Front & Back cover caption, volume 24 issue 5 Iron Mike (see back cover) represents a generic soldier at Fort Bragg, one of the world's largest military bases, in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Here he appears to patrol streets under martial law, empty and grey. The Pawn Shop Target Practice (see front cover) is also in Fayetteville. At the back of the shop you can buy guns, bullets, jewellery and more, and also take aim at various targets – images of a woman in a bikini, an anonymous silhouette, a deer. Violence is found in Fayetteville as a symbol of protection, as entertainment, and certainly as a commodity. The absence of living people in these photographs underscores a clinical attitude cultivated in the military towards the largely dehumanized adversary other – a long way from the kind of engagement anthropologists seek through participant-observation. It may well be that the military would benefit from being ‘anthropologized’. However, given Keenan's and Besteman's experiences in Africa, as described in this issue, what is the guarantee that the African peoples will actually benefit from militarization at this time of US military expansion? MILITARIZING THE DISCIPLINE? US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates approvingly cites Montgomery McFate: ‘I'm frequently accused of militarizing anthropology. But we're really anthropologizing the military’.* This issue of ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY draws attention to the launch of two initiatives in October this year, both of which will have an impact on the peoples we work with and on anthropology as a discipline. The first is the launch of Minerva, a new Pentagon initiative to recruit social scientists for research, for which proposals are due this month. As Catherine Lutz argues in her editorial, this programme may soon outspend civilian funds within our discipline, and will thus undoubtedly influence our research agenda and restrict the public sphere in which we work. If the Pentagon wants high-quality research, why not commission this from reputable and experienced civilian research agencies, who should be able to manage peer review at arm's length from the Pentagon? The second initiative is AFRICOM, the newly unified regional US command for Africa. Although presented benignly as supporting development in Africa, it was originally cast in the security discourse of the global ‘war on terror’, with the aim of securing North America's oil supplies in Africa. In this issue, Africanist anthropologists Jeremy Keenan and Catherine Besteman criticize AFRICOM's destabilizing and militarizing effect on the regions in which they work, which collapses development into military security. Once deployed to the ends of military securitization, can anthropology remain non-partisan? Alf Hornborg, in his editorial, asks if we can continue to rely on the cornucopia of cheap energy, arguing that military intervention to securitize oil supplies, and academic discourse that mystifies the logic of the global system, benefit only a small minority of the world's population. In the light of developments such as Minerva and AFRICOM, can anthropology continue to offer an independent reflexive ‘cultural critique’ of the socio-political system from which our discipline has sprung? *Montgomery McFate, quoted by Robert M. Gates (‘Nonmilitary work essential for long-term peace, Secretary of Defense says’. Manhattan, Kansas State University, Landon Lecture, 26.11.2007), as cited in Rohde, David, ‘Army enlists anthropology in war zones’ (New York Times, 05.10.2007). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]