The Habsburg military establishment lay at the very center of the reform impetus and the debates surrounding it throughout the reign of Maria Theresia. Military defeats were the most obvious symptoms of the Habsburg commonwealth's relative weakness and backwardness in the three decades from the early 1730s to the early 1760s, and there is little doubt that the major impulse for political as well as military change came from a determination to redress this perceived inferiority. The political, social and particularly fiscal ramifications of creating a military establishment equal to the difficult international challenges which confronted the Monarchy were the key issues over which bitter differences of opinion prevailed. These differences, in turn, were based on differing diagnoses of the military failures of the two major wars in the Empress's reign. The military reforms of Maria Theresia thus fall into two very distinct periods. The first period covers the reforms undertaken in response to the failures of the War of the Austrian Succession, and includes the test of the mettle of the reformed army in the Seven Years War. The failure to achieve victory in this war, for which the diplomatic framework established by Kaunitz seemed to hold out so much promise, led to the second period of army reform. The premises of this reform period then dominated Habsburg military thinking well into the era of the French Revolution.