The Balkan defeat serves as a historical moment that reformers identified as a wake up call, using it to demand greater cultural rejuvenation. An examination of the physical condition of the soldier’s body was one of the issues that surfaced in these discussions. Ali Seydi Bey, an author of several morality books, blamed the defeat on the soldiers’ lack of agility and physical infirmity. However, the reformists went beyond the barracks in their critiques and included the Ottoman nation in general, identifying the lack of activeness and a propensity for laziness as the greatest enemy within. What were the effects of wars in general, and the Balkan War in particular, on the discourses of subject formation? Did the practices that are related to a new conceptualization of the body change after the Balkan defeat? This paper will explore the possible shifts that took place during the Balkan Wars in the discourses and practices regarding the body of the political subject. I aim to accomplish two tasks: first, I situate these accusations, and subsequent reform propositions as part of a nation-formation process which has been going since the mid-nineteenth century. Secondly, I aim to show that the cultural production of the period, such as the plays, morality texts, and journals display an increasingly exclusionist and militarized language. The militarization that became the marking characteristic of the last decade of the Ottoman Empire and the first decades of the Turkish Republic cannot be understood without taking into account the process by which the body of the citizens became a site of national anxiety. I take the Balkan Wars ‘not as an event, but as a social process’ that allows us to see how war-making and nation-building were interdependent processes, and how the wars made the critiques that pitted an ideal “able” Ottoman against the “feeble and lazy” real Ottoman more visible. As the building block of a nation, the human body became a topos where both physical and mental infirmities ought to be defeated to establish a “productive nation.' This is a part of a larger project on how the relationship between body and work was reconfigured at a period when series of modern binaries, such as modern vs. traditional and productivity vs. laziness, were becoming hegemonic in late Ottoman society (1839-1920).