American International Journal of Social Science

Defence and Wider Government Policy
Mosses Eromedochene Ukpenumewu Tedheke, Ph.D.

Abstract
In this study we are concerned with the role of the military or defence in wider government policy. We are not approaching this from the point of view of a historical perspective and from the point of view of eclecticism based on the current dynamics of defence and wider government policy. Our view in this study is based on a holistic analysis and on historical materialism not anchored on eclecticism. According to Karl Marx, Frederick Engels and Vladimir I Lenin eclecticism is a senseless jumbo of materialism and idealism which places itself more on contemporaneous situations rather than the movement of history. This will not give us the logic of the inner kernel of the dynamics of the emergence of the military and the state in the long view of history. In this respect therefore, this research has investigated the emergence of the state and military in history and the contribution of the military in state building in the historical process. We have discovered that the military has been the inner kernel of the state and is the source of class/state power and therefore, has always been of wider government policy. It was instrumental to the emergence of the post-feudal Atlantic states as it employed violent force and capital force to build the modern powerful Atlantic states called by Thomas Hobbes as the great leviathan. This state which later expanded to include the North American, the Japanese, Australian and New Zealand used the killer machine in what is known as predatory accumulation to advance capital accumulation and as such the birth of the modern powerful advanced capitalist states. This opportunity is no longer available to Third World military and their states. These states and their militaries must conquer the minds of their people in science and technology to establish the base of power for a second independence and viable militaries based on science and technology. This is the only precondition that the military and the state must bring to bear on the backward capitalist societies. No more, no less’.

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