Just-in-Time Imperialism: The Logistics Revolution and the Vietnam War

Abstract

In this article, I argue that an important yet understudied consequence of the Vietnam War was an imperial turn toward modern logistics management. Drawing on archival documents collected from the National Archives and Records Administration, I track how the U.S. military and the U.S. Agency for International Development increasingly championed logistics management as a way of solving some of the “frictional” supply problems that threatened to paralyze the transnational war effort in South Vietnam. As part of this process, imperial agents cobbled together various infrastructures of supply and provision into a broader, more complex system for managing the transpacific flow of life-sustaining and life-eliminating commodities between the United States and South Vietnam. In this way, the Vietnam War served the U.S. empire-state as an experimental laboratory for repurposing logistics from a capitalist science of economic management into an imperial technology of rule and pacification.