Civil-military relations as a ‘coordination problem’? doctrine development and the multiple ‘missions’ of the Brazilian Armed Forces

ABSTRACT

As the Brazilian Armed Forces are increasingly deployed outside the realm of defence against external threats (in tasks such as peacekeeping, public security, and migration management), military doctrine on Civil-Military Coordination and Cooperation (CIMIC) has emerged as a body of ‘technical knowledge’ which would support their interactions with various civilian actors. This is expressed in frequent demands by military officers for the development of a ‘Brazilian CIMIC doctrine’ reflecting both the accumulated knowledge of international partners, such as NATO and the UN, and their own experience in the ‘field’, as in their recent engagement in the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH). We argue that the progressive institutionalization of CIMIC military doctrine recently observed in the country reinforces a perspective according to which several domains of action traditionally attributed or led by civilian actors are seen as a legitimate part of the so-called ‘mission’ of the Brazilian Armed Forces. As a result, political disputes concerning civil-military relations and the role of military organizations outside the realm of external defence are reduced to technical challenges of coordination and cooperation between military officials, civilian state agencies and the Brazilian society. In this article, we discuss this trend by analysing the development of military doctrine on CIMIC within the Brazilian Army, and its connections with their increasing engagement in peacekeeping, public security, and migration management at home and abroad.

KEYWORDS:

• Civil-military coordination
• Brazilian Army
• peacekeeping
• public security
• military doctrine

Acknowledgments

We thank the two anonymous reviewers, as well as the editors and guest editors, for their invaluable comments and suggestions. We also thank members of the Brazilian Network of Research on Peace Operations (REBRAPAZ) who have offered important inputs to this research, including officials at the Brazilian Peace Operations Joint Training Center (CCOPAB).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Between February and December 2018, a Federal Intervention placed the entire public security of the state of Rio de Janeiro under the command of a federal ‘intervenor’ – Army General Braga Netto, who would in 2020 become Chief of Staff as mentioned above, and who in 2021 became the Brazilian Defence Minister. While the Federal Intervention was presented as a ‘managerial’ operation focused in improving public security institutions, civil society analyses have demonstrated that it was an expensive interference followed by no lasting results and an increase in police brutality (Ramos 2019).

2. The distinction between levels of war pervades modern military doctrine and field manuals. A distinction between tactical, strategic and operational levels – found, for instance, in US field manuals – is often traced back to the works of Clausewitz (see Franz 1986). According to the Brazilian military doctrine, responsibilities for the organization, preparation and conduct of war are distributed along four levels of decision-making: political (which defines the political aims of war, amongst other fields of action), strategic (which transforms the political orientations and conditions into strategic actions to be developed by military forces), operational (which includes military planning and the execution of war operations) and tactical (the deployment of military troops for specific missions) (Brazilian Defence Ministry 2015, 181–182).

3. There have been important disputes over the implications of this attribution to guarantee law and order, especially between those who see it as a licence to intervene in politics whenever the Executive, Legislative or Judiciary powers demand it, and those who argue for a much more restricted understanding (Mori 2020). More often, the term refers to military engagements in public security activities, as discussed later in this article.

4. Authorized under Chapter VII in April 2004 through the Security Council Resolution 1542, MINUSTAH had the declared purpose of promoting national reconciliation and the full return to democracy after a coup d’état against President Jean Bertrand Aristide. After massive devastation caused by an earthquake in 2010, MINUSTAH’s mandate came to include several reconstruction and humanitarian tasks implemented both the military and the civilian arm of the UN mission. In 2017, MINUSTAH’s mandate came to an end, and it was replaced in the ground by the United Nations Mission for Justice Support in Haiti (MINUJUSTH), mainly composed by police force members and civilians.

5. The authors have talked to several CIMIC instructors at CCOPAB and attended the course as part of this research.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the following Brazilian agencies: the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (Finance Code 001), Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico, and Fundação Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro.