War & Peace Quote by Adnan Pachachi

The line lands like a reprimand to every state that thinks security is a procurement problem. Pachachi, a politician forged in the churn of modern Iraq, is pointing at the real lever of force: legitimacy. You can train an army to march, shoot, and coordinate; you can’t train it to mean something. The decisive variable isn’t competence but command - the “authority it serves,” and by extension whether citizens recognize that authority as lawful, national, and worth obeying.

The subtext is a warning about armies in post-colonial, coup-prone, externally pressured states: professionalization becomes cosmetic when the chain of command is contested. An army that serves a party, a family, a sect, or a foreign patron will fight like it serves those interests. It will be brave in repression and brittle in defense, because its mission is political survival, not public protection. Pachachi’s phrasing quietly indicts regimes that treat the military as a private instrument, then act surprised when it fragments, defects, or collapses under stress.

Context matters. Iraq’s 20th- and early-21st-century history is a case study in how armies can be simultaneously formidable and unstable: coups, purges, politicized officer corps, sanctions-era hollowing, then post-2003 rebuilding efforts where training and equipment often raced ahead of consensus about sovereignty. Pachachi compresses that experience into a single criterion: the army’s true strength is the authority behind it, because that authority determines loyalty, restraint, and the story soldiers believe they’re fighting for.