Militaries, like any organisation, share a basic vulnerability - they're made up of people. And wherever there are people, there is an organisational culture. Culture can shape the way a military performs just as much as the capabilities of its weapons or the count of its personnel. Having all the tanks in the world only means so much if the system maintaining them is weakened by corruption and false reporting - factors we've explored before. But there's a third part of this story, the component that helps explain why systems adopt inefficient structures, struggle to coordinate or become filled with mutual distrust and self sabotage. Politics. Where the political interests of individuals deviate from the interests of the collective, bad things happen, and where leaders begin to put more focus on loyalty than on competence, then a system will never live up to its full potential. This episode serves as the third episode in the trilogy that began with "How corruption destroys armies"