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Notes -
You can still be crushed by your own iron fist if it mutinies. This normally looks like a military coup (see Roman Emperors passim ad nauseam) but the Russian Revolution (February and October) is also an example.
Maintaining political control of the military is a hard problem. The reason why democracy overperformed in the 19th century and dramatically won the 20th century is that maintaining political control of the type of military needed for industrial age warfare without neutering it turns out to be easier under democracy that other forms of government. This is also the tl;dr of Why Arabs Lose Wars - Arab armies are designed to be incapable of staging military coups, not to be capable of defeating Israel.
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