Soon after the 15 July 2016 failed coup attempt in Turkey, the Turkish government announced a new plan for military deconcentration. Major military troops and installations were redeployed from metropoles like Istanbul and Ankara to smaller places in their vicinity. If the plan was motivated by security concerns to preempt the likelihood of another coup, it also had an underlying developmental rationale to boost socio-economic development in smaller settlements through intensified troop concentration. In a period when the public reputation of the military institution had cratered, many inhabitants from across Turkish cities rallied to attract the soon-to-be-transferred troops, competing to become beneficiaries of a new force disposition. Based on 3-year dissertation research in Turkey, this paper discusses the historical vicissitudes and contemporary relevance of ‘militarized development,’ that is, the widespread social belief in militarization as a purveyor of positive social change. Drawing on archival research, semi-structured interviews with civilian and military populations, and ethnographic fieldwork in Corlu, a long-time garrison town with added post-coup forces in Turkish Thrace, it examines the public and political purchase of militarization as a pathway to development from both historical and contemporary angles. Accordingly, it asks: 1) why many urban residents seek militarization as a viable if not an ideal way for the betterment of their lives, and 2) how military forces remold the socio-economic and political fabric of the settlements adjacent to where they are stationed? This paper argues for the centrality of defense allocations in understanding the promise of militarization and host community - base relations in Turkey. It adopts an expansive view of ‘defense allocations’ that goes beyond the mere apportioning of defense funds, defining the term instead as the distribution of people, resources, and materials in space with a view to constant war readiness. Using interviews and a manually-compiled original dataset on local military spending through local newspaper research, the paper provides a window into how defense allocations, in a context of mass-male conscription, high force levels, and relatively low technology requirements, may particularly appeal to middling cities, like Corlu, as a developmental boon. Yet, while defense allocations may tilt regional hierarchies in certain places’ favor, they are also likely to introduce fractured patterns of (under)development on regional and national scales.