IX. The Nitrodollar Dimension: Conditions of Possibility and Falsification
9.1 The Construct, Now Narrowed
The Nitrodollar, Nitrofication, and Explosionomics constructs were introduced in earlier work in this corpus. They are working theoretical frameworks rather than established defense-economics terminology. The Nitrodollar names a hypothesized monetary mode in which a substantial fraction of US defense-sector revenue derives from the production and expenditure of high-explosive material, the demand for which is generated by the operational tempo of conflicts licensed under the master vernacular. Nitrofication names the structural transition from petroleum-anchored to munition-anchored defense-industrial flows. Explosionomics names the analytical project of treating sustained-conflict economics as a distinct sub-domain of defense political economy.
The present article narrows the operative claim. It does not argue that counterterrorism is the cause of US defense-procurement patterns. Procurement is overdetermined by long-cycle institutional patterns, by congressional district-level political economies, by alliance and great-power dynamics that operate independently of counterterrorism framing, and by technological and industrial trajectories whose timelines exceed the relevant counterterrorism episodes. The article argues a more modest and more defensible claim: that the master vernacular is one of the conditions of possibility for the procurement loop’s sustained political viability over multiple decades and across changes of administration. The narrowed claim is falsifiable, condition-of-possibility in form, and consistent with the framework’s broader commitments. It does not require the maximalist reading that earlier formulations courted.
9.2 Discourse and Matter: The New-Materialist Bridge
The Nitrodollar claim depends on a theoretical commitment about the relationship between discourse and matter. The article makes this commitment explicit by drawing on new materialism (Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter [2010], Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway [2007], the edited volume by Coole and Frost [2010], Manuel DeLanda’s assemblage theory) and on critical infrastructure studies (Susan Leigh Star and Geoffrey Bowker on infrastructure classification, Brian Larkin’s Annual Review of Anthropology essay on infrastructure [2013], the edited volume by Anand, Gupta, and Appel [2018], Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy [2011], Ashley Carse’s Beyond the Big Ditch [2014], Paul Edwards’s A Vast Machine [2010]).
The new-materialist insight relevant to the present argument is that discourse and matter are not separable layers. The political viability of a procurement loop depends on a discursive infrastructure that licenses its operation; the discursive infrastructure depends on the material practices it licenses for its continued operational reality. Neither precedes the other in time. The procurement loop and the master vernacular are co-constituents of an apparatus whose operation requires both.
Critical infrastructure studies supplies the analytic vocabulary for treating procurement systems, supply chains, and ordnance flows as objects of political analysis in their own right, not merely as outputs of policy decisions. The 155mm artillery shells expended in Gaza are material objects with specific production histories, specific manufacturing sites, specific labor and capital flows, and specific replenishment requirements. They are also discursive objects sorted into specific use categories by the labels attached to them in the appropriations documents, the contract awards, the operational planning documents, and the post-operation reporting. The materiality and the discursivity are co-present in the objects; neither dimension can be separated from the other without distorting the analysis.
This theoretical move forestalls two opposing misreadings. The vulgar-materialist misreading treats discourse as epiphenomenal to material interests; on that misreading, the master vernacular is a rationalization of procurement decisions that would have been made regardless. The discursive-idealist misreading treats material flows as merely produced by discourse; on that misreading, the procurement loop is the executive arm of a vernacular that operates without material constraint. The framework requires both pillars to operate simultaneously, and the new-materialist bridge supplies the theoretical resources for treating them as co-present rather than as alternative.
9.3 The MOU, the Supplementals, and the Distribution Structure
The empirical record of US security assistance to Israel provides the institutional substrate for the Nitrodollar claim. The 10-year Memorandum of Understanding for FY2019 through FY2028 commits $38 billion in security assistance, with approximately 75 percent of the funds required to be spent on US defense contractors. The post-October 7, 2023 supplemental appropriations, principally the National Security Supplemental Appropriations Act (P.L. 118-50, April 24, 2024) and successor instruments, have added more than $17 billion. The aid is not a transfer in the conventional sense; it is a procurement program with structural beneficiaries on the US side. The principal beneficiaries are Lockheed Martin (F-35 production, Hellfire missiles, Multiple Launch Rocket System variants), RTX (Patriot air defense, Iron Dome co-production, Tomahawk and other guided munitions), Boeing (JDAM kits, AH-64 Apache helicopters, F-15 production), General Dynamics (artillery shells, M1 Abrams tank components, naval platforms), and Northrop Grumman (E-2D Hawkeye, RQ-4 Global Hawk, electronic warfare components).
The procurement footprint is distributed across congressional districts in a manner that produces structural political constituencies for the loop’s continuation. Lockheed Martin’s F-35 production at Fort Worth, Texas, and the program’s subcomponent manufacturing across more than forty states; RTX’s Patriot production in Massachusetts and Arizona; Boeing’s defense work in Missouri, Pennsylvania, and Washington; General Dynamics’s facilities in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and across the Midwest — the distribution is not accidental. It is a deliberate feature of the contracting architecture, and it produces the political-economic conditions under which procurement decisions are insulated from ordinary policy debate by district-level employment and tax-base concerns.
9.4 Tight-Coupling Demonstrations
The narrowed claim requires empirical demonstration that specific vernacular events tightly couple to subsequent procurement spikes in nameable line items. The article identifies three demonstrations that warrant fuller empirical treatment in subsequent work but whose outlines can be sketched here.
The first is the AUMF-procurement coupling. The Authorization for Use of Military Force of September 18, 2001, was followed within 24 months by specific procurement increases in the FY2003 and FY2004 Department of Defense appropriations. The line items most directly affected — precision-guided munitions including JDAM kits and Paveway laser-guided bombs, Hellfire missile production, Predator and Reaper platform acquisition, and the broader special-operations forces equipment lines — show identifiable production-rate increases and contractor-revenue effects in the period. The coupling is not deterministic (the procurement increases would have occurred to some degree under any plausible post-9/11 response), but the line-item composition and the speed of the appropriation cycle are tightly aligned with the AUMF’s enactment.
The second is the FY supplementals–replenishment coupling. The April 2024 supplemental’s line-item composition (155mm artillery shells in substantial quantities, Iron Dome interceptors, Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System rockets, JDAM kits) tracks the operational expenditures of the immediately preceding period. The interval between appropriation, contract award, and announced production-line increases is documentable in the relevant contractor press releases and government contracting databases. The replenishment dynamic is the most visible operational mechanism of the procurement loop and the one most amenable to falsification testing.
The third is the FTO-designation-financial-architecture coupling. The October 8, 1997 inaugural FTO list and the subsequent terrorism-finance-architecture expansion (the post-9/11 buildout of Treasury’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, the OFAC designation cascade, the Treasury-led international financial-sanctions coordination) trace the institutional growth of the terrorism-finance apparatus following the designation regime’s establishment. The growth is not principally a procurement matter, but it is a closely related structural pattern in which vernacular designations directly produce institutional architecture and budget growth.
Each demonstration is read in the article as evidence of tight coupling, not of causation. The framework’s claim is condition-of-possibility, which is satisfied by the demonstration of reliable temporal-institutional alignment between vernacular events and structural-material consequences.
9.5 Falsification Criteria
The Nitrodollar thesis, as narrowed, is falsifiable. The article is explicit about what evidence would weaken or refute it, in keeping with the methodological commitment to falsifiability that the framework requires.
The first falsifier is diversification. If major prime contractors’ revenue streams are diversified such that counterterrorism-labeled conflicts and the associated procurement loops are not a primary driver of revenue, stock-price performance, or workforce composition, the Nitrodollar thesis weakens. The article must engage this possibility seriously. The post-2022 surge in European defense procurement driven by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine complicates a counterterrorism-only reading: the same prime contractors that benefit from US counterterrorism-labeled procurement also benefit substantially from European great-power-competition-labeled procurement, and the latter has been growing rapidly. The framework’s response must be that the conditions-of-possibility claim does not require counterterrorism to be the sole driver; it requires the master vernacular to be one of the discursive conditions under which the procurement loops remain politically viable. The framework remains testable, but the test is not satisfied by demonstrating that other framings also operate.
The second falsifier is discursive substitutability. If procurement loops sustain themselves across multiple, substitutable framing regimes — counterterrorism, great-power competition, climate-security, cyber-threats — without measurable disruption at the moments of transition, then the master-vernacular thesis weakens. The post-2018 shift in US Department of Defense strategic documents toward great-power competition is the principal recent example. The 2018 National Defense Strategy explicitly identified state competition with China and Russia as the primary US defense priority, marking a transition away from the post-9/11 framing. The framework’s response must be that the transition has involved vernacular addition and reconfiguration rather than substitution: the master vernacular of counterterrorism has not been retired but has been folded into a wider framing that includes great-power competition without displacing the counterterrorism apparatus’s continuing operations. Whether this response is empirically adequate is a question the article cannot fully resolve and that subsequent work would need to address.
The third falsifier is temporal decoupling. If procurement decisions are demonstrably driven by long-cycle institutional and budgetary patterns whose timing is decoupled from discrete vernacular events, then the tight-coupling demonstrations of §9.4 lose their evidential weight. The budget-process scholarship of Aaron Wildavsky (The Politics of the Budgetary Process), Allen Schick (The Federal Budget), and Graham Allison (Essence of Decision) supplies the counter-hypothesis: that US budget patterns are produced by incremental processes whose dynamics operate largely independently of the discursive events the article identifies as licensing operations. The framework’s response must distinguish the long-cycle patterns the budget-process scholarship documents from the marginal-allocation patterns at which discursive events plausibly operate. The distinction is not always clean, and a serious test of the framework would require the kind of empirical work that this article identifies as future research.
The fourth falsifier is cross-national absence. If parallel security-assistance arrangements in other states do not show comparable discourse-procurement coupling, then the US-Israel coupling becomes idiosyncratic rather than diagnostic of a broader pattern. The UK-Saudi Arabia relationship, the French-Sahel relationship, and the German-Egyptian relationship would be the principal comparative cases. The framework’s response is that the absence of comparable coupling does not falsify the present claim, which is about a specific apparatus; the comparative evidence would, however, bear on the generalizability of the apparatus. The comparative table in §11.8 takes up this question at the structural-pillar level.
9.6 Disposition: A Hypothesis Under Test, Not a Settled Finding
The Nitrodollar thesis is offered in this article as a hypothesis under test, supported by tight-coupling demonstrations and constrained by explicit falsification criteria. The framework’s claim about the master vernacular’s licensing function does not stand or fall with the Nitrodollar thesis. The vernacular pillar’s role in deflection and question-foreclosing is established by the close readings in Section VI independently of the procurement-loop argument. The Nitrodollar argument is the boldest claim in the article and is correspondingly the one most carefully circumscribed.