The recent discussion on the appointment of a Defense Minister of military origin once again revealed conflicting positions on an unresolved dilemma: national defense remains the largest absentee since 1983.
For four decades, the country has fostered a distorted and stigmatized concept – the misunderstood “civilian control of the armed forces” – that has occupied the space where political and strategic leadership should be established as a result of democratic consensus. The result was a scheme characterized by ideological bias and institutional discipline. In the best cases, political leadership of the armed forces was achieved, but not national defense in the strategic and geopolitical sense. The deficit is deep and structural.
The result was clear: defense was never transformed into strategic public policy. Governments of all stripes agreed to move it to a secondary level, and limit it to stifling budgetary efforts, symbolic reforms, and isolated decisions, without including it in a national geopolitical project. Institutional subordination was maintained, but strategic leadership was abandoned.
Thus, for more than forty years Argentina lacked a political leadership capable of directing its efforts toward the strategic interests of the nation. Defense was not integrated into foreign policy, articulated to address short-, medium- and long-term challenges and was not coordinated multi-sectorally with the rest of the country.
The problem was not only a budgetary one, but also a conceptual one. The priority was to prevent the armed forces from regaining their political weight, but no one worked to restore their strategic weight. Progress has been made in controls, but not in strategic concepts, designs, or acquisition of systemic capabilities compatible with our environments.
They insisted on an ideological reading of the past, without building a vision for the future. Rather, there was an attempt to undermine the values, traditions, ethical rules and professional practices that constitute the military spirit, which led to the weakening of the most valuable thing, which is its human resources. Despite all this, the silent effort of men and women, even in adversity, has maintained the conduct and professionalism that has placed the Armed Forces among the country’s most reliable institutions.
There have been specific developments – defense law regulation, capacity planning, the National Defense Fund, administrative improvements – but they have never been part of a sustainable policy. They were exceptions in a system characterized by disconnection, bias, lack of consensus, and lack of a strategic compass. Little was planned, little was implemented, and defense was almost never understood as an instrument for advancing national interests.
The cost of this drift is clear. The country faces a more competitive international context, punctuated by disruptive technological advances, the rise of artificial intelligence, a potentially imminent demand for stabilization forces, an increasingly important South Atlantic with open conflict, and Antarctica highlighted as a contested future geopolitical space and an energy, agro-, mining, and maritime matrix that requires protection. All this in a vast area where strategic spaces and connections require effective monitoring and control between agencies. However, the military tool arrives deteriorated, defunded, with little training and disconnected from its objectives.
Strategic defense behavior is not an academic exercise or an agenda for specialists: it is a prerequisite for protecting sovereignty, resources and the future. In the absence of a strong, multi-sectoral vision aligned to foreign policy, Argentina will continue to be absent from the discussions shaping the architecture of the twenty-first century, leaving voids that will be filled by other actors.
It is time to abandon empty proselytizing rhetoric and the idea of “civilian oversight” as an end in itself, and replace it with political leadership with a strategic perspective, exercised by men of vision, morals, and ability, regardless of their origin. Democracy has already paid the cost of a rudderless defense system.
Argentina needs a national defense that is seen as a state policy: independent, modernized, professional and oriented towards the important interests of the country. It is about recovering an indispensable tool for any nation aspiring to its own project in an increasingly challenging world; This requires the best, wherever they come from. Th