Early Professionalization Efforts
The final three decades of the nineteenth century witnessed the beginning of the Argentine armed forces' modernization and professionalization. Formal education programs for those aspiring to military careers were incorporated into professional training; new armaments and equipment improved the armed forces' fighting capabilities and served to boost its prestige. General staff organization was modernized and institutionalized during the 1890s. By 1900 foreign military advisers, almost all former Prussian army officers, had arrived to help expand and refine the forces' capabilities.
During the presidency of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1868-74), the Military College and the Naval Military School, the first service academies, were established for the army and the navy. Admission was open to any healthy Argentine male aged 14 to 18 who could pass an entrance examination. Graduates from the three-year program offered by the Military College became second lieutenants in either the infantry or the cavalry. Those completing the five-year program were commissioned as first lieutenants (tenientes) and assigned to the artillery corps, the engineering corps, or the General Staff.
Top-ranking graduates from the three-year program were also awarded first lieutenants' commissions after 1884. The acquisition of arms and equipment was an important component of the armed forces' modernization. In the early 1870s the Remington rifle and carbine were introduced and became standard issue for the Argentine infantry and cavalry, respectively. These weapons were said to have provided the government the decisive advantage required to put down continuing insurrections and to "pacify" the Indian population during the 1880s. The Gatling machine gun, which was first employed by the Argentine military during the War of the Triple Alliance, remained the single most important weapon for the artillery corps through the early 1890s, even though various models of the Krupp breech-loading field gun were also acquired.
Julio Argentino Roca, who served as president from 1880 to 1886 and again from 1898 to 1904, was the Argentine leader most responsible for the institutional development and consolidation of the armed forces. Although Roca was an army general—whose support from other senior officers had proved crucial during his first electoral bid—his tenure in office was distinguished by his efforts to restrict the heretofore increasing participation of the military in national political life. Both military discipline and supremacy of civilian authority over the armed forces were emphasized.
The implementation of changes in the organizational structure of the military was also part of Roca's efforts to modernize and professionalize the armed forces. By 1882 four divisions, each having its own staff, had been organized as the largest troop formations in the army's force structure. Two years later the overall command of the army was reorganized, and the old General Inspectorship and Troop Command was replaced by the Permanent General Staff, which was divided into seven administrative sections.
At the beginning of the 20th Century the national armies of the majority of South American countries experienced a qualitative leap. As a result of many factors, the "old army" gave way to a "new army." The overall military modernization began with the "professionalization" of the officer corps. The change involved making officers true professionals at arms, with the understanding that they would then be concerned only with their profession. In a word, a reform that was aimed at organizing "the nation at arms" resulted in making military life a permanent full-time paid profession that required study, lengthy physical and intellectual preparation, and was subject to strictly codified bureaucratic rules.
The voluntary isolation that is supposed to anticipate the autonomy of armies on campaign, also has another function that is symbolic in character — that is, to produce an acceptance through rituals and myths, images and identification procedures, of the monopoly of violence.
The modern armies were forces that guaranteed internal order and the uninterrupted exploitation of the mineral and agricultural riches desired by Europe. As modern institutions with a technical level that was advanced by international — that is, European — standards, they projected an image abroad of seriousness and competence that reassured investors. In a way they were the complement "for foreign consumption" of the Westminster-style parliamentarianism that seemed to delight the Latin American elites at the turn of the century.
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