Militarism

• 1. Introduction

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  Militarism is the belief that a state should maintain a strong military capability and use it aggressively to expand national interests and values. At its most extreme, it tips into something more: the glorification of soldiers, the dominance of armed forces over civilian life, and the slow conversion of an entire society into an instrument of war. One in five people in North Korea serves in the armed forces today. Iraq, by 1990, had become the most militarized country per capita in the world. Prussia once spent 73 percent of its entire annual budget on the military alone. These are not outliers. They are the logical endpoints of an idea that has gripped governments across centuries and continents. How does a country become an army with a country attached to it, rather than the other way around? And what happens when the costs of that transformation finally come due?

• 2. Prussia's Army with a Country

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  Frederick William I of Prussia began large-scale military reforms in 1713, and the numbers tell the story plainly. By the time he died in 1740, Prussia's standing army had grown to 83,000 men, one of the largest in Europe, drawn from a total population of just 2.5 million people. Annual military spending had been pushed to 73 percent of the entire Prussian budget. Prussian military writer Georg Heinrich von Berenhorst later captured the result in a phrase that became famous: Prussia was "not a country with an army, but an army with a country." That line is often misattributed to Voltaire or to Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau, but it originated with Berenhorst.

  The structural roots went deeper than any single monarch. Historian Hans Rosenberg traces German militarism back to the Teutonic Order's colonization of Prussia in the late Middle Ages, when mercenaries from the Holy Roman Empire were granted lands and gradually formed a landed militarist nobility, the class from which the Junker nobility would later evolve. During the 17th-century reign of Frederick William, the Great Elector of Brandenburg, Brandenburg-Prussia had already expanded its military to 40,000 men and built a military administration run by the General War Commissariat.

  After Napoleon defeated Prussia in 1806, a peace condition required the army to shrink to no more than 42,000 men. Prussia responded with the Kruemper System: trained soldiers were regularly dismissed and replaced with raw recruits, cycling a far larger number of men through military ranks than treaty limits appeared to allow. Officers came almost exclusively from the landowning nobility, and enlisted men were trained to obey all commands without question. Because the officer class also supplied most civil administrators, the interests of the army and the interests of the country were treated as one and the same.

• 3. Weimar's Hidden Armies

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  Germany's defeat in World War I did not end German militarism. The Allied powers had identified Prussian and German militarism as a principal cause of the war, and the Treaty of Versailles was designed in part to crush it, capping the German army at 100,000 men. Within two years, the Reichswehr had found a way around the cap. In 1921, it established the Black Reichswehr: a secret reserve of trained soldiers, organized inside its own units as "labour battalions" called Arbeitskommandos. The Black Reichswehr was dissolved in 1923, but by then the damage was structural.

  The 1920 Kapp Putsch, an attempted coup against the republican government by disaffected military members, signaled the tone of the years ahead. Mathematician and political writer Emil Julius Gumbel published detailed analyses of the paramilitary violence saturating German public life during the Weimar era and of the state's lenient, sometimes sympathetic, response when that violence came from the political right.

  Right-wing mass organizations proliferated. The Freikorps was banned in 1921. Der Stahlhelm operated openly. Many former members of both the Freikorps and the Black Reichswehr moved into the Sturmabteilung, the SA, the paramilitary wing of the Nazi party. Throughout all 14 years of the Weimar Republic's existence, these networks sustained what Gumbel documented as an atmosphere of lingering civil war. The moderate elements of German militarism drifted toward the German National People's Party; the more radical elements found a home in Adolf Hitler's NSDAP.

• 4. Japan's Coup Culture

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  Japan's militarism drew on centuries of samurai tradition, but its modern, nationalist form crystallized after the Meiji Restoration, which restored the Emperor to power and launched the Empire of Japan. The 1882 Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors formalized the core demand: absolute personal loyalty to the Emperor from every member of the armed forces.

  Two structural features made the 20th-century military nearly ungovernable from within. The first was the Military Ministers to be Active-Duty Officers Law, which required the Imperial Japanese Army and Imperial Japanese Navy to agree on Cabinet appointments. This gave the military effective veto power over any government that Japan's ostensibly parliamentary system tried to form. The second was gekokujō, an institutionalized culture of disobedience by junior officers toward their seniors. Radical junior officers would press their political goals to the point of assassination.

  In 1936, gekokujō produced the February 26 Incident: junior officers attempted a coup and killed leading members of the Japanese government. Emperor Hirohito ordered the rebellion suppressed, and loyal military units carried out his order.

  The Great Depression gave radical elements the opening they had been waiting for. In 1931, the Kwantung Army staged the Mukden Incident in Manchuria, triggering an invasion and the creation of the puppet state of Manchukuo. Six years later, the Marco Polo Bridge Incident outside Peking ignited the Second Sino-Japanese War, which ran from 1937 to 1945. Japanese troops conquered Peking, Shanghai, and the national capital of Nanking; the fall of Nanking was followed by the Nanking Massacre. In 1940, Japan allied with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The following year, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, partly to prevent American intervention after the United States had banned oil sales to Japan in response to the Second Sino-Japanese War and the invasion of Indochina.

• 5. The Soviet Cost Ledger

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  Russia's militarism has deep roots. After Peter the Great's reforms, Russia became one of Europe's great powers. Through the imperial era it pushed into Siberia, the Caucasus, and Eastern Europe, eventually absorbing most of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The end of imperial rule in 1917 cost territory via the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, but the Soviet Union reconquered much of it, including participation in the partition of Poland and the reconquest of the Baltic states in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Soviet influence over Eastern Europe reached its peak after World War II, organized through the Warsaw Pact.

  The source describes the Soviet Union as "the most militarized large economy the world has ever seen." What made that description especially consequential was the secrecy surrounding its costs. A climate of state control, rigid centralized resource allocation, economic isolation, and unquestioning acceptance of Communist rule were all framed as national security necessities. The economic and social costs were in many cases not tracked, or were withheld from civilians. When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991 and a market economy exposed those hidden costs, many Russians blamed the new system for creating them rather than for revealing them.

  Vladimir Putin described the Soviet dissolution as the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century. By the end of 2023, his government planned to spend nearly 40 percent of all public expenditures on defense and security. UK Chief of Defence Staff Admiral Tony Radakin noted that the last time such levels appeared was at the collapse of the Soviet Union itself. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin promoted a school curriculum called Important Conversations, which some parents compared to Soviet-era patriotic education.

• 6. Turkey's Coup Calendar

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  The Ottoman Empire lasted for centuries on military strength, but militarism as a feature of everyday life only arrived with the modern institutions that accompanied the Republic of Turkey, founded in 1923. The founders of the republic were themselves military men. They believed in modernization, but their vision was bounded by a military tradition that held the authority and sacredness of the state as non-negotiable. The public trusted the military for a concrete reason: it was the military that had led the nation through the War of Liberation from 1919 to 1923.

  What followed was a measurable pattern. The first military coup in the republic's history came on the 27th of May 1960. It resulted in the hanging of Prime Minister Adnan Menderes and two of his ministers, and produced a new constitution creating a Constitutional Court and a military-dominated National Security Council modeled loosely on the Soviet politburo. The second coup came on the 12th of March 1971, this time stopping short of dissolving parliament; the government was forced to resign and replaced with a cabinet of technocrats. The third coup, on the 12th of September 1980, dissolved parliament and all political parties and imposed a more authoritarian constitution. A fourth intervention, labeled a post-modern coup, forced a government to resign on the 28th of February 1997. A coup attempt on the 15th of July 2016 failed. Constitutional referendums in 2010 and 2017 subsequently changed the composition of the National Security Council and placed the armed forces formally under civilian government control.

• 7. America's Defense Intellectuals

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  After the American Civil War, the national army fell into disrepair. Reforms drawn from Britain, Germany, and Switzerland rebuilt it as a professional force responsive to central government. Those reforms coincided with social Darwinist ideas that supported overseas expansion in the Pacific and the Caribbean. The Spanish-American War made the practical need concrete: the army needed to occupy territories acquired from Spain, including Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. A new army bill signed on the 2nd of February 1901 raised the regular force limit from 24,000 men to 60,000, with authority to expand to 80,000 at presidential discretion during emergencies.

  Retired Major General Smedley Butler, the most decorated Marine at the time of his death, spoke publicly against what he saw as trends toward fascism and militarism. He briefed Congress on what he described as a Business Plot for a military coup, for which he had been suggested as the figurehead leader. The matter was partially corroborated, though the scope of the real threat has been disputed.

  The Cold War transformed the civilian side of military thinking. Figures such as Henry Kissinger and Herman Kahn, academics and industrial researchers, became significant voices in decisions about the use of military force. Kahn worked at the RAND Corporation, one of the think tanks that emerged from debates over nuclear strategy. Dwight D. Eisenhower, himself a retired top military commander who became a civilian president, warned on leaving office of the development of a military-industrial complex. President Joe Biden signed a record defense spending bill of $886 billion into law on the 22nd of December 2023, in an era the source characterizes as neomilitarism: a reliance on volunteer fighters, heavy use of complex technologies, and the expansion of government recruitment advertising.

• 8. Iraq's Hollow Arsenal

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  Iraq's militarization began with Abd al-Karim Qasim, who seized power in 1958. His territorial ambitions against Kuwait and Iran's Khuzestan province required a capable army, and he built one. The Ba'athists who took power in 1968 continued that trajectory. Between 1960 and 1980, a period the source describes as peaceful, military expenditure tripled. By 1981, it stood at US$4.3 billion, nearly equal to the combined national incomes of Jordan and Yemen. Per capita military spending that year was 370 percent higher than per capita spending on education.

  During the Iran-Iraq War, military expenditure climbed further even as economic growth shrank. The number of people employed in the military grew fivefold, reaching one million. By 1990, Iraq had become the most militarized country per capita in the world, ranking in the top ten on many measures of military capacity. The country also had a domestic military industry.

  Yet the source's verdict is blunt: despite the costs, despite the numbers of soldiers, and despite the weapons, the effectiveness of the Iraqi army remained questionable. In 1991 and again in 2003, the army was routed by enemy forces and suffered very heavy losses while inflicting no serious damage in return. The gap between a country's military spending and its military effectiveness is one of the sharpest lessons the Iraqi case offers, and it echoes in the story of Syria, where decades of militarization under Hafez al-Assad and later Bashar al-Assad could not prevent the rapid collapse of the regime in December 2024 after 13 years of civil war had hollowed out the army through corruption, fuel shortages, and low morale.