UCSB: Military University

Western colonization of the Goleta Valley through the Mission Period decimated the Indigenous Chumash people and cleared the way for the first phase of militarized development of the valley. Today's locations of UCSB and the Goleta Slough were home to a Chumash village and sacred sites. To support the armed operations of the Santa Barbara Mission, the dense oak forests that covered the valley were cut down to make way for colonial agriculture and ranchland. [3]  Thus began layers upon layers of militarized and colonial development of the Goleta Valley.

After the forests were clearcut, new settlers to the valley found a new extractive industry: asphalt and tar. The location UCSB campus today was the site of a highly lucrative deep shaft asphalt mine. The asphalt from Goleta was declared to be the best quality ever found at the time and was shipped via train all over the growing country. The streets of New Orleans were paved with Goleta asphalt. [4]  The US empire's massive westward expansion, urbanization, and the rise of automobiles required huge amounts of asphalt to pave roads, and the Goleta operation importantly reduced dependency on imports from the British Empire's Trinidadian asphalt mine. [5]  Although asphalt production waned near the turn of the century, its extraction facilitated the rise of the oil industry.

With the discovery of oil all along the central coast of California, speculators began drilling in earnest, pumping millions of barrels of oil out of the ground and chasing profit in the oil hungry economy. In 1897, the first offshore oil field in the world was established just south of Santa Barbara, making the area known for offshore drilling. [6]  Adjacent to UCSB up the coast, the Ellwood oil field, discovered in 1927, became the most important in the area. By the end of 1949, the Ellwood oil field had produced 85.6 million barrels of oil. [7]  While oil production in the county has lessened through the decades, it has never gone away, even in the face of catastrophic environmental damage like the famous spill of 1969. In October of 2024, Santa Barbara County Planning Commissioned approved permits to restart oil production on platforms off the coast. [8]  Alongside oil, the La Goleta Natural Gas Field, right next to UCSB's main entrance, has been a site of extraction since 1929, and is one of only four natural gas storage sites in use by SoCalGas today. [9]  UCSB is surrounded on either side by massively consequential energy infrastructure older than the school itself. See map below of oil and gas wells around Goleta.

As the United States entered into World War II, the marine's invaded Goleta, building a sprawling base and laying the infrastructure for the next round of development. Marine's trained on the base were deployed on aircraft carriers in the Pacific Theater. [10]  On February 23rd, 1942, in one of the only attacks on the continental US, a Japanese submarine hit the Ellwood Oil fields in Goleta. While the attack did almost no damage, the event was mobilized by the US secretary of state, FDR, and even the district attorney for Santa Barbara County to justify and accelerate Japanese-American dispossession and incarceration into concentration camps, which began one week after. The attack became an important talking point across the nation to stoke the war economy, spurring an 'Avenge Ellwood' campaign which produced brisk sales of war bonds. [11] 

A little bit up to coast from the Marine Base on Edwards Ranch, the US also built a Prisoner of War camp for German and Italian soldiers captured in North Africa. Because of the wartime labor shortage, Nazi prisoners were put to work in Goleta's agricultural industry, picking lemons and cracking walnuts. Many of the soldiers fell in love with Goleta's weather and coastal beauty and even moved to the area permanently after the war, another marker of Goleta's particular collaboration between violence production and the beach. [12]  In 2018, UCSB acquired the Edwards Ranch, including what remains of the camp, through a donation by the late finance capitalist and architect of the infamously proposed windowless dorm, Charles Munger. [13 , 14]  UCSB continues to operates the ranch today.

After the end of WWII, Goleta faced a water problem. A drought in Southern California hit the main industry of agriculture particularly hard, and while the new wartime round of infrastructural investment set the grounds for further development, water remained too unpredictable. [15]  With funding from the federal government, the county embarked on a project to dam the Santa Ynez river in the mountains above Goleta, creating Lake Cachuma, securing water supply for the valley, and joining the ranks of the massive water engineering projects of California. [16]  The valley was open for business.

Starting in 1950, the US embarked on a rearmament campaign, spending large of amounts of government money while boosting the power of private industry. From 1950-53, the US dropped 635,000 tones of explosives and 30,000 tons of napalm on North Korea, killing 1/5th of the population and making the case for further military armament. [17]  This began the country's policy of military Keynesianism, in which the US stimulated the global economy by building bombing machines to be used in the service of imperial and capitalist expansion at home and abroad. [18]  Following the Department of Defense policy of dispersing national defense projects beyond the existing California concentrations of Los Angeles and Silicon Valley, the aerospace industry moved into Goleta, establishing research and manufacturing facilities to fulfill their bulging DoD contracts close to the important airport hub. [19]  The first company to make a home in Goleta, Aerophysics, developed a campus on Los Carneros Road to produce their Dart guided missile, marketing to employees Goleta's exceptional atmosphere for both work and play as a "year-round resort" with abundant housing and parking. [20]  In 1956, The city gave the Raytheon Corporation a lease for $25 dollars a year, and other major defense and aerospace firms quickly developed facilities on Hollister Ave. [19,  21]  Although many of the names of defense firms today are different due to decades of mergers and acquisitions, the facilities built in the boom of the late 50's still form the backbone of the Goleta defense industry today.

"The massive infusion of wealth designated for aeronautical and electronic warfare innovations required a new and specialized labor force, prompting the state to make enormous investment in education infrastructure." [22]  In 1955, Santa Barbara College, the precursor to UCSB, moved from the riviera location to the former marine base in Goleta, converting the marine dorms into classrooms and becoming the third main campus for the rapidly growing UC system three years later. [23]  Alongside the rise of the Goleta defense industry, the University of California, Santa Barbara grew directly on the military installations of the previous decade and began to provide the labor force ready to produce arms for the empire's war against communism abroad while becoming an ideal suburban consumer at home.

UCSB and the Goleta defense industry's concurrent establishment and growth stemming from US policy of driving the economy with arms manufacturing exemplified the type of development occurring across the region. As of 1961, one out of every three jobs in Southern California depended on defense spending, and private capital from all over followed the government investments, underwriting the credit creation that drove suburban sprawl. [24]  Most of Goleta's existing housing stock of single family homes was built between 1955-69 to house aerospace and UCSB workers, locking in ever increasing home prices. [25]  "Government money, private industry pursuing new technologies, and the academy in between added up to a booming economy and a powerful America." [26]  The modern Goleta finally took shape: plenty of water for the lawn of the suburban subdivision, easy commute to the beautiful midcentury bomb factory, abundant parking at the beach for sunset, and an UC school for the kids next door.

While Goleta retained the image of a sleepy beach town, nearby Isla Vista became a hub for protest against the Vietnam War and the US's brutal bombing campaign of Southeast Asia. In the late 60's, students organized mass protests against the draft and the ROTC at the same time that UCSB engineering went through massive growth, establishing departments, graduate programs, and buildings to house research labs and gobble up DoD funding. [27 , 28]  As part of this expansion, the College of Engineering developed a computer center in North Hall to support burgeoning computer science research and to run campus administration, receiving funding from the DoD's Advanced Research Projects Agency to become one of the four original nodes for ARPAnet, the precursor to the internet we use today. [29]  Campus protests escalated through the late 60's, and in 1968, a year before the completion of the ARPAnet node, Black students took over North Hall, renaming it to Malcolm X Hall to demand an end to racism and the creation of a Black Studies Department, succeeding in the latter. The decision to target North Hall was a deliberate and strategic move to threaten both daily campus operations and the expensive research equipment including ARPAnet research notes. [30 , 31] 

Protests continued in the 70's. In 1970, students targeted the institutions supporting the Apartheid Regime of South Africa, burning the Bank of America in Isla Vista for financing apartheid. [32]  Governor Ronald Reagan himself got involved, analyzing the moment saying, "We knew about the rent strike in Berkeley and the new revolutionary tactics of attacking business rather than just university administration. There is less mob protest and more bombing and sniping. I think this indicates some organization." [33]  Reagan decried the student movement as "bombing and sniping" while fully supporting the most egregious bombing campaign in history taking place in Vietnam and Cambodia. [34]  When President Nixon on May 9th, 1972 announced that the Navy would mine the ports of North Vietnam, students escalated their tactics, gathering 3,000 in a few hours to march from Isla Vista to Highway 101, the main road in and out of Goleta. After successfully blockading the highway for most of the night, the students headed back to IV, stopping at the Goleta Raytheon plant to throw rocks at one of the main Navy weapons manufacturers. [35]  The next day, students marched on and took control of the Goleta airport, shutting down all operations. [36]  Reagan was right, the UCSB students were organized and strategic in their mass action—locating, burning, and taking over vital nodes, infrastructures, and logistical hubs of the capitalist imperialist research-defense industry, occupying their local chokepoints of power to demand an end to the US's murderous bombing regime.

The defeat of the US military by the Vietnamese on the battlefield and the solidarity movement at home prompted a collapse and restructuring of the military Keynesianism that had worked for decades. [37]  The 70's and 80's were marked by periods of capitalism in crisis, culminating in the 1990-91 crash. As the Californian manufacturing sector waned, the Goleta defense industry staked their way through by specializing in infrared technology.[ 38,39 ] While the area around Stanford became Silicon Valley, Goleta became Infrared Valley, finding a buyer for advanced electronic laser guidance and detection warfare systems in President Reagan's Star Wars DoD. [40]  The Santa Barbara Research Center (SBRC), General Research Corporation (GRC), and Mission Research Corporation (MRC) exemplified this specialization. Without adjusting for inflation, together these three companies sold more than $1.5 billion worth of laser guided missile parts, infrared detection and image processing devices, and specialized research to the DoD from the 70's to the 90's, becoming some of its top contractors. [41 , 42 , 43 , 44 ] The DoD wasn't the only customer for this infrared expertise. SBRC played a pivotal role in NASA missions and GRC, along with the CIA, conducted the aerial imaging of the consequential 1969 Santa Barbara Oil Spill (one Goleta industry feeding another).[ 45 , 46 ] As the defense industry further consolidated through layers of mergers and acquisitions at the turn of the century, SBRC and MRC were gobbled up by Raytheon and Lockheed Martin respectively, whose Goleta plants continue to specialize in infrared targeting and vision systems research and manufacture.[ 47 , 48 ] An outpost of the UCLA Health Center now operates in the former GRC complex on Hollister Ave. [49] 

The economic crises of the 80's heralded in new policies of privatization, austerity, and law and order, in which the state, led by Reagan, slashed public education funding, greatly increased student tuition at the UCs, and struck down the racial justice wins of the earlier decade.[ 50,51 ] As UCSB research depended more and more heavily on federal defense funding, the College of Engineering brought in Robert Mehrabian, the former director of materials science at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. [52]  As dean, Mehrabian oversaw the creation of the Materials Science department and an off campus applied research center.[ 53 , 54 ] He formalized relationships with the private defense industry through the College of Engineering's Industrial Liaison Program, giving private weapons manufactures easy access to UCSB research labs.[ 55 ] In 1992, a new dean, Venkatesh Narayanamurti, came in with a focus on entrepreneurship, starting programs for professors and graduate students to spin out their research into commercial ventures, almost always with DoD seed funding.[ 56 , 57 , 58 ] Thus, UCSB's modern dependence on defense research and industry was born: from the long economic crisis emerged a dizzying new interlacement of militarized development pathways through and from the financializing university, capturing debt-laden students on one side while producing privatized knowledge for profit on the other, all in the service of the US empire's wars of aggression abroad.

The former UCSB engineering dean Mehrabian went on to become the chairman, CEO, and president of Teledyne Inc, a conglomerate of sensor companies with a booming defense contracting business. [59]  In 2021, Mehrabian presided over Teledyne's $4.8 billion acquisition of FLIR, an infrared sensing and drone company who themselves had acquired the UCSB-Goleta Startup Indigo Systems in 2004.[ 60 , 61]  Goleta innovations in infrared vision and targeting have been some of the defining technologies in American imperial wars from Operation Desert Storm to today, taking infrared targeting to new levels with advanced image processing technologies.[ 62 , 63 , 64 ] The Goleta outposts of Teledyne FLIR, RTX Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin all manufacture Infrared Focal Plane Arrays put to use in fighter jets and bombing planes for American and Israeli pilots to see the people they target in the nighttime.[ 65 , 66 , 67 ] Many of these innovations have come from UCSB research and startups in the 21st century that specialize in Gallium based semiconductor technology, developing and manufacturing in the on-campus UCSB nanofab.[ 68 , 69 , 70 , 71 , 72 , 73 , 74 ] Gallium based chips are a key part of defense development and Biden and Trump's ongoing supply chain war with China, which has instituted a ban on Gallium trade to the US.[ 75]  In response, Goleta based firms have pushed for new extraction of gallium, which often takes place through violent displacement and environmental harm.[ 76 , 77 ] Goleta today is once again on the forefront of a new round of militarized development in service of US Empire, exemplary of the emergent rearmament economy of the genocidal Biden era.[ 78 , 79 ] As the genocide in Gaza continues and the US opens up more fronts of war with China and in the Middle East, the defense industry of Goleta will only grow in importance and scale.