Spain - Army History
Permanently organized armed forces were first created during the reign of Ferdinand of Aragon (Spanish, Aragon) and Isabella of Castile (Spanish, Castilla) in the fifteenth century. Throughout the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, the army was well organized and disciplined, employing the most technologically advanced weapons of all the forces in Europe; in that period it suffered no decisive defeat. The army was colorful, feared, and respected. Military careers had status, and they were sought by the aristocracy and by the most ambitious of the commoners.
The appeal of military careers gradually declined, and the lower ranks became a haven for social misfits. Foreign mercenaries outnumbered Spaniards in twenty-six of the thirty-one brigades formed during the reign of Philip III (1598-1621). The Thirty Years' War began the eclipse of Spain's international prestige as a military power. Spain initially prevailed in the Thirty Years War, having beaten France at the Battle of Honnecourt and at a time threatened Paris. But the tide turned when it lost the Battle of Rocroi. Spain began a slow fall from its position as most powerful in the world, but it still proved more than capable of defending itself and inflicting damage on others.
France and Spain had failed to come to terms in the Peace of Westphalia, and the Franco-Spanish War of 1635-1659 between the two countries went on for eleven years more. Spain was in a desperate condition in 1648. She had been weakened by a revolt of Catalonia supported since 1640 by French troops, by the loss of Portugal, where John of Braganza was proclaimed king as John IV. (1640–56), by the crushing defeat at Rocroy (1643), and by a great rising of the people of Naples (1648).
But suddenly the tables were completely turned, and Spain was saved by the outbreak of the Fronde, the rebellion of the Parliament, the princes and the nobility against the new order of things established by Richelieu. Spain did manage to win back some territory and push the French out of Catalonia and won the Battles of Pavia (1655) and Valenciennes (1656). By 1659 both Spain and France were utterly exhausted and needed peace. France retained Mardyke and a chain of fortresses on the northern frontiers and restored the rest of the conquests to Spain.
Spain managed to prevail over Britain and inflict far heavier casualties in the War of Jenkins' Ear. Notably, the disaster of the Battle of Cartagena de Indias in 1741 against the Spanish came at a time when Spain was supposed not as strong as France or Britain. The War of Austrian Succession helped Britain recover, as Spain was more embroiled than Britain. And while Britain might have won the Seven Years' War against France and Spain, it lost to them during the American Revolution in which Spain's role is often downplayed.
Even during Napoleon's wars, it was Spain that gave the French military their first real defeat at the Battle of Bailen in 1808 and which inspired the rest of Europe to form the Fifth Coalition and keep fighting. The occupation of Spain by Napoleon Bonaparte in the first decade of the nineteenth century was the last occasion on which Spanish forces participated in a major conflict with those of other European powers.
The War of Independence (1808-14) marked the armed forces' departure from unquestioning obedience to the government. Although the government had acquiesced in the French occupation, and many of the army's leaders had concurred in this, a number of regular army units rebelled against the occupation and responded to the patriotic cause. After the defeat by the French, guerrilla units continued to resist. Composed largely of former army personnel, these units were, in effect, fighting a people's war in opposition to the so-called legal government.
When the War of Independence ended, officers from the old army were joined by those of the resistance groups. Most retained their military status rather than resign or retire, because there were few employment opportunities in the sluggish civilian economy of the time. The glut of officers persisted, and it was one of the factors contributing to the military's continued dabbling in the political arena.
The Carlist civil wars that occurred intermittently between 1833 and 1876, the decadent monarchy, and the weak governments of the nineteenth century cemented the military's involvement in politics. Civilian politicians were rarely willing to turn over power, but they often encouraged actions by the military when conditions under the group in control could no longer be tolerated. Although not all its members shared a common ideology, the military was generally among the more liberal forces in society.
Particularly in the brief Spanish-American War, American forces were aided by Cuban and Filipino who had already come cloae to wresting independence from Spain on their own, provoking American intervention to pluck these morsals from the clutches of Germany and Japan. In some battles where the Spanish inflicted heavier casualties on the locals than on the Americans, such as the Battles of Las Guasimas, Battle of El Caney, and Battle of San Juan Hill. The battles were counted as American victories but saw the Spanish inflict heavier casualties, especially when the Americans had the help of Cubans and Filipinos.
The armed forces were either the instigators of, or the major participants in, most of the governmental changes between 1814 and the Civil War of the 1930s. There were so many military interventions that the procedure followed a stylized scenario, known as the pronunciamiento (pl., pronunciamientos). A group of officers--usually led by a general--would, after exploring the "will of the people," seek a commitment to rebellion from other officers, who would pledge their troops and agree to act upon a proper signal. Convinced of adequate support, the leader would then issue a pronunciamiento, which typically would consist of an address to the troops or to a street gathering, taking the form of direct or oblique threats against the government. Both the military leaders and the government would then watch the public reaction to determine whether there had been an impressive rallying to the rebel cause, in which case the government would resign. If the pronunciamiento were not greeted with revolutionary enthusiasm and if those who had agreed to stage simultaneous demonstrations failed to do so, the effort was quickly abandoned.
Pronunciamientos were made almost annually between 1814 and 1868, and occasionally thereafter until the 1930s. The last successful one brought Primo de Rivera to power in 1923.
Depite the position of the armed forces as a highly important factor in Spanish politics, they demonstrated deplorable incompetence in battle. Spain's Latin American colonies successfully broke away early in the nineteenth century. Spain's last colonies, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines, were lost during the Spanish-American War of 1898. The navy shared the army's disgrace; its crushing losses during the Spanish-American War left it with only two major combat vessels.Spain emerged successfully from a frustrating campaign against Morocco (1907-27) only after painful and humiliating defeats.
Since the early nineteenth century, the Spanish armed forces had been burdened by an inflated officer corps and had had infrequent military challenges. The professional military was preoccupied with its status and its privileges. Promotions were slow, and they were based on seniority rather than on merit. Fighting units were starved of modern equipment because of heavy personnel costs. The military had established a tradition of frequent interventions to alter the course of internal politics in what it perceived to be the higher interests of the nation. Nevertheless, until the authoritarian regime of Miguel Primo de Rivera (1923-30), the military was more inclined to induce changes in civilian governments than it was to impose direct rule.
Although left with a large and powerful army at the close of the Civil War in 1939, Franco allowed the armed forces to deteriorate. The majority of his officers were identified with the most reactionary elements in the government and with the repressive aspects of the regime. They were thrust into an uneasy relationship with the civilian politicians of the democratic government installed after Franco's death in 1975. Aggrieved over the course of events, a small group of army and Civil Guard (Guardia Civil) officers attempted a coup on February 23, 1981, by holding the entire government hostage in the Cortes (Spanish Parliament). The coup failed because of the lack of support and the intervention of the king on the side of democratic rule.
The Socialist government that assumed office in 1982 introduced a radical program to reform the status of the armed forces. It set out to improve the material conditions of military life, but it also imposed layers of civilian control and a sharp cutback in the size of the army and the number of active-duty officers. Smaller, but more rationally configured and embarked on a modernization program, the armed forces were faced with the task of coordinating Spain's fighting strength with the overall NATO defense effort. Although the officer corps continued to be treated cautiously as a potentially intrusive factor if the civilian government faltered, its traditional political role seemed increasingly anachronistic.
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