Churn: Mobilization–demobilization and the fungibility of American military life

Introduction: Churn, drawdown, and becoming veteran

In Hullford, a military town in the US south where I have conducted over three years of ethnographic fieldwork with post-9/11 military veterans, everyone knew that the Army had been shrinking, and that the way it got rid of soldiers was often central to what it meant to be – or to become – a veteran. Local advocates and officials routinely claim that anywhere from 100 to 300 people leave military service from Fort Crocker, the base that neighbors Hullford, every month. ¹ The shrinking sometimes seemed arbitrary, if not illogical or even pointlessly cruel. As Jamis, a career soldier with more than seven years of combat deployment time in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, put it to me, ‘OK, I sacrificed x amount of time for this, and now I’m not worth anything to you?’ Jamis was severely injured in combat, moved to a new job once he healed up, and then sidelined by his command when, faced with budget cuts, they decided that his old injuries made him an attractive candidate for ‘deselection’. Depressed, bored, and visited by the unwelcome memories and feelings of post-traumatic stress, Jamis drank heavily, and was eventually arrested for driving under the influence (DUI). Just a few years earlier, he told me, both his injury and his arrest would have been excused by a command that needed to keep its soldiers ready to deploy. Now these things made him a pariah, and he was first barred from training and then made a candidate for discharge. The strangest thing of all, though, was that as he waited in limbo for his orders to be finalized, the Army had asked him to come back. Suddenly they needed more people with his training. He would go back and fight in a heartbeat, he said, but he turned them down.

Jamis’s worthiness as a soldier shifted with the Army’s budget and its human resources needs. His physical and mental integrity were directly interwoven with military prerogatives of mobilization and demobilization – that is, the ability to put people and resources in motion for war-making purposes and then to release or abandon them as needed. As part of the Army’s ongoing effort to eliminate personnel from ranks swollen – and depleted – by years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, a massive contraction began in 2012, targeting tens of thousands of personnel at a time in the Army alone. This purge was slowed by a larger 2017 defense budget, but its reverberations continue, along with the routine work of shedding personnel for which the military has no further use. Senior non-commissioned officers and commanders who once carried out policy that demanded exhausting and injuring levels of readiness, discipline, and utility from soldiers for open-ended wars now carry out policy targeting and disposing of those soldiers whose behavioral or mental health problems, aggravated by the demands of war, mark them as especially ‘risky’ to the military’s mission. The veteran population in Hullford is amply representative of broader patterns of physical injury and debility, mental illness, and social disruption and dispossession among the USA’s 3 million or so post-9/11 veterans, including high levels of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and related conditions (Dursa et al., 2014; RAND Center for Military Health Policy Research, 2008), high demand for disability compensation (McNally and Frueh, 2013), elevated risk of self-harm and suicide (Shen et al., 2016), involvement in the crimino-legal system (Lawrence, 2015), and financial, employment, and housing precariousness (Brown, 2013).

I met Jamis in the Hullford Veteran Treatment Court, a civilian municipal court in which veteran offenders can forgo jail time and earn a reduced or expunged sentence by completing an intensive, judicially supervised therapeutic and self-help regimen. The court is one of a series of spaces of veteran care in Hullford – governmental, non-profit, and religious services and veteran welfare entities offering employment, legal, and financial support, clinical and spiritual healing, communal fellowship, and assistance navigating Army and Veterans Administration (VA) ² bureaucracy and the potential perils of life after war. For those passing through these spaces, war-related physical injury and psychological stress were frequently interwoven with the routine exhaustion of repeated deployments, intimate, financial, and legal precariousness, and, as Jamis’s account illustrates, the instrumental logic of military institutions. Combat veterans are well represented in Hullford, but, as Jamis’s example shows, combat experience alone is rarely the sole driver of veteran vulnerability. Sites of veteran care in Hullford are full of stories of diagnoses ignored or covered up so that soldiers could continue to deploy, substance use brought on by the malaise of being sidelined by physical injury, and car crashes, petty crime, breakups, and bad behavior at once exceptionally destructive and normalized by military cultural norms and institutional demands. Denied re-enlistments, premature separations, returns to war via contracting work, and absent or insufficient military and veteran medical and disability benefits thread through the mix as well. Even in the midst of caring and biopolitically sustaining mechanisms, war can become too much in the people who make it (MacLeish, 2019b).

The importance of such accounts for this discussion is in the way that becoming soldier and becoming veteran belie attribution of injury and trauma strictly to enemy violence, linear or periodizing narratives of war-related harm, confinement of war to foreign battlefields and military institutions, and efforts to demarcate an innocent and welcoming ‘civilian’ world into which ex-military subjects might ‘transition’ or ‘reintegrate’. The bodily, psychic, and social disorder attributed to ex-military life appears rooted in the technical mechanisms that made that life available for war in the first place, formed it into a useful tool of state violence, and then dispensed with and abandoned it. Setting lives to the work of war is not only a matter of biopolitical instrumentality – disciplining, empowering to kill, keeping alive (Foucault, 2003; MacLeish, 2013) – but of the fungibility of war-making bodies and lives and, in anthropologist Danny Hoffman’s (2011a) words, of war violence as a mode of production.

As the editors of this special issue point out, the way that resources, bodies, and lives ‘are conscripted, regimented, and deployed into martial worlds’ is central to war’s ontology, unfolding, and becoming, regardless of where the formal boundaries around specific conflicts, institutions, and social domains are drawn (Bousquet et al., 2020: 105). This logistically driven becoming continues in the demobilization of military subjects. The shrinking Army is no mere aftermath or collateral effect. It is, rather, the continued becoming of war in the bodily, affective, and psychic lives of its participants and in the war-making institutional processes seeking to sustain themselves by managing, containing, or disposing of the lives in their sway. Some people in Hullford call this churn, one of a diverse set of characterizations of both the rhythm of impersonal institutional demands and the feeling – often as satisfying and validating as it is exhausting and wounding – of being used and used up by those demands. Churn is a sign that using up and getting rid of soldiers is as crucial a condition of possibility for war as finding and making soldiers in the first place, and the two processes are bound together in ways both highly technical and viscerally intimate. To the extent that it entails the routinized extraction of war-making labor power and a host of acute and incremental embodied burdens, churn is linear and cumulative, tending toward the debilitation and exhaustion of military lives. But churn is also cyclical and anticipatory, an institutionalized expectation of constant war, with the bodies needed to wage it kept in motion into, through, out of, and often back into the military apparatus.

In what follows, I outline an empirically grounded framework for thinking US military life in terms of mobilization–demobilization that complicates the boundaries drawn around war in space, time, and sociality. First, importing Hoffman’s theorization of war work in West African militia labor into my ethnography in Hullford, I posit mobilization–demobilization as a departure from analyses of ex-military life rooted in ‘transition’ and ‘reintegration’, and as a challenge to ‘militarization’ as the primary framework for analyzing the sociality of war. Then, I trace the importance of mobilization and demobilization across scholarly accounts and historical developments in 20th- and 21st-century US policies, institutional structures, and cultural narratives around the management of soldiers and veterans. I show how mobilization–demobilization accounts for the anticipatory and self-referential logics of war-making institutions and their interconnectedness with – rather than distinction from or distortion of – other ‘war-like’ elements of domestic politics (see Howell, 2018). Finally, I return to Jamis’s account of livelihood and combat injury entangled with the dynamics of mobilization–demobilization, illustrating the latter as both a ruthless institutional mechanism and a generative site of affective investment in war-making. I argue that these dynamics demonstrate crucial empirical links between the domestic and global faces of US war-making.

Theorizing mobilization–demobilization

The analytic of mobilization–demobilization proposed here is inspired by the work of anthropologist Danny Hoffman with current and former militia fighters in Sierra Leone, young men called up as brutally casualized paramilitary labor during the 1991–2002 civil war there. Even though they fought on the side of the Sierra Leonean government against now-defeated rebel groups and foreign forces, the informality of militia fighters’ labor means that there is no institutional apparatus to care for or compensate them, and the prevailing cultural narrative about them is of a rootless destructive force with no proper place in the post-conflict social order. Hoffman (2011a) highlights the status of war violence as a mode of production for fighters, a socially constitutive livelihood rather than an ideological or nationalistic commitment. War is generic work, he writes, ‘something one does’ that is infused with ‘the jouissance of combat and camaraderie’ (Hoffman, 2011a: 38). And one of war’s conditions of possibility in this setting is the pre-existing economic and structural instability that makes fighters available as mobilizable and disposable workers. In language borrowed from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theories of capture and control (Deleuze, 1992; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), Hoffman describes these fighters as war machines – social actors and forces that the state temporarily appropriates for war-making purposes and that frequently elude, resist, or are released from total and continuous state control. Through moves that are themselves war-like, the state interiorizes and exteriorizes, de- and re-territorializes, codes and re-codes the life of such war machines, by turns bringing them under state sway and putting them to useful work – including in formal, disciplinary incarnations like armies and militias – but also casting them out into spaces of neglect, freedom, and ‘disorder’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). With disarmament and the end of conflict, Sierra Leonean militia fighters do not ascend to a culturally valorized veteran status or ‘transition’ into civilian life, but rather find themselves more vulnerable than ever to direct violence and to social exclusion and economic precariousness (Hoffman, 2011a, 2011b). They live on through war’s becoming as anxious objects of state exclusion and control while remaining available for possible recapture and future use.

What would it mean to imagine a place like Hullford, or indeed the war state of the USA as a whole, in the terms offered by Hoffman? There are remarkable resonances: the fungibility that allows easy disposal of former fighters but also makes war labor economically appealing in the first place; the embodied and affective investment in the work; the antagonism and interdependence between institution and war-laboring subject; the anxiety on all sides about how formerly warring subjects fit into nominally peaceful social orders; and the fact that it is precisely ex-military status that marks one as a target or vector of new forms of violence and vulnerability. All these serve as a clarifying foil against which to think about American ex-military life. Despite its status as a globally unique instrument of sovereign state prerogative (in size, expense, ubiquity, frequency of use), the US military could not function without outsourcing, downsizing, neoliberal management, the goad of civilian-world structural and economic precariousness, and contractual arrangements that ensure maximal institutional flexibility, limited liability, and the continued availability of future workers, even those who have previously been released or discarded (Lutz, 2001; see also Bailey, 2009; Coburn, 2018; Mittelstadt, 2015). The differences between ex-military life in Sierra Leone and a place like Hullford are, of course, vast, as Hoffman (2011a) notes, not least because of unique forms of postcolonial violence and vulnerability (Dubal, 2018; Hansen and Stepputat, 2005). Unlike former militia fighters, US soldiers and veterans are the products of a massive, durable, and wealthy disciplinary institution, the clients of their own mini welfare state in the form of the VA, and the protagonists of heroic and moralistic public narratives. But the inherently imperial and colonial character of American war-making (Grove, 2016; Stoler, 2016) and its deep links to capital (Alliez and Lazzarato, 2016) can also speak to the inescapable consistency of this comparison: wherever the setting, the state has to find its fighters, get rid of them, and know where to find them again.

Mobilization–demobilization obliges careful consideration of where war can even be said to begin and end. As an analytic, it stands in deliberate contrast to the substantial portion of scholarly and lay accounts of military sociality that proceed from the position that military lives, experiences, and domains are defined by their separation from the civilian society within which they are situated, from which they draw people and resources, and in whose interest they nominally operate. These literatures foreground the exotic, self-contained distinctiveness of martial worlds: rites of passage, ‘warrior castes’ and moral codes, economies of sacrifice, individual transformation through violence and discipline, and alienating challenges to selfhood and psyche associated with ‘return’ or ‘resettlement’ in the civilian domain (Frese and Harrell, 2003; Hawkins, 2005; Ricks, 1997; Simons, 1997; Wright, 2004). These works illuminate military ways of life that are ignored or misunderstood by civilians and civilian scholars. They inform veteran advocacy, support, and mental health efforts with crucial sociocultural context (Cooper et al., 2018; Godier et al., 2018), pointing out ‘identity struggle’ (Smith and True, 2014) interwoven with the psychiatric, medical, interpersonal, and livelihood challenges confronting many veterans (Finley, 2011; Higate, 2001). Within such framings, the terms ‘transition’ and ‘reintegration’, routinely used to describe the post-service trajectories of ex-military subjects, seem utterly natural, describing the movement of subjects across the culturally salient boundary dividing the domains called ‘military’ and ‘civilian’ (Lutz, 2001).

In their typical use in military studies literatures, ‘transition’ and ‘reintegration’ imply clear distinctions between war and civilian life: a progressive, linear temporality of the before–during–after of war, a siloing of violence both disciplined and excessive within explicitly military spaces, and a spatial containment of the comforts of home and the good life away from the foreign terrors of the battlefield. But to paraphrase a recent intervention by Sarah Bulmer and Maya Eichler (2017: 173), such rhetoric ‘implies an analytical distinction’ between military and civilian that can be empirically ‘very tenuous’ at the level of ex-military life. As recent ethnographies of US military sociality have explored, veteran experience is frequently shot through with unruly becomings, ontological uncertainty, and novel forms of harm – including churn – produced by the very institutional and cultural doxa that structure aspirational norms of transition and reintegration (MacLeish, 2013; Sørensen, 2015; Wool, 2015). As anthropologist Zoë Wool (2014) writes, war does not simply happen to people ‘in the context’ of non-war social relations, but actively co-constitutes those relations. The distinction is just as hard to sustain when it comes to asserting coherent boundaries between military and civilian domains, as Bulmer and Eichler suggest of the broader scholarship on militarization and militarism. To connotatively privilege military institutions not just as the technical instruments of state violence but as the origin points of war risks positing a passive, innocent vision of civilian sociality and politics (Bulmer and Eichler, 2017) and eliding, in Ali Howell’s (2018: 119) words, ‘the extent to which we live with war’ as a pervasive mode of politics and the management of contemporary life in general (see Bousquet et al., 2020). As scholars of militarism and militarization have themselves so effectively documented (e.g. Enloe, 2000; Gusterson, 2007; Lutz, 2002), the distinction of civilian from military is vital to the preservation of military actors’ and institutions’ unique prerogatives and authority, even as it is only in the civilian domain that wars become possible (Bulmer and Eichler, 2017). The ‘compartmentalization’ of war in critical discourses on militarism can obscure its ‘labyrinthine’ implication with other domains of social and political life (Hautzinger and Scandlyn, 2014).

Mobilization–demobilization is not meant to replace analyses based on militarization, transition, or reintegration, but rather to furnish a way to think otherwise about phenomena only incompletely described by these terms. With mobilization–demobilization, war’s potentials, becomings, and uncontrolled collateral effects are always already everywhere. Proceeding from Ernst Jünger’s (1998) early 20th-century formulation of the term, mobilization indicates the mustering of social energies for total war, facilitated by disciplinary techniques that, in Manuel DeLanda’s (2005: 119) words, envision and produce civilian populations as ‘a resource (for war, production, motivation) to be tapped into at will’. Mobilization’s movement of people, things, and forces is not about the ideological distortion of civil society, hatred for the enemy, or libidinal enthusiasm for violence (Hoffman, 2011a), but rather the ‘deadly’ deployment of logistics itself in war and peace (Cowen, 2014). Demobilization, on the other hand, denotes the formal end of an operational cycle or the actual disbanding and disarmament of military or paramilitary forces. Demobilization is thus the point at and process by which war-making subjects become problematic to the institutional and state forces that have no further use for them and to the civil and political orders of peacetime, homefront, or ‘post-conflict’ to which they are seen to pose a threat. While mobilization mingles the military and civilian to organize instruments of war and place them in motion, demobilization is a kind of neither–nor relegation: in policy interventions and post-conflict scholarship, warring subjects need to be demobilized because their ‘military’ designation is no longer legitimate, but the ‘civilian’ cannot accommodate them. Even as the demobilized may struggle with injury, trauma, and disorientation, they become figures of exception, subjects of legally mediated reconciliation, pathologized targets for rehabilitation, or retrospective scapegoats (Dubal, 2018; Hoffman, 2011b; Theidon, 2007).

From such a perspective, the primary problem of the ex-military subject is not a matter of failed or stalled movement from one to another category of relationship to war, but rather of an open-ended potentiality initiated by the state’s opportunistic uptake, use, and release of military life. Military status ceases to appear as definitive, stable, or encompassing. Identity is not something that ex-military subjects simply have or have to recover – it is something they embody, practice, and become, often in conditions of social fragmentation and material peril (Bulmer and Eichler, 2017; Hoffman, 2011a). War does not cease amid this flight and recapture, but becomes through it. ‘The violent assemblage of moving parts’ of war-making is put into motion for specific political ends, as Carl von Clausewitz writes, but it ‘soon takes on a productive logic all its own’ (quoted in Hoffman, 2011b: 19) that endures and develops well past any given conflict’s apparent end. It is this phenomenon that the next section addresses.

American military life in motion

Ex-military subjects frequently negotiate the norms of ‘transition’ and ‘reintegration’ with relative success. Recent veterans in Hullford get laborer, skilled blue-collar, and service and managerial jobs in the area; they get hired as well-paid private contractors on Fort Crocker doing work similar to what they did in the military; they use their post-9/11 GI Bill and VA Vocational Rehabilitation benefits to train for new careers at local colleges and trade schools or online; they medically retire through the Warrior Transition Battalion on Fort Crocker and are supported by Army and VA medical and disability benefits; they resume or embrace anew their roles as spouses and parents and community members.

But the trajectories of newly minted veterans are not merely a matter of shuffling between distinct roles and categories. They are products of US military labor’s fungibility – and of the instrumental ruthlessness occasioned by its expense and institutional logic. The military began to shrink aggressively in 2012 when a combination of federal budget sequestration and drawdown in Iraq and Afghanistan demanded significant personnel reductions. Even in comparison to expensive hi-tech weapons systems, personnel are the most expensive part of the military apparatus: while soldiers are not paid particularly generously, they enjoy a raft of benefits far more generous than most of the civilian sector, many of which can last well after their service ends. Over 40 percent of Department of Defense outlays go toward personnel costs (Blakely, 2017), and care and compensation for veterans has been estimated to constitute a significant portion of the total dollar cost of the USA’s post-9/11 wars (Stiglitz, 2008; Vine, 2015).

Personnel also seem to be the expense most readily taken on or disposed of. This is especially so for the Army, which is the biggest of the service branches at between 450,000 and 500,000 active-duty troops and a similar number of National Guard and reservists; the Army has deployed the most people, demanded the longest and most frequent tours from troops, and thereby furnished the largest number of literal boots on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan. It relied on a number of techniques to do this, including unusually generous enlistment bonuses, a ‘backdoor draft’ of stop-loss involuntary extension of service contracts about to expire (Burgess, 2004), the large-scale recall of soldiers whose contracts kept them in ‘ready reserve’ status even after their service ended (Kojetin, 2008), and unprecedentedly extensive mobilization of Reserve and National Guard personnel – non-active-duty soldiers with civilian jobs – for war-zone deployment.

The military’s shrinking trend began to reverse slightly with the 2017 Defense Authorization Act (and its accompanying budget bump), signed on one of President Barack Obama’s last days in office (Worthington, 2017). But its convulsions linger, as the Army continues to search for people to cut while also scrambling to replace specialized positions too aggressively purged in the downsizing. Re-enlistment bonuses of up to $90,000 were announced in 2017 as part of an effort to retain troops (Sicard, 2017). In early 2018, the Department of Defense announced that personnel without domestic or overseas deployments would be prioritized for separation and barred from re-enlistment (Copp, 2018). A few months later, however, the Army actually found itself short 400 recruiters and reached out to recently retired personnel to help fill the slots (Myers, 2018).

From the perspective of mobilization–demobilization, these recent convulsions are not exceptional, but rather of a piece with the broader social order, cyclical patterns, and anticipatory logics of recruitment, retention, and post-service care and compensation. A full survey of the institutional sociology and political economy of military labor through the lens of mobilization–demobilization would demand an article all its own. But it is worth noting in brief how the injury and psychic and social disorder frequently framed as problems of integration and transition or as features of militarization can also be read as elements of US war-making’s imbrication with other forms of ‘war-like’ politics and of war’s autonomous, self-reproducing logic.

Mobilization and demobilization frequently leverage and reproduce the violence and structural vulnerabilities of the existing social order (Hoffman, 2011a), trafficking directly in what Ali Howell (2018) terms the ‘war-like’ domestic politics of race, class, gender, disability, and nation. It is via such politics that various categories of life are rendered available, useful, reproducible, worthy of protection and care, or contemptible and disposable, as they are taken up and expelled by military institutions. Throughout the early to mid-20th century, postwar rehabilitation and benefits frequently amounted to ‘affirmative action for white men’ (Kinder, 2015: 9), sustaining ex-military life but also protecting and preserving racial and gender hierarchies by restoring debilitated (white) veterans to idealized norms of bodily autonomy, non-dependence, ability to work, and heterosexual, nuclear kinship, often at the expense of the needs of non-white, queer, and women service-members (Canaday, 2009; Serlin, 2003; Skocpol, 1997). In the 1970s and 1980s, even as policy and public sentiment turned against American state welfare programs, the armed forces traded on discourses of militarism to protect the resources that the service-member benefits system afforded them, especially as the withdrawal of other civilian welfare resources made military service one of a shrinking number of viable paths to stable employment and social mobility (Lutz, 2001; Mittelstadt, 2015). Most recently, debates over the inclusion of women, queer, transgender, and immigrant troops have linked liberal identity-politics projects to the violence of empire (Mesok, 2016; Mitchell and Snyder, 2015; Puar, 2017; Spade and Willse, 2014), even as national-security rhetoric is invoked to mark others among the ranks for exclusion or deportation (see, for example, Difazio, 2018; Hodges, 2019).

The tensions of mobilization–demobilization also show up in modes of US veteran politicization that both mimic the state and assume attitudes of grievance or resistance toward it. High-profile moments of veteran political mobilization, like the 1932 Bonus March at the height of the Great Depression (Dickson and Allen, 2006) or 1960s and 1970s GI resistance to the war in Vietnam (Lembcke, 2000; Sir! No Sir!, 2005), have employed militaristic language and organizing against the state and had state violence turned against them (Dickson and Allen, 2006). In the wake of the Vietnam War, a ‘paramilitary spillover’ of military rhetoric, techniques, materiel, and experience was appropriated by white-power activists in the name of anti-state racial supremacy at the same time as war-like practices were taken up by law enforcement to combat such groups (Belew, 2018). In examples like these, the military and ex-military status produced by mobilization and demobilization are not ‘identities’ that stand in isolated coherence (Bulmer and Eichler, 2017; Hoffman, 2011a); rather, they are ways of being that are assembled out of diverse elements of empowerment, vulnerability, and fungible violence as war traverses military and civilian domains.

Across these and other examples, the aims of one or another particular war emerge as only incidentally significant to what Clausewitz calls the military apparatus’s ‘logic of its own’, an anticipatory, self-referential reproduction of war as such. Mobilization–demobilization points less to particular wars than to the underwriting and capacitating of future wars and of war in general. In a mirroring of DeLanda’s notion of civilians as an ‘on demand’ resource, military recruitment, assessment, and screening take on their own lives as tools for evaluating, governing, and imaginatively involving civilian populations (Jauregui, 2015; Lutz, 2001). According to Howell (2018), civilians are not so much ‘militarized’ as they are fungible elements ‘always already involved’ in war’s becoming. This involvement can take starkly literal forms. In 2017, the Army’s recruiting command announced with dismay that of the 33 million Americans between the ages of 18 and 24, only 136,000 – less than half of one percent – were viable recruits, thanks to a lack of interest and poor physical fitness (Myers, 2017). But recruiting standards are far from absolute: just ten years earlier, during the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Army recruiting age caps were raised and waivers for psychiatric diagnosis, drug use, and prior criminal convictions that would have precluded enlistment were issued in unprecedented numbers to grow the ranks (Alvarez, 2008). Under drawdown, it was often these same marks of deficiency that commanders were encouraged to seek out – ‘high-risk’ criminality, substance use, or psychiatric diagnosis – for ‘deselection’ (Department of the Army, 2012: 3). This selective demobilization of personnel suddenly deemed problematic was not prompted by war’s end, but rather, in the Army’s words, by the need for ‘force readiness’, a ‘strategic reset’ that both responded to the austerity of drawdown and looked to conflicts yet to come (Department of the Army, 2010: ii, 2012).

These dynamics also extend into efforts to recode the governance and embodiment of military and ex-military subjects themselves. Recent reforms in military welfare and benefits programs abound with notions of ‘resilience’, ‘independence’, and ‘personal responsibility’ (Howell, 2015; Jauregui, 2015; MacLeish, 2019a; Mittelstadt, 2015; O’Malley, 2010) that rhetorically and practically limit the military’s long-term accountability to its troops and further facilitate the fungibility and disposability of military subjects in favor of the self-perpetuating logic of the war apparatus itself. At the same time, military subjects ‘successfully’ rehabilitated from injury and debilitation become the paradoxical basis for a downward recalculation of the costs of past and future wars (Kinder, 2015; Linker, 2011; Lutz and Millar, 2012). Prosthetic and regenerative medicine invest war with salvific potentials, suggesting that war injury can open the door to augmented and enhanced human embodiments, perhaps to be redeployed in the next conflict (Bickford, 2008; Terry, 2017). Even basic welfare protections like medical coverage, military-specific life insurance, and long-term disability benefits anticipate and normalize service-members’ becoming war in ways that tend toward injury, debility, and death.

This hasty sketch suggests the inadequacy of terms like ‘transition’ or ‘reintegration’ to describe the churn, ebb, and flow of war across delineations of space, time, causal explanation, and social domain. Caught up in the midst of such dynamics, a soldier or veteran may be called a subject of transition or reintegration, but in practice they are fundamentally framed, to paraphrase Kinder (2015), as a ‘problem’ imposed by demobilization upon the institution and the prevailing social order. Just as military powers of mobilization are not settled or hegemonic, as Bousquet et al. write (2020: 107), demobilization also demands attention to ‘all that resists, escapes, and exceeds its injunctions’. Perhaps inevitably, the perpetual catch-and-release, boom-and-bust of mobilization and demobilization, anticipating, instrumentalizing, and leaving behind military life, produces subjects of deficiency, excess, and transgression: too unruly, dependent, lazy, inexperienced, bored, strong, or hurt; too worn out beyond their years, too primed for bad behavior, too capable of carrying it out. The war machine of military life, only ever captured partially and in passing, is not just a figure of discipline but also of resistance, with the state alternately trying to make use of, quell, and cast out what Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 357) call ‘the fundamental indiscipline of the warrior’. As the next section demonstrates, this dynamic is fundamental to how war’s becoming is embodied in its participants and lived with in places like Hullford and across the landscape of US war-making.

Red-flagged

Jamis, the soldier I mentioned in the introduction, is a white guy in his early thirties, short but powerfully built, with a shaved scalp, expressive brows, and a cleft chin; in conversation, his stoically set features animate into a genial self-awareness punctuated with a companionable laugh.

Jamis left the small midwestern college not far from where he grew up to enlist in the Army after a high-school friend was killed in Afghanistan in 2004. He was good at being a soldier. He rose through the enlisted infantry ranks, did two 15-month tours in Iraq, and spent a total of four and a half years deployed in Afghanistan, much of that time as the head of his unit’s sniper section. This is the kind of elite position that military vernacular refers to as ‘high speed’, and Jamis’s uniform tunic was crowded with achievement and award badges. On his last deployment to Afghanistan, he survived a catastrophic roadside bomb strike and ended up with shattered ribs, a broken back and hip, and a traumatic brain injury (TBI), ‘and that kinda put me out of the infantry world’. But then a different feature of his body turned him toward another ‘high-speed’ position: Army regulations require that pilots have a ‘sitting height’ of no more than 40.15 inches, and thanks not only to Jamis’s exemplary record and his qualifying exam scores but also his five-foot-and-five-inches stature, he was offered a flight-school billet. He got promoted again when he completed the nearly two years of training, and for another eight months he flew the Army’s complex, expensive, and lethal Apache AH-64 attack helicopters with his new unit at Fort Crocker.

One day in mid-2016, Jamis reported for his regular physical, and the unit’s flight surgeon, noting his old TBI, said, ‘Well, you know, we kinda need to ground you and monitor that for a while.’ After repeated assessment at Fort Crocker’s TBI clinic, Jamis was eventually cleared to fly again, but in the meantime he had fallen far short on the flight hours he needed to stay qualified. Drawdown-related cutbacks meant that fuel and flying time were both in short supply at his unit, and he was too far in the hole to catch up on hours. Being grounded ‘gave [me] a lot of down time and brought up a lot of emotions’ from deployment. ‘I ended up drinking a lot. Got in trouble for DUI.’ And that grounded him for good.

The drawdown was, in many ways, at the heart of Jamis’s problems. In the mid-to-late 2000s, at the height of the wars, ‘when we were, like, very fired up for deployments and stuff, you could kind of get by’ after a DUI or other minor criminal charge, he said. The relentless operational tempo made the cost of losing personnel too high, so if you got in trouble you would ‘take your punishment and whatever, but they weren’t immediately going [to] put you out. It was, like, take a rank away’ – demote the offender and thereby punish them with a pay cut as well – ‘and let you earn it back and keep doing your thing.’ Jamis didn’t say whether he had ever found himself on the receiving end of this kind of flexibility, but nearly every current and former soldier I met in Hullford described a similar dynamic. Medical standards were handled differently as well: when the demand for pilots was high, as Jamis’s own experience a few years earlier demonstrated, medical staff would work hard to clear a TBI or other limiting condition as quickly as possible rather than allowing an expensively trained and in-demand pilot to languish on the ground.

But at this particular and unlucky moment, the changing demands of mobilization made Jamis redundant. As he told it, the idleness that came with still being part of the Army but no longer part of the churn opened into discomfiting psychological and affective becomings that his therapist and psychiatrist would come to read as symptoms of post-traumatic stress. Unable to fly, he had no regular duties at his unit and spent his days filling out VA paperwork and going to doctor’s appointments in anticipation of his medical separation. He remained behind when the unit deployed, and, after a change of command, no one even knew who he was. ‘I became, for lack of a better term, the shitbag in the unit,’ he said, invoking Army slang for a soldier whose illness or injury makes them a target of suspicion and contempt. Despite his exemplary service, ‘They were just like, “Well you’re kinda useless to us at this point.” And that’s kinda where a lot of . . . I wanna say past experience I guess caught up with me.’ He started having terrifying, sleep-wrecking nightmares and panicking in public settings. He drank heavily, first at home and then at a bar where the owner, a friend, hired him as a bouncer, which did nothing to curb his consumption.

In the veteran court, I had heard Jamis recount an earnest confessional narrative of service-related trauma, naming the fear, guilt, and grief that he said haunted him, the vulnerability he had to embrace in asking for help from others, and the self-responsibility demanded by sobriety and dealing with his criminal charge. But in the version of things he shared with me, these psychological elements were inseparable from the dynamics of demobilization. He mentioned the nightmares and the panic but focused on

a lot of resentment and hate that kind of rolled into a depression. Like ‘OK, I sacrificed x amount of time for this, and now I’m not worth anything to you?’ . . . So basically I gave the country my youth for them to just pretty much say, ‘OK, well you got hurt, so . . . .’ You know what I mean? And that’s kinda where a lot of the animosity grew from.

As central as his trauma and substance use were to his circumstances, these feelings also hung on his disposability as a war machine. The Army had enticed him into this new position by telling him it would ‘better his career’, and he had agreed, and, then, it seemed, they had punished him for it. Now they had no use for him. He asked to go back to an infantry unit, ‘’cause that’s what I know how to do, and I’m very good at that’, but there was no program to re-class him. ‘If you’re gonna waste that kinda money and that experience, that doesn’t make any sense to me. Still doesn’t. Doesn’t make sense to a lot of people I know that are out [of the Army] right now that are kinda wondering the same thing.’ What he resents and criticizes here is not just the Army’s cold rationality, but its excess and wastefulness, its failure to fully get its arms around the forces it had mustered for war. The fungibility that allowed Jamis to fall through the cracks and be rendered ‘useless’ was also something he retained as a source of embodied value that he could turn back on the Army as critique.

As he told it, he was in good company. He had observed the unforgiving human logistics of mobilization and demobilization all around him, that feeling of being ‘one less person’ to deal with, ‘one less number that they have to make sure [of]’. The rapid pace of pre-drawdown operations had meant that heavily deployed combat aviation and specialized infantry units like the ones he was in had enjoyed generous budgets up until 2012, so there was always money for extra-duty pay, transportation, ammunition and other training supplies, or, as in Jamis’s most recent case, aviation fuel. But, within a short handful of years, he had seen entire units literally dissolve. Fort Crocker was one of numerous bases to house units of OH-58 Kiowa helicopters, smaller and lighter than the AH-64s that Jamis flew, and nearly the entire fleet of them were removed from service between 2014 and 2016 (Cleveland, 2017). There were several dozen Kiowas at Fort Crocker in the unit Jamis was familiar with, he told me, and more in some smaller units, with five pilots attached to each one and hundreds of support and technical personnel serving them all. With all the deployments, all the churn, people thought ‘oh they’re never gonna get rid of us’. But the Army shut them down permanently. Jamis was friends with a lot of the pilots, people who were just a few years from the 20 or 22 years of service when they could retire with a pension and full benefits. Some of them got moved to other aircraft. But the Army, ‘they were just like, “Oh well, half you guys gotta go home.” [It] took their retirement plans away.’ They hadn’t anticipated the devastating contractions of demobilization, hadn’t ‘leaned forward’ on what they knew might be coming, he said, and then suddenly would ‘get an email from [Human Resources Command] like, “Hey, you’re out in 90 days.”’ Some people, accustomed to the churn and its self-perpetuating logic, held out hope that the units would be stood up again, that they could stick it out until the next wave of mobilization. But ‘a lot of ’em said, “Screw it, we’ll just get out.” They’re out here [in Hullford] driving dump trucks and stuff like that, like, “I was a pilot six months ago. This is ridiculous!”’

In perhaps the most ironic turn, now that Jamis’s separation paperwork was due to come from Human Resources Command any day, the Army had begun to hound him, asking him to come back and fly again, ‘Like, “Oh well, we’re gonna spin it back up so we need pilots.”’ Apparently neither the brain injury nor the DUI was a problem that couldn’t be looked past in the name of mobilization. ‘Well, sorry!’ he said to me sardonically. ‘Better call somebody else.’

This was to spite the Army, but it wasn’t to spite war. There was something in him that was ready to go back into motion, regardless of everything that had happened to him. He acknowledged the strangeness: ‘it’s weird if you think about it.’ War had hurt him: ‘I see a psychiatrist and do all these things and take these meds’ because war ‘potentially made me like this, like, suicidal alcoholic.’ Jamis said that, chatting in a Facebook group of friends from his old sniper team, they all felt that they would go back to war if they could. ‘Looking at the world right now’ – he mentioned ISIS and the Syrian civil war – he knew there would be more Americans being sent to do more fighting and getting hurt and dying. ‘I’m pretty sure I got another one in me. We’ve already kinda learned how to live with it, so it’s, like, why continue to do that to someone else. We’re just, like, we get it. A 19- or 20-year-old kid is gonna be able to endure a lot more of that, but why make his body feel like mine does every day?’ In an echo of Hoffman (2011a), Jamis suggests that there are enemies out there, but the real preoccupation is just as much about simply taking up the work of war. His body was diminished but still fungible, substitutable for somebody else’s. To mobilize again would be to continue to live out potentials that still lived within him, to return to ‘what you built and what you know how to do and what you become good at. That’s your thing,’ he said. ‘That’s what you own’ – a martial body becoming at the meeting point of debilitating loss, rebellious excess, and virtuosic capacity.

Jamis is in some ways an exceptional case: he is a uniquely accomplished soldier, a combat veteran, and the holder of two unusually elite and selective military occupational specialties. He survived some pretty horrific injury, and in many ways didn’t get that bad a deal on his way out of the Army, securing medical retirement and placing into a highly selective joint military–civilian job-training program despite his DUI charge. At the same time, his case shows just how arbitrary and ruthlessly instrumental mobilization and demobilization are, affecting even those soldiers who most clearly and directly and with such virtuosity embody military investment in the production of warring bodies. The relentless churn of mobilization–demobilization can not only dictate that someone like this no longer belongs in the Army, but also amplify the indignities enacted by military bureaucracy into their own form of harm, and make the Army itself into another enemy. And, despite all this, the embodied becoming of war is not done with Jamis, nor he with it, as he imaginatively projects the fungibility of his body into the future and into the places of those others he knows will go to war.

Conclusion: No outside to war

With the stories of Jamis and others like him as an empirical anchor, departing from ‘transition’ and ‘reintegration’ can help reveal something other than orderly progression, neatly demarcated domains, practices, and actors, and a kind of innocent stability that even the most critical and humane deployments of these terms – and their cousin ‘militarization’ – potentially reproduce. Mobilization–demobilization names an alternative logic, one directly rooted in the self-referential technical and institutional features of war-making that also accounts for the excess and unruliness that seem inherent in the ‘problem’ ex-military life perennially imposes upon social order.

Not only might the history and structural conditions of American war look different from this perspective, but conditions on the ground can be reckoned in new ways. One day in the veteran court where Jamis had been earning his way out of his DUI charge, the judge, an avuncular and deeply caring man who grew up as a civilian in Hullford, mentioned that the ‘need’ for the veteran court was evidence that the Army’s troop strength should be increased to reduce the burden of lengthy repeat deployments, presumably in future wars. Conversely, he said, he wanted everyone down to the company commanders and senior non-commissioned officers at Fort Crocker to know about the court, to know that a soldier with a promising career could get help there and not be pushed out and left behind by the Army. The logistics of war-making and the fungibility of military labor take center stage in the judge’s assessment. A broadened scope of mobilization anticipates and responds to the excess and transgression of demobilization, and Hullford’s war-like civilian judicial and law enforcement powers of surveillance and capture become an important adjunct to war – not just to the literally life-saving biopolitical mission of shoring up military and veteran life in its wake, but also to keeping military life in motion. To describe this civilian court as ‘militarized’ would tell only part of the story, eliding a more fundamental condition under mobilization–demobilization by which it seems impossible to tackle problems of ex-military life without taking additional war as given or even as part of the solution. And as Jamis’s words above indicate, this assumption is not merely imposed from the outside by a unilateral ‘militarizing’ force: it animates and endures in the lives and bodies of war’s makers, whose existence, if attended to carefully, presses critically against the received knowledge of where war begins and ends. This critique is an important message for anyone concerned at any level with the burdens of ex-military life.

Mobilization–demobilization is also a becoming with broad-reaching conceptual implications. A whole range of critical scholarship on post-9/11 war-making has shown how war’s becoming is fundamentally intertwined with violently enforced liberal notions of care and enlightened defense of the good life, in which the sentimentalized preservation and ‘liberation’ of migrants, refugees, and civilians in foreign war-zones is inevitably bound up with their governance and control (Fassin, 2012), the ‘necessary evil’ of their destruction (Asad, 2007; Weizman, 2011), and their relegation to ‘ungrievable’ status (Butler, 2009). In the era of ‘global civil wars’ in which US forces both military and economic are major instigators and participants (Alliez and Lazzarato, 2016; Hardt and Negri, 2005), analyses that compartmentalize war along ‘military’ and ‘civilian’ lines are ill-equipped to intervene in the broader politics that enable war’s dire global becomings.

To place mobilization–demobilization firmly in an American context, then, is to follow where the martial empiricism proposed by the editors of this special issue leads: to incorporating the USA’s domestic arrangements of military and ex-military life more explicitly into what we already know to be true of war at a global scale. In the terms that Hoffman (2011b: 17) borrows from Deleuze, there is ‘no longer an outside to war’. For all that it is presumed to ‘face out’ against enemy others (Cowen, 2014: 5), reckoning with war’s becomings means addressing the ways in which it turns in upon its own makers, turns those makers upon themselves, and involves us all while inviting us to look away.