The national security state and the uses of militarism

Beginning in the 1960s, advanced industrialized states have gradually replaced the mass army, recruited via mandatory conscription, with a volunteer military recruited via market mechanisms. Although some military sociologists bemoaned that military service was consequently becoming merely a “job,” rather than a duty of citizenship, many post-conscription polities valorize and romanticize their volunteer soldiers, recruited for service on the open labor market, as paragons of patriotism and good citizenship. In the spirit of this special issue, this article explores the relationship between contemporary militarism and the national security state. Militarism might well be in the interests of the national security state: it might help sustain the national security state’s fiscal foundation, promote deference to military officers and perhaps even civilian defense managers, undermine democratic scrutiny and control over the security apparatus, bolster recruitment into the organs of the security state, and lower the impediments to the use of force. Drawing on novel observational and experimental survey data from four democracies, we show that militarism is in fact associated with these political consequences. Although we cannot conclude that the managers of the national security state bear direct responsibility for the emergence and spread of militarism, the evidence clearly suggests that there is an “elective affinity” between militarism and the national security state.