Armed Force definition and military coups

[gregfowlerphd]

According to the definition, to be an armed force, an organization must ‘hav[e] the Objective to further the foreign and domestic policies of a Government and to defend that body and the nation it represents from external and internal aggressors’. However, sometimes a nation’s military overthrows its government precisely because it disagrees with that government’s policies (and hence, it seems, doesn’t have the objective to further those policies). Thus the definition implies that a military engaged in such a coup is no longer an armed force, but I’m inclined to think that’s false (though that’s not entirely clear).

Side question: What is it to have an objective, understood in the quasi-technical sense specified in the definition of ‘Objective’? Is it to be the agent mentioned in that definition, or something else?

[alanruttenberg]

Definition of objective specification in IAO (OBO)
A directive information entity that describes an intended process endpoint. When part of a plan specification the concretization is realized in a planned process in which the bearer tries to effect the world so that the process endpoint is achieved.

An implication is that information entities can be concretized by realizable entities.

[neilotte]

@gregfowlerphd As this question is a little more open ended and seems to warrant discussion, I'm moving it to the discussion forum.

FWIW: I think most militaries that engage in coups still believe they are defending the nation from internal aggressors (the internal aggressor being their own government).

[gregfowlerphd]

@neilotte: Your FWIW sounds right. That said, the militaries don't seem to satisfy the first conjunct in the case of coups, so they don't seem to satisfy the definition as a whole.