The relationship between war and empire is one of codependency and ambivalence. An empire must expand to survive or risk being taken over by a more powerful one. It must subjugate native populations to grow, requiring the forces of war. War is expensive, complex, and ambitious, requiring the control of men and nature, technology and knowledge, society and state, all of which must be directed towards a defined end (Rafael 6-1). War installs colonial infrastructure and agents, either turning native peoples into servants of the empire or exterminating them. The long-term objective of the empire is continued expansion, which is dependent on more war.

However, an empire is locked in an ambivalent relationship with those under its control due to its dependence upon them. Colonies, outposts, and military branches can never be placed under complete obedience because they exist within a larger world of influence outside the reach of the empire. The intermingling of native and colonial peoples, government bureaucracy, and language barriers can affect the values of colonizers, and geographic distance can block the flow of resources, creating instability and rebellion (Rafael 1-2). War creates inherently unstable conditions that affect the people the empire depends on for continued expansion.

Because an empire depends on the people it subjugates, it seeks to hide its relationship's true nature by ruling in ways that create minimal friction. Therefore, empires use both embodied (visible) and disembodied (invisible) methods of rulership (Rafael 6-4). The United States uses economic, military, political, and cultural approaches to imperial rulership, what economist James Laxer refers to as the pillars of the American empire (Laxer 65).

Disembodied approaches of U.S. power manifest discreetly, resulting from political practices toward other nations in treaties and alliances designed to provide and ensure economic access to resources, markets, and trade control. Examples include the Monroe Doctrine (the U.S. claiming sovereignty over home territories) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which allows multinational corporations to develop leverage over lesser nations (Laxer 74). Substantial cultural power is also exerted through Hollywood movie, television, and musical exports while limiting similar cultural imports from other nations, encouraging other countries to adopt American values, products, and attitudes toward capitalism (Laxer 70). Many global elites have been educated at American universities in American capitalism, an approach of cultural proliferation used by the Roman Empire (Laxer 71). The United States also has physical forms of disembodied rulership in covert militaries, such as the C.I.A., Navy SEALS, and others. It engages in proxy wars and secretly funds resistance movements against governments of countries that do not align with its interests, like the Reagan Administration's funding of the Contras (Laxer 82).

The U.S. demonstrates embodied power through the most powerful military on Earth. Knowing it could not indefinitely dominate the world economically, the U.S. increased defense expenditures during the Bush Administration to ensure no other country could challenge it militarily, spending more than the following sixteen countries combined (Laxer 66). The United States has installed military bases in countries of interest around the globe that function like arms of the American empire. Bases adhere to their own laws, jails, and court systems and operate effectively as states of exclusion within native territories (Rafael 6-4). They are located within striking distance of metropolitan areas while remaining guarded and secretive, acting as sites for the deployment of war agents, supply and information lines, and potential delivery of nuclear attacks. Military bases are robust projections of power the United States uses during political negotiations, functioning as permanent possibilities of war because they are conduits for delivering soldiers, the agents of war. The soldier is a direct projection of military power and embodies empire, reflecting the same codependent, ambivalent nature (Rafael 6-5).

Civilian men are transformed into U.S. soldiers through the stages of subjugation, hypermasculinization, and collectivization (Rafael 6-5). The subjugation stage involves breaking down the recruit under immersive conditions. Enlisted individuals are placed within a strict structure, removing all forms of individuality and choice. They are verbally abused via feminine language, forced to work as a unit to overcome challenges under intense emotional duress, and punished collectively for any single member's mistake. The recruit learns to sleep with his weapon, and it becomes a part of him. He takes on the character of his weapon. "By the time marksmanship training begins, your M-16 has become another limb...you have faith in its life-preserving power. 'I think that's why we sleep with our rubber duckies, sleep right beside them'" (Tietz 58). The recruit's old identity is removed, and a new one is provided through emotional bonds of shared suffering and accountability. Once he has been entirely subjugated and bonded to his group, it is time to weaponize the trainee through hypermasculinization.

A critical part of weaponizing the soldier requires denying all things feminine (Rafael 6-5). Femininity, as it relates to war, is associated with emotion, indecisiveness, and ambivalence. By opposing and removing what is soft within the soldier, he can become hardened for action, taking on the character of his hypermasculinity: strong, emotionless, and decisive. Abjection of femininity further adds to the fundamentally ambivalent nature of the hypermasculine soldier. Because removing all feminine elements of oneself is impossible, such subjugated aspects provide an eternal enemy, keeping the soldier aligned toward his military indoctrination and perpetually seeking to validate his hypermasculine self.

As it turns out, people are not naturally inclined to kill each other (Tietz 1). A weaponized soldier does not equate to a killing machine. The final stage of building a soldier, collectivization, adds the motivating force to kill. Recruits experience a collective rebirth from their past civilian lives as they transition into part of the military collective. This transition is demonstrated in the movie "Full Metal Jacket," where, after hiking to the top of a mountain together, Gunnery Sargeant Hartman addresses the newly formed battalion: "Marines die. That is what we are here for. But the Marine Corps lives forever!" (Full Metal Jacket). It is this extreme sense of collectivism that turns murder into a moral obligation to protect the objectives of the group.

The collective is then given an enemy, labeled with racial and gendered terms to justify the label of Other (Rafael 6-5). Each war has presented its unique racial slurs and practices used to dehumanize opponents, allowing the military collective to claim moral superiority and target the enemy for collaboration or elimination (Rafael 6-5).

The prostitute provides a perfect source of ambivalence for the soldier, validating his masculinity and morale through his physical and sexual domination of her. She is also the perfect threat. Externally, she threatens the soldier's physical well-being by introducing the possibility of sexually transmitted disease, as an outsider capable of stealing his possessions, and as a potential love interest that might come between him and his battalion. Internally, the prostitute reminds him of his own subjugated femininity. Therefore, she can only be objectified and never trusted (Rafael 6-6).

The prostitute serves one more essential role in enforcing the group identity of soldiers. As a native and a woman, she is both a sexual object and a symbolic object of the ambivalent, codependent nature of the empire. She is a slave to the initiation rituals of soldiers performed in the Rest and Recreation areas of the Military Prostitution Complex (Rafael 6-6). Being used in this way, the native prostitute serves to bolster soldier identity as a sacrifice to the sexual imperialism of the West (Sturdevant et al. 326).

Works cited:

Full Metal Jacket. Directed by Stanley Kubrick, Warner Brothers, 1987.

Laxer, James. Empire. Groundwood Books, 2006.

Raphael, Vicente L. "History of Comparative Colonialism." HSTCMP485 B, University of Washington, 13 Nov. 2023, https://canvas.uw.edu/courses/1668500

Sturdevant, Saundra Pollock, and Brenda Stoltzfus. Let the Good Times Roll : Prostitution and the U.S. Military in Asia: 1st ed., New Press, 1993.

Tietz, Jeff. "The Killing Factory." Rolling Stone. Issue 998, 20 Apr. 2006, pp. 54–76.

Pictured above
Walker, Coire: Photograph of le Seine, Paris, France. 28 Jul. 2022. Author's personal collection.