Discuss the Military as apparatuses of state.
Answers
Superficially, military forces are a prime root of war. They are responsible for fighting, the organised use of force against human and technological opposition. Without military forces, there would be no war as currently conceived.
At a deeper level, military forces may seem to be a consequence of the war system, namely as agents of ruling groups. Modern military forces are mobilised by the state, as a defence of the interests of state elites against external and internal enemies. Without addressing the dominant social interests in the state, a focus on eliminating the military alone is quite inadequate.
But although military forces do indeed serve the interests of the state, the military is not purely a tool. Military personnel, and especially military elites (the officer corps) have their own special interests. Military elites will not sit by idly while state power is dissolved or transferred to interests seen as hostile to military interests. The many military regimes around the world testify to the potential semi-independent political role of military forces. Military forces may serve state interests, but this is often contingent on state interests serving military interests. The state and the military support each other, and they need to be addressed both separately and jointly.
Even in societies where military forces are overtly subordinate to civilian elites, military perspectives and interests can penetrate deeply into a society's fabric. This process of militarisation has been especially noticeable in industrialised countries since World War Two. Since then, 'peacetime' military spending has provided a rationale for continuing state intervention into economies and for the turning of industrial and professional efforts toward military priorities.
Bureaucracy can be seen as a root of war because it facilitates the maintenance of elite power and smashes or pre-empts non-hierarchical and self-reliant forms of human interaction. The military is bureaucratic in form, and indeed in many ways is a pioneer and model bureaucracy. Thus the military is closely intertwined with the state and bureaucracy, two other key roots of war. In addition, as described in the following chapters, the military is strongly interconnected with patriarchy and with science and technology.
The close connection between the military, bureaucracy and state is shown by the revolutionary role sometimes played by military elites. Ellen Kay Trimberger in Revolution from Above has analysed several instances in which a revolution (a forcible alteration of class forces) has been implemented by military elites acting as state administrators. She uses the examples of Japan beginning in 1868, Turkey in the 1920s, Egypt under Nasser since 1952 and Peru under the generals since 1968. In each case military bureaucrats, having captured state power without mobilisation of the populace, proceeded to destroy the power of the dominant economic class, such as the aristocracy.