Tournament: UNT | Round: 6 | Opponent: na | Judge: 

K

====National-level war powers debate produces dissociative rhetoric that quarantines civilian and military knowledge. Collectivizing discussions of military issues erase the experience of individual soldiers, merging them into the singular identity of military leadership.====
Stahl 09 ~Roger Stahl is Assistant Professor of Speech Communication at the University of Georgia. Why we support the troops. Rhetoric 26 Public Affairs Vol. 12, No. 4~
If deflection works to construct the drama of war, the function of dissociation works
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picturing the soldier as a real individual, such as soldier body counts.

Our current national discourse surrounding soldiers is a result of the blindness of politics.  Individual narratives of war are swallowed up in favor of a simplified version capable of consumption during the five o clock news.  Soldiers are solicited to act on the nation’s libidinal imaginary, called forth to perform again and again until their bodies are broken.  As a result, war rhetoric creates us into a collectively acting, yet unthinking body.  The AFF’s resolve of war through fiat as the end byproduct, and not an experience, is an example of how the unseen director constructs our field of vision towards an ever-closing finalé.  The epistemological blindness created by this politics overcomes all social movements.

Grand, 2007:
"Maternal Surveillance: Disrupting the Rhetoric of War", Grand, Sue. Psychoanalysis, Culture 26 Society12.4 (Dec 2007): 305-322.Dr. Sue Grand is faculty and supervisor at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis.

War rhetoric always conjures this blindness. It relies on a shuttered, and redundant
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assent to its own obscurity. (We do not endorse ableist language)

In national level policy discussions, the authority of generals and presidents always trumps that stories of individual soldiers.  There is no space in the world of the affirmative for Luke to tell his story.  The futuristic frame of the 1AC scenarios and plan mean we can never share the experience of those who have already been affected by war, because we’re always being called to prevent the next occurrence.  Only the alternative offers a pedagogy that reclaims our ability to understand war.  Without our alternative, endless future war is inevitable.

Engels and Sass, 2013:
~Jeremy Engels is an Associate Professor, and William O. Saas is a Ph.D. Candidate, in the Department of Communication Arts 26 Sciences, Penn State University, "On Acquiescence and Ends-Less War," Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 99(2)~

A number of tropes and techniques are used today to promote acquiescence, to cultivate
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creating space for talk where we have previously been content to remain silent.

Veterans feel so marginalized in their identity, that last year, 22 of them committed suicide every day.  22.  They have no place to tell their story, feeling as though they have slipped between the cracks.

CNN 13, "Soldier’s suicide note goes viral; family demands better for veterans", By Chelsea C. Cook, CNN, Sat July 6, 2013, http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/06/us/soldier-suicide-note/index.html
"Too trapped in a war to be at peace, too damaged to be
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there for him," he said. "He fell through the cracks."

Thus, The Alternative: In this round we should welcome military veterans.  The role of the ballot is the critic should vote for the team that best welcomes military veterans.

Storytelling is the only way for returning veterans to reclaim their identities.  In fact, the status quo academe Silences The Voices And Experiences Of Veterans, Putting Them At Risk Of Terminal Education Failure. This isn’t like their nuclear war scenarios.  This is real, and the way we construct our conversations about war makes our activity complicit in it.  Veterans desperately need to reclaim their identity from liminality.  The academic setting is a unique site for the possibility of dialogue between students, both veteran and civilian.  This open discussion Is Key To Understanding Our National War Policy, making the alt a prerequisite to topical education..

Moore, 2012:
~Ellen Moore, PhD candidate, Graduate School of Education, U Cal Berkeley. "From Combat to College: Student Veterans in Academic ’Contact Zones’". http://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/92m9r81k. September 11~
In this paper I have discussed pedagogical and cultural disjunctures felt by veterans who attend
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achieve the educational promise for which they have paid an extraordinarily high price.

We are ALL morally implicated in war and it should be spoken of as a collective, public trauma.  Sharing veteran’s stories is key to communalizing the grief they bear, returning them into our shared civic space.  The affirmative’s attempt to solve the next war "over there" prevents us from accepting responsibility for previous wars and trauma.  We are not the Heroes to Be, but the Accomplices of the Past.

Carlton 12 ~Lisa Silvestri Carlton is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa. "Together We Stand, Divided We Fall: Building Alliances with Combat Veterans." Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal,Vol. 95, No. 3~
What is striking about both of these cases—the new PTSD policy and the
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.7 This demands an examination of the way power is socially configured.