Securitizing biological risks ties health to the protection of global capitalism. ‘Disease as threat’ narratives militarize responsibility for public health, replicating past colonial structures to secure neoliberalism.

The globalization of economies has produced accelerated patterns of movements of capital, goods, services, materials, and labor, simultaneously resulting in the accelerated production and circulation of anxieties constituted around these movements. Neoliberal organizing of health manifests itself in the development and deployment of surveillance, management, and coordination networks that see health primarily in the realm of threats posed by diseases dispersed through global networks, networks of bioterror, emerging infectious diseases, and biowarfare (Salinsky, 2002). The response of health systems therefore is formulated in the form of network structures of biodefense and homeland security, performing functions of surveillance, information gathering, and information dissemination, constituted around the economic logics of growth and efficiency. The protection of the economic opportunities of globalization becomes the function of public health systems formulated in the narrative of geosecurity and implemented in the form of programs controlled by the police-military complex within structures of biodefense, biosecurity and geosecurity.

With this emphasis on security, the mandate for health depicts continuity with colonial implementations of public health administration to manage erstwhile colonies, increasingly being set within the military metaphor of health, turning health into a geosecurity threat for the new configurations of empire, and therefore, deploying military interventions to address health issues. Consider the following depiction in a report issued by the U.S. National Intelligence Council (NIC) that offers a picture of the global health threats posed by infectious diseases:

New and reemerging infectious diseases will pose a rising global health threat and will complicate U.S. and global security over the next twenty years. These diseases will endanger U.S. citizens at home and abroad, threaten U.S. armed forces deployed overseas, and exacerbate social and political instability in key countries and regions in which the United States has significant interests. (Gordon, 2000) [END PAGE 167]

The protection of human health is seen as a function of the military, tied to the goals of defending global capitalism against the threats to health and reflecting the colonial undertones of health containment measures deployed by the instruments of empire. In this instance of the report published by the NIC, knowledge about health is constituted in the realm of intelligence gathering to protect the interests of national security of the United States.

Framed as threats to the health of citizens at home and abroad and to the health of the armed forces deployed overseas, infectious diseases are seen as contributors to social and political instability in key strategic regions of significant value to the United States. International relations are understood in the language of security, casting interpenetrating networks as targets of surveillance and management. The portrayal of infectious diseases as threats to geosecurity deploys valuable health resources into the hands of the military, placing the power of disease management under military structures and framing the responses to disease in military interpretations. Moreover, the juxtaposition of epidemic narratives amid narratives of war and bioterror heighten the concerns for geosecurity, foregrounding and necessitating a variety of military response strategies (Aaltola, 2012).

The interpenetrating relationship between health and the military constitute one element of the consolidation of power in the hands of the global elite achieved through neoliberal transformations. The military emerges as a global organizational structure for the management of health, simultaneously justifying the deployment of resources to the military and the deployment of military strategies to address health issues. This emphasis on the military framed within the realm of protecting geostrategic interests constructs health in the realm of threats, simultaneously erasing questions of fundamental human rights to health. Similarly, in the president's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, a significant proportion of resources are housed in the military in order to deploy military-to-military interventions within the broader umbrella of protecting the geostrategic interests of the United States. Consider, for instance, the workings of the U.S. Africa Command to address HIV/ AIDS prevention as a security threat in Africa.

The U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) is the result of an internal reorganization of the U.S. military command structure, creating one administrative headquarters that answers to the Secretary of Defense and is responsible for U.S. military relations with 53 African countries. AFRICOM recognizes that HIV/AIDS has an enormous impact on economic and political stability across the continent, and, by degrading military medical readiness, weakens the national security of individual countries. HIV/ AIDS programming will be a key component of AFRICOM's security cooperation and humanitarian assistance activities. (www.pepfar.gov/about/agencies/ cl 9397.htm) [END PAGE 168]

Critical to the deployment of a militarized form of governance in addressing health is the consolidation of power within elite structures, working through militarized systems of governance to control disease to protect the economic interests of the status quo. The military, as an instrument of power and control, functions within the narratives of security cooperation and humanitarian assistance activities to assert its power and control in global governance. Intelligence gathering emerges as an instrument for the generation of data to secure and protect zones of economic function. This gathering of targeted intelligence and the deployment of targeted interventions becomes particularly critical within the context of maintaining open zones of communication and economic exchange within the neoliberal structuring of economic relationships. Knowledge and technical interventions in this sense are constituted amid the paradoxical agenda of needing to protect boundaries and at the same time ensuring transnational spaces of movement of capital, labor, services, materials, and markets. In this chapter, we closely interrogate the meanings that circulate around the militarization of health, and attend to the communicative processes through which the militarization of health is achieved. The surveillance of spaces and the militarization of responses, I argue, are continuous with colonial logics of controlling spaces in distant locales of imperial governance, and are discontinuous from the colonial forms of governance because of the paradoxes of networked flows in neoliberal governance.