Since military functions center about destroying the person and property of the "enemy"--domestic or foreign--public funds are made available or are pre-empted by the military during periods of martial law. As a civilization becomes more complex and extensive, the funds at the disposal of the military tend to increase. The same factors of extent and complexity lead to larger and larger numbers of confrontations and conflicts in which the military is called upon to play the leading role. Increasingly, therefore, the military is at the center of policy making. Finally a point is reached at which war, civil, colonial or international is always in progress somewhere within the territories occupied by the civilization. At such periods civil law slumbers and military authority is more or less dominant and permanent. Under the slogan "defense of civilization," military necessity and military adventurism shape public policy, empty the public treasury, bankrupt and eventually destroy the superstructure of a civilization. The nucleus which lies at the heart of an empire or a civilization has a political life cycle that runs from the unstructured or little structured aggregation of confederation or self-determining local groups to a highly centralized political absolutism holding and exercising its authority by the use of the military. The steps in this process have been clearly marked in earlier civilizations. They are playing a decisive role in the day-to-day life of western civilization. They extend from early forms of government under leaders selected or elected by popular acclaim or at least by popular consent, to more or less permanent leadership enjoying many political privileges, including the selection of its successors. Under the pressure of social emergency, engendered within the social group or imposed from outside the group by migration, intrusion or invasion, leadership takes the measures which it considers necessary to preserve and/or extend its authority. Each emergency offers leadership an opportunity or an excuse to by-pass custom and/or law, overlook whatever public opinion may exist and proceed to the measures needed to meet the emergency. In each organized social group the exercise of authority has provided the leadership with a near-monopoly of money and weapons in the hands of a permanent military elite. The use of this elite to deal with the emergency is accepted by civil authority as a matter of course. When social division of function has produced and armed a military elite, leadership turns to this elite in any emergency arising from natural disaster or social crisis. The outcome is a community directed by a military arm seeking to perpetuate and enlarge its own role in the determination and exercise of public authority, using any means which seems likely to produce the desired results.