Imagining Military Suicide

Abstract

Military suicide is widely regarded as a crisis in the contemporary United States. Indeed, the rate of military suicide has risen consistently over the course of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and is one of the leading causes of death among American military personnel. Military suicide is widely regarded as scandalous sign of the trauma of war and the indifference or failure of military institutions. This chapter places these assumptions in the broader context of the entire system of war-making that shapes military service members’ experience. It describes that system in terms of military biopolitics under which the mechanisms that seek to police and prevent military suicide are fundamentally linked to the mechanisms that have already exposed soldiers to harm and empowered them to commit violence.