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I'd argue that by the standards of 1914, Germany was a relatively liberal power.
I'm actually not all that convinced that the deck was as stacked as you think - it's a mistake to just look at a map and assume that the amount of colour on the map is directly proportional to military power. Germany didn't have a huge colonial empire, but it was a large, rapidly industrialising European power with a lot of human capital, which had also militarily embarrassed France relatively recently in the 1870s. I don't look at French West Africa and therefore assume that metropolitan France should have had an insurmountable military advantage over Germany, its larger and more populous neighbour, with access to the same technological base.
But at any rate, let's grant that Germany overperformed in WWI and WWII. Is that enough to conclude that liberal states militarily underperform? That seems like a lot to generalise fron a single example, particularly considering that WWI Germany arguably was a liberal state, and that illiberal states (Austria, Russia, the Ottomans) also put in noticeably poor showings. If we grant that Britain and France underperformed, that seems less like liberal states being weaker, and more like... well, everybody underperforming relative to Germany. Maybe Germany just had really good fundamentals, or lucked into a few military geniuses and associated reforms, or something else. My point is that the pattern doesn't seem to be "liberal weak, illiberal/autocratic strong". At best the pattern is "Germany strong".
That is, however, a single example, and I am wary of drawing strong conclusions from single examples. For instance, if we go back a century (plus a half, if you're counting from WWII), we find Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, which was undoubtedly the most liberal country in Europe by a massive margin, and their decades-long overperformance. If you were generalising from the period 1790-1810 or so, where France took on pretty much the entire rest of Europe and kicked them around one by one, you might be tempted to conclude that liberalism is a kind of cheat code to military supremacy.
I'm just not seeing a strong general correlation between a liberal constitution and military underperformance.
Particularly when military-industrial investments and the quality of the opposition's decision making is factored in.
If you show a map of a large part of the world and small part of the world, but the small part of the world invests more in the most relevant military technologies that can be brought to bear than the large part, you should expect to see to see the smaller part of the world out-perform and out-compete the larger parts, and to continue to do so until industrial outmatch leads to disparities that can overcome advantageous positions (like, say, being able to launch history's largest naval invasion to overcome the moat that is the English Channel).
It turns out, military-industrial economics don't work like in video games, where you pay money to buy a formation whole-cloth. You actually need to, you know, build the relevant assembly lines beforehand... emphasis on before. And a significant part of the WW2 opening military dynamic was that the western europeans were much later to invest in military expansion.
That, in turn, was driven by the rest of the world's assessments of what a good german leader would do. German headstart mobilization was tolerated / not matched up to a point in no small part because the western europeans and soviets alike thought Germany would have to be very stupid to begin a warmongering campaign against the western empires who economically outsized them on the west, and particularly with the the soviets who outsized them on the east. It would be a particularly bad leader who, even with the early military investments, would try to take one or the other, let alone both.
Which was correct! It was very stupid of the Germans to begin a warmongering campaign. That was an accurate understanding of the situation, because even with its unexpectedly high initial performance advantages the Germans did ultimately fail and fall. The unexpected success in topping- which was unexpected on both ends and hardly a reasonable expectation- did not, in fact, enable Germany to beat the Soviets in turn, even when the Soviets took several non-necessary policy errors like 'purge the Red Army right before a war' and 'ignore strategic warning intelligence.' Even with major unexpected failures on the part of the allies, and gambles that even the Nazis acknowledged were gambles, the Nazis still lost. The pre-war expectations- that the Germans would have to be stupid to try such things- was validated.
It just didn't mean that the hyper-authoritarian Germans wouldn't do stupid stuff that got their own country conquered in the process. Hitler was a romantic-nihilist, and that is not exactly commonly understood even now, let alone back then.
Which, in turn, throws another wrench in the 'liberalism is incompetent, authoritarianism is based' premise. The authoritarian lost, and lost badly, and lost for reasons broadly known beforehand. The western liberal incompetence along the way, in turn, were generally either 'this emerging aspect of technology was not recognized across the world'- in other words, not a general competence failure- or failures to believe the authoritarian would be that stupid by gambling on high risks... which, of course, is treated as a validation of the authoritarian.
The former is hindsight bias of believing what is known afterwards should have been obvious at the time, and the later is just the military variant of 'jokes on you, I was just pretending to be retarded.'
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