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

Abstract

Abstract This article posits an analytic of mobilization–demobilization that attends to the instrumentalization and fungibility of military lives as both a primary source of embodied war-related harm and an undertheorized logic of the US war-making apparatus. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among post-9/11 military veterans in a US military community, the article explores mobilization–demobilization across three registers. First, I contrast it with dominant scholarly framings of ‘transition’, ‘reintegration’, and ‘militarization’, terms that analytically compartmentalize war in space and time. Second, I show how mobilization–demobilization drives the uptake and release of military labor and accounts for continuities between war violence and ‘war-like’ domestic political relations in 20th- and 21st-century US military recruiting, welfare, and personnel practices. Finally, I describe the trajectory of one veteran caught up in some elements of mobilization–demobilization, including injury, post-traumatic stress, substance use, and law-breaking, which are structured by the military’s management of his labor. These dynamics demonstrate crucial empirical links between the domestic and global faces of US war-making, and between war and nominally non-war domains.