Military Geographies

Military Geographies is about how local space, place, environment and landscape are shaped by military presence, and about how wider geographies are touched by militarism. A book about how local space, place, environment and landscape are shaped by military presence, and about how wider geographies are touched by militarism. Sets a new agenda for the study of military geography with its critical analysis of the ways in which military control over space is legitimized. Explores the ways in which militarism and military activities control development, the use of space and our understanding of place. Focuses on military lands, establishments and personnel in contemporary peacetime settings. Uses examples from Europe, North America and Australasia. Draws on original research into the mechanisms by which the British government manages the defence estate. Illustrated with maps, plans and other figures.

This book of contributed chapters by subject matter expertly provides an overview and analysis of salient contemporary and historical military subjects from the military geographer’s perspective. Factors of geography have had a compelling influence on battles and campaigns throughout history; however, geography and military affairs have gained heightened attention during the past two decades, and military geography is the discipline best situated to explain them. Hence, the premise of this book and its contents are founded on the principle that geographical knowledge of space, place, people, and scale provide essential insights into contemporary security issues and promotes the idea that such insight is critical to understanding and managing significant military problems at local, regional, and global scales.

A Research Agenda for Military Geographies explores how military activities and phenomena are shaped by geography, and how geographies are in turn shaped by military practices. A variety of future research agendas are mapped out, examining the questions faced by geographers when studying the military and its effects.

An examination of geography's critical effects on battles throughout the ages

Military geography, one of several subsets within those broad confines, concentrates on the influence of physical and cultural environments over political-military policies, plans, programs, and combat/support operations of all types in global, regional, and local contexts. Key factors displayed in table 1 directly (sometimes decisively) affect the full range of military activities: strategies, tactics, and doctrines; command, control, and organizational structures; the optimum mix of land, sea, air, and space forces; intelligence collection; targeting; research and development; the procurement and allocation of weapons, equipment, and clothing; plus supply, maintenance, construction, medical support, education, and training.

The conduct of any military enterprise is conditioned by the character of the area of operations - the military operating environment. The book focuses on the synergy between georgraphy and military operations wherever they occur.

Countermapping the geospatial footprint of the U.S. Department of Defense to reveal the making, unmaking, and remaking of a vast military-logistical landscape. This book is not about war, nor is it a history of war. Avoiding the shock and awe of wartime images, it explores the contemporary spatial configurations of power camouflaged in the infrastructures, environments, and scales of military operations. Instead of wartime highs, this book starts with drawdown lows, when demobilization and decommissioning morph into realignment and prepositioning. It is in this transitional milieu that the full material magnitudes and geographic entanglements of contemporary militarism are laid bare. Through this perpetual cycle of build up and breakdown, the U.S. Department of Defense—the single largest developer, landowner, equipment contractor, and energy consumer in the world—has engineered a planetary assemblage of “operational environments” in which militarized, demilitarized, and non-militarized landscapes are increasingly inextricable. In a series of critical cartographic essays, Pierre Bélanger and Alexander Arroyo trace this footprint far beyond the battlefield, countermapping the geographies of U.S. militarism across five of the most important and embattled operational environments: the ocean, the atmosphere, the highway, the city, and the desert. From the Indian Ocean atoll of Diego Garcia to the defense-contractor archipelago around Washington, D.C.; from the A01 Highway circling Afghanistan's high-altitude steppe to surveillance satellites pinging the planet from low-earth orbit; and from the vast cold chain conveying military perishables worldwide to the global constellation of military dumps, sinks, and scrapyards, the book unearths the logistical infrastructures and residual landscapes that render strategy spatial, militarism material, and power operational. In so doing, Bélanger and Arroyo reveal unseen ecologies of power at work in the making and unmaking of environments—operational, built, and otherwise—to come.