Hogan’s Heroes

This chapter defines the key terms used throughout the book: military, military coup, and popular revolution. The military, also known as the armed forces, is the state institution responsible for defending a nation’s borders. Importantly, the military is a separate institution from the state’s security forces. Although journalistic and historical accounts often conflate the military with the security forces, they serve distinct functions. Although most nations employ various measures to keep the military subservient to the civilian government, those measures are effective only if the military chooses to follow them. When the military disregards those measures and unleashes its coercive power against the sitting head of state, the result is a coup d’état. The definition of a coup ordinarily requires that its perpetrators come from a state institution such as the domestic military. Although many features of coups are also present in revolutions and popular movements, the definition of a military coup excludes these events because they are perpetrated by the masses, not members of the military.