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.

中文翻译：

---

流失：动员-复员和美国军事生活的可替代性

本文对动员-复员进行了分析，它关注军事生活的工具化和可替代性，它既是战争相关伤害的主要来源，也是美国战争机器的理论不足的逻辑。基于对美国军事社区 9/11 后退伍军人的民族志实地调查，本文探讨了三个登记册中的动员-复员。首先，我将其与“过渡”、“重新整合”和“军事化”的主要学术框架进行对比，这些术语在空间和时间上对战争进行分析划分。其次，我展示了动员-复员如何推动军事劳动力的吸收和释放，并解释了 20 世纪和 21 世纪美国军队招募、福利、和人员做法。最后，我描述了一位退伍军人的轨迹，他陷入了一些动员-复员要素，包括受伤、创伤后压力、药物使用和违法，这些要素由军队对其劳动的管理构成。这些动态显示了美国发动战争的国内和全球面孔之间，以及战争和名义上的非战争领域之间的关键经验联系。