An Army of Debt

Abstract

Over the past decade, the US Department of Defense has become increasingly concerned with how the financial insecurity of military families compromises the overall security of the nation. Through an analysis of the policy reports focusing on predatory lending and military personnel and the initiatives designed to improve the financial capabilities of servicemembers and their families, this article situates the everyday domestic lives of indebted military personnel with respect to the racialized, gendered and militarized logics of global finance capital. Specifically, I argue that the perceived crisis in ‘financial readiness’ is endemic to the US security state and its efforts to protect and produce financialized markets at home and abroad. Inspired by the growing body of Cultural Studies and American Studies scholarship on the relationship between race, empire and the financialization of capitalism, this article unpacks the ways in which state practices of war-making fuel and are fueled by the chronic indebtedness of communities of colour and working-class communities. I open with a discussion of how the Pentagon's coercive enlistment practices burden economically insecure bodies with the work of securing the nation and, in doing so, create concentrated populations of young people who, with a regular pay cheque yet no credit history, are particularly vulnerable to the financial structures they ‘volunteered’ to defend. I then conclude with an examination of the Pentagon's family-focused financial readiness programmes that school servicemembers in how to invest for their futures and that call specifically upon military wives to do the labour of mobilizing household financial plans in the service of US imperial interests. By focusing on how military families are imagined to manage and mismanage their debt, this article offers insight into how the militarization of citizenship coincides with the financialization of family life in the United States today.