The American Pacific as a Zone of Militarized Circulations

Simeon Man's Soldiering through Empire traces circulatory connections between military laborers across an ostensibly decolonizing Asia-Pacific. American policymakers supplemented their strategic labor requirements by imposing themselves on processes of decolonization and inducting indigenous coercive institutions into imperial service. While this gave efforts at communist containment a more “Asian” face, it also generated transpacific forms of anticolonial resistance committed to constructing demilitarized political systems that transcended national boundaries. Bases, barracks, and naval vessels became zones of contestation between American officials organizing power projection and activist groups attempting to dissuade soldiers from engaging in wars of neocolonial aggression. America's imperial circuitry was thus turned against itself by left liberals and Asian American activists who made common cause with nonwhite servicemen seen to be bearing a disproportionate share of Washington's wars.

Man focuses primarily on Filipino, Korean, and Asian American military personnel during the Korean and Vietnam Wars, providing a more peripheral discussion of African American soldiers. Economic opportunities, rather than ideological dogmas, pushed these young men into performing the bloody work of empire. Resentments widened when physical and psychological costs began to outweigh material gains. Man views Vietnam as a space where these contradictions and tensions peaked. By the late 1960s, some nonwhite soldiers went so far as to claim that they had more in common with the enemy than their white fellow servicemen. Military structures ostensibly geared toward the sociocultural integration of America's multiethnic landscape created as many divisions as they overcame.

Man's work has much to offer, but there are several problematic assumptions that merit reconsideration. His discussion of Koreans rightly mentions the swift passage of officers from Japanese colonial armies into American imperial service. He also points out that many common soldiers in the Republic of Korea were refugees pushed out of the communizing north. Yet, Man does fully not consider their ideological motivations. Numerous anticommunist youth groups spread across the southern peninsula during its de facto partition. These organizations found a ready-made constituency among northern refugees and acted as funnels for recruitment into the Republic of Korea's army.Footnote ³ The Yosu rebellion in 1948 provided a pretext to purge leftists who had percolated into southern security forces, resulting in more ideologically cohesive armed units. Material interests and conscription were elements in assembling an anticommunist army, but not the only ones.

Man is correct in viewing Ferdinand Marcos and Park Chung-hee as consolidating praetorian loyalties by providing their respective militaries with direct conduits to American resources. This layered co-optation of soldiers into national and supranational patronage systems assured regime security, but the political economies of South Korea and the Philippines could not have been more different. Park used American rents and praetorian loyalties to construct a highly innovative industrial state, while Marcos squandered American aid on assembling and sustaining a centralized patrimonial regime engaging in parasitic predation.Footnote ⁴

Furthermore, I feel Man's contention that mass American violence in South Vietnam sprung from racial hatred does not give sufficient emphasis to the inevitably destructive outcomes, be what may the racial politics, of deploying massive firepower in a compact and densely populated space. Finally, the American military's conversion into an all-volunteer force may not make it the best locus for current activism. The US armed forces have become something of a foreign legion entitled to special privileges that buffer its membership from the hard edges of postindustrial neoliberalism. Environmental and civil liberties NGOs are far better platforms for achieving a truly demilitarized Asia-Pacific.

Rather than focusing on US-Philippine diplomatic relations, Christopher Capozzola's Bound by War shifts its analysis to interactions between Americans and Filipinos in an extensive and evolving military labor market. Since the colonial advent in 1898, American military commanders and policymakers have repeatedly mobilized indigenous military labor across the Philippine archipelago to serve various strategic objectives. Colonial conquest and pacification, followed by external defense, guerrilla resistance, reconquest, counterinsurgency, and deterrence, would have been far more costly endeavors for the United States had Filipinos not been on hand to augment American military ranks. In addition, native troops helped hide empire from a mostly anticolonial American public.Footnote ⁵ Generations of Filipinos, both in the Philippines and the United States, provided service in exchange for material benefits and social mobility. Such benefits rarely came easy. The US armed forces provided pay, weapons, and privileges to servicemen during military campaigns but proved reluctant to make long-term investments in noncitizen soldiers. Consequently, Filipino veterans repeatedly made claims on the American state via organized political action. Capozzola provides a thorough examination of claim making and the difficulties soldiers faced in receiving just rewards.

Such difficulties aside, military service, whether as army infantrymen or naval messmen, provided Filipinos with comparatively high incomes and fast tracks to US citizenship. The United States has leveraged its Filipino community to maintain deep linkages with its former colony. Although domestic processing and service sector jobs have grown in recent decades, the Philippines still relies heavily on remittances from overseas workers. This gives Washington a constituency through which it pursues its perennial strategic interests in the South China Sea. As Capozzola points out, however, the effects have not always been positive. Oligarchic elites and authoritarian chief executives alike have acted as gatekeepers to, and extracted percentages from, overseas labor. Ferdinand Marcos accrued political slush funds from the United States by providing civic action troops to Vietnam, just as Gloria Arroyo obtained the funds and weapons necessary to repress progressive reformers by making the Armed Forces of the Philippines an appendage of the US military during its war on terror.

In addition, the presence of gargantuan military bases at Clark and Subic during the Cold War did far more than create problems typically associated with prostitution, pollution, and infringements on territorial sovereignty. American bases diverted Filipinos’ productive energies into what were, in effect, enclave economies premised on maintenance and recreational services. Their closure did not result in the transfer of established labor pools into high-value manufacturing facilities on former base properties, as was originally intended. South Vietnam's construction boom provided opportunities for Filipino contractors during America's war, but these proved ephemeral. While economic development took hold in much of anticommunist Southeast Asia after 1965, the Philippines remained dependent on strategic rents, low-skilled service provision, and overseas remittances.

Capozzola provides a readable and engaging narrative of US-Filipino security partnerships and subaltern military labor movements during America's first Pacific century. My only reservation would be his overemphasis on the Philippines’ strategic value to the United States in the post–Cold War era. For all their problems, the bases generated far greater resource commitments and imperial oversight from Washington than is presently the case. Periodic populist pronouncements premised on anti-American sentiments make the Philippines a far less reliable ally than Japan or South Korea. As China presents an increasingly conventional security threat to American dominance, military bases in politically stable Asia-Pacific states will provide the primary means of containment and power projection.

Colleen Woods's Freedom Incorporated focuses on US-Philippine security relations during the transition from formal to informal empire. Her monograph deconstructs notions of American exceptionalism by demonstrating that Washington's objectives in its former colony had more to do with guarding the archipelago's strategic assets than implanting inclusive democracy. Indigenous elites played a crucial role in reconfiguring American hegemony. Rather than viewing the Huk challenge to oligarchic rule as an expression of local socioeconomic grievances rooted in changing land rights and labor practices, Philippine caciques globalized agrarian reformers into national manifestations of a worldwide communist conspiracy bent on overthrowing democratic states. This allowed the United States to justify exogenous interventions in a purportedly postcolonial era by presenting its actions as defending a fledgling nation from communist imperialism. Unlike European colonizers in Southeast Asia, Americans found Philippine nationalism perfectly acceptable so long as it was anticommunist. Political beliefs superseded outmoded racial hierarchies. White Americans and nonwhite Filipinos transcended the color line to combat an ideological contagion threatening free peoples the whole world over.

This neo-imperialist discourse enabled an immediate and aggressive containment of agrarian radicalism after America completed its reconquest of the Philippines in 1945. As was the case in South Korea, military commanders on the ground did not allow burgeoning reformist movements to take root. In the countryside, pro-US guerrillas received American protection, arms, and material goods while Huks were disarmed, imprisoned, and terrorized. Private armies attached to local landholders in Central Luzon also obtained and deployed loose firearms that saturated the postwar Philippines. Anticommunist guerillas, village guards, and formerly pro-Japanese constabulary units rapidly transferred into national coercive institutions that further brutalized agrarian leftists. State violence only made insurgents more violent and this eventually compelled counterinsurgent recalibrations. The United States enabled the Philippine state to deal out a combination of bargains and force. US agencies funded palliative agrarian reforms, resettlement schemes, and civic action programs that temporarily improved peasant livelihoods. American military advisors amalgamated the army and constabulary in 1950, thus thickening the state's coercive presence across insurgent areas. Furthermore, the US-Philippine Mutual Defense Treaty in 1951 allowed Philippine security forces to concentrate exclusively on internal repression.

Once the Philippines was sufficiently pacified, Washington exported its counterinsurgent practices and personnel to other zones of Cold War contestation. Woods delineates how American officials pushed Philippine techniques into the South Vietnamese countryside in the mid-1950s. Medical teams provided treatment to political refugees from the north under Operation Brotherhood while the Freedom Company provided security training and organized anticommunist associations. This was yet another form of imperial occlusion, as the United States could present these initiatives as Asians helping other Asians contain communist aggression. South Vietnamese officials rarely found such initiatives convincing. The Vietnamese took the aid but saw Filipinos as little more than American flunkies attempting to divert domestic initiatives at postcolonial nation-building in unwanted directions. Transnational anticommunist solidarities never superseded national interests and identities.

Freedom Incorporated stresses the importance of discursive constructions in obscuring imperial continuities and interventions. Ideologies centered around combating communist imperialism enabled Philippine oligarchs and American policymakers to pursue ulterior motives. Nevertheless, I feel these ideational formulations had a significant effect on subaltern security personnel. Philippine troops may well have been the oligarchy's soldiers, a force armed and sustained to maintain profound socioeconomic inequalities. Yet, they did not always see themselves that way. Many believed, or wanted to believe, they were defending their country's integrity against dark forces that stood outside a coalescing national community. For some, anticommunism could be a coping mechanism for the unpleasant tasks at hand. Much more work remains to be done on discursive internalizations among soldiers engaged in empire's dirty work.

Strategic Shifts, Circulatory Recalibrations, and Contextualized Mobilizations

In addition to serving as strategic platforms from which the United States projected power, these works contend that allied Asia-Pacific states functioned as sites of service procurement for wars of containment. In response to changing Cold War contexts, US policymakers and military commanders repeatedly shifted their strategic requirements. This resulted in circulatory recalibrations that directed Asian military labor into new roles and operational zones. We should, however, guard against overgeneralization. Certain allies proved more malleable than others. Prior precedents, coupled with varying degrees of progressive political activism, determined how far Americans could go in mobilizing and repurposing indigenous auxiliaries. Both the limitations and opportunities of allied personnel recruitment became most evident during the second Indochina War. America's colonial legacy in the Philippines placed significant constraints on how it could involve the archipelago in the conflict. By contrast, the US role in constructing and defending the Republic of Korea, almost from the ground up, enabled more direct Korean involvement in Vietnam.

Although it is by no means certain that the Philippine revolution would have succeeded in building a cohesive nation-state, American intervention in 1898 violently disrupted seismic endogenous change. Fierce resistance necessitated co-optation of revolutionary elites, some of whom came into the fold reluctantly. Moreover, subaltern social orders, never fully integrated into colonial hierarchies, continued to wage protracted insurgencies that were only temporarily repressed. Patronage systems premised on electioneering compelled elites jockeying for position to pander to popular sentiments and minimize societal obligations. For all their power, and no matter how much aid America offered, national oligarchs had to factor this into their political calculus. Even Marcos could only push the people so far. Dispatching combat forces to Vietnam would have exponentially increased the groundswell of popular resistance to his rule and further underlined the neocolonial character of the Philippine state. The Americans had to settle for base servicing and civic action showmanship.

South Korea presented fewer problems. The United States provided protection and positions to former Japanese collaborators in the southern state's coercive-bureaucratic apparatus. When the North's invasion dislodged this stratum in 1950, American military forces intervened massively to lock them back into place. Growing dissatisfaction with an increasingly sclerotic civilian elite led to the imposition of direct military rule in 1961 with full US support. Soldier-politicians proved eager to provide what Washington was looking for regarding allied Asian armed forces in South Vietnam. Korean democratic activists in the 1960s focused their energies on opposing the normalization of relations with Japan, thus allowing Park to deploy substantial combat troops to Vietnam without large-scale resistance.

Various states and territories fell under America dominion after the Pacific War, and all were subjected to voracious demands for military labor. Nonetheless, scholars must consider the specific sociopolitical contexts that determined the kinds and quantities of personnel Washington extracted from its clients. America's Asia-Pacific empire was both cosmopolitan and composite in character.