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The key is selecting officers for competence, not loyalty. This requires all the other stuff in your country to be set up so that the leaders aren't worried about coups from your own military, but the advantage to getting all of that is that you can have a much more effective military. Why? Because any time junior officers just went through losing a war they are going to be pissed off that they were sent out there to do something that was impossible, and got a lot of their friends killed doing it. And if you let them, they are going to fix your military and make it more effective. My favorite example of this is the unpublished Ph.d thesis from Marshall Michel, The Revolt of the Majors (https://etd.auburn.edu/handle/10415/595) about all of the junior pilots in the US Air Force who experienced, first hand, how terrible and useless the USAF was during Vietnam and over the course of the 1970's and 1980's built the totally different US Air Force that did Desert Storm. If you are fortunate enough that you don't have the experience of recently losing a war, there will be a smaller number of junior officers who will be worried about losing the next one, and it will take more effort to identify those officers and put them into positions of power, but it is still possible to revolutionize your military without the bitter taste of a defeat. Defeat just makes it so that there are lot more junior officers committed to reform, and they will have the upper-hand over the more senior officers- so long as they are all selected for competence and not loyalty. If promotions are selected with loyalty as the primary factor, then you don't get reform, you get patronage. Sometimes a patronage system can be effective, but it ends up being like the Czarist Russian fleet of 1905: Admiral Makarov was very very good, and everything directly under him was competent, but all of the other admirals varied between mediocre and terrible and the rest of the fleet was as well. After Makarov's ship the Petropavlovsk sank with almost of its officers and men (including him) the Russian Navy gave no further benefit to the state, it was just a sacrifice. |