwhelming logistical superiority: With few exceptions (light armor in the initial occupation of Iraq), no American soldier anywhere on the global has lacked the material necessary for their mission. Even with political incoherence and immense expense, this logistical empire has conquered the globe.

So Cowen is not a serious military historian, which is fine. Most lefty geographers find war abhorrent. But while military and civilian logistics share genealogy and some techniques, (including a love of cybernetics inspired systems diagrams), there's a big difference between enabling high-tempo kinetic operations in an evolving strategic domain, and multi-modal value added supply chains.

The major point of the book (I decline to give it the honor of thesis) is that the actual workings of the current American empire are enacted through a doctrine of total supply chain security. This hidden foreign policy is managed through anodyne acronyms, like C-TPAP (Customs-Trade Partnership against Terrorism) and TWIC (Transportation Workers Identification Credential). Even as the border became more fortified in the wake of 9/11, public-private partnerships carved out a trusted regime of security partners, manufacturing and shipping firms qualified to manage their own inspections.

But nuggets of facts are buried in depths of theory. If I might digress for a moment, one reason why academic research is valuable is that experts have the time and skill to read things we'd rather not, like the voluminous official documentation on the DHS website about C-TPAP. My sense of this book is that the analysis of the actual materials is rather cursory. Cowen is far more interested in delving into Marx and Foucault than the actual subjects of her work. A similar lackadaisical approach to the matter is evident in the interviews, which concern a fatality of a union longshoreman, and not the grinding pace of the casual logistics worker. App-based delivery like Uber Eats or Doordash was a true start-up when this book was written in 2013, but Mother Jones was writing about the horrific conditions of warehouse workers in 2012. Again and again, Cowen points to the existence of a thing, offers a 'first-page-of-Google' summary, and then hares off in pursuit of some Theory driven explanation. It is rather telling that the most sustained and systematic analysis in the book is of the symbolism in a National Geographic produced, UPS sponsored wildlife documentary series Great Migrations.

This review is becoming rather scattered, but Deadly Life is a rather scattered book. The Mother Jones article linked above is far shorter, more focused, and has more evidence. In particular, Cowen makes the key error of using her theoretical tools to construct a monolithic strawman of a neoliberal American logistics empire, rather than using those tools to critically interrogate the gaps and contingencies in real world logistical systems and concepts. That said, Deadly Life broadly opens up some questions for further research.

1) Protection of the supply chain has become an obsession of modern states and large corporations. Yet supply chain disruption attacks have not happened? (I follow John Robb, if it had happened, he would have mentioned it). Is this due to the success of these security policies, or are they based on a fantasy? While the COVID-19 pandemic saw shortages and disruptions, these were represented by price increases and temporarily bare shelves, rather than any kind of collapse. Even road-blocking protests as part of Black Lives Matter are about disrupting commutes rather than logistics broadly. If logistics are so vulnerable, how are they so resilient?

2) Logistics Hubs underpin urban amenities, and require armies of disposable workers to function. Can these hubs work with humane labor practices? How can labor power be rebuilt against technology to render them deskilled biorobots?

3) What is the impact of American-style unlimited logistics on contemporary military operations? Can a leaner force with a smaller logistic tail still meet the political needs of American empire?

Interesting questions. However, this is not the book the answer them.