Global Wars, Environmental Strategy, and the Military-Ecological Complex, 1914–1975

The First World War (1914–1918) inaugurated Global War in the twentieth century. Although anchored in the muddy trenches of Europe, the tentacles of its warring sides—the Triple Entente of France, Russia and Britain, aided by the U.S. versus the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary)—grappled around the globe destroying the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East, dipping into Lake Victoria in East Africa, and the waters of the East China Sea, and the Pacific Ocean. The chapter opens by discussing the geo-political perspectives of Alfred Thayer Mahan, the German Geopolitik School of Richard Haushofer and the British imperial geographer Halford J. Mackinder's 'Heartland' theory, before detailing the use of the geo-hazards of floods and fire as catastrophic battle weapons in the Second World War. Lastly, the memoirs and fiction of Vietnam War Veterans and pieces of journalism reflect how the power of the U.S. Military Industrial-Complex was countered by North Vietnam’s Military-Ecological Complex.