The Market and the Military: Satellite Telephony and Entanglements of the Global in the 1990s

This paper focuses on a question crucial to this reconfiguration:  How did military interests get reinterpreted and connected to the market as this turn unfolded?  This analysis will explore the ways in which the boundaries among the military, the market, technology, politics, and concepts of the global were reconstituted as seen through one of the grand business initiatives of the 1990s—the creation of a global, wireless telephone system via a network of 66 satellites in low-Earth orbit called Iridium, the brainchild of Motorola, a Fortune 500 company.

In design, scale, and ambition, Iridium represented a dramatic departure from Cold War approaches to providing satellite communications.  As the largest private capital investment initiative in the last several decades, its global scope was mirrored in its investment and business structure—thirteen non-U.S. corporations and governments (including Cold War adversaries Russia and China) became partners in the project.  Even though Motorola emphasized Iridium’s market, non-military character, the effort from its inception had intimate connections to the US military and through the 1990s each side explored and negotiated the boundary between corporate and military interests via contracts, organization, people, and Cold War historical legacies.  This process, though, took shape within the larger frame of evolving ideas and practices relating to the global, including new systems of economic regulation and policy.  The Iridium-military relationship, thus, was inseparably bound to problems of production and consumption on a transnational scale and of reinvigorated attention to questions of empire and the postcolonial.