Beyond its tragic consequences, ambiguity remains surrounding the Turkish military’s failed coup on July 15, 2016. The military’s recent intervention is widely seen either as a return to older habits in Turkey, which has experienced five military interventions and troubled civil-military relations since 1960, or a marker of the decisive end of the military’s political dominance at the hands of an increasingly authoritarian government. However, the 2016 coup not only followed two decades of unprecedented demilitarization of Turkish politics, but was also highly unusual in being led by middle-ranking officers rather than the commander-in-chief, and was the first failed coup since 1963. What explains this breakdown in the long-term demilitarization of Turkish politics, and why did the coup take the particular form that it did? While most accounts remain fixated by discussion of the coup’s ultimate political agency, this research contends that recent events cannot be understood without reference to deep-rooted institutional and social-cultural shifts within the Turkish military itself since 1997. Drawing on ethnography, interviews with active-duty and retired officers, and archival work in Ankara, Istanbul, and smaller military garrisons like Polatli, Eskisehir, and Tekirdag since June 2016, my research emphasizes the impact of organizational, cultural, and structural changes in the Turkish military on the military’s interventionist behavior from the ‘soft coup’ of 1997 until the failed coup attempt in 2016. Turkey began to recruit officers with civilian degrees in 2001, which gradually altered the socio-economic, educational, and ideational make-up of the officer corps. Also, staff officers, a very small and exclusive elite group, who played central role in all interventions from 1913 to 2016 (Akyaz 2002; Hale 1994; Ahmad 1993), have lost their hegemony in the military ecosystem over time because of the rise and diversification in other officers’ education. Finally, a compulsory and protracted transition to a semi-voluntary recruitment model (Varoglu and Bicaksiz 2005) has changed the military’s entire social base and its ties to and view of society. Cultural changes are also important. A gradual increase in the military’s social, educational, and gender diversity (Gürcan 2016), coupled with greater lawfulness and transparency has lessened the organizational culture’s highly patrimonial character. I argue that these largely inadvertent organizational, structural, and cultural changes, have significantly altered the intra-institutional distribution of power, and constrain the military’s capacity and motivation to intervene, notwithstanding the persistence of intervention as a viable option for officers.