Do Military Dictatorships and Juntas tend to be better in military affairs than civilian led militaries? Why/why not?
Do Military Dictatorships and Juntas tend to be better in military affairs than civilian led militaries? Why/why not?
Do Military Dictatorships and Juntas tend to be better in military affairs than civilian led militaries? Why/why not?
No.
They like to posture and spend a lott more money on the military but that investment goes into coruption or internal bickering.
The army of a military dictatorship is primarily to repress the internal population and not for external operations.
The army in dictatorships are also verry devided because the dictator can't afford the army being competently led because then it might coup him.
Just look at Gaddafis Lybia or the Arab armies.
Or more current the Russian army
fpbp
Dictatorships/emperors/kings/etc all suffer the exact same fundamental issues of human nature but without the checks that balanced democracies, however imperfect, add. Always ends up with more corruption, Emperor's New Clothes syndrome, style over substance, and on and on. It's easier to destroy than create, and unchecked rot at the top will spread down real fast. It's not even that it's impossible to occasionally have and start out with a good king, but they WILL die if nothing else same as everyone else and then you're rolling the dice on the next one. And even more likely they'll make fuckups and end up in echo chambers, maybe even for perceived good reasons at the start, or lose their minds with age/disease or whatever else.
In our modern western systems like in America we do a much better job with our monarchies and balancing the strengths vs weaknesses. Plenty of improvement to be made but it's held up over the long term better than anything else so far.
No. A junta or dictatorship must be cognizant of the fact that a military is a double ended sword, one ended pointed outwards and the other pointed inwards. You need to have something counter balancing them that can keep you secure (something like Iraq's Republicna Guard) but that division fosters inefficiency. If you make your army too good, a general or more likely a colonel will get the idea that he can replace you easily. So you need to keep it low quality so it can't overwhelm your much smaller coup-proof forces.
There's other reasons too like
Fun fact, iraq actually had 3 armys, the army, the republican guard, and then when saddam decided he couldnt trust them either he created the special republican guard
Holy fuck i was doing some googling to check my facts before posting, turns out there was a fourrh army aswell, the fedayeen saddam. Wow saddam did NOT trust his subordiates at all
>the fedayeen saddam
>Much like other paramilitaries, the Fedayeen was volunteer based and the units were never given an official salary. As a result, most of the members resorted to extortion and theft of property from the general population, even though the members had access to sanction-evading trade and high quality services (i.e. new cars, hospitals reserved for officials, expensive electronics) and a general standard of living considerably higher than that of the average Iraqi of the time.
fucking lol
Military leadership is nepotistic and retarded, civillian leadership is fickle and cowardly.
Take your pick
every military junta that I can think of that has been in a war against a western civilian led military has had its head caved in
Doesn't even have to be proper western armies.
Just look att the Toyota war where the Libyan army that was well equipped and supplied though oil money was completely routed by thechadian forces equipped with little but Toyota and French missiles. Because they where purposefully disunited and poorly led as gaddafi was afraid the army would coup him like he had done some years earlier.
People are putting the cart before the horse and assuming military dictatorships are shit because they lose external conflicts against civilian led militaries, but that's apples and oranges. Different countries are going to have different capabilities. Those dictatorships sucked ass in external conflicts because that country sucked ass. They'd have sucked EVEN MORE ASS if the previous civilian government had ended up in an external war against the same forces. Military dictatorships wouldn't rise to power in the first damn place if they weren't capable of crushing civilian led militaries, as they have done through history.
The worst military dictatorship isn't going to be worse than the worst civilian led military. The best military dictatorship isn't going to be better than the best civilian led military.
>Military dictatorships wouldn't rise to power in the first damn place if they weren't capable of crushing civilian led militaries
Why? All that is needed for a military dictatorship is for a coup to happen
What do you think a coup entails?
The army rolls up to the capital city and tells the civilan government to fuck off
>The army
The army the civilian government was in control of? And why don't loyalist forces respond to this obvious illegal action?
If you aren't getting my point here, military coups only succeed when the military is able to intimidate or kill anyone that would have a problem with them succeeding. Or when they win a war outright in the worst case.
It is NEVER the case that the entire fucking military defects en masse. If that were the case, then arguably it wasn't a civilian led military at fucking all. It was a civilian government with an independent military.
>The army the civilian government was in control of?
Evidently not
> And why don't loyalist forces respond to this obvious illegal action?
In a well planned coup the entire army is onboard so there are no 'loyalist forces', we tend to refer to poorly planned coups as civil wars, take a look at sudan atm or the spanish civil war
>only succeed when the military is able to intimidate or kill
Its the army, killing people is their job
>
It is NEVER the case that the entire fucking military defects en masse
They need only be ambivalent
I think you have a but of a pop culture understanding of coups, try reading some books
>They need only be ambivalent
No. They need only believe the situation lost. People don't die for lost causes. You've a naive view of coups.
Militaries are complex organizations of varying political views that hold themselves together through social and legal pressure as well as physical coercion. Even when bloodless coups happen, they only do so because the people that would stop them take the view that they can't be stopped.
>They need only believe the situation lost
Or not care, which is ambivalence
Anyway its starting to seem like youre onboard with my orogonal point now. 'Dictatoroal armys' dont have to be better than 'democratic armies' for coups to happen.
All thats needed for a coup is for the people in charge of the army to plan and execute a good coup.
You seam to have missed the point here.
A military dictatorship will almost slawys be less efficient with the use of its resources than a civilian structure. With stuff like parallel structures to protect against coups from one or the other. Every situation is diferent ofcourse and you have exceptions on both sides (like France in the 1930s) but the pattern definetpy exists.
>efficiency
You can be less efficient and still win. And military dictatorships often pop up in corrupt shitholes where the civilian government was already being inefficient as fuck.
OK yes it is posible to just throw mountains of money att a problem and have it turn out okay. Like the Saudi army.
But that doesn't make it good att being a military. It just means it has a lott of resources.
No. Junta's specifically are even worse because all the power blocs control a section of the armed forces, compete violently over resources, and often refuse to cooperate well in actual conflict.
See: Argentina and Japan.
The egyptian armt is this to the extreme
The generals spent more time acrivley sabotaging one another than they did fighting the israelis
Doesn't the Egyptian army control like half the Egyptian economy including producing washing machines or something
Its a state within a state, might aswell be a monarchy at this point
With Japan the Army and the Navy basicaly considered the other one a bigger enemy than the Americans.
So uou got a situation where the Army had aircraft carriers and the Navy had considerable land forces.