I’m fairly certain there isn’t one hour of the day–here in the Sonoran Desert–where military planes aren’t rupturing the soundscape as they move in and out of the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base (DMAFB). It’s bewildering that we need co-sign to this disruption and ecological devastation in order to call Tucson, Arizona our home. Frequently while teaching, I need to pause my lecture; I’ll point overhead–another day of Forever War.
My mind also clocks this ruination by checking on the day’s Department of Defense contracts, then toggling over to White House transcripts and a quick scroll through sites like ‘Defense News’ to keep loose tabs on the linguistic gymnastics of couching slaughter, torture, blank-check DoD budgets and (but not limited to) carceral capture into neat bylines. (For example, on May 2, 2025: “Pentagon seeks drone-killing technology that’s safe for civilians.”)
On May 5, 2025: “US Air Force sending ‘boneyard’ F-16s to Ukraine for spare parts” piqued my curiosity; before reading on–oh of course. I know that boneyard.
The 309th AMARG takes care of nearly 4,000 aircraft, making it the largest aircraft storage and preservation facility in the world. (January 2018). Image via the U.S. Navy.
DMAFB is just six miles from our small rented home. This massive tract of land on the southeast side of Tucson–what the murky “Sun Corridor, Inc.”[1] calls the “Tucson International Airport Employment Zone” (saying the quiet part out loud: “no real property tax for tenants”)–as with all Tucson–is occupied Tohono O’odham land. And on-site is the “Boneyard”–the world’s largest aircraft boneyard–a Military Aircraft Storage and Disposition Center (MASDC). [2]
Aircraft Maintenance and Regeneration Group (AMARG) boneyard at Davis–Monthan Air Force Base. Image via the U.S. Air Force.
Granted, the stripping of decommissioned aircraft and machinery for parts in a small southwest town isn’t captivating breaking news; but I pinballed around to find more. The Kyiv Post shared the story, pinpointing the ordeal to April 30, 2025. The article introduced me to a new concept–mothballing. I envision an overstuffed closet with putrid odors wafting when opened. But instead of preserving, for instance, your favorite sweater or baby blanket, we’re instead protecting (and tracking) “preservative-wrapped Vipers being loaded onto an Antonov An-124 in Tucson, Arizona, before the aircraft was tracked flying to Poland.” The piece furthered:
[Military bloggers on] Wednesday, April 30 [2025], showed decommissioned F-16 fighter aircraft being loaded onto a Ukrainian An-124-100M at the Tucson International Airport in Arizona… The condition of the F-16s is unclear, but it is likely they will be used to provide spare parts to keep Ukraine’s fleet of donated aircraft serviceable or to act as ground decoys to confuse ongoing Russian airfield assaults… Open-source flight data sites showed that the Antonov flew from Tucson via the New Hampshire city of Portsmouth to the Polish airport of Rzeszów, the key military aid logistics hub located 80 kilometers (50 miles) from Ukraine.
The F-16, manufactured by General Dynamics since 1976 prior to the company’s selling of aircraft manufacturing business to Lockheed Martin in 1993, was used extensively in combat by the US military during Operation Desert Storm, the Balkan wars, the occupation of Afghanistan and intervention in Libya, as well as scores more global US-led (and funded) invasions. Turkey has used F-16s excessively, including in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Greece, and against the Kurds across Kurdistan. The Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF)[3] utilized F-16s during Operation Opera, the 1982 and 2006 invasions of Lebanon, and Operation Cast Lead in Gaza (2008-2009).
What I mean is: these planes gathering dust in the Sonoran Desert are stained with imperial bloodthirst.
There are military historians and other scholars examining the MASDC infrastructure[4] and its inventory,[5] and I am not one. But what I cannot shake is… in virtually all coverage of these aging planes and its swooning over the favorably arid conditions and hard alkaline soil (caliche)[6] of the Sonoran Desert… a phrase repeated for decades– [the Boneyard] ‘naturally preserves aircraft for cannibalization or possible reuse’.[7]
In a US Government document from February 1961 which discusses hawking plane parts:
THE DEPARTMENT OF THE AIR FORCE HAS BEEN GIVING CONSIDERATION TO THE ADVISABILITY OF RETAINING THE PROPERTY FOR PURPOSES OF CANNIBALIZATION AND USE WITHIN THE DEPARTMENT, IN THE BELIEF THAT THIS DISPOSITION WILL BETTER SERVE THE INTERESTS OF THE GOVERNMENT.
Sure, to cannibalize can be the reuse of salvageable parts. But we can also consider–the Forever War machine must eat itself for survival–or, that the insatiability of settler colonialism demands the consumption of both life and death as a totalizing project.
Retired F-16s at the Boneyard in the Sonoran Desert. In the background, the Santa Catalina Mountains. See also: Tucson is the ancestral homeland of the Tohono O’odham; this region has been continuously inhabited by its Indigenous people for thousands of years. Image via the U.S. Air Force
This beast that must cannibalize itself concurrently leaves its excrement everywhere it moves. Shahram Khosravi writes about how pierced steel planks (PSP), otherwise known as Marston Mats, found their way into his village in the Bakhtiari region in southwest Iran–repurposed metallic boards from abandoned drilling sites in the Zagros Mountains. The PSP were mass produced during World War II for the US Air Force’s rapidly-constructed runways. PSP were proliferated during the Vietnam War when US forces built landing strips for planes and helicopters in the middle of the jungle. This war surplus–parts of the US imperial cache– is found everywhere from Hawai’i to the Philippines, Papua New Guinea and across Africa and the Middle East. PSP were used in older sections of the US-Mexico border wall.
(From The Los Angeles Times, Sept. 13, 2017): March 22, 1967 – Thousands of military planes are stored at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson. Dozens of the aircraft were being pulled out of retirement, rebuilt and sent for use in the Vietnam War. This photo appeared in the Los Angeles Times on April 30, 1967. Image courtesy of Larry Sharkey / Los Angeles Times
(From The Los Angeles Times, Sept. 13, 2017): March 1960 – U.S. Air Force B-36s lined up for demolition at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson. After the aircraft are cut up, the scrap is melted down. Image courtesy of Larry Sharkey / Los Angeles Times.
Ann Laura Stoler writes at length on this imperial debris:
“To ruin… is to inflict or bring great and irretrievable disaster upon, to destroy agency, to reduce to a state of poverty, to demoralize completely.” Attention here is on to ruin as an active process, and a vibrantly violent verb… Such effects reside in the corroded hollows of landscapes, in the gutted infrastructures of segregated cityscapes and in the microecologies of matter and mind. The focus then is not on inert remains but on their vital reconfiguration. The question is pointed: How do imperial formations persist in their material debris, in ruined landscapes and through the social ruination of people’s lives?
Genocidal campaigns of the present must be understood on the continuum of annihilation–spearheaded by stakeholders lusting for… investing in…endless war; a global crusade of empire and capital. Decades of scorched earth campaigns, foremost led by the US military and the IOF, have sickened us all; poisoned food and waterways, air, and all the spaces humans and more-than-humans move through and affecting racialized and intentionally blighted populations most severely.
Trillions are earmarked for, still following Stoler, “occupations, dislocations, and preemptive military assault in the name of peace”; for so-called “defense” technologies, designed and produced for swift obsolescence–the crux of why “The Border” is never fully sealed. From May 2, 2025: “[The Fiscal Year 2026] Budget proposes unprecedented increases for defense and border security. For Defense spending, the President proposes an increase of 13 percent to $1.01 trillion for FY 2026; for Homeland Security, the Budget commits a historic $175 billion investment to, at long last, fully secure our border.” Integral here is the phrasing fully secure – instead of, for example, fully sealed, because we know there must always be holes, gaps, seepages… the next “invasion” and land to grab to precipitate the next border billions. This is why “The Mission” is never truly completed; there is always a next frontier, a next frontline for the US (and its zionist settler colonial bedfellow, IOF) to conquer. This is why ‘The Border’, ‘A Border’, is always moving–is porous, shapeshifting–to ensure the next contracts for further hyper-militarization, containment and torture are guaranteed.
Footnotes
[1] From their website, “Sun Corridor Inc. is a CEO-driven regional alliance whose members aggressively champion mega-regional issues that impact economic competitiveness and quality of life.” On December 10, 2024, Sun Corridor announced their merger with the Tucson Metro Chamber of Commerce. “Notable businesses” Sun Corridor boasts involvement with include: Bombardier, Honeywell, Sargent, Universal Avionics (Elbit Systems), Caterpillar, Raytheon Missiles & Defense, Amazon and Hexagon Mining.
[2] For years, the Pima & Space Museum offered public and private tours of the Boneyard. Now on their site: “The bus tours to Davis-Monthan AFB of the 309th AMARG (AKA “The Boneyard”) have permanently ended. This tour is no longer offered and will not be coming back due to changes in U.S. Air Force security considerations.”
[3] Aviation blogs circulate that there is a plane boneyard near the Israel Aerospace Industries manufacturing plant adjacent to Ben Gurion Airport. While zionist cartographies insist this is “Lod,” the Palestinian town of Lydda was captured by the Haganah during the Nakba in 1948. This, a palimpsest of “boneyard,” as the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine requires the IOF (and US) to ceaselessly devour the land and its people.
[4] See: Wilson, Sharon, Jacob C Miller, and Helen M King. “The Multiple Speeds of Infrastructural Violence, or Putting Flesh on the Boneyard.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 114, no. 10 (2024): 2352–69. doi:10.1080/24694452.2024.2380927;
[5] Part of which includes “hundreds of surplus B-52 Stratofortress bombers [that] have been dismantled at the facility, either due to obsolescence or as part of disarmament treaties” and Lockheed Martin C-5A Galaxy military transport aircraft. A Department of Defense story, “Aircraft Boneyard Supports DOD Readiness, Saves Taxpayer Dollars,” outlines: “Besides military parts and aircraft, the boneyard also stores aircraft from other agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, NASA, Forest Service, National Science Foundation and Smithsonian Institution. AMARG also stores aircraft for allied nations.”
[6] Nevermind how the Air Force Base and adjacent Raytheon Missiles & Defense have poisoned the soil and aquifers of the Sonoran Desert for decades.
[7] No need to cite every source where this is seen for the past six decades–however, I’ve noticed it in The New York Times, Airplane Boneyards, Defense News, and the Air Force Times.