Fieldnotes from Seoul ADEX 2023 /S.M. Downer

*이 글은 여기서 한국어로도 읽으실 수 있습니다.

ADEX: A Weapons Convention for Everyone

As I step off the bus, my ears swell with the thunderous soar of bomber jets overhead. A hoard of men in suits and well-shined shoes walks ahead of me, beelining for the gates of Seoul Airport, hoping to beat the line to enter. Bearing badges that announce their arms industry affiliations, they shake hands, slap shoulders, and exchange grins. This is the stage of South Korea’s biannual Aerospace and Defense Exposition (ADEX), opened on October 17, 2023, at the Seoul Air Base in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province. Aiming to forge industry ties between defense officials and company representatives, ADEX’s organizers boast that the exposition is “the largest, most comprehensive event of its kind in Northeast Asia.” It is not coincidental that ADEX is hosted by South Korea, a crucial US Cold War ally since the Korean War, and an integral part of the US military empire in Asia and the Pacific, host to 28,500 US troops and several of the most active US military installations in the world. Every Expo since 2013, activists at ADEX have staged crucial disruptions that challenge the normalization of militarization as the condition of everyday life, both in Korea and beyond its borders. This year is no exception.

After being patted down by an Expo employee, I walk into the most prominent of ADEX’s white-tent exhibition halls, the USA Partnership Pavilion. Organized on the 70th anniversary of the ROK-US alliance by Kallman Worldwide, Inc.—a consultancy based in New Jersey that aims to be “an advocate and partner for America’s global export interests”—in coordination with US government agencies, the Pavilion exhibits over 30 booths displaying the latest in missile and surveillance technologies. It is noteworthy that many exhibitors at ADEX are not direct producers of arms per se; their presence shows the entanglement of war-making with “civilian” business. Booths manned by representatives from local universities, metropolitan Korean and foreign governments, and smaller technology companies manufacturing products also used for cars and computers coexist with the flashy displays of the Lockheed Martins, Northrop Grummans, and Boeings of the industry. Deflecting attention from the complicity of education, politics, and technology sectors in the production of state-sanctioned death with shiny promises of STEM education programs, economic growth, and the cultivation of friendly diplomatic relations between nations, the participation of institutions that are not explicitly weapons manufacturers or militias in ADEX lends a mollifying veneer to the violent edge of war.

Though ostensibly a trade show, ADEX is not only an occasion for the war machine’s white-collar marketers to network and make deals. Open to non-industry attendees on all days, with organizers putting on explicit public programming on designated “Public Days,” ADEX makes use of a variety of tactics to advance an understanding of securitization as not only the concern of industry “experts,” but also one that requires the participation of everyday people. Among ADEX visitors, in addition to the button-downed, slacked-up men, there are older men in everyday clothing; young Korean men in military uniform; men with their wives and young children who have made ADEX into a family outing. The atmosphere in the tents is one of excitement, as chattering attendees flit between miniature model displays of battlefields, attack helicopters, unmanned drones. In addition to its internal industry function, ADEX seduces visitors with the opportunity for proximity to powerful weapons: Attendees can try out extended reality shooting simulators to approximate real-life training scenarios; climb into an aluminum-frame tactical shelter system, designed to shield occupants from combat conditions; and feel the cool weight of a rifle in their hands, all from the safety of the tent. By stripping military technology of its lethal context, ADEX domesticates the tools of warfare, making them available to hobbyists and traders for experimentation and play, ultimately reinforcing in participants a sense of dissociation from the brutal, sadistic reality of militarized invasions and occupations.

Lovely Ladies and Marriage Pilots/Plots: On Loving War

Later that day, at a debrief among several peace movement activists present at ADEX, 뭉치, an organizer with PEACEMOMO(피스모모), shares that several company representatives had noticed her perusing the booths earlier that day. They approached her with the seeming intention to recruit her for an interview, making small talk and doling out their business cards. In our experience of ADEX, we discuss how women, let alone a younger Korean woman walking alone through the exhibition halls, are rare among attendees—unless they are working as company representatives. I recall that, while passing by an exhibitor’s booth manned by a made-up and slickly dressed Korean female employee, I overheard her rebuffing an attendee who had presumably commented on her weight, replying that no, she was normally on the slender side. In front of another booth, an elderly Korean man walking with several others bumped into me. He began to apologize, turning around; however, upon seeing me—younger, Korean/American, femme—he turned back to his coterie, chuckled, and walked away without another word. 

Gender, which makes up the packaging and the substance of militarism’s cultural politics, has long drawn the incisive attention of feminist organizers like the activists of PEACEMOMO, as well as of scholars in feminist security studies. Gender at ADEX is nowhere in the official signage, and yet appears everywhere in the exchanges between people and things: a knowing glance shared by female employees who, despite surely experiencing discrimination, also participate in the gendered economies of the arms industry; a father choosing to take his school-aged son to the exposition; an attendee running his hand over the body of a gun. In the afternoon, I step out of the tents to witness one of ADEX’s many airshows, which are scheduled to take place every day at regular times. Hundreds of people are already gathered outside, gandering at the tanks and helicopters stationed along the runway that are manned by Korean and US military personnel, or sipping iced lattes from the many coffee carts stationed outside the tents. Jets roar overhead. Several onlookers plug their ears as the planes cut the sky with dyed vapor, drawing an enormous scarlet heart; all while Bruno Mars’s “Marry Me” blasts from a nearby speaker, the song’s hand-clapping backtrack battling the aircraft’s booming echoes.

What does this invocation of romance have to do with militarism? Another example: Prior to the opening of ADEX, The Korea Herald, Korea’s largest English-language newspaper, published an article celebrating the selection of Lee Ho-jeong, a 41-year-old Vietnamese marriage migrant to Korea, as a “People’s Pilot” for the ADEX airshows. The article, picked up by Vietnamese media, gushes about Lee’s childhood dream of becoming a pilot—a dream deferred, “due to financial difficulties”—and implicitly attributes Lee’s migration to South Korea as the occasion that allowed her to secure a light aircraft pilot’s license, alongside her two jobs as a banker and a Vietnamese language tutor. Lee’s status as a national pilot would bestow her the honor of sitting on a guided, hour-long flight in a T-50 fighter jet at ADEX, flown by a member of the ROK Air Force. At the conclusion of the flight, the People’s Pilots who are meant to “[represent] members of the public”—including a neurosurgeon at Seoul’s prestigious Severance Hospital, a college student ultramarathoner, and the brother of an ROK Air Force major killed in duty— receive a red scarf, as worn by pilots in the ROK Air Force, symbolizing their crowning as honorary Koreans and patriots.

In 1987, after observing defense intellectuals and nuclear strategy analysts, feminist scholar Carol Cohn wrote of the centrality of sexual and domestic metaphors in the rhetoric of the defense industry. Cohn describes atomic scientists metaphorizing their dreams for the success “Little Boy” and “Fat Man”—the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—in the language of birthing “by saying that they hoped the baby was a boy, not a girl—that is, not a dud.” The power of men in high positions to destroy earth, which is often feminized, is transformed in a single line into “the power to create…It converts men’s destruction into their rebirth.” Through its airshows, at ADEX, the life-destroying force that is the arms industry, and the institution of the military attached to it, facilitate feelings of affection, romance, and fondness among onlookers. It is worth noting the specter of the Vietnam War that haunts Lee’s inclusion at ADEX as a national pilot, a move that evokes the participation of South Korean forces, recruited as a neocolonial cold war paramilitary force by the United States, in the massacre and sexual torture of Vietnamese people. By displaying its inclusion of minoritized others like Lee, what is ostensibly an industry based on facilitating the capacity of nation-states to kill rehabilitates itself into the guarantor of life-changing opportunities that attend inclusion into the Korean nation.

“Asia is Not Your Market”: Against War as Common Sense

Evacuating the nation’s colonial, postcolonial, and neocolonial past and present, ADEX presents a vision of the future where military power itself is the source and object of national pride. As a consequence, national security emerges as a discursive field where social “problems” rooted in the racialized and gendered legacies of imperialism are resolved. Yet in reality, it is militarization itself that creates the material conditions for such inequities to emerge, from the oft-depraved conditions that Southeast Asian marriage migrants face in their relationships with Korean men, to the inequality forged by the nation’s rapid industrial development under successive military dictatorships, to the irresolution of the Korean War that continues to inform South Korea’s cold war turn to the United States. The abstraction of carnage carried out by military forces into arms sales statistics, weapons precision assessments, and swimming hearts in the sky signal that the “rational world” of defense intellectuals—and arguably, of the arms industry—is, as Cohn writes, “hermetically sealed.” That is, questions of the defensibility of bodies maimed, lands rubbled, and lifeworlds destroyed are framed by warmakers as inquiries that exist outside of their realm of expertise, external to what defense intellectuals and defense industry dealers “do.” At best, they are acknowledged as necessary casualties of the business, ugly components of the industry’s common sense.

Anti-military and peace movement activists have always organized to disrupt the separation of the business of war from the state-sanctioned racialized and gendered violence that is war itself. On the second day of ADEX, organizers from STOP ADEX gather in front of the Lockheed Martin booth in the USA Pavilion, donning keffiyeh, the popularity of which has spread beyond occupied Palestine as a sign of solidarity with Palestinian liberation. Raising signs censuring the ongoing US-sponsored Israeli genocide in Gaza, the organizers stand in a line, wielding their bodies to disturb the fantasy of independence—contrasted with the reality of its centrality to imperial violence—that the global arms industry uses to justify its prioritization of profit over people. Though the activists manage to disrupt the activities of the booth, several security guards swarm their demonstration, forcibly shoving and dragging the activists from the premises. While the swiftness of ADEX’s security response to the organizers could be interpreted as an a sign of the defense industry’s ability to shield itself from the critique, the extent of the Expo’s repressive apparatus can also be interpreted as a sign of paranoia, and of the precarity of the epistemological separation it attempts to maintain between itself and the unconscionable fallout of warfare.

On the third day of the Expo, organizers from STOP ADEX mobilize again at ADEX outside the Media Conference Room, where Aviation Week Network, an aerospace consulting and publishing firm, is hosting its so-called Asia Defence Market Briefing. The speakers, two editors for Aviation Week magazine, spend the hour speculating about the “Asia-Pacific'' as a defense export market, praising the expansion of military partnerships between the United States and Singapore, and, perhaps most bizarrely, valorizing the victory of Kang Chang-hyeon—the 18-year-old Korean champion of the 2019 Féderation Aéronatique Internationale World Drone Racing Championship—as a promising indicator of South Korea’s competitiveness in the global defense industry. The recent rise of South Korea as a global arms exporter is a popular topic during the Q&A period with attendees. In addition to being one of the United States’ key importers of military equipment, South Korea has become a major global exporter of arms to a largely European clientele: Reuters reported in early November that South Korea and Poland were working to remove hurdles to striking a weapons sale amounting to 30 trillion dollars, the largest potential arms deal to be made in South Korean history. 

As South Korea continues to beef up investments in its defense industries, organizers for peace have continued to engage critical direct and indirect actions to bring the nation’s war machine to a grinding halt. Activists from World Without War conduct crucial surveillance of Korean weapons exports with the goal of reducing South Korean military spending. When the defense briefing concludes, several peace movement organizers at ADEX stand in silence near the building exit with slogans that expose their complicity in the global arms race. Bearing signs reading “Marketing War Makes War Crimes” and “Arms Dealers are Committing War Crimes in Asia,” the organizers close the purported distance between marketing war and making war, illustrating the entanglement of profits and the production of dispensable populations. My favorite sign is direct and to the point: “Asia is not your market.” The sign underscores a fundamental difference in the imaginaries of the presenters, and of peace activists, about what “Asia” could mean beyond a set of national borders, an arena of capitalist circulation, or a state-brokered security alliance. 

What might it look like to turn to Asia not as a source of extractive profit, but as a network of anti-military organizers whose work illuminates the global implications of the militarized inheritances of the cold war? What would it look like for South Korea to divest from its security alliance with the United States—to approach this partnership as one that creates further precarity, rather than true security? What does the refusal of market logics entail for what peace means, as a potentially anti-capitalist state of affairs? As ADEX’s guards violently drag the protestors out from the venue for a second time, I regard the gaggle of onlookers who gather on the scene. Some attendees crane their necks to get close to the commotion, while others ask what is happening aloud. It strikes me that every spectator is also a potential witness. There are others standing around who watch on in silence, and I wonder what is on their minds: whether they have glimpsed the organizers’ picket signs, sustained a shroud of doubt, sensed the spectral presence of these questions hanging, heavy, in the air; if they have felt felt in themselves a slight, bright opening, a softening toward another world, where independence is a fiction and interdependence is the rule, where the power of profit pales in comparison to the strength of bonds among people and the places they call home, where the bombs fall on the land as softly and dully as round fruit.

/S.M. Downer

She writes, and researches, living between the United States and South Korea. She is writing her doctoral dissertation on the nexus of U.S. militarism and tourism industrialization in South Korea.