# Militarism The elevation of military power, military values, and military solutions to a central place in a society's politics and self-understanding — distinct from simply having a large military. [[Andrew Bacevich]] supplies the vault's working definition in *[[The New American Militarism]]* (2005): American militarism is **a civilian romance with military power**, not a case of generals seizing control. Its carriers are the political class, the intellectual class, the churches, and the entertainment industry, and its symptom is that the use of force stops requiring justification. Distinguish from **[[Jingoism]]** (belligerent nationalist sentiment, episodic) and from the **[[Military-Industrial Complex]]** (the material and contractual layer). Militarism is the cultural and political condition in which those other two operate without friction. ## The vault's uses Militarism is the concept the restraint coalition organizes against, which is why the [[Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft]], the [[Costs of War Project]], [[Stephen Wertheim]], [[Stephen Walt]], [[John Mearsheimer]] and [[Trita Parsi]] all link here: their shared claim is that the condition Bacevich describes — force that no longer needs justifying — is bipartisan, institutional and self-funding through the [[Military-Industrial Complex]]. [[Forever Wars]] is the policy output; the [[All-Volunteer Force]] is the structural enabler, since a professional military insulates the public from the costs that once produced resistance; [[Civil-Military Relations]] is the constitutional check that erodes as the civilian romance deepens. [[Sacrifice and Political Violence]] carries the cultural layer — the sacralization of the soldier that makes criticism of the mission read as contempt for the troops. The [[Treaty of Versailles]] entry supplies the historical warning about what a militarized political culture does to a defeated state, and [[Samuel Huntington]]'s *The Soldier and the State* the classic theory of the civil-military bargain that militarism dissolves. In the second Trump term the concept has acquired a domestic face: troops in American cities, the Department of Defense renamed for War, the military parade — the [[Concepts Hub]] files these under militarism rather than under any single event. ## See Also - [[The New American Militarism]] · [[Andrew Bacevich]] - [[Civil-Military Relations]] · [[Military-Industrial Complex]] · [[Forever Wars]] · [[All-Volunteer Force]] · [[War on Terror]] - [[Jingoism]] · [[American Exceptionalism]] [[Concepts Hub]]