Military cooperative

A military cooperative is an organization that provides service members with products at a low profit margin and protects them from profiteering. Such organisations were popular in a number of countries, particularly in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Among others, they were popular in Poland in the interwar period. In the United Kingdom the Army & Navy Co-operative Society was founded in 1871 but ceased to be a cooperative in 1934, becoming a provincial department store. The Canteen and Mess Co-operative Society, founded in 1894, operated canteens on a cooperative basis until absorbed into a government body during the First World War. This later developed into the Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes (NAAFI) which continues to provide services to the British military.

A military cooperative is a form of cooperative movement aimed at providing equipment and supply to the military personnel. Such cooperatives aim to supply soldiers with all kinds of products; in peacetime, they are also supposed to defend soldiers against exploitation. Military cooperative stores usually have low profit margins as they sell goods at preferential prices to the eligible customers.

The Army and Air Force Canteen Service (AAFCANS) was established in 1915 as the Army Canteen Service. It is a not-for-profit Commonwealth statutory body that operates under the Defence Australia portfolio and is answerable to the Minister for Defence, the Minister for Defence Personnel and the Chiefs of Defence, Army and Air Force. It provides goods, facilities, and services to or for the entertainment and recreation of designated members of the Australian Defence Force community.

Military cooperatives have been described as existing in Jordan around the late 20th/early 21st century.

The first military cooperatives in Poland appeared in the aftermath of World War I in 1918. The Polish military started to regulate those institutions shortly afterwards when in November 1920, General Leon Berbecki issued an order defining a typical statue of a military cooperative. A month later, General Edward Śmigły-Rydz gave an order to his subordinate units to create military cooperatives, which contributed to a significant increase in this type of activity in the recently recreated Polish Army. In 1922 rules for military cooperatives were codified by the Polish Ministry of the Interior. Initially, Polish military cooperatives had multiple functions, with some specializing in financial aids, others in activities like house construction or publishing. After a few years, however, virtually all remaining cooperatives focused on food distribution and supply.

By 1928, there were about 300 such institutions in the Polish Army, many of them grouped under the Audit Union of Military Cooperatives (Związek Rewizyjny Spółdzielni Wojskowych). In 1936 there were about 240 remaining cooperatives in the Audit Union. Some Polish military cooperatives issued their own coinage, which is now considered a numismatic and militaria collectible.

After World War II, in the late 1940s, some military cooperatives were recreated in the People's Republic of Poland.