Natalie Bormann begins her book on the politics of the U.S. missile defense program with the question that most conventionally inclined students of security would want answered: “Why adopt a poststructural lens for the reading of the military strategy of national missile defence (NMD)?” (p. vii). Her answer is precisely the one you would expect if you are, instead, a student of what has come be known as “critical security studies”: “The conventional arguments for NMD … do not ‘add up.’ Therefore, the path to understanding the workings behind, and of, missile defence must necessarily take us to unexpected places and beyond conventional inquiry, and this requires unconventional tools for analysis” (p. vii). In this she is exactly right, and the tools she has chosen—drawn mainly from the work of Michel Foucault and those in international relations who have followed him, most notably David Campbell—provide her with an excellent conceptual context within which to move unconventionally in unexpected places.

The book begins with a discussion of the relevance of Foucault's work to international security in general and missile defense in particular. This is now well-worn ground in the critical study of security, but still essential for the book to be read beyond the converted, and so poses a challenge for any author. Bormann discusses Foucault's work concisely in a clear and readable manner. From there she spends three chapters, composing nearly half the book, on the history and conventional justifications for missile defense. It is in these chapters that she justifies her claim that these stories do not “add up.” Here is a program that, in one form or another, reaches back to the 1950s and has survived the First Cold War, the “missile gap,” détente, the Second Cold War, the end of the Cold War, the “peace dividend,” and even the emergence of terrorism as the world's primary threat, and has managed at each stage to be positioned as one of the answers, if not the only one, to the security problem the United States faces. Bormann reviews this history, repeatedly showing both that the threats are not as self-evident as the U.S. security discourse suggests and that missile defense is not as obvious an answer as its proponents would have us believe.

The last three chapters then take up the challenge posed by the flaws in the conventional account. In the first, she deploys Foucault's notion of a “regime of truth” to explore the means by which missile defense discourse produces that which it names: the “reality” of the threat and the utility of the missile defense response, utility understood as both its ability to meet the stated threat (whatever that happens to be at the time) and its functionality as technological system (which has never been demonstrated, despite a number of attempts to do so). In other words, Bormann seeks to ask, as Cristina Masters has done: What work is “missile defense” already doing? In her penultimate chapter, Bormann turns to the realm of popular culture, or everyday life, to find some of the answers to that question, exploring sport and shield metaphors, as well as film and science fiction, as sites at which missile defense (discourse) is already working. In the final chapter, she turns her attention to the present, showing how the missile defense discourse intersects with the so-called Bush Doctrine of preemption to create the dominant security discourse of our age.

Readers of this review may have noticed that I have yet to use the word “identity,” despite having provided an overview of the entire text, and yet the word features prominently in the title of the book. Indeed, from the title, you would expect this to be a text as much about U.S. identity as it is about national missile defense. In this, I think, the title is quite misleading. Bormann does speak to the politics of U.S. identity in her discussion of the production of the rogue as “Other,” and invokes the concept at regular intervals. However, this is not a book about the politics of U.S. identity, at least not as we would expect, given her obvious debt to David Campbell's classic text on the subject, Writing Security, 1992. Her failure to deliver on the promise of the title does not, however, make the book a failure, as what it does is useful and even important, just poorly advertised. In concluding the book, Bormann writes: “The fact that the United States is deploying a national missile defence system is, in itself, unremarkable; more interesting and important is how the system is rendered meaningful as a significant strategic imperative in the current U.S. thinking on security” (p. 140). Here, rather than in the phrase “the politics of U.S. identity,” the author captures the essence and contribution of her text. Having made the case powerfully (if perhaps a bit repetitively) that the conventional account of the need for NMD does not add up, she takes inspiration from Foucault and Campbell to show how such a persistent, indeed dominant, security program becomes possible. In this objective she is successful, and those who might be made wary by the “poststructural” of the title will be pleased to know that the success is achieved with very little theoretical excess.

I was not entirely satisfied with this book, however, even having forgiven Bormann the slightly misleading title. It seems to me that at the very least, it required another turn through the copy editor. The discussion of the conventional story, over three chapters, was a little too repetitive, and so a final, careful revision would have improved the flow of those chapters. In addition, the prose is marred in too many places by malapropisms, which the editor really should not have let through. But my dissatisfaction runs a little deeper that this. The book is short, running only to 144 pages, including notes. Brevity is almost always a virtue, but here the result is that the meat of the book, the final three chapters, seem, well, a little bony. The issues taken up in these chapters—the functioning of official discourse as a regime of truth, the metaphors productive of the missile defense discourse, film and science fiction as sites at which missile defense becomes possible, and the intersection of the Bush Doctrine and missile defense—all deserve more extensive treatment than they receive here, if they are to bear the weight of responding to a story that allegedly does not “add up.”

Taken together, then, Bormann's text is a useful addition to the literature in critical security studies, providing a clear critique of the conventional discourse around missile defense, and doing so in a way that is indebted, in particular, to Foucault, without being written in a fashion that will alienate those not already versed in his work. It is also suggestive of what a poststructural argument can provide in response to that conventional story. The pity is that it is not more than suggestive. And so we can look forward, perhaps, to an expanded second edition.