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Book Reviews 169

He also serves as the elected chair of the Chicago Chapter of the National
Writers Union, UAW #1981. His latest book is AFL–CIO’s Secret War against
Developing Country Workers: Solidarity or Sabotage? (Lexington Books, 2010 hard-
back and 2011 paperback). He can be reached at kscipes@pnc.edu, or through
his website, http://faculty.pnc.edu/kscipes.

Kennard, Matt. Irregular Army: How the US Military Recruited Neo-Nazis, Gang Members, and
Criminals to Fight the War on Terror. New York and London: Verso, 2012. 260 pp. US$26.95
(hardcover).

Matt Kennard’s recently released book Irregular Army is an exhaustively

researched account of the U.S. military force degradation since the invasion of
Afghanistan over eleven years ago. While many have chosen to take moralistic,
or abstractly political, approaches to the wars of the twenty-first century,
Kennard joins an important, and all too small, tradition of military analysis from
the position of logistical capacity and strategic effects, in the tradition of a writer
like Jeremy Scahill. The central narrative of the text centers on the U.S. military
recruitment and the loosening of requirements for the enlistment of soldiers to
be cannon-fodder for American military adventurism. Through this narrative,
however, a series of themes begin to present themselves that are, on many levels,
more compelling and central to the question of the U.S. military overextension
than the specifics of the personal stories, which are the basis for the highly
anecdotal style through which Kennard weaves this story.
Since the beginning of war in Iraq, military recruiting numbers have
decreased significantly, at a time when more troops were needed to maintain two
separate occupations in highly volatile regions of the world. The body of the text
begins with Kennard traveling to the Tampa area to interview a former soldier
who had recently returned from overseas deployment in Iraq, and who is an
open and practicing neo-Nazi. From this opening, Kennard begins to discuss the
loosening of military restrictions on the displaying of racist tattoos, and the
distribution of racist literature and paraphernalia within military units, as well as
the intentional effort that numerous neo-Nazi organizations have made to enlist,
both for weapons training and recruitment purposes. Similarly, Kennard out-
lines the process by which the limiting of restrictions on tattoos, which also
covered gang-related tattoos, created a dynamic resulting in the recruitment of
members of street gangs, who have been found to be organizing within the
military, running illegal drugs into bases and guns out of bases and on to the
streets.
Restrictions were also loosened on the entrance of felons into the ranks of
the military, through the expansion of a waiver system, which allows those with
felony records to enlist under certain circumstances. The loosening of these
requirements has led to issues in the bases around the U.S. and the world, from
the murder of soldiers over gang rivalries to racist attacks, the photographing of
a squad of soldiers in front of an SS flag in Afghanistan, to the slaughter of a
170 WORKINGUSA: THE JOURNAL OF LABOR AND SOCIETY

family of Iraqis due to an attack at a checkpoint that occurred earlier that day.
Kristian Williams discusses similar dynamics with the recruitment of American
prison guards into military police units and the torture of prisoners in Iraq.
These catastrophic internal divisions, the theft of equipment, and the construc-
tion of forms of alternative unity outside of the limitations of the military all
have created a situation in which force degradations begin to spiral as the
internal logistical cohesion of the military becomes increasingly stretched.
Kennard speaks at length about this dynamic, and this is the strongest aspect of
the text.
The U.S. military force composition also became less able to fight over time,
and Kennard details this in the middle two sections of the book. Here, he focuses
most of his attention on the problems of fitness within the U.S. military, spe-
cifically the obesity rate among soldiers and how this has forced the military to
lower fitness standards, and the age of soldiers entering service, specifically the
very young and very old soldiers who have been allowed to enlist, and how this
has been facilitated by the attempts to re-enlist those who have served in the past
and are now in their 40s or 50s, as well as the increasing penetration of recruiters
into our schools and social spaces. He also points to the increasing rates of
addiction and alcoholism within groups of combat troops, and the after-effects of
this addiction, specifically when combined with rising rates of posttraumatic
stress disorder. In the final section of the text, Kennard also details how this
loosening of recruitment restrictions and internal standards also led to the
preliminary elimination of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, as well as the admission of
recent immigrant, non-citizens, into the military.
The questions raised by this book are important and profound but slightly
misplaced and partial. He centers the conclusion of the book on attempting to
remedy this degradation of force composition. There is an implicit argument
that the U.S. global military hegemony is possible or preferable, and that this is
based on force quantity and quality. The addition of force quality is an important
aspect of tactical analysis that is often overlooked by those that comment on the
U.S. military force composition, such as those still clinging to a Cold War model
of military, but this is a problematic conclusion. To make this point, he comes to
rely on an example of Rome, likening the admission of gang members to Roman
uses of tribal fighters as mercenaries during the end of the empire. While this
argument holds on a superficial level, it ignores a wider point about the U.S.
military strategy and force allocation.
As has been noted in other places, there is a profound difference between
invading a space with overwhelming force and collapsing the standing state, and
then attempting to police that space. We saw this process in Afghanistan, where
when the Taliban was driven out of their power centers, the U.S. began to run
out of targets to bomb due to the disappearance of Taliban infrastructure, and
resorted to dropping bombs or drone-delivered missiles on single houses, vastly
increasing the civilian casualty count and losing the counter-insurgency due to
this “collateral damage.” This difference is profound; to eliminate the state is to
disrupt its logistical capacity to operate, which, with enough magnitude of force,
Book Reviews 171

pinpointed on critical infrastructure, can be confined to attacking points on a

map, while occupation requires one to attempt to police every moment, in all
space, necessarily multiplying the terrain of conflict.
Che Guevara emphasized this point in Guerrilla Warfare—when asymmetric
forces become invisible and disappear out of the terrain, the battlefield becomes
everything. The false allusion of comparing the U.S. military force degradation
to the becoming-mercenary of the Roman legion is to ignore the underlying
reasons for this destruction of force “cohesion,” and that is the impossibility of
the state, or occupation, as such. To occupy space, or to police space, requires a
total operation, which is numerically and materially impossible. Numerically, we
can never speak of force cohesion; there is no number that is unified in a total
way. A military force is a conceptual form of cohesion that attempts to operate
through the use of drill and discipline—as De Landa points out in War in the Age
of Intelligent Machines—but this requires surveillance and policing to eliminate
the particularity of those that construct that force in particular moments, and
this dynamic becomes increasingly impossible to control in counter-insurgency
situations where individual units are often responsible for particular spaces, and
are stretched out in fire bases or patrol bases that are miles from the nearest
support or logistics base.
As space multiplies, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain force pres-
ence in space, and every absence of force presence is a space in which contin-
gency and crisis multiplies. As this space multiplies, one also exposes oneself to
more attacks, both on patrols and supply lines, and every action taken in the
attempt to police space amplifies a concentration of conflict and contingency.
This is the paradox of occupation and is the root of military force degradation;
the loosening of enlistment requirements is a side effect of trying to maintain
force at any cost. Historically, it is at this point where the crisis generated in the
occupation hits a point of rupture, where the occupation cannot proceed, but
this always occurs after the projection of force into occupation. This points to a
different conclusion—it is not that the problems of the U.S. military force
extension can be solved with tightening recruitment requirements, even if this
were a result that we would desire, it is more the tensions of occupation and the
length of the supply lines involved in overseas occupation that is both rupturing
military logistical capacity and requiring ever more amounts of financial
resources to compensate for.
As force allocations shifted from Afghanistan to Iraq in 2002, in anticipation
of the invasion and occupation, troops in Afghanistan widely reported being
short of essential equipment or the numbers to occupy a space as complex and
mountainous as Afghanistan. In the invasion of Iraq, and the subsequent occu-
pation, strategy was seemingly being planned in a Pentagon bubble, under the
assumption that Iraq was a temporary diversion of force. To fill the ranks with
enough troops to functionally occupy two large, complex spaces with histories
of anti-imperialist resistance, recruitment standards were lowered, and this
caused logistical issues, which necessitated more troops to fill in the gap, low-
ering standards again. The focus on this dynamic is absolutely essential to
172 WORKINGUSA: THE JOURNAL OF LABOR AND SOCIETY

understand the failure of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but is only part of
the picture. The similarity with Rome has become the attempt to police fron-
tiers; Eyal Weizman notes this about the Israeli occupation of Palestine as well.
As supply lines extend, it becomes increasingly complicated to bring material to
units, and those supply lines become targets for attack, as we saw with the
roadside bomb.
As space is patrolled, troops come to occupy very little space practically, and
those spaces become smaller as attacks on positions and patrols increase. As
resistance builds, the space that has to have force allocated to it expands. There
have been three primary effects of these phenomena since the beginning of the
war in Afghanistan: the increasing use of robotics to amplify force and extend its
projection, the use of private military contractors to take over logistical work
and security of spaces and specific people, and the degradation of the U.S.
military force. Policing of space has to spread out through the totality of space,
in all moments, as a logistics of force; to the degree that we maintain the
occupation, we are maintaining this constant deployment of force on our
streets, or the streets of Baghdad. It is a question of policing, or occupation,
operating to the degree that it becomes total social war and the impossibility of
maintaining total policing. As we are seeing with the new military force com-
position initiatives that are being undertaken by the Obama administration, the
attempt is to maintain this global social war, or “national security,” through a
military structured around quick reaction strikes on any target deemed a threat,
facilitated by the surveillance apparatus already in place within organizations
such as the National Security Agency; the problems of force quality are being
remedied already through the elimination of a military force that can engage in
long, protracted occupations of space. This manifestation of the Petraeus Doc-
trine solves the problems that Kennard is concerned with by eliminating the
long supply lines and infrastructure needed for occupation, but this is being
replaced with drone strikes and SEAL raids.
While Kennard’s book is a fantastic description, and exhaustive documen-
tation, of the specifics of force degradation, the conclusion that this can and
should be overcome overlooks the very reason for it occurring in the first place,
the projection of the U.S. military force globally, the globalization of social war
in the attempt to define space and existence. As such, the book itself is a partial
discussion of the implications of the global projection of military force. In this
partiality, a fundamental point is missed.
Underlying the premise of this study is that the military will continue to
rely on material presence of human bodies in warfare, and that therefore mili-
tary uses of force, and the physical presence of military policing and occupation
operations, rely on the logistical aspects of force composition. Increasingly, and
this is a point that Scahill brings up in his book Blackwater, military force is
coming to rely not only on non-traditional forces, like contractors, but also the
remote projection of force globally through the use of long range drones and
Special Forces-based Quick Reaction Forces, as well as the use of localized
forces, as in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization operations in Afghanistan,
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Book Reviews 173

and to a certain and less direct degree in Libya. This shifting force calculus is
something that revolutionaries have to be focusing attention on, and how this
plays itself out on our streets through the infinite proliferation of the surveil-
lance apparatus and quick reaction police swarming tactics. Although Kennard’s
text is exhaustively written, and based in incredibly thorough documentation of
the degradation of “force quality,” there is a lack of connection between this
phenomena and the shifting calculus of military force and projection, and in
this we obscure a discussion of the tactical importance of this shift, and its
implications, for the dynamics of war and policing, as well as resistance and
insurgency.
The degradation of “force quality” is symptomatic of a much wider shift
away from the attempt to physically occupy space, into the attempt to operate a
global security logistics that operates everywhere and positions itself nowhere.
The calculus of tactical force has changed dramatically, and this narrative is a
partial description of some effects of this tactical shift. This degradation of the
U.S. military force, and the projection of this force in physical occupation, is not
something to lament; it is a new military reality, and one that we are going to
have to learn to address if we ever hope to be effective in material political
actions.

Tom Nomad recently earned his PhD in Philosophy at the Philosophy, Inter-
pretation and Culture Program at Binghamton University. In 2011, his review
essay of Kristian Williams’ work appeared in this journal. He lives, organizes,
and works in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (USA). E-mail: nomadicschism@gmail.
com.

Dobbz, Hannah. Nine-Tenths of the Law: Property and Resistance in the United States. Oakland: AK
Press, 2012. 302 pp. US$21.00 (paperback).

It was probably dark when Hannah Dobbz first crept into the abandoned
turbine warehouse under the bridge in Emeryville, California. “I shimmied up a
drainpipe with a heavy power drill in my backpack, climbed onto the balcony,
and, after teetering on the sill for a moment, entered through a broken window.”
In Nine-Tenths of the Law, Dobbz exercises an equal nimbleness in unlocking a
veritable people’s history of squatting in the U.S. Beginning with her own
romantic tales of touring European squats and founding a squat (dubbed the
“Power Machine”) in duly do-it-yourself-grunge-bohemian fashion—replete
with untamed parties and communal kitchens—Dobbz then delves into the
experiences of America’s indigenous peoples with the European occupiers, the
challenges to frontier-era squatters, and the living history of Lower East Side
(LES) squats, among other stories.
With an uncanny blend of irony and fury, the “Indians of All Tribes” offers
to trade $24 in glass beads and red cloth for Alcatraz Island after reclaiming the