[[link removed]]

UARCS: THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES THAT PRODUCE WARFIGHTERS  
[[link removed]]


 

Sylvia J. Martin
September 1, 2024
Monthly Review
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_ Relations between universities and the U.S. military are not always
mediated by the corporate industrial sector. American universities and
the U.S. military are also linked directly and organizationally. _

The U.S. Army Research Laboratory and the University of Southern
California opened a new collaborative research facility yesterday at
the USC Institute for Creative Technologies facility in Playa Vista,
California., U.S. Army DEVCOM.

 

Students throughout the United States have called for their
universities to disclose and divest from defense companies with ties
to Israel in its onslaught on Gaza. While scholars and journalists
have traced ties between academic institutions and U.S. defense
companies, it is important to point out that relations between
universities and the U.S. military are not always mediated by the
corporate industrial sector.1
[[link removed]] American
universities and the U.S. military are also linked directly and
organizationally, as seen with what the Department of Defense (DoD)
calls “University Affiliated Research Centers (UARCs).” UARCs are
strategic programs that the DoD has established at fifteen different
universities around the country to sponsor research and development in
what the Pentagon terms “essential engineering and technology
capabilities.”2
[[link removed]] Established
in 1996 by the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and
Engineering, UARCs function as nonprofit research organizations at
designated universities aimed to ensure that those capabilities are
available on demand to its military agencies. While there is a long
history of scientific and engineering collaboration between
universities and the U.S. government dating back to the Second World
War, UARCs reveal the breadth and depth of today’s
military-university complex, illustrating how militarized knowledge
production emerges from within the academy and without corporate
involvement. UARCs demonstrate one of the less visible yet vital ways
in which these students’ institutions help perpetuate the cycle of
U.S.-led wars and empire-building.

The University of Southern California (USC) has been one of the most
prominent campuses for student protests against Israel’s campaign in
Gaza, with students demanding that their university “fully disclose
and divest its finances and endowment from companies and institutions
that profit from Israeli apartheid, genocide, and occupation in
Palestine, including the US Military and weapons manufacturing.”3
[[link removed]] USC
also happens to be home to one of the nation’s fifteen UARCs, the
Institute of Creative Technology (ICT), which describes itself as a
“trusted advisor to the DoD.”4
[[link removed]] ICT
is not mentioned in the students’ statement, yet the institute—and
UARCs at other universities—are one of the many moving parts of the
U.S. war machine that are nestled within higher education
institutions, and a manifestation of the Pentagon’s “mission
creep” that encompasses the arts as well as the sciences.5
[[link removed]]

Significantly, ICT’s remit to develop dual-use technologies (which
claim to provide society-wide “solutions”) entails nurturing what
the Institute refers to as “warfighters” for the battlefields of
the future, and, in doing so, to increase warfighters’
“lethality.”6
[[link removed]] Established
by the DoD in 1999 to pursue advanced modeling and simulation and
training, ICT’s basic and applied research produces prototypes,
technologies, and know-how that have been deployed for the U.S. Army,
Navy, and Marine Corps. From artificial intelligence-driven virtual
humans deployed to teach military leadership skills to futuristic 3D
spatial visualization and terrain capture to prepare these military
agencies for their operational environments, ICT specializes in
immersive training programs for “mission rehearsal,” as well as
tools that contribute to the digital innovations
[[link removed]] of global
warmaking.7
[[link removed]] Technologies
and programs developed at ICT were used by U.S. troops in the U.S.-led
Global War on Terror. One such program is UrbanSim, a virtual training
application initiated in 2006 designed to improve army commanders’
skills for conducting counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and
Afghanistan, delivering fictional scenarios through a gaming
experience.8
[[link removed]] From
all of the warfighter preparation that USC’s Institute researches,
develops, prototypes, and deploys, ICT boasts of generating over two
thousand academic peer-reviewed publications.

I encountered ICT’s work while conducting anthropological research
on the relationship between the U.S. military and the media
entertainment industry in Los Angeles.9
[[link removed]] The
Institute is located not on the university’s main University Park
campus but by the coast, in Playa Vista, alongside offices for Google
and Hulu. Although ICT is an approximately thirty-minute drive from
USC’s main campus, this hub for U.S. warfighter lethality was
enabled by an interdisciplinary collaboration with what was then
called the School of Cinema-Television and the Annenberg School for
Communications, and it remains entrenched within USC’s academic
ecosystem, designated as a unit of its Viterbi School of Engineering,
which is located on the main campus.10
[[link removed]] Given
the presence and power of UARCs at U.S. universities, we can
reasonably ask: What is the difference between West Point Military
Academy and USC, a supposedly civilian university? The answer, it
seems, is not a difference in kind, but in degree. Indeed,
universities with UARCs appear to be veritable military academies.

What Are UARCs?

UARCs are similar to federally funded research centers such as the
Rand Corporation; however, UARCs are required to be situated within a
university, which can be public or private.11
[[link removed]] The
existence of UARCs is not classified information, but their goals,
projects, and implications may not be fully evident to the student
bodies or university communities in which they are embedded, and there
are differing levels of transparency among them about their funding.
DoD UARCs “receive sole source funds, on average, exceeding $6
million annually,” and may receive other funding in addition to that
from their primary military or federal sponsor, which may also differ
among the fifteen UARCs.12
[[link removed]] In
2021, funding from federal sources for UARCs ranged “from as much as
$831 million for the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab to
$5 million for the University of Alaska Geophysical Detection of
Nuclear Proliferation.”13
[[link removed]] Individual
UARCs are generally created after the DoD’s Under Secretary of
Defense for Research and Engineering initiates a selection process for
the proposed sponsor, and typically are reviewed by their primary
sponsor every five years for renewed contracts.14
[[link removed]] A
few UARCs, such as Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Lab
and University of Texas at Austin’s Applied Research Lab, originated
during the Second World War for wartime purposes, but were designated
as UARCs in 1996, the year the DoD formalized that status.15
[[link removed]]

UARCs are supposed to provide their sponsoring agency and, ultimately,
the DoD, access to what they deem “core competencies,” such as
MIT’s development of nanotechnology systems for the “mobility of
the soldier in the battlespace” and the development of
anti-submarine warfare and ballistic and guided missile systems at
Johns Hopkins University.16
[[link removed]] Significantly,
UARCs are mandated to maintain a close and enduring relationship with
their military or federal sponsor, such as that of ICT with the U.S.
Army. These close relationships are intended to facilitate the
UARCs’ “in-depth knowledge of the agency’s research
needs…access to sensitive information, and the ability to respond
quickly to emerging research areas.”17
[[link removed]] Such
an intimate partnership for institutions of higher learning with these
agencies means that the line between academic and military research is
(further) blurred. With the interdisciplinarity of researchers and the
integration of PhD students (and even undergraduate interns) into UARC
operations such as USC’s ICT, the question of whether the needs of
the DoD are prioritized over those of an ostensibly civilian institute
of higher learning practically becomes moot: the entanglement is
naturalized by a national security logic.

_Sources:_ Joan Fuller, “Strategic Outreach—University Affiliated
Research Centers,” Office of the Under Secretary of Defense
(Research and Engineering), June 2021, 4; C. Todd Lopez, “Howard
University Will Be Lead Institution for New Research Center
[[link removed]],”
U.S. Department of Defense News, January 23, 2023.

A Closer Look

The UARC at USC is unique from other UARCs in that, from its
inception, the Institute explicitly targeted the artistic and
humanities-driven resources of the university. ICT opened near the Los
Angeles International Airport, in Marina del Rey, with a $45 million
grant, tasked with developing a range of immersive technologies.
According to the DoD, the core competencies that ICT offers include
immersion, scenario generation, computer graphics, entertainment
theory, and simulation technologies; these competencies were sought as
the DoD decided that they needed to create more visually and
narratively compelling and interactive learning environments for the
gaming generation.18
[[link removed]] USC
was selected by the DoD not just because of the university’s work in
science and engineering but also its close connections to the media
entertainment industry, which USC fosters from its renowned School of
Cinematic Arts (formerly the School of Cinema-Television), thereby
providing the military access to a wide range of storytelling talents,
from screenwriting to animation. ICT later moved to nearby Playa
Vista, part of Silicon Beach, where the military presence also
increased; by April 2016, the U.S. Army Research Lab West opened next
door to ICT as another collaborative partner, further integrating the
university into military work.19
[[link removed]] This
university-military partnership results in “prototypes that
successfully transition into the hands of warfighters”; UARCs such
as ICT are thus rendered a crucial link in what graduate student
worker Isabel Kain from the Researchers Against War collective calls
the “military supply chain.”20
[[link removed]]

USC was touted as “neutral ground” from which the U.S. Army could
help innovate military training by one of ICT’s founders in his
account of the Institute’s origin story.21
[[link removed]] Yet,
universities abandon any pretense to neutrality once they are assigned
UARCs, as opponents at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa (UH
Mānoa) asserted when a U.S. Navy-sponsored UARC was designated for
their campus in 2004. UH Mānoa faculty, students, and community
members repeatedly expressed their concerns about the ethics of
military research conducted on their campus, including the threat of
removing “researchers’ rights to refuse Navy directives.”22
[[link removed]] The
proposed UARC at UH Mānoa occurred within the context of university
community resistance to U.S. imperialism and militarism, which have
inflicted structural violence on Hawaiian people, land, and waters,
from violent colonization to the 1967 military testing of lethal sarin
gas in a forest reserve.23
[[link removed]] Hawai’i
serves as the base of the military’s U.S. Indo-Pacific Command,
where “future wars are in development,” professor Kyle Kajihiro of
UH Mānoa emphasizes.24
[[link removed]]

Writing in _Mānoa Now_ about the proposed UARC in 2005, Leo
Azumbuja opined that “it seems like ideological suicide to allow the
Navy to settle on campus, especially the American Navy.”25
[[link removed]] A
key player in the Indo-Pacific Command, the U.S. Navy has long had a
contentious relationship with Indigenous Hawaiians, most recently with
the 2021 fuel leakage from the Navy’s Red Hill fuel facility,
resulting in water contamination levels that the Hawai’i State
Department of Health referred to as “a humanitarian and
environmental disaster.”26
[[link removed]] Court
depositions have since revealed that the Navy knew about the fuel
leakage into the community’s drinking water but waited over a week
to inform the public, even as people became ill, making opposition to
its proposed UARC unsurprising, if not requisite.27
[[link removed]] The
detonation of bombs and sonar testing that happens at the biennial
international war games that the U.S. Navy has hosted in Hawai’i
since 1971 have also damaged precious marine life and culturally
sacred ecosystems, with the sonar tests causing whales to “swim
hundreds of miles, rapidly change their depth (sometimes leading to
bleeding from the eyes and ears), and even beach themselves to get
away from the sounds of sonar.”28
[[link removed]] Within
this context, one of the proposed UARC’s core competencies was
“understanding of [the] ocean environment.”29
[[link removed]]

In a flyer circulated by _DMZ Hawai_‘_i_, UH Mānoa organizers
called for universities to serve society, and “not be used by the
military to further their war aims or to perfect ways of killing or
controlling people.”30
[[link removed]] Recalling
efforts in previous decades on U.S. campuses to thwart the
encroachment of military research, protestors raised questions about
the UARC’s accountability and transparency regarding weapons
production within the UH community. UH Mānoa’s strategic plan
during the time that the Navy’s UARC was proposed and executed
(2002–2010) called for recognition of
“our _kuleana_ (responsibility) to honor the indigenous people and
promote social justice for Native Hawaiians” and “restoring and
managing the Mānoa stream and ecosystem”—priorities that the
actions of the U.S. Navy disregarded.31
[[link removed]] The
production of knowledge for naval weapons within the auspices of this
public, land-grant institution disrupts any pretension to neutrality
the university may purport.

Further resistance to the UARC designation was expressed by the UH
Mānoa community: from April 28 to May 4, 2005, the SaveUH/StopUARC
Coalition staged a six-day campus sit-in protest, and later that year,
the UH Mānoa Faculty Senate voted 31–18 in favor of asking the
administration to reject the UARC designation.32
[[link removed]] According
to an official statement released by UH Mānoa on January 23, 2006, at
a university community meeting with the UH Regents in 2006, testimony
from opponents to the UARC outnumbered supporters, who, reflecting the
neoliberal turn of universities, expressed hope that their
competitiveness in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics
(STEM) would advance with a UARC designation, and benefit the
university’s ranking.33
[[link removed]] Yet
in 2007, writing in _DMZ Hawai_‘_i_, Kajihiro clarified that while
the UH administration claimed that the proposed UARC would not accept
any classified research for the first three years, “the base
contract assigns ‘secret’ level classification to the entire
facility, making the release of any information subject to the
Navy’s approval,” raising concerns about academic freedom, despite
the fanfare over STEM and rankings.34
[[link removed]] However,
the campus resistance campaign was unsuccessful, and in September
2007, the UH Regents approved the Navy UARC designation. By 2008, the
U.S. Navy-sponsored Applied Research Laboratory UARC at UH Mānoa
opened.

“The Military Normal”

UH Mānoa’s rationale for resistance begs the question: how could
this university—indeed, any university—impose this military force
onto its community? Are civilian universities within the United States
merely an illusion, a deflection from education in the service of
empire? What anthropologist Catherine Lutz called in 2009 the ethos of
“the military normal” in U.S. culture toward its counterinsurgency
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—the commonsensical, even prosaic
perspective on the inevitability of endless U.S.-led wars disseminated
by U.S. institutions, especially mainstream media—helps explain the
attitude toward this particular formalized capture of the university
by the DoD.35
[[link removed]] Defense
funding has for decades permeated universities, but UARCs perpetuate
the military normal by allowing the Pentagon to insert itself through
research centers and institutes in the (seemingly morally neutral)
name of innovation, within part of a broader neoliberal framework of
universities as “engines” and “hubs,” or “anchor”
institutions that offer to “leverage” their various forms of
capital toward regional development in ways that often escape
sustained scrutiny or critique.36
[[link removed]] The
normalization is achieved in some cases given that UARCs such as ICT
strive to serve civilian needs as well as military ones with dual-use
technologies and tools. Yet with the U.S. creation of the national
security state in 1947 and its pursuit of techno-nationalism since the
Cold War, UARCs are direct pipelines to the intensification of U.S.
empire. Some of the higher-profile virtual military instructional
programs developed at ICT at USC, such as its Emergent Leader
Immersive Training Environment (ELITE) system, which provides
immersive role-playing to train army leaders for various situations in
the field, are funneled to explicitly military-only learning
institutions such as the Army Warrant Officer School.37
[[link removed]]

The military normal generates a sense of moral neutrality, even moral
superiority. The logic of the military normal, the offer of STEM
education and training, especially through providing undergraduate
internships and graduate training, and of course funding, not only
rationalizes the implementation of UARCs, but ennobles it. The
fifteenth and most recently created UARC, at Howard University in
2023—the first such designation for one of the historically Black
colleges and universities (HBCUs)—boasts STEM inclusion.38
[[link removed]] Partnering
with the U.S. Air Force, Howard University’s UARC is receiving a
five-year, $90 million contract to conduct AI research and develop
tactical autonomy technology. Its Research Institute for Tactical
Autonomy (RITA) leads a consortium of eight other HCBUs. As with the
University of Hawai’i, STEM advantages are touted by the UARC, with
RITA’s reach expanding in other ways: it plans to supplement STEM
education for K–12 students to “ease their path to a career in the
fields of artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, tactical autonomy,
and machine learning,” noting that undergraduate and graduate
students will also be able to pursue fully funded research
opportunities at their UARC. With the corporatization of universities,
neoliberal policies prioritize STEM for practical reasons, including
the pursuit of university rankings and increases in both corporate and
government funding. This fits well with increased linkages to the
defense sector, which offers capital, jobs, technology, and gravitas.
In a critique of Howard University’s central role for the DoD
through its new UARC, Erica Caines at _Black Agenda Report_ invokes
the “legacies of Black resistance” at Howard University in a call
to reduce “the state’s use of HBCUs.”39
[[link removed]] In
another response to Howard’s UARC, another editorial in _Black
Agenda Report_ draws upon activist Kwame Ture’s (Stokely
Carmichael’s) autobiography for an illuminative discussion about his
oppositional approach to the required military training and education
at Howard University during his time there.40
[[link removed]]

With their respectability and resources, universities, through UARCs,
provide ideological cover for U.S. warmaking and imperialistic
actions, offering up student labor at undergraduate and graduate
levels in service of that cover. When nearly eight hundred U.S.
military bases around the world are cited as evidence of U.S. empire
and the DoD requires research facilities to be embedded within places
of higher learning, it is reasonable to expect that university
communities—ostensibly civilian institutions—ask questions about
UARC goals and operations, and how they provide material support and
institutional gravitas to these military and federal agencies.41
[[link removed]] In
the case of USC, ICT’s stated goal of enhancing warfighter lethality
runs counter to current USC student efforts to strive for more
equitable conditions on campus and within its larger community (for
example, calls to end “land grabs,” and “targeted repression and
harassment of Black, Brown and Palestinian students and their allies
on and off campus”) as well as other reductions in institutional
harms.42
[[link removed]] The
university’s “Minor in Resistance to Genocide”—a program
pursued by USC’s discarded valedictorian Asna Tabassum—also serves
as mere cover, a façade, alongside USC’s innovations for warfighter
lethality.

Many students and members of U.S. society want to connect the dots, as
evident from the nationwide protests and encampments, and a push from
within the academy to examine the military supply chain is
intensifying. In addition to Researchers Against War members calling
out the militarized research that flourishes in U.S. universities, the
Hopkins Justice Collective at Johns Hopkins University recently
proposed a demilitarization process to its university’s Public
Interest Investment Advisory Committee that cited Johns Hopkins’s
UARC, Applied Physics Lab, as being the “sole source” of DoD
funding for the development and testing of AI-guided drone swarms used
against Palestinians in 2021.43
[[link removed]] Meanwhile,
at UH Mānoa, the struggle continues: in February 2024, the Associated
Students’ Undergraduate Senate approved a resolution requesting that
the university’s Board of Regents terminate UH’s UARC contract,
noting that UH’s own president is the principal investigator for a
$75 million High Performance Computer Center for the U.S. Air Force
Research Laboratory that was contracted by the university’s UARC,
Applied Research Laboratory.44
[[link removed]] Researchers
Against War organizing, the Hopkins Justice Collective’s proposal,
the undaunted UH Mānoa students, and others help pinpoint the flows
of militarized knowledge—knowledge that is developed by UARCs to
strengthen warfighters from within U.S. universities, through the DoD,
and to different parts of the world.45
[[link removed]]

Notes

* ↩
[[link removed]] Jake
Alimahomed-Wilson et al., “Boeing University: How the California
State University Became Complicit in Palestinian
Genocide,” Mondoweiss, May 20, 2024; Brian Osgood, “U.S.
University Ties to Weapons Contractors Under Scrutiny Amid War in
Gaza,” Al Jazeera, May 13, 2024.
* ↩
[[link removed]] “Collaborate
with Us: University Affiliated Research Center
[[link removed]],”
DevCom Army Research Laboratory, arl.devcom.army.mil.
* ↩
[[link removed]] USC
Divest From Death Coalition, “Divest From Death USC News Release,”
April 24, 2024.
* ↩
[[link removed]] USC
Institute for Creative Technologies, “ICT Overview Video
[[link removed]],” YouTube, 2:52,
December 12, 2023.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Gordon
Adams and Shoon Murray, Mission Creep: The Militarization of U.S.
Foreign Policy? (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2014).
* ↩
[[link removed]] USC
Institute for Creative Technologies, “ICT Overview Video”; USC
Institute for Creative Technologies, Historical Achievements:
1999–2019
[[link removed]] (Los
Angeles: University of Southern California, May 2021), ict.usc.edu.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Yuval
Abraham, “‘Lavender’: The AI Machine Directing Israel’s
Bombing Spree in Gaza
[[link removed]],” +972
Magazine.
* ↩
[[link removed]] “UrbanSim,”
USC Institute for Creative Technologies.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Sylvia
J. Martin, “Imagineering Empire: How Hollywood and the U.S. National
Security State ‘Operationalize Narrative,'” Media, Culture &
Society 42, no. 3 (April 2020): 398–413.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Paul
Rosenbloom, “Writing the Original UARC Proposal,” USC Institute
for Creative Technologies, March 11, 2024.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Susannah
V. Howieson, Christopher T. Clavin, and Elaine M. Sedenberg,
“Federal Security Laboratory Governance Panels: Observations and
Recommendations,” Institute for Defense Analyses—Science and
Technology Policy Institute, Alexandria, Virginia, 2013, 4.
* ↩
[[link removed]] OSD
Studies and Federally Funded Research and Development Centers
Management Office (FFRDC), Engagement Guide: Department of Defense
University Affiliated Research Centers (UARCs) (Alexandria, Virginia:
OSD Studies and FFRDC Management Office, April 2013), 5.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Christopher
V. Pece, “Federal Funding to University Affiliated Research Centers
Totaled $1.5 Billion in FY 2021,” National Center for Science and
Engineering Statistics, National Science Foundation, 2024,
ncses.nsf.gov.
* ↩
[[link removed]] “UARC
Customer Funding Guide,” USC Institute for Creative Technologies,
March 13, 2024.
* ↩
[[link removed]] “Federally
Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDC) and University
Affiliated Research Centers (UARC)
[[link removed]],” Department of Defense Research
and Engineering Enterprise, rt.cto.mil.
* ↩
[[link removed]] OSD
Studies and FFRDC Management Office, Engagement Guide.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Congressional
Research Service, “Federally Funded Research and Development Centers
(FFDRCs): Background and Issues for Congress,” April 3, 2020, 5.
* ↩
[[link removed]] OSD
Studies and FFRDC Management Office, Engagement Guide, 18.
* ↩
[[link removed]] “Institute
for Creative Technologies (ICT)
[[link removed]],”
USC Military and Veterans Initiatives, military.usc.edu.
* ↩
[[link removed]] USC
Institute for Creative Technologies, Historical Achievements:
1999–2019, 2; Linda Dayan, “‘Starve the War Machine’: Workers
at UC Santa Cruz Strike in Solidarity with Pro-Palestinian
Protesters,” Haaretz, May 21, 2024.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Richard
David Lindholm, That’s a 40 Share!: An Insider Reveals the Origins
of Many Classic TV Shows and How Television Has Evolved and Really
Works (Pennsauken, New Jersey: Book Baby, 2022).
* ↩
[[link removed]] Leo
Azambuja, “Faculty Senate Vote Opposing UARC Preserves Freedom
[[link removed]],” Mānoa
Now, November 30, 2005.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Deployment
Health Support Directorate, “Fact Sheet: Deseret Test Center, Red
Oak, Phase I
[[link removed]],”
Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Defense (Health Affairs),
health.mil.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Ray
Levy Uyeda, “U.S. Military Activity in Hawai’i Harms the
Environment and Erodes Native Sovereignty,” Prism Reports, July 26,
2022.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Azambuja,
“Faculty Senate Vote Opposing UARC Preserves Freedom.”
* ↩
[[link removed]] Kyle
Kajihiro, “The Militarizing of Hawai’i: Occupation, Accommodation,
Resistance,” in Asian Settler Colonialism, Jonathon Y. Okamura and
Candace Fujikane, eds. (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press,
2008), 170–94; “Hearings Officer’s Proposed Decision and Order,
Findings of Fact, and Conclusions of Law,” Department of Health,
State of Hawai‘i vs. United States Department of the Navy, no.
21-UST-EA-02 (December 27, 2021).
* ↩
[[link removed]] Christina
Jedra, “Red Hill Depositions Reveal More Details About What the Navy
Knew About Spill,” Honolulu Civil Beat, May 31, 2023.
* ↩
[[link removed]] “Does
Military Sonar Kill Marine Wildlife?,” Scientific American, June
10, 2009.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Joan
Fuller, “Strategic Outreach—University Affiliated Research
Centers,” Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (Research and
Engineering), June 2021, 4.
* ↩
[[link removed]] DMZ
Hawai‘i, “Save Our University, Stop UARC
[[link removed]],”
dmzhawaii.org.
* ↩
[[link removed]] University
of Hawai’i at Mānoa, Strategic Plan 2002–2010: Defining Our
Destiny, 8–9.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Craig
Gima, “UH to Sign Off on Navy Center,” Star Bulletin, May 13,
2008.
* ↩
[[link removed]] University
of Hawai’i at Mānoa, “Advocates and Opponents of the Proposed
UARC Contract Present Their Case to the UH Board of Regents
[[link removed]],” press
release, January 23, 2006.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Kyle
Kajihiro, “The Secret and Scandalous Origins of the UARC,” DMZ
Hawai‘i, September 23, 2007.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Catherine
Lutz, “The Military Normal,” in The Counter-Counterinsurgency
Manual, or Notes on Demilitarizing American Society, The Network of
Concerned Anthropologists, ed. (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press,
2009).
* ↩
[[link removed]] Anne-Laure
Fayard and Martina Mendola, “The 3-Stage Process That Makes
Universities Prime Innovators,” Harvard Business Review, April 19,
2024; Paul Garton, “Types of Anchor Institution Initiatives: An
Overview of University Urban Development Literature,” Metropolitan
Universities 32, no. 2 (2021): 85–105.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Randall
Hill, “ICT Origin Story: How We Built the Holodeck,” Institute for
Creative Technologies, February 9, 2024.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Brittany
Bailer, “Howard University Awarded $90 Million Contract by Air
Force, DoD to Establish First-Ever University Affiliated Research
Center Led by an HCBU
[[link removed]],” The
Dig, January 24, 2023, thedig.howard.edu.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Erica
Caines, “Black University, White Power: Howard University Covers for
U.S. Imperialism,” Black Agenda Report, February 1, 2023.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Editors,
“Howard University: Every Black Thing and Its Opposite, Kwame
Ture,” The Black Agenda Review (Black Agenda Report), February 1,
2023.
* ↩
[[link removed]] David
Vine, Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and
the World (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2015).
* ↩
[[link removed]] USC
Divest from Death Coalition, “Divest From Death USC News Release”;
“USC Renames VKC, Implements Preliminary Anti-Racism
Actions,” Daily Trojan, June 11, 2020.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Hopkins
Justice Collective, “PIIAC Proposal,” May 4, 2024.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Bronson
Azama to [email protected], “Testimony for 2/15/24,”
February 15, 2024, University of Hawai’i; “UH Awarded Maui High
Performance Computer Center Contract Valued up to $75 Million,” UH
Communications, May 1, 2020.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Isabel
Kain and Becker Sharif, “How UC Researchers Began Saying No to
Military Work
[[link removed]],” Labor
Notes, May 17, 2024.

_SYLVIA J. MARTIN holds a PhD in Anthropology. She is the author of
the book Haunted: An Ethnography of the Hollywood and Hong Kong Media
Industries (2017), and numerous articles on globalization and the
intersection of narrative and the U. S. national security state. She
has taught in Hong Kong and the United States._

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