Back to Center Stage: Causes and Consequences of the Political Role of the Military under Bolsonaro
Octavio Amorim Neto and Igor Acácio
Octavio Amorim Neto, PhD in political Science from the University of California at San Diego (1998), is full professor at the Brazilian School of Public and Business Administration at the Getulio Vargas Foundation (EBAPE), Rio de Janeiro. He is the author of De Dutra a Lula: A Condução e os Determinantes da Política Externa Brasileira (2011) and Presidencialismo e Governabilidade nas Américas (2006). His work has appeared in such journals as American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, European Journal of Political Research, World Politics, and Armed forces and Society.
Igor Acácio is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of California at Riverside. He is currently a visiting research fellow at the Center for the Research and Documentation of Contemporary Brazilian History (CPDOC) at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, and a dissertation fellow of the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at the University of California. He co-authored Atlas da Política de Defesa Brasileira (2017). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Comparative Politics, Democratization, Journal of Democracy and Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics.
The authors would like to thank General (retired) Francisco Mamede Brito Filho, Sergio Fausto, Júlio Cesar Cossio Rodriguez, Bernardo Sorj and Eduardo Viola for their comments on a previous version of this article.
1. Introduction
A few striking features of Brazilian politics in the twentieth century long thought to be gone have made a comeback in the country’s daily life. This is certainly the case with the return of the military to the center of the political arena. The press has reported that over 6,000 members of the military hold subcabinet positions and more than 3,000 of them in active duty.
The president, democratically elected in 2018, is a former Army Captain and a plurality of his ministries is headed by officers of the armed forces. No wonder there is talk of militarization of politics. Brazilian and international observers have paid close attention to the developments in Brazil, noting that the political roles played by military officers adds to another recent trend of domestic deployment of the military in law-and-order missions. This is evidence of a new militarization of politics in Latin America, a region dubbed as the “land of militarized democracies.”
Can Brazil be considered a militarized democracy? If so, what can account for the recent prominence of military officers in Brazilian politics? What consequences might this lead to? These are the questions addressed in this essay.
We argue that the militarization of Brazilian democracy under Bolsonaro can be explained by a combination of key features of the political system and aspects regarding civilian-military relations. The causes are rooted in the interactions between extreme multiparty presidentialism and the military. A typical pattern of cabinet appointments fostered by such institutional structure and material and ideological motivations of the armed forces mostly account for what has occurred in Brazilian politics since January 1, 2019. We describe this process in the second and third sections of this article. The fourth section identifies the backsliding brought about by the return of military officers to the center of the political arena. The fifth and final section sets out proposals that could concomitantly enhance civilian control over the military and Brazil’s national defense.
2. The political participation of military officers in the Bolsonaro government
First off, it is worth distinguishing the prominence of military officers today from what took place during the authoritarian regime from 1964 to 1985. Unlike the coup that washed out Brazil’s first democratic experience, the return of the military to the center of the political arena today is the result of an invitation extended by a democratically elected leader, a feature of the most recent episodes of military prominence in Latin America. We consider the military’s renewed involvement in politics in terms of the threat their influence poses to the democratic control of the armed forces. In the words of Samuel Huntington, “Military influence is increased if members of the officer corps assume positions of authority in nonmilitary power structures.”
Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil is a rare experiment among contemporary democratic regimes when it comes to the participation of the military in politics. On August 7, 2020, as of the writing of this article, Brazil had nine ministers who were or had been career officers in the armed forces, making up 39.1% of the president’s cabinet. This is certainly the highest proportion in the current democratic regime (i.e., between 1985 and 2020). Prior to this, the record high of members of the military profession in the cabinet was 29%, set in 1994 by the Itamar Franco administration (1992-1995), which was on shaky political ground after the impeachment of Fernando Collor, the first democratically elected president since the military regime. Franco relied on the support of the barracks to make it to the end of his term.
The literature on civil-military relations describes spheres of military autonomy throughout what Pion-Berlin calls the political-military continuum. Civilian supremacy is ideal in all spheres, on democratic theory’s assumption that the military ought to be the armed instrument of democratically elected officials. However, certain degrees of military autonomy are more tolerable than others. For example, activities related to the strictly professional tasks of the armed forces can be delegated with less harm to civilian control. Some scholars go as far as arguing that such delegation enhances professionalism and reduces the potential for military intervention in politics.
On the other hand, setting the broad guidelines for the conduct of defense policy, military budgets and the main plans regarding the use of the armed forces must be the responsibility of civilians. According to this logic, it is even less advisable for military officers to be involved in nonmilitary government activities. Therefore, appointing generals and other officers, even if they have left active duty, to such positions violates the principle of civilian control over the armed forces. A rebuttal often heard in Brazil these days argues that that these military officers perform their duties at the behest of a democratically elected government and that they consider their nonmilitary posts a mission. However, retired General Francisco Mamede Brito Filho, a military academy graduate of the same cohorts of the officers currently in the high command of the Brazilian Army, clarified the issue: a mission performed by members of the military is to be treated as such only if military in nature, and added: “an active-duty military officer who joins the government and says that in doing so is fulfilling a mission is sending a blatantly distorted institutional message.”
To be clear, no matter how much active-duty military personnel insist that the armed forces as an institution are separated from the government and that the officers that serve in the executive branch are at their own volition (i.e., not at the orders of the high command of the armed forces), the truth is that the presence of several generals, some in active duty, in non-military ministerial posts and thousands of military personnel at the lower echelons of the executive branch, also in civilian roles, generates great ambiguity regarding the place of the armed forces within the political order. This ambiguity has weakened civilian control over the military and made the policy process of Brazil’s democratic regime much less transparent.
A democratic regime implies not only full subordination of the military to the constitution and government, but also that the military have their influence limited to the area of their professional expertise, that is, issues of national defense. When the military’s power expands beyond that realm, civilian’s ability to control the military dwindles. Additionally, placing military officers at the center of the political arena means to place representatives of an opaque and radically verticalized organization at the center of a political system that should be based on the exact opposite, i.e., transparency and horizontal relationships. It is precisely because of these characteristics that the legislative branch and political parties are the key institutions of any democracy. In a democratic regime, does it make sense for the high command of the army to opine on decisions made by the Federal Supreme Court and by Congress on issues unrelated to national defense, and to be a key player in the country’s political dynamics, as they were in the first half of 2020 in Brazil? It does not. It is a clear distortion of democracy’s political process.
Finally, another argument for the presence of military officers in the government sustains that such personnel are well-trained managers and should therefore be considered public servants and eligible to serve the president as needed. However, career military officers are not merely bureaucrats; they are professionals trained to use maximum force against an enemy under a rigid system of command and control based on hierarchy and discipline. In order to obtain absolute compliance, military organizations are total institutions; their doctrine, processes and organizational culture dominate all aspects of the public and private lives of their members, such that once an officer, always an officer. Consequently, a retired general is still a general. A former lieutenant is still a lieutenant. For those still unpersuaded, it is worth reading how the Command of the Brazilian Army defines a military career:
“A military career is not an unspecific and expendable activity or a mere job, an occupation, but rather an absorbing and exclusive profession, which conditions and imposes limits on ourselves until the end. It does not demand availability during business hours set out by law, but rather takes all the hours of our lives, and thus levies upon us our fates. We cannot easily and even indifferently take off our uniforms; they are our second skin that holds fast to our very souls, irreversibly, forever.”
3. Explaining the militarization of a consolidating democracy
Our analysis combines hypotheses stemming from the scholarship on both Brazilian and comparative politics, as well as civil-military relations. The Brazilian political system as shaped by the 1988 Constitution, despite having provided the basis for the country’s longest democratic experience, has serious flaws that facilitated the comeback of military officers into politics.
Ever since 1994, Brazil has voted into office some of the world’s most fragmented legislatures since the beginning of the twentieth century. The 2018 election led to a lower house with 30 different parties and an effective number of parties equal to 16.4. The combination of a presidential system of government that grants broad powers to the head of state with a highly fragmented legislative branch, leading to Brazil’s now famous coalitional presidentialism, has disparate consequences. It is a very vague governance formula whose constituent elements can assume various configurations. The extremely high degree of legislative fragmentation in Brazil has made forming and maintaining governing coalitions an arduous task while also creating greater incentives for presidents to act unilaterally.
On the one hand, Brazil’s institutional arrangement fosters the building of fragmented and heterogenous coalitions, which can be costly from a fiscal perspective and require presidents to resort to unorthodox or nebulous methods in order to survive. On the other hand, the high degree of fragmentation also implies that the size of the president’s party in the legislature tends to be small, which, in turn, favors the appointment of minority governments and a relatively high number of non-partisan ministers. Extremist presidents affiliated with small parties are particularly prone to forming minority governments and to appointing non-partisan ministers. Finally, in Latin America, minority governments are associated with presidential falls.
The empirical findings cited above suggest that extreme multiparty presidentialism has contributed, albeit indirectly, to militarization in several ways. How?
First of all, between 2003 and 2018, Brazil was ruled by broadly fragmented and heterogeneous coalitions, whose formation is linked to major corruption scandals (mainly the mensalão, and petrolão) and, starting in 2015, to a serious economic crisis arising from the unchecked public spending and an uptick in criminal violence. This explosive combination, in turn, undermined the legitimacy of the largest parties. Finally, the increased severity of public security problems and the subsequent calls for law and order and a “mano dura” policy to tackle crime increased popular support for militarizing public security, a process that was already underway for some time through the expansion of the so-called Guarantee-of-Law-and-Order operations.
Hindsight is always 20/20 and thus provides a clear view that during the 2018 presidential campaign Bolsonaro realized and paid close attention to the zeal – of the population and of large sectors of the elite – for ethics in politics, for economic stability through reducing public spending, and demands for reducing violence through militarization of public security. Bolsonaro made the explicit promise that the military would help him govern and that he would appoint an officer to lead the Ministry of Defense. However, despite being elected with 46.03% of the vote in the first round and 55.13% in the second, his party only gained 10.14% of the seats in the Lower House and 4.94% in the Senate. Bolsonaro, an extremist president affiliated to a relatively small party in Congress, was doomed to form a minority government and appoint non-partisan ministers, just as suggested by the academic literature discussed above. Like any good reader of Brazilian politics, from the very beginning of his term, the president also proved to be fully aware that his presidency ran a serious risk of early termination. In short, as soon as the presidential election was called on October 28, 2018, the necessary – but never sufficient – conditions for militarizing the government were met. Now we turn to the sufficient conditions.
Once Bolsonaro put on the presidential sash, he made every effort to link the armed forces with his administration, such that he achieved three goals: deterring Congress from impeaching him; having loyal staff; and benefitting from the positive image of the armed forces, gradually recovered since leaving power in 1985. We can see these efforts in a set of seven measures taken by Bolsonaro: (1) frequent visits by the president to military ceremonies and units, (2) appointing retired and active-duty military officers to the cabinet, (3) appointing thousands of officers to subcabinet positions, (4) a scaling down of social security contribution by the armed forces compared to other sectors after a controversial pension reform, (5) reform of the military career along with a significant salary increase, (6) issuing a legal instrument that allows retired military personnel to play a role in the public sector with a 30% increase in their pay, and (7) a set of decisions that made it possible to increase the budget for investment in defense starting in 2020, as well as guarantees that the funding allocated would not be impounded. The funding, in spite of the pandemic and a severe economic crisis, includes maintaining investments in the armed forces’ strategic projects, such as the nuclear-powered submarine, the KC-390 cargo jet, and the Guarani Armored Vehicle.
Bolsonaro’s measures were very comprehensive and, as far as we can tell, an effective package to bring in the military and fend off impeachment threats. The effectiveness is seen in, for example, the timid response of the opposition and congressional leaders to start an impeachment proceeding against the president, in spite of all the threats Bolsonaro has lobbed at the legislative branch and his lack of presidential decorum; in the absolute loyalty shown by the Ministry of Health, headed by active-duty General Eduardo Pazuello, to the president’s denialist agenda regarding the pandemic; and in the overwhelming reluctance of the institutional armed forces to publicly repudiate Bolsonaro’s words and deeds affronting the constitution and democratic institutions.
We will now turn to the military’s commitment to Bolsonaro.
4. Why did the military support Bolsonaro?
The involvement of military officers in politics only takes place when an opportunity opens up in the political system and there is a motive for the military to leave the barracks. The factors related to the political system, outlined in the previous section, are only permissive conditions that that were already in place prior to 2019. In that case, what drives the military officers to get involved in such a risky undertaking?
The massive presence of military personnel in the government is a risk for the armed forces for three reasons. First, because active-duty officers start to become less concerned with their main function, i.e., national defense. Second, because should Bolsonaro’s administration fail, the positive image that the armed forces have gained in the eyes of the population could be tarnished. Third, because creating ties with a government that may fail could dig a serious divide between the armed forces and the civilian elites, which, in turn is also not ideal for national defense. Considering all these risks, what led the military to back Bolsonaro?
Unlike political parties, the armed forces do not have their programs approved in sessions open to the public, thus it is impossible to know the relative weight of internal factions. The very nature of military activity requires a degree of secrecy and opacity. Even so, the armed forces are organizations with their own culture that further their interests in a consistent way. It is through those lens that the military respond to openings and gaps created by the political system. And three sets of factors shape the preferences and behavior of military officers: structural, ideological, and material.
The structural factors are related to security issues and the types and configuration of threats – internal and/or external – a country faces. Countries with external threats and an absence of internal threats tend to have armed forces dedicated exclusively to preparation for war. Historically, in Brazil a relative absence of external threats and the perception of internal threats have caused the armed forces to have an “internalist” orientation, constantly involved in domestic politics and executing internal security and national development missions. In recent years the heightened tensions in South America due to the crisis in Venezuela and the fiercer rivalry between China and the United States on the global stage should have led the Brazilian armed forces to focus on external defense. However, that is not what has happened. On the contrary. Thousands of military officers have taken on other activities unrelated to national defense and all sorts of internal missions, starting with the control of the Ministry of Health amidst a pandemic. Structural factors, therefore, cannot account for the current behavior of the Brazilian armed forces.
What about the ideological factors? The organizational culture of the armed forces – their ideas, beliefs, attitudes, and the way they perceive their role in society – is fertile ground to explain the political behavior of the military. Brazilian military officers, beyond having governed Brazil for one of the longest military regimes in Latin American history, often intervened in domestic politics during the twentieth century, especially in times of institutional instability, solving crises, as a last resort, with coups. It comes as no surprise that throughout Brazil’s republican history, the military always viewed themselves as moral guardians of the nation. This is the so-called military salvationism. When the military’s prestige is in jeopardy, they take action to salvage their reputation as guardians of the nation.
This is what happened during the Dilma Rousseff administration (2011-2016), which, along with the delegation of many tasks related to the public administration to the armed forces, had to deal with different tensions with the military on the symbolic realm. For example, in 2014, a little before March 31, the day on which the 1964 coup d’état was staged, the then president ordered the minister of defense not to condone the celebration of the coup in the barracks. However, the most grievous facts for the military were the Final Report of the National Truth Commission, published in December 2014, and the downgrading from ministerial status of the Institutional Security Office (Brazil’s equivalent to the US national security council) in the second half of 2015. The Office has always been headed by an Army general.
The National Truth Commission, unable to legally prosecute the people it suspected had violated human rights during the military regime, chose to name and shame the suspected perpetrators. The list of names created a major stir in the barracks, leading to an outcry by military associations. For example, General Sérgio Etchegoyen, an important leader in the Army, sued the Truth Commission for including his father’s name on the list, a lawsuit that was rejected by the Fourth Regional Federal Court in June 2020.
Dilma Rousseff’s decision to downgrade the Institutional Security Office’s from its ministerial status amounted to the first time in Brazil’s republican history in which there was no military officer at the cabinet level. This instilled a feeling of disregard among the armed forces. Not surprisingly, one of the first decisions taken by the Temer administration, which succeeded Rousseff after her removal from office, was precisely to return the Office to its previous status and to appoint General Sérgio Etchegoyen to head it. Bolsonaro capitalized on this feeling of disregard by bringing the military into the inner circles of decision-making in his government. His closest cabinet members are military officers, his political coordination is headed up by military officers, and key ministries, like Defense, Health, Mining and Energy, Infrastructure, Science and Technology, are all led by members or former members of the armed forces.
Additionally, the economic failure of the Dilma Rousseff government, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and the Workers’ Party’s loss of credibility through the uncovering of massive corruption schemes by Operation Carwash, along with the polarization generated by the controversial impeachment trial of Rousseff in the first half of 2016, awoke the sleeping giant of anti-communism, a distinctive ideology of the Brazilian armed forces since 1935, from a long slumber. Bolsonaro shrewdly knew how to tap into the dormant anti-communist sentiment of Brazil’s military, turning it an anti-Workers’ Party movement (antipetismo in Portuguese) more suitable to the twenty-first century.
Finally, material factors can also help explain the behavior of the Brazilian military. Ever since Fernando Henrique Cardoso (FHC)’s two terms (1995-2003), the military started to complain about defunding, as the then president was making deep cuts in public service salaries, even though defense was constantly one of the top items in public spending both during the FHC and the Lula years. Such dissatisfaction in the ranks of the military encouraged officers to follow Bolsonaro in search of material advantages and support for the armed forces. In fact, meeting the economic demands of the army is a tried-and-true strategy among political regimes that depend on military support. However, the armed forces received considerable material benefits during Lula’s second term (2007-2011). The Workers’ Party’s administration backed many strategic projects of the armed forces, such as the purchase of the Gripen fighter aircraft and cooperation agreements to build a nuclear-powered submarine. In addition, under Lula there were substantial salary increases for both active-duty and retired military personnel, something they had demanded since the 1990s.
In addition to budgetary issues, the military can rationally try to protect their interests through securing control over defense policymaking. In the case of Brazil, some sectors of the armed forces were very reluctant to accept the creation of the Ministry of Defense during the Fernando Henrique Cardoso administration. Other sectors became extremely critical of the former president due to salary issues and because FHC had not consulted them regarding some issues of national defense. It was not until General Joaquim Silva e Luna became defense minister in February 2018 under the Michel Temer presidency that the military quieted their long-standing quibble that the civilians leading the ministry were not defense specialists.
Note that since the 1990s Brazil had made major progress in terms of civilian control of the armed forces through the creation of the Ministry of Defense (1999) and the New Defense Act (2010). Civilians gradually started to get more involved in defense policymaking. Between January 1999 and February 2018, all defense ministers were civilians. Civilians made up 66.7% of the authors of the 2012 White Paper on National Defense. Nonetheless, a significant proportion of defense policy formulation remained in the hands of the military. In other words, even at its best, Brazil still had a lot of ground to cover in order catch up to neighbors like Argentina or Chile when it came to civilian control over defense policy.
In sum, what really motivated the military to back the Bolsonaro government politically was a set of ideological and material factors. Bolsonaro, a former Army captain considered a “bad officer” by former general-president Ernesto Geisel (1974-1979), always acted as a “union” leader of the armed forces during his 28 years as a member of Congress, fighting for their salary and corporate interests. As president, he restored the central political position that the military had occupied between 1889 and 1985. Bolsonaro brought the military into the fold of his government by appealing to their material interests and the latent salvationism and anti-communism in the armed forces, particularly in the Army.
5. The consequences of the new military prominence
Civil-military relations are the keystone of any democracy. Control of the armed forces, and thereby the subordination of the military to the democratically elected branches of government are considered essential for consolidating democracy. Samuel Huntington, author of a work translated into Portuguese and praised by the Brazilian military, put forth a theoretical framework that recommends keeping the armed forces out of politics, thus channeling all their attention to national defense. Democratically elected officials would govern without military influence as long as they delegated military tasks to the professionals in uniform. In Brazil, since the publication of Alfred Stepan’s now classical work, no one should believe that this kind of delegation works. Military professionalism, in Brazil and in many countries, did not distance the barracks from politics. On the contrary, it brought them together. Today, once again there is backsliding in the realm of civilian-military relations due to the revival of military political prominence. Below, we will describe the three main fronts of what we call backsliding through militarization.
As already mentioned above, much had changed since the end of the last century in Brazil in terms of civilian control of the military, given (i) the creation of the Ministry of Defense in 1999 and the publication of the National Defense Strategy in 2008, drafted by both civilians and the military; (ii), the beginning, in 2009, of a broad and ambitious plan for modernizing the armed forces; (iii) the passage of the New Defense Act in 2010; and (iv) the publication of the first White Paper on National Defense in 2012, written in partnership with a significant number of civilians. These facts and events clearly indicated a stronger control over the military by civilians, the latter’s greater involvement in defense policymaking, and greater salience of defense policy on the political agenda.
Brazil may have been slow and late to the game, but it was taking steps in what Narcís Serra, a scholar and respected Minister of Defense of Spain between 1982 and 1991, called “the military transition,” which takes place simultaneously with the political transition to democracy. Military transitions have three stages. The first involves avoiding coups d’états. The second is to remove military officers from politics, stripping them of any veto power on government decisions unrelated to national defense and drastically reducing the military’s autonomy. The last stage is the establishment of civilian supremacy, which is defined “…as the ability of a democratically elected civilian government to carry out a general policy without interference by the military, define the goals and the general organization of national defense, formulate and carry out defense policy, and oversee the application of military policy.” Until recently, Brazil was in the second stage and trying to step into the third.
Given this scenario, the first backsliding resulting from the kind of relationship Bolsonaro cultivated with the armed forces is obvious: as long as there is a strong presence of military officers in the government, the idea of establishing civilian supremacy is on hold if not fading away.
Second backslide: Brazil runs the risk of slipping back into the first stage of the military transition because in the first half of 2020 the country’s political agenda was dominated by an intense debate on the possibility of a military coup or of an extremely controversial intervention by the armed forces invoking Article 142 of the Constitution in the conflict between the federal government and the Supreme Court.
Third backslide: the recent trends in the international system, with rising tensions both in and out of South America, could lead to an absence of social and political consensus in the country to channel funds for projects of the armed forces. Such projects cost huge sums of money and can take a fair amount of time. Therefore, without such consensus, there is a high risk that they be either interrupted or diminished due to downsized budgets. Because of the delegation aforementioned, the lack of civilian involvement can affect national defense. Without civilians to dictate what the defense priorities are and without society knowing what to demand from the armed forces, any initiative for obtaining funding for the military, even if legitimate, will be seen as suspicious by several sectors in the political class and the civil society, as happened in the second half of 2020, when stern criticism was leveled at the substantial increase in the budget for the Ministry of Defense in the 2021 budget proposal submitted to Congress by the federal government. Consequently, the Ministry of Defense’s budget will go from one extreme to another. Prior to 2019, investments in defense were not in sync with the size, interests, and international responsibilities of Brazil – they were insufficient and ineffective. Hereafter, they will not be in line with the sorry social and economic state of the country after the pandemic – they are excessive and also ineffective, since most of the funds will be committed to paying salaries and pensions.
In the medium term, the combination of a defense policy controlled by the armed forces with civilian suspicion could lead to the undoing of modernization plans, thus increasing Brazil’s vulnerability on the international stage at a time when global geopolitics is changing at a breakneck pace.
6. Proposals for change
What to do to keep these instances of backsliding through militarization from running their full course?
First of all, it is crucial to pass the proposal of the former speaker of the lower house, Rodrigo Maia, to keep active members of the military from serving in federal government positions not related to national defense. If military officers wish to serve in civilian roles in the federal administration, the solution is rather simple: they should take a civil service exam or leave the active duty before they are appointed. They cannot go back to the barracks after serving in these posts. This, in fact, would be consistent with the professional reforms put forth by Marshal Castello Branco in the 1960s, which aimed at putting an end to officers who ran for office or held government posts and would return to military waiting for the next post outside the barracks. Rodrigo Maia’s proposal would significantly reduce the ambiguity stemming from the presence of so many military officers in civilian posts, as there are today.
The second suggestion was put forth by historian José Murilo de Carvalho: eliminate four words, “safeguarding the constitutional powers,” in Article 142 of the Constitution, which states that the Armed forces “are permanent and regular national institutions organized on the basis of hierarchy and discipline under the supreme authority of the president of the Republic and have the purpose of defending the homeland and safeguarding the constitutional powers and, by will of any of these, the law and order.” The removal of those words would do away with the conflicting interpretations of the armed forces’ constitutional role, conflicts that in the first half of 2020 led Brazil to slide back into the first stage of military transition as described by Narcís Serra and mentioned above.
There are four other measures designed to remove the military from the political arena and bolster the orientation of the armed forces toward national defense activities. All of them are faster and easier execute.
First, the country needs to civilianize its Defense Ministry. The National Defense Strategy, an official publication of the Ministry of Defense issued in 2008, included the following promise: “The Ministry of Defense will conduct studies about creating a staff of civilian defense experts to prepare them for career paths in the civil and military administration, such that it would create a labor force capable of managing defense policy, working in programs and projects in the field of defense, as well as interacting with government agencies and society, integrating political and technical points of view.”
Twelve years later, a country where civil service careers are so prestigious and numerous, where people make it their full-time job to compete for those coveted spots, has yet to design an exam and a career for civilian defense experts. The expectation is that 100 positions are necessary in order to create this staff. It is not for lack of funding that this exam was not created. Likewise, there is no dearth of excellent candidates for such positions. Brazilian civilians have the critical mass to discuss national defense and armed forces; for example, there is a professional association dedicated to this topic, the Brazilian Defense Studies Association (ABED). Every year the country produces hundreds of PhDs in public administration, political science, law, economics, history, and international relations who could take such exams and fill the defense specialist positions. Therefore, with a simple bill, a new civilian president could easily make that exam a reality. In the long term, civilian experts would enable the democratization of civil-military relations’ core, the Ministry of Defense – by breaking up the monopoly that the military have on the knowledge and information on such subjects. Argentina and Chile undertook this process some time ago.
Second, in a similar way, if Brazilian civilian elites want to improve the quality of congressional activity on national defense, they need to hire more defense experts for the standing staff of legislative aides in both houses of Congress. Such professionals – specialists in defense and the armed forces – are crucial for providing members of Congress with independent information on these topics.
This staff of civilian specialists will certainly meet a lot of resistance by the armed forces once the Ministry of Defense is no longer run mostly by officers from the Navy, Army and Air Force, as is the case today. In order to attenuate this resistance, here is the third suggestion: a new president of civilian origin should not cut down defense investment, so that the armed forces can be guaranteed the resources for completing their main projects within the planned timelines (acquisition of fighter aircraft by the Air Force of Brazil – Project FX-2; programs for building submarines and the Navy’s nuclear program – Pro-sub and PNM; expenses related to the procurement of tactical 10-20-ton cargo craft – Projects KC and KC-X; expenses related to the plan for implementing the strategic defense system with rockets in the Astros 2020 project; and expenses related to implementing the Integrated Border Monitoring System – Sisfron).
It will be a heavy bill to pay, especially in a country that will be in the throes of a deep economic and social crisis after the pandemic, but paying it is the necessary condition for the armed forces to be able to focus on national defense. A future civilian president should have the will and capacity of cutting budget spending allocated for rent-seeking activities to fund defense investments while not cutting social expenses, as did the Bolsonaro government.
The last suggestion is to ensure that the civilian elites care about issues of national defense and civil-military relations. A recent statement made by Raul Jungmann, a former Minister of Defense, indicates a symptomatic neglect for these topics: “Public authorities are supposed to define the National Policy and the National Defense Strategy, the goals, structure and means for our Armed Forces. However, the authorities are not doing this, they are shirking their responsibilities. The policy and strategy currently in place, developed in 2016 when I was the Minister of Defense, were voted in both houses of Congress without public hearings, without amendments or debates, and by hand votes.” From a practical perspective, congressional leaders ought to start a vigorous conversation about defense policy and strategy, such that there will be active congressional support for the use of the armed forces in activities closely related to national defense.
That said, a warning is also due: it is absolutely necessary that the democratic leaders in Brazil start thinking seriously about civil-military relations and the role of the military after Bolsonaro, otherwise the country may have to live with the ghosts of praetorianism for a long time to come. It is, again, necessary for Congress to engage in an intense debate led by party leaders on the role of the armed forces. Raul Jungmann, in another op-ed, states that talking about the defense budget is a futile activity if the Brazilian society does not debate what it is that they want from their soldiers. Do we want the military to act as a gendarmerie to fill in where the police fall short? Do we want the military to be deployed on government orders to solve any number of problems that arise from weak state capacity?
It seems acceptable that from time to time the military be called upon for logistics and support tasks, as they were in the COVID-19 pandemic to distribute supplies and set up field hospitals. Or, as suggested by sociologist Simon Schwartzman, does Brazil need a hybrid model, under which the military would be permanently involved in primarily civilian roles? Or yet, does Brazil want its armed forces prepared, ready and equipped to carry out their main function of national defense, so that one of the top ten economies in the world have military capabilities commensurate with its geopolitical stature?
The Brazilian society, by means of its representatives in the executive and legislative branches, has been reluctant to decide what its national defense priorities are and what role the armed forces are to play. For example, the last series of national defense documents, produced in 2016, was passed by Congress without a debate and without the signature of the president of the Republic. With regards to the documents produced in 2020, the then speaker of the Lower House, Rodrigo Maia, said that there would be a congressional debate, but that no modification can be made because the National Defense Policy is a sort of international treaty. Such reluctance is an ominous sign, and it clearly shows the grave responsibility civilians have in the backslidings we described above.
Every change recommended above tends to be supported by political actors on the center, center-left and left of the ideological spectrum. However, they alone do not have the political power to enact them. The extreme right is sure to oppose these proposals. The key to success for these reforms is, therefore, in the hands of the center-right and of the liberals (in the European sense of the word), groups that at certain decisive moments in the twentieth century allied themselves with the military to protect their own political and economic interests. Just as with what happened during Brazil’s protracted transition to democracy in 1974-1985, an alliance that ranges from the center-right to the left will once again be necessary to remove the military from politics.
Lastly, one would have to be naïve or oblivious to history to believe that the end of the Bolsonaro presidency will settle the issue. In the next presidential elections, the strongest contenders must extensively bring the role of the armed forces into the discussion. The winner must pledge to send the military back to the barracks, so as to have sufficient political capital to face the laborious task of submitting the military to civilian control once again. Should this issue not be addressed during the next presidential campaign, we can expect to see fewer military officers heading civilian ministries and holding subcabinet posts, but changes in all remaining problems – reducing military hegemony in the Ministry of Defense, curtailing the privileges of the armed forces, and turning the focus of the military back to national defense – will be very unlikely.