Several devote more than three-quarters of their defence budgets to personnel costs: maintaining armies of greying, pot-bellied dentists, cooks and clerks in khaki, rather than investing in expeditionary troops.
Since then, the process has been perfected, and has played a huge role in maintaining armies and world travelers through the centuries.
Russia, though it would never dream of actually taking them in, has stirred things up, for instance by granting Russian citizenship en masse to their inhabitants and maintaining army bases there.
The Assassin leaders did not maintain armies.
Although the government maintains armies of paid censors, those who run Internet forums are ultimately responsible for removing so-called politically sensitive content.
In the real world, governments not only maintain armies, they also provide a variety of public goods and services that would be impractical for private citizens to provide for themselves.
That is a measure of the kind of jackpot Genentech could scoop from the new drug before its patents expire.But to achieve such returns from technological innovations, companies such as Genentech, Intel and Microsoft have to maintain armies of researchers.
Deaths in training are no new thing, and as long as we pursue conflict and maintain armies for that end, this less publicised kind of tragedy will continue in the name of wars far away from these shores.
Coming off the British monarchy, in which the king not only acted as commander in chief, but also had the power to raise and maintain armies, the founders decided to separate war powers: the president remained commander-in-chief, but the responsibility to raise and support the military lay in the hands of Congress, the branch believed to be most connected to the people.
Three of the parties -- the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Iraqi National Congress and the Iraqi National Accord -- have a history of maintaining private armies.
It was the ascending scale of war that originally called forth the existence of the nation-state as an administrative unit capable of maintaining mass armies and the infrastructure – for taxation, weapons manufacture, transport, etc – that they require.
