ABSTRACT
Over the past decade, Xi Jinping’s one-party China and Vladimir Putin’s petro-nationalist Russia have weaponized entertainment to build popular support for wars. But the United States is the globe’s most significant center for “militainment” (or, military-themed entertainment that is made by media corporations with assistance from military publicity offices). To show how the US Department of Defense (DoD) uses “militainment” for imagining (and waging) future warfare, the chapter’s first section contextualizes the United States’s military-corporate futurism industry, the DoD’s hegemonic genre of dystopian futurism, and the DoD’s new partnership with science fiction writers. Drawing from past and present examples, the second section identifies eight salient ways that the DoD uses militainment to sustain a dystopian future warfare imaginary. Militainment helps the DoD: (1) imagine future threats to national security; (2) imagine future enemies; (3) imagine how future warfare will be fought; (4) imagine futuristic weapons systems and R&D projects; (5) imagine future soldier identities; (6) enlist personnel for future warfare; (7) train the imagination of personnel in preparation for future warfare; and, (8) move the civilian imagination toward future warfare. For the foreseeable future, the likely outcome of the US military-entertainment complex’s militainment will be more conflict and war, both real and imagined.
