Editing The World Wars (section)

===Militarism===
Militarism on its own resulted partially from the romanticizing of knights and chivalry, and the idea that serving in the military to conquer colonies for the homeland served to make the state better as a whole. And of course the best way to conquer stuff and then to protect the stuff you'd conquered was to have better weapons and soldiers than the other guys. While most major nations participated in the rise of militarization to some degree, Germany was the keystone of the movement, as its progenitor Prussia was oftentimes called "an army with its own state". This had some factual basis, given that Prussia was born from the Teutonic Crusader State, and its military aristocracy continued to define German policy and culture well into the 20th century.

The veritable arms race in the late 1800s was meant to force peace, resulting in the development of semiautomatic pistols, advanced artillery, increasingly advanced warships, automatic firearms, and a slew of military technological innovations designed to increase the killing power of an individual soldier or unit. Most wars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were colonial conflicts waged against low-tech indigenous populations or countries with shitty militaries (the Anglo-Zulu War, the Boxer Rebellion, the Boer Wars, the Spanish-American War, the Philippine-American War) and as a result were laughably one-sided. This resulted in a general myth that war was an adventure where you got to go kill a bunch of dumb people who needed to understand that your country was better than theirs. It hadn't occurred to the top brass, or anyone else, that if the other guy has the same weapons you do, it isn't nearly as fun; this in spite of warnings from colonial veterans that such a slaughter is inevitable, especially under the old Napoleonic tactics that Europe was still using.

One thing that we'll discuss later is the dreadnought battleship, which radically altered the idea of naval warfare and made everything before them obsolete. A nation's prestige was tied to how many battleships it had, so literally everyone and their dog who could afford one was trying to get their hands on them.