Rounding off this week’s symposium on Support the Troops: Military Obligation, Gender, and the Making of Political Community, Katharine Millar responds to commentaries from Mirko Palestrino, Pinar Bilgin, Cian O’Driscoll, and Ellen Martin and Chris Rossdale.
To begin, my immense gratitude to Pinar Bilgin, Cian O’Driscoll, Ellen Martin, Mirko Palestrino, and Chris Rossdale for their close reading, sharp observations, and thoughtful engagement with my work. It’s an intimidating pleasure to have scholars whose work I so value, and whose insights to which I’m indebted, discuss the book. They’ve given me a lot to think about which, over ten years into this project, is a real gift.
Much of the perceptive (and generous) commentary offers a push to clarify and (re)consider what the book does or does not do, does or does not include, and how its insights might be extended to related phenomena. Not unlike the intro to the forum, there are (at least) two ways of approaching this discussion.
The first, I think, is fairly formal answer about scope conditions, and the ambitions of the book to empirical and analytic generalizability. As the reviewers, note, the account of the “fracture” of the liberal military contract, and subsequent politics of supporting the troops, isn’t meant to be empirically generalizable beyond the US and UK. Likewise, I attend only to mainstream and elite discourses; I don’t include the perspectives of serving military personnel, or less organized resistance to the obligation to support the troops.
There are also several entailments of my argument the book doesn’t consider because, following its own logic of inquiry, it can’t. This is because, analytically, I’m interested in the problem that “support the troops” discourses work to solve: the legitimation and normalisation of citizens’ participation in collective violence for/by the state. Liberal democracies encounter a particular spin on this problem, as ideological commitments to autonomy, liberty, and equality sit uneasily with the expropriation of citizens’ time, labour, and lives in the form of military service. But all states encounter a version of this quandry; even in liberal democracies, “support for the troops” doesn’t manifest mechanistically or uniformly. And my account of “supporting the troops” is pitched at the level of a broad discursive formation, and the conditioning of social intelligibility, rather than an interrogation of the intentionality and experiences of “support” of specific individuals. (This latter is incredibly interesting; a discourse analytic approach just can’t get there).
What the book works towards, then, is some scaffolding for thinking through the various ways this “problem” is resolved – with a particular, but not exclusive, interest in the ideological and normative tensions posed by contemporary iterations of multicultural, ostensibly non-imperial liberal democracy. All polities need some way of accounting for/narrating the terms of military service. And I’d expect to see that narrative entangled with (contingent, contextual) notions of “good” public personhood, idealized gender (and sexuality, race, coloniality, etc.), violence, and political belonging.
This account of the limits of my argumentation, evidence, and analysis is accurate. Its reliance on the somewhat sterile language of research design – as important as it is to be precise about claims – is, however, not the only story. Research design doesn’t spring from the void; it’s the result of a series of smaller and larger analytical, ethical, and political choices. And, to open up the second approach to this discussion, I’ll take up the invitation (and challenge) to reflect upon those choices, their implications, and their not-insignificant limitations.
O’Driscoll’s sharp intervention asks, in this account of supporting the troops, where are the soldiers? In his piece, O’Driscoll outlines the many attitudes and affects serving soldiers might told towards StT practices and discourses, ranging from ambivalence to experiences of comfort and care to the potential for support to bring about inadvertent harms. This, anecdotally, aligns with my own discussions of StT with serving and former military personnel. Kenneth MacLeish’s striking 2013 ethnography of Fort Hood presents the somewhat counterintuitive idea that civilian support for the troops – both affective and material – frequently presents a problem to be managed for both individual servicemembers and the institutional military. (I’ve actually written a bit about this elsewhere myself, in an article interrogating the consequences of the imposition of “support” as a form of charity for military personnel and veterans).
Likewise, O’Driscoll draws our attention to the material limits of support, in asking how far it extends after the war, in the less-glamorous provision of care and support to veterans and military families. This is something of a resurrection of the Vietnam-era betrayal narrative, one that can be seen in the work of, for instance, veterans’ groups in the US lobbying for the reform of the Veterans’ Administration and military healthcare reform as a form of “support for the troops”. It reminds me of Deborah Cowen’s excellent work on warfare as “workfare”, wherein soldiers anchor an imperfect ordering of citizen “deservingness”, simultaneously justifying the shrinking of the welfare state for non-soldiers while also failing to provide military personnel with adequate public goods. All of which is to say, O’Driscoll asks a good question.
I don’t present soldiers and veterans’ perspectives on “supporting the troops”. To do so, though the move is intuitive and has an ethics of its own, would fall into the same normative/political StT trap I document throughout the book. I observe, alongside Tidy, Managhan, and Schrader, how, in an era where abstaining from anti-war dissent is reconstituted as the hallmark of masculinised/ising citizenship, only protest by military servicemembers and their families is constructed as legitimate. (Not for nothing, though it’s not my central point here, this is a reversal of the typical principles of the democratic control of the armed forces). The martiality of the “troops” earns the right to dissent – again, a potential avenue for short-term anti-war protest – without confronting the underlying conflation of martiality and masculinity as the basis for normative citizenship and intelligible political speech.
Though I don’t believe that resisting the obligation to support the troops requires treating military personnel or their families callously, or disregarding their experiences and suffering, I also don’t think “the troops” can serve as the politico-ethical foundation for the anti-war movement. It’s a tautological rehearsal of the same masculinity-martiality-citizenship nexus the discourse reproduces and reinforces. (This can also be seen, I think, in O’Driscoll’s observation that StT is sufficiently flexible to both support and condemn those accused of war crimes). And so I decided that centring the perspectives of military personnel empirically within an account that seeks to challenge that politics analytically would be inconsistent. It risks playing into the logic outlined above wherein military service is elevated as the sole warrant for war opposition and only “the troops” can authorize a perspective on “the troops”.
O’Driscoll also raises important questions about “the troops” I didn’t discuss (or, rather, the military personnel who fail to be recognised as “the troops”) and who were, and are, treated poorly. Most centrally, O’Driscoll points out that the dynamics I point towards in the US and UK are highly complicated by imperialism, in so far as military personnel may or may not be members of the abstract, figurative “troops” that must be supported, may or may (in their own account, or via the recognition of power) be members of the polity that is protected/projected by the dynamics of “support”. In the book, I unpack this primarily with respect to locally-employed civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as non-citizens serving in the US and UK armed forces. My interrogation of the colonial hierarchies at work within transnationalised and racialized StT discourse could, I think, have been more curious about the silences around the ANA and Iraqi military. It’s true that they too appear constrained by the asymmetric expectations of ostensibly-voluntary, universal “support” for the troops (and wars) of the liberal international, while being subject to similar racialized projections of presumptive enmity/suspicion that military service is itself insufficient to overcome.
At the same time, however, I’d want to take seriously, empirically, the many polities, and visions of “good” public personhood through which participation in the ANA and Iraqi armed forces may be constituted, contested, and legitimated. These may – but also, as Bilgin reminds us, may not – be most legible through the heuristic of the liberal military contract. Though I argue pretty forcefully for StT as bounding the political (and, in my account, a fairly contemporary “liberal” political, which seems important to keep in mind), an account of what happens when the polity to whom violent obligation owed is changing or itself under contestation remains to be specified. Paying attention to the shifting terms of violent obligation is itself analytically and politically important, even in instances where the liberal contract doesn’t empirically hold, and, I suspect, may shed light on the bounds and constitution of the new/contested polity.
O’Driscoll (and Bilgin) also briefly point to the central absence of the project: the peoples and communities harmed in the theatres of war during the “global war on terror”. The major fact of the “global war on terror”, to date, is the deaths of over 920,000 people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, and Syria, and suffering of millions of others. The book doesn’t – and can’t – comment on the experiences of people in “troop receiving” (i.e. invaded) states. But those deaths, and related indirect harms, are the most important element of the wars; the analysis of StT contained within the book is aimed at not at displacing that suffering, but at understanding how it was made possible and, in so doing, how it might be avoided. Anti-war and anti-militarist resistance – indeed, reaching towards military abolition – is the animating politics that accompanies the formal, social scientific story of the book.
The account of anti-war resistance in the book brings us to Martin and Rossdale’s queries about StT and the US and UK “everyday”. In conversation with Martin’s doctoral research, which I’m incredibly enthusiastic about, they ask how “hegemonic” StT really is. They recount fascinating empirics from online forums such as Reddit, Student Room, etc, wherein users contest the heroization of the military and outright challenge the obligation to support the troops. This again seems right to me; the claim that StT discourse is hegemonic isn’t meant to imply that it is impossible for individuals or communities to object to its account of violent obligation and gendered citizenship. Rather, it’s meant to point towards the fact that it was – and remains, I think, though arguably this is lessening – difficult to be read as a legitimate social actor engaging in politics, rather than an offensive outlier and bad person while simultaneously challenging the obligation of support and normativity of “the troops”.
Here, the possibility offered by the forums of anonymization, and thus some insulation from the prospect of public shaming, seems key. I’m also curious about the timeframe of the discussions, and whether Martin’s research suggests that absent public engagement with a collectively-understood war (or wartime, in conversation with Palestrino’s interests) the obligation to StT might slacken. (I also, to be honest, wonder about the extent to which StT has become so normalized that contesting it may sit within a broader online genre of shitposting and culture of contesting received wisdom and social expectations. Though that would still, of course, be a form of resistance).
This is related, I think – though I struggle to explicate quite how – with Martin and Rossdale’s question about the erotics of “the troops”. Which, to be honest, I hadn’t previously considered – but here’s how I think it works. Briefly, my sense is that the constitution of “the troops” as dependent, vulnerable, frequently passive, etc tends to figure them in terms of ideas of boyish innocence and a fairly young sense of naivete (see Boose 1993). This production of the troops works, via gendered and sexualized logics of contrast, to preserve and reinforce, alongside the heroism, agency, etc. of the hyper heteromasculine combat soldier, his sexiness.
There’s actually a psychoanalytically-driven reading of the gendered and sexualized dynamics of StT, that I decided not to pursue, that reads “support” as a form of mimesis of idealized martial masculinity – of, for lack of a better word, gendered and sexualized “wannabeeism”. There’s a sense in which is this is accurate, but it also imputes (fairly universal and thus essentialistic) motivation and affect to actual civilian supporters, rather than subject positions within discourse, in a manner that doesn’t, and didn’t, sit well with me. “The troops”, in this symbolic economy, are highly fetishized, though in a manner more immediately akin to a Marxist reading of commodity fetishism, recast in terms of the material relations of war/militarism, than erotics. Not, of course, that the two are wholly unrelated; in each case, I think it’s fair to read “the troops” as an object of investment, be it material relations of “war exchange” or gendered and sexualized fantasy, identification, and obligation.
In an interesting way, then, Martin and Rossdale’s fascinating questions about discourses of obligation around state institutions of violence and “Blue Lives Matter” are also questions about the failure of the police to likewise become a fetishized collectivity of universal (if only in ideological aspiration) affective investment. I really appreciate Martin and Rossdale’s tracking of (some) key differences between soldiering and policing. Policing is not tied into formal ideals of liberal citizenship in way I argue soldiering is – not least because “we” lack an understanding that everyone is obliged, or potentially obliged, to become a law enforcement officer.
Those differences in idealized normative scaffolding aside – to say nothing of the historical and contemporary realities of the racist, sexist, trans- and homophobic violence enacted by law enforcement – “Blue Lives Matter” also tracks with support the troops discourses in important ways. Among other things, it emerges, though in conversation with previous pro-police movements and politics, in 2014 in response to the emergence of Black Lives Matter as an anti-racist, anti-police brutality movement following the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri (see Bock and Figueroa 2018). Chronologically, then, it follows the emergence of StT discourses across the twentieth century, and their consolidation as a form of moral commonsense, supported by social media posts, apparel, bumper stickers, and other quotidien paraphernalia. The grammar of “Blue Lives Matter”, symbolically, and in its attempt to forge a solidaristic obligation to support violence, mirror – though without the universalizing, if still racialized, aspirations of liberalism – those of StT.
This matters in many ways – one of which is the attempt to further the on-going construction of policing as akin to soldiering in terms of risk, sacrifice, and heroism, while similarly attempting to elide political consideration of the violence such discourses valorise and excuse.[1] Likewise, the framing of law enforcement officials as heroes people are ostensibly obliged to solidaristically support is telling in terms of what it suggests about the underlying political community. It reveals that the polity protected and enacted by policing is not the one envisioned by StT discourses and formal stories of citizenship, but rather a White settler community, to be defended against violence and encroachment by racialised Others. Here, I think, as I often do, fairly immediately of the work of Alison Howell, and her assessment of this racialized conflation of militarism and policing as a form of “martial politics”, spanning and blurring conventional categories of war/peace, domestic/international, etc. (In my own work, I’ve also tracked the emergence of populist, White – up to and including white supremacist – understandings of vigilantist violence within some pro-military “troop support” spaces and organisations in recent years, often following vectors likewise associated with policing).
The question of the constitution of legitimate political speech brings me on to Martin and Rossdale’s final, and similarly excellent, question, about the relationship between substantive identity, in terms of gender, sexuality, race, coloniality, class, and so forth, and experiences and expectations of support in civilians’ actual lives. Martin is completely right in pointing towards the way ideas of racialized deservingness and contingent citizenship (even if cast in liberal idioms of univeralism and, increasingly, a somewhat antiseptic neoliberal “multiculturalism) inform the demands of support for the troops. “Everyone” is obliged to support the troops, but minoritized and marginalized peoples are more obliged. This, again, is scholarship I’m excited to learn about further, alongside important existing work that sheds light on the complicated affective dynamics of support for the troops offered by groups – such as queer (e.g. Puar 2017) and/or Latino/a communities (e.g. Marsical 1991) – frequently marginalized within these racialized dynamics of formally equal liberal citizenship.
I miss (some) aspects of how “support” tracks with the hierarchies of racialized and imperial liberalism – something I think is also apparent in Bilgin’s observations about the Eurocentrism of much of militarism scholarship. Bilgin observes that “the international” appears in the book in two ways: first, in the transnationalisation of support along alliance and colonial lines, discussed above; and second, in its absence, in terms of the vanishing of the actual violence of war and suffering of civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other theatres of the “global war on terror” from StT discourse.
Bilgin also suggests, powerfully, that the book misses another, deeper facet of “the international” at work within StT discourse – the way “a ‘disconnect’ was allowed to emerge between peoples and the Troops in ‘Europe’, people in in ‘non-Europe’ have learned and/or sustained militarist ways of doing things”. In other words, if I understand correctly, Bilgin points out that the very structural transformation I diagnose as bringing about the impetus to support the troops is itself an empirical, historical function of European colonialism and its continuation throughout the North-South geopolitics of the Cold War. And, playing this logic out, though Bilgin perhaps doesn’t quite say so, the Eurocentric assumptions of analytical conceptions of militarism (and the possibility/plausibility of the liberal contract?) upon a particular division between violence/politics, inside/outside, military/civil, etc, enacted as normative in the Global North through its facilitation as normal, if ostensibly pathological, in the Global South.
In offering a response to this point, I find myself in a bind, as in the argument’s broad sweep, I (almost) wholeheartedly agree. The “almost” comes in only with the return to the concept of militarism, which Bilgin reads, I think, empirically, as describing a particular institutional and normative arrangement of civil-military relations. This is an understanding of militarism I try and work beyond (or, perhaps more accurately, orthogonally to), within the book. The existence of the concept of militarism, as a pathologized term imply something is “off” in the civil-military arrangement, does, I argue, quite a lot of work in the legitimating, civilizational and hierarchical politics between the Global North and South that Bilgin’s intervention points towards (see also Stuurman 2020). But Bilgin’s broader point, that the operation of the gendered liberal military contract, such as it is, empirically and historically relies upon a civilisational geopolitics of war (and, of course, violent obligation), is completely accurate. And though I do discuss the constitutive violences of liberalism at work in colonialism and imperial war within the book…I also leave it there. And so I’m really grateful to Bilgin for generously connecting these points up, and revealing a layer of “the international” at work in StT, and my analysis, I didn’t entirely catch. In that sense, it doesn’t really matter what it’s called.
As we draw towards a close, Palestrino also hints towards a potential extension – and analytical inconsistency? – in my account of StT and its relationship to time. Palestrino points out that though my conceptual framework takes great pains to challenge a series of other binaries associated with liberal violence, including the violence/politics, civil/military, public/private, domestic/international, etc, my analysis leaves another important binary, of wartime/peacetime, reasonably intact. There’s a practical reason for this – empirically, I demonstrate that the articulation (and volume) of StT discourse aligns with both intersubjectively understood “wartime” and the fortunes of those wars. (This empirical work was an important part of demonstrating the relationship between political events/outcomes and the discourse itself, suggestive of a broader and deeper politics than a “mere” bumper sticker reaction to an unpopular war).
That said, Palestrino makes a great point about the temporality of, and enacted within, “supporting the troops”. Though I’ve been reasonably content to lean on conventional accounts of war(time) in constructing my conceptual approach, I also, as does Palestrino in his piece, refer in passing to the persistence of the social relations of StT beyond the formal hostilities of war, particularly as vested in the remnants of StT’s material culture. (In a box somewhere, I have a t-shirt that says “if you don’t support the troops, please stand in front of them”; Rossdale picked it up for me at a US flea market years ago). It now strikes me as odd that despite the leftover poppies and the replaced yellow ribbons and the faded bumper stickers and items like that shirt, I still considered these items to be a sort of quixotic detritus, more a reminder of past events, and persistence of supportive social relations, than an extension of the temporality of the war (or of the blurring of the war/peace that Palestrino is wise to emphasize). It strikes me that this must also be another function of how “supporting the troops” becomes naturalised…not through its own insistence in ostensible “peacetime”, but by leaning on the normalization of something called “peacetime” to become nearly literally part of the furniture, unremarkable and unremarked…until the next time it’s needed.
With respect to Palestrino’s concluding point – about what do we do with all the violent artefacts – I’m, frankly, not sure. Or, at least resisting the temptation to give a really definitive answer. Palestrino is completely right to observe that the meaning of the poppy has shifted over time, from something closer to somber remembrance (even hope for peace) to a practice today pretty closely related to discourses and affects of support for the troops (see Haigh 2020; Basham 2016) . He’s also right that this historical arc, and existence of the white poppy, mean that it need not. Meanings can, and do, shift over time. They are contingent, and at least partially open to subversion. The yellow ribbon itself is invested with a variety of contemporaneous meanings; it requires context to parse whether a given ribbon refers to the troops, to suicide prevention, missing persons awareness, dog bite prevention, or solidarity with Hong Kong pro-democracy protests (to give a non-exhaustive list). There is scope, I think, for holding out for the possibility of remembrance without a sense of martial support.
At the same time, I want to ask (in a genuinely open sense), when it comes to these artefacts, and even memories, why keep them? There are some straightforward responses here, in terms of nationalism, memory, and respect (though that brings us back to questions of the possibility of non-martial war commemoration), as well as more disparate, individuated sentimentality, nostalgia, and, I think, obligation. As well as just a tendency towards attachment to the material, and memory-in-the-material, as a signal of importance, of historical record, of meaning. I wrote an entire book challenging the politics of the slogan on the T-shirt, and it’s still in a box in my office. I genuinely don’t know if the objects of troop support, already offered in a spirit love and solidarity (albeit to violent ends), can be repurposed, can be in some sense, redeemed. Is this the terrain upon which to contest violent solidarism? Maybe – I don’t know. But I find the question, and the impulse to do so, genuinely fascinating. Where I (currently) land is this: an absolutist impulse to destroy and dispose of these uncomfortable objects seems, ineffably, unwise. But, at the same time, I think “we” need to be willing, in a fairly literal sense, to let them go.
[1] The obverse of this dynamic can be seen in the various “Clap for Carers”, “Support Health Care Workers” campaigns of the Covid-19 pandemic. These discourses, which also leveraged ideas of obligation and solidarity through/within state institutions (at least in the UK), displaced political consideration of a different form of violence – that of suffering, and disposability, and risk placed upon both healthcare workers and vulnerable peoples by state policy and (lack of) resourcing during the pandemic. Here, the parallel to soldiering is clear, in so far as it’s dangerous to be made into a hero.
The Disorder Of Things 