Military Organizational Unity and National Orientation: Hypotheses and Qualifications

Comparative Analysis

A classic criticism of the military has been that its codes, hierarchy, uniforms, and barracks set it dangerously apart physically and psychologically from civilian life. Recently, however, a new school of analysts, worried by the problems of national unity and nation-building in developing countries, has emphasized that the military can perform a constructive role in these areas precisely because its training, organization, and national recruitment mission help isolate it from subnational tribal, regional, or political pressures in the polity.

Guy Pauker, in his influential analysis of Southeast Asia, commented on the "habits of discipline, hierarchical organization, and responsible command" of the military. He urged that: "Ways must be found to utilize the organizational strength of the national armies and the leadership potential of their officer corps as temporary kernels of national integration."

An influential exponent of this "neorealist" position in the area of Latin American politics is John J. Johnson. He argued:

Until responsible civil services emerge, the armed forces as coherent groups of men often will be as competent as any other group concerned with national policy. Furthermore, for the next decade or more, they will on occasion be the most reliable institution to ensure political continuity in their countries. They will, in certain instances, stand as a bulwark of order and security in otherwise anarchical societies.

As a group, this school of analysts has helped make political observers sensitive to the fact that under some circumstances the military can make a contribution to development. Clearly, in a country such as Turkey the army has played an important role in nation-building and modernization. In comparison to other elites, the military is often less parochial and more national in orientation.

While recognizing this, I nevertheless feel that both the traditional liberal critics of the military and the modern "neorealists" often overestimate the unitary, self-encapsulated aspects of the military institution, and underemphasize the degree to which a military organization is permeated and shaped by outside political pressures. Obviously the situation will vary from country to country. However, if we examine the question of the military's contribution to national unity, much evidence exists that in many developing countries not only is the military not isolated from the tensions experienced by the general population and therefore not able to act as an integrating force, but the military is itself an element in the polity that may transform latent tensions into overt crises.

The armies of many of the new nations were originally created as instruments of imperial control. As such they were often deliberately constructed with extreme tribal, racial, and religious imbalances.* This policy, coupled with the normal differential rates of recruitment based on education and inclination, makes these armies all too often both unrepresentative and explosive. Contrary to the national orientation and national integration hypotheses, the power to "socialize to national identity" of these armies has often been very weak. Primordial sentiments and loyalties frequently express themselves in violence. Three of the most costly civil wars in the newly independent nations had their immediate origins within the military.

In Nigeria a mix of tribal loyalties and intertribal animosities permeated the whole society. As in most new nations the initial stages of modernization tended to exacerbate traditional conflicts and intensify primordial sentiments. But they were felt in the army even more strongly because the requirements of cooperation, obedience, and command were more intense within the military than in society at large, and antagonisms were amplified. In addition, the existing tribal imbalances within the officer corps were inherently unstabilizing both because political actors were constantly tempted to interfere with the military hierarchy to shift the military balance of power, and because the dominant tribal group within the military was tempted to use its military power base to change the national political balance. The Ibo tribe of Eastern Nigeria, partly because of its Christianization and superior education, dominated the officer corps after Nigeria attained independence. In 1961, of the 81 Nigerian officers, nearly 60 were Ibos. Most were from the small Ibo heartland of Onitsha. However, the more traditional Muslim tribes in Northern Nigeria dominated the federal political structure. Tensions between the two major groups finally culminated in a wholesale assassination of northern political leaders in a military coup led by Ibo officers. Their action eventually resulted in the secession of Biafra, a civil war, and tremendous loss of life.

Another case where the army has been a major force of instability is Sudan. The Sudanese army has been called the "one African ... modern military establishment" at the time of independence. Upon independence, however, the officer corps was almost exclusively composed of Arabs from the north, while the sergeants and enlisted men were largely non-Arab blacks from the south. Racial tensions first broke out in a mutiny of black sergeants against their Arab officers in 1955 and later in continuing guerrilla warfare that had cost an estimated 500,000 lives by 1968.

Indonesia from 1958 to 1961 was also torn by a civil war led by army elements stationed in Sumatra and the Celebes. In assessing causes for the civil war, one expert observer wrote, "The most obvious explanation would be that all these senior officers, and their junior commanders in Sumatra and the Celebes, were fighting for the 'states rights' of their respective provinces."

As these examples illustrate, one cannot confuse the "ideal type" of military organization and its presumed unity and insulation from local politics and sentiments with empirical reality.

Brazilian Military: Recruitment Structure

The Brazilian military outwardly appears to conform to a national and therefore integrating institution. Indeed, a motto is stamped on many of the army publications: "The Army — Agent of National Integration." Its proudest claim is that the army is, in the words of a minister of war:

... unquestionably a part of the people, perhaps the most representative of the people, because within its ranks the classes mix, the social standards become the same, the creeds and political parties are ignored, differentiation and inequality among men are forgotten. ... The Army ... has been since the beginning of the Nation the great armor which sustained the unity of the Homeland, preserving it from threats of fragmentation, assuring the cohesion of that archipelago of provinces that tended to become isolated, each with its own peculiarities.

Undoubtedly, the army and the navy played a major role in suppressing the regional revolts that rocked Brazil between 1824 and 1848. Other undeniable contributions were the army's roles in linking the country by road-building and in establishing settlements in the previously almost unpopulated areas of the vast hinterland. But today how strong is the army's ability to inculcate a sense of national identification in its members? Is it exclusively a nationally oriented institution, or is it also strongly influenced by local factors? Does the ideal-type image obscure important aspects of the political behavior of the military?

To attempt to answer the question for Brazil, I have first analyzed the military draft structure. Evidence indicates that the claim to be a "melting pot," in which distinct regional and social characteristics disappear, is a gross oversimplification. The recruitment policy of the Brazilian army has traditionally been that of drafting men from an area as close as possible to each garrison, the vast majority of which are located in urban areas. In practice, this means that most of the draftees are urban and they serve in a unit less than ten miles from their homes and families. Additional factors inhibiting socialization to a national perspective or to army standards are that draftees are normally released after serving nine months of their year of obligated service and, while on active duty, normally return to their homes every weekend. Quite often, indeed, recruits eat lunch and spend their nights at their family's home during their period of service in the army.

These recruitment policies are formalized in army regulations. The major reason for local recruitment seems to be a desire to eliminate the considerable cost of transportation involved in taking a recruit from his home for a short stay in a different geographical area. Because Brazil has no organized reserve, local recruitment also increases the likelihood that a recruit will reside near the unit in which he formerly served, making it easy for the unit to call him up in an emergency. A third reason for the recruitment policy is a deliberate attempt to slow the rural exodus by not drafting rural recruits to serve in urban garrisons and thus risking the possibility that they would not return to the countryside upon completion of their military service.

What of the career-enlisted men and officers? Do they conform more closely to the image of the professional military man as encapsulated in a national institution without real links to his region of origin in what S. E. Finer termed the military's "systematized nomadism moving from one garrison town to another"?

On the whole, one must answer in the negative. Family ties are still very important in Brazil. In addition, military pay scales are low. In order to avoid high costs for transportation to visit families and for other personal reasons, many officers, if they are not attending service schools or serving in army headquarters in Rio, prefer to be stationed close to their families. For example, Brazil's strongest army, the Third Army, headquartered in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, is predominantly made up of natives of the state. It is estimated that in the Third Army units in Rio Grande do Sul all the draftees, 95 percent of the career corporals, 70 to 80 percent of the sergeants, and 50 to 60 percent of the officers are from the state of Rio Grande do Sul. Thus the national army of Brazil has some of the recruitment characteristics of a state militia, since it is largely manned by soldiers from the immediate area.

Another feature of the federal army also reduces its nation-building potential. Brazil, with a population of 90 million, has far more draftable men than it needs. Indeed, as in many developing countries, the problem quite often becomes one of establishing criteria for selecting draftees. As a result of excess supply, the army can afford to be very selective in recruiting draftees. Their choice lies between either emphasizing the nation-building role of the army by deliberately drafting a cross section of the population or satisfying army requirements for skilled and literate draftees who can rapidly develop some degree of technical military competence.

Official Brazilian publications often make allusions to massive numbers of illiterates who enter the army each year and are released only when they have become literate. The barracks are said to be "huge classrooms" within which the men of the countryside are given their first exposure to modernity. This is rarely the case. Analysis shows that faced with the choice between educating rural illiterates and drafting already trained men, the Brazilian army chooses the latter alternative. This is acknowledged in an official but little-known publication which explains and documents that the army prefers to select

youths from urban centers, since they are better able by their occupations and self-confidence to adapt themselves to the needs of military life; city youths have a higher literacy rate and provide an economic saving on transportation. ... The armed organizations are not interested [in drafting] men from the rural areas because they are in general illiterate and unskilled. The short duration of military service and the requirements of the military necessitate that those who are selected are already literate and have some technical training.

My own visits to numerous garrisons generally confirm this picture. In Brazil, there is no centralized mechanism of recruitment. Each unit, in conjunction with a few local government officials, drafts its own recruits from its immediate geographical area. Whether to choose illiterates or not becomes a matter of the personal preference and professional needs of unit commanders. As one officer said to me: "We don't have to take any illiterates because sufficient literates are of draft age. We accept illiterates as our quota of sacrifice." How high is the normal quota?

The commandant of the First Battalion of Light Combat Cars in Santa Angelo, Rio Grande do Sul, said that while his immediate area of recruitment was 40 percent illiterate, his unit was only 4 percent illiterate because he needed literate recruits to handle the technical equipment. Similarly, in the Third Infantry Division, a staff officer stated that, in an artillery regiment of 220 men, there were only three illiterates. The infantry, which was less technical, could afford more illiterates and had about 10 percent. The commander of a coastal artillery battery in Rio de Janeiro, in an informal conversation, commented that almost all the recruits he selected were high school graduates, both because they were better trained, and, as the group of young men most hostile to the military, he felt it would be useful if they were exposed to the military institution and had an opportunity to realize that the army was identified with the interests of the people.

The chief of schools for the Brazilian army was equally candid in an interview:

We draft only a small percentage of draft-age people. We try To select draftees who are the best of the group. I believe illiterates Form less than 5 percent of the total.

The Political Significance of the Brazilian Recruitment Structure

It is clear that an army organized on a local basis, with an exclusive system of recruitment that favors the literate over the illiterate, the urban over the rural, cannot bring ordinary soldiers from different geographical and educational sectors of Brazil into face-to-face cooperation in a nationally oriented institution. The hypothesis, therefore, that the recruitment structure of the military makes a major contribution to nation-building needs to be seriously qualified.

In fact, a locally recruited army in a federal system of politics has some serious political implications. Brazil has many political disputes which involve conflicts between individual states and the central government. In addition, many of the individual states have strong state military police forces, normally called militias even though they are full time. Sao Paulo, for example, had a French military mission for most of the 1906–1924 period and in the late 1920s was building a strong air arm. In the classic period of the "Old Republic," between 1894 and 1930, its state militia normally outnumbered federal troops garrisoned in the state by ten to one. In 1965 the size of the state militia in Sao Paulo was over 30,000 men. This state militia still has light armored personnel carriers with machine guns. It continues to outnumber federal troops stationed in the state, although the ratio has diminished. In 1965 it was estimated that the state militia of Rio Grande do Sul had a force of 15,000 men, Minas Gerais over 13,000, and Guanabara 13,000.

Since 1964, the successive military governments have attempted to tighten army control over the militias. Before 1964, these militias were largely commanded by the governors of the states. Equipment routinely includes rifles, machine guns, trucks, occasional armored personnel carriers and some light mortars. Judged by fire power alone, the state militias have not been a match for the federal army since the 1930 revolution curtailed their equipment and autonomy. But since they were often the armed representatives of powerful state governors, at least until 1964, and since the federal army itself had a territorial recruitment base, the state militias nonetheless presented a periodic political and psychological threat to the national army. The local base of the national army, together with the fact that state politicians have been armed through state militias, has several times precipitated a crisis of loyalty that fragmented entire sections of the national army. In the conflicts of 1930, 1932, and 1961, armed civil war either occurred or seemed imminent.

In each case, a strong governor or state leader was initially in conflict with the national army. The state leaders were all backed by their state militias. In all three cases there was sustained "psychological warfare" in which appeals were made to local loyalties of federal troops, as against national loyalty to the federal army.

In 1930, when Getúlio Vargas, the governor of Rio Grande do Sul, was defeated in a disputed presidential election, his partisans began to organize for civil war. Local newspapers began a campaign aimed at neutralizing the federal army in the state. Various state slogans were used, such as "gauchos do not fight against gauchos." When the uprising began, the Third Army fell apart. Large sections of it eventually joined the rebels. A federal commander acknowledged that appeals made by the families of the soldiers "without doubt contributed to the conversion of many."