The military remains one of the most highly trusted institutions in American society. While this level of support can be attributed to specific factors (e.g., public perceptions of competence and professionalism), as identified in the vast literature on civil-military relations, a more affective rationale is also at play. Katharine M. Millar’s new book Support the Troops: Military Obligation, Gender, and the Making of Political Community, zeroes in on exactly that. Disagreements about how the military is utilized are commonplace, even healthy in democracies, but there is an enduring and surprisingly robust consensus around supporting the troops. Should we support the troops is a question that is seldom asked but that underlies Millar’s riveting and painstaking deconstruction of the ubiquitous “Support the Troops” discourse. Millar boldly suggests that, far from abdicating our duty of care to members of the armed forces, their families, and veterans, we need to carefully scrutinize the promise of belonging, which yellow ribbons bestow upon people. Not supporting the troops is likely to be painted, by Millar’s own admission, as a “potentially traitorous” project (p. 3). It is not an idea you can just throw out there, given the high emotional stakes involved, and Millar is acutely aware of that. Wisely, she raises that question most directly (and with great sensitivity) only once the reader has been made fully conscious of how pervasive and deeply engrained “Support the Troops” discourses have become.

In this book, Millar is adept at uncovering how “Support the Troops” narratives coexist alongside public and official discourses tied to the use of force during the Global War on Terror (GWOT), with an empirical focus on U.S. and UK newspapers, state documents, and military-related non-governmental organizations. The prose can be lengthy and arduous at times, but Millar is always precise and compelling in her analysis. What she proposes is an impressively comprehensive account of discursive martiality, one which reinforces the notion that, as a socially constructed institution, the military is adept at maintaining an aura of inevitability and permanence. What is particularly unnerving is the realization that supporting the troops is pitched as apolitical, which of course it is not; this is exactly where we enter into dangerous territory when it comes to healthy and democratic civil-military relations. The fact that no one really argues against the idea of supporting the troops, that it is framed as an apparent obligation, articulated by anti-war activists and Pentagon officials with the same degree of ease, should make the topic of supreme interest to political scientists. The book fits well within the excellent scholarship of critical security and military studies. Like Anthony King’s or Megan MacKenzie’s work, it shows a curiosity and genuine interest for documenting micro military practices that contain broader significance for the armed forces as an institution, and civil-military relations more broadly. A case in point is Millar’s discussion of small-unit-combat cohesion as a conceptual analogy for understanding how supporting the troops embeds ideas of solidarity and political belonging into its package of discursive martiality.

At the core of Millar’s argumentation is the relationship between non-serving civilians and the troops, in the age of all-volunteer professional armed forces, acknowledging that fewer and fewer Americans and Britons serve. When everyone serves and when everyone supports both the war and the troops, as was the case during World War II, it is a conscious exercise, given that most everyone has something at stake. By contrast, today’s rationale for supporting the troops presents a different relationship to the idea of service, one which is rooted in guilt. Indeed, there is palpable (and gendered) civilian anxiety as a result of not serving and as an all-volunteer professional military is taking on that burden. To understand these dynamics, we are invited to revisit the liberal social contract which, according to Millar, has been updated, even amended, with “Support the Troops” narratives. In lieu of direct service to the state, citizens are at the very least expected to support their military. This is how the logic gets intertwined with feelings of guilt and shame, because how could you possibly withhold support for the people who are willing to risk life and limb to protect you and your way of life? Supporting the troops acts like a balm, soothing civilian anxiety tied to opting out of military service. In this framing, all those who serve are heroes and are entitled to support from the general civilian population. Millar goes even further, arguing that “support is the new service” (p. 146), a claim that certainly has merit in the U.S. context but that might not be as generalizable as some of her other observations. Like me, Millar is Canadian and shares a vignette in the preface about feeling the social expectation of supporting the troops. Having grown up in Québec, where anti-military sentiment more visibly accompanies narratives of war opposition, I am interested in those fissures and nuances in multi-lingual and multicultural contexts and would look forward to Millar’s take on them in future work.

In terms of the research data, Millar opted for a stratified data collection strategy to analyze “Support the Troops” narratives in the United States and in the United Kingdom, acknowledging that the discursive practice is more prevalent in the United States. What is particularly important about the empirical analysis is that it focuses not just on official discourse, but narratives from different types of stakeholders, which allows the reader to grapple with the totalizing nature of this narrative and discursive practice. Yes, “Support the Troops” is “reified by state discourse” (pp. 87-88) but it is adopted and instrumentalized by a number of different players, from the community level to the international realm. Indeed, Millar points to the prevalence of “Support the Troops” narratives in alliance politics. It’s at this point of the book that, though the comparison between the United States and the UK is instructive, one gets curious about how the argument might travel across a broader set of cases. Canada, for example, could have been added as another “special ally” fairly seamlessly (Chapter 8 devotes some space to exploration of special allies), especially given its refusal to participate in the 2003 war in Iraq. It would have strengthened the empirical grounding of this chapter and more decisively answered the question of how “Support the Troops” narratives adapt to non-participation and war opposition.

Another aspect warranting further development would be some analytical engagement, and even some empirical overview, of the activities that were carried out during the GWOT period that were not war. If anything, it makes the argument more persuasive because through the range of other activities, members of the military, even if not in a war, benefit from automatic support in a way that other professions with at times comparable tasks do not (think law enforcement).

Reading this deeply analytical account of the “Support the Troops” discourse during the GWOT years made for some truly enthralling, but at times demoralizing reading given how hard it is to walk back deeply entrenched and affective narratives. The conclusion offers some respite, especially in the last two pages of the book when Millar proposes bold avenues for change, building on her research findings. It implies nothing short of tearing down this consensual but ultimately unhealthy “Support the Troops” artifice. While I may have taken an entirely different research design to investigate the embeddedness of supporting the troops, I’m convinced I would have arrived at a similar sentiment, namely that while we have a duty of care toward troops, veterans and their families, our democratic debate tied to the use of force is undermined by affective and uncompromising bonds toward the military. To realize that the “support the troops discourses severely constrained the conditions of legitimate political dissent during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan” is an important finding that has been echoed in the work of other scholars of civil-military relations (p. 194). For example, Peter Feaver’s book Thanks for Your Service: The Causes and Consequences of Public Confidence in the US Military draws similar conclusions about the social pressure and bipartisan consensus around supporting the troops and being deferential to military expertise. Both works, by drawing from very different arguments, literatures, and methodologies, raise alarm bells about increasingly entrenched (and worrying) dynamics of democratic civil-military relations. Indeed, this crucial amendment of the liberal military contract passed with such roaring approval that it is incredibly delicate to question it. While the discourse and practice of supporting the troops create a reassuring connection to military service for the rest of society, Millar’s incisive analysis foregrounds the cost involved, which is civilian complicity in the democratic use of force and, by the same token, the harms of war.