Theories of nation- and state-building have long argued that military conflict is linked to the expansion of state compulsory education with aim of building citizen loyalty. We update these theories to make them applicable to the post-World War II context where most states already offer compulsory state education. Using novel expert-coded data on patriotic and political education, we show how centralized autocracies, more so than democracies, respond to military conflict by expanding political and patriotic education. Our findings show, how in the era of mass provision of compulsory state education, military conflict continues to trigger politicization of education, but only in consolidated autocracies that already have centralized policymaking power. We argue that for modern autocratic regimes, patriotic and political education as means of indoctrination is best understood as a long-term `investment' strategy for already consolidated regimes.