Problematizing Managerial Militarization: Claims to Military Logistical Expertise in the COVID-19 Pandemic in Brazil

Introduction

Among its multiple effects, the COVID-19 pandemic intensified the mobilization of the military in the public domain across continents. The expanded range of tasks in which the military have taken presence in our daily lives has been giving new breath to debates on militarization in the world. Critique of this recent role expansion is often based on the need to ensure that civilian authority is in charge of managing the effects of the pandemic, as well as on the imperative to confine the military back to the barracks on the grounds of their socialization based on the use of violence (Giroux & Filippakou, 2020; Kozicki et al., 2020; Schenkkan, 2020). Relatedly, there have been concerns about the mobilization of war-related metaphors to make sense of the threat posed by COVID-19 and the means to fight it (Gibson-Fall, 2021; Giroux & Filippakou, 2020, p. 168; Musu, 2020; WeCope, 2020).

However, the pandemic has revealed more than an intensification of military presence in the domain of public security or of the securitization of public health under war-related terms: it has deepened the mobilization of the military as managers of responses to the public health crisis. ¹ Although military forces have often acted as providers of medical care and public health in contexts other than war, the recent involvement of the armed forces in the pandemic was accompanied by growing claims on the military as privileged experts to handle humanitarian crises and health emergencies (Gibson-Fall, 2021; Harig, 2021). These demands resulted in (i) the mobilization of military industrial capacities to produce medical supplies; (ii) the use of military healthcare capacities for decontamination, vaccination, and care for patients; (iii) the provision of logistical support by building and maintaining healthcare facilities, repatriating nationals, and transporting supplies and patients; and (iv) military participation in health bureaucracy, shaping policy agenda on the matter, among others (Croissant et al., 2023).

In Latin America, public order and border security were estimated to represent only 30% of the activities performed by the military in the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, while 43% corresponded to health assistance, and 20% to the distribution of food and/or water supplies (2020). In these contexts, the discourse used to justify military engagement with non-coercive tasks has been anchored on the armed forces’ claim to logistical expertise and capabilities, and to their alleged ability to provide quick responses to humanitarian crises and to ensure large-scale supply of medicines and equipment (Kozicki et al., 2020, p. 145; Gibson-Fall, 2021; 2020, pp. 161, 166).

In Brazil, the contours of this participation merit our attention. Soon after his appointment as interim Minister of Health, Army General Eduardo Pazuello named 15 other active-duty officers to managerial and advisory positions (Akkoyunlu & Lima, 2021, p. 46). Pazuello’s nomination was part of a broader trend observed during Jair Bolsonaro’s administration (2018–2022), when the number of active-duty officers working in the Executive branch reached 2,558 in July 2020—a 40% increase in relation to 2016 levels (Akkoyunlu & Lima, 2021, p. 45). Simultaneously, the Brazilian military were tasked with one of their largest missions in history, Operation COVID-19—mainly composed of logistical support tasks. In both engagements, a regime of justification grounded on a managerial expertise in logistics has played a central role. Interpreting Brazil as a particularly acute expression of the traction enjoyed by that discursive articulation in contemporary times, we investigate the expertise claims that enable this role expansion, the historical and transnational conditions that shape these claims and make them stick, and the implications of these claims for how managerial expressions of militarization can be problematized.

With this move, we seek to contribute to current debates on the sociopolitical conditions for the expansion of military roles in democratic times, in Brazil and beyond. To do so, we first rely on press releases, articles, and specialized studies produced by the Brazilian military to explore how their participation in Operation COVID-19 and in the Health Ministry has been justified. As we will see, in these two roles, the Brazilian Armed Forces have been claimed as an efficient “response-oriented” structure in contexts of crisis, especially due to their logistical capabilities. We argue that this regime of justification expresses transformations in the expertise for which the military professional has come to be valorized—not by reference to their previous experience and training in combat, but to their managerial expertise in logistics drawn from professionalization programs and the terrain in contexts other than war.

Second, in dialogue with contemporary critical logistics studies (Attewell, 2018; Cowen, 2014; Ziadah, 2019) and drawing on the analysis of Brazilian military doctrine and complementary documents, we investigate the transnational historical emergence of logistics as a privileged technocratic field inscribed in a broader managerial expertise that crosses both the civil–military and the peace–war distinctions, at the same time it increasingly gains specific contours in military professionalization. As such, it convokes us to revisit the terms through which the “problem of the military” is understood in democratic contexts. In other words, if the expertise with which the military professional has been produced and/or socially legitimized has changed throughout the years, then the critique of militarization should go beyond an unease towards a breach in the civil-military distinction and engage the place of a managerial logic in remaking this boundary.

It is to this task that the final section turns to. More specifically, by arguing that the mobilization of claims to a managerial expertise in contexts of “crisis” is discursively detached from the use of violence that grounds the predominant problematization of the expansion of military roles, we reflect on the implications of this discursive re-articulation to present debates on the subject. Here, although we are aware of different concepts of “militarization,” ² we focus on the expansion in the range of realms in which the military participate because this is the most recurrent understanding in the civil-military relations literature. Importantly, privileging that body of works to approach needed re-articulations in the critique of militarization was a methodological choice given the resonance enjoyed by this literature in public debates about the “problem of militarization,” as well as in policy recommendations about how to solve that specific understanding of the problem.

Pandemic Expertise: Two Versions of Managerial Militarization in Brazil

The Brazilian military’s participation in the management of the COVID-19 pandemic has had two main expressions. The first was the wide set of activities attributed to the Armed Forces under the umbrella of “Operation COVID-19,” led by the Ministry of Defense. The second was the naming of military officers for several high positions in the Ministry of Health.

In the first case, in March 2020, after COVID-19 was characterized as a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO), the Brazilian Defense Ministry launched “Operation COVID-19,” aiming at deploying the Armed Forces in support of health and public security agencies. ³ For that goal, the Ministry activated a Joint Operations Center in Brasilia to coordinate actions and created ten Joint Forces Commands and an Airspace Operations Command covering the entire national territory (Brazilian Defense Ministry, 2020b). At that time, the Ministry also listed some of the possible activities for which the Joint Forces Commands should be prepared: supporting public security agencies in border control; using the means of biological, nuclear, chemical, and radiological defense for material decontamination; deploying military and civilian personnel in awareness-raising actions; supporting the triage of possibly infected persons for hospital care; and establishing liaisons with subnational health agencies (Brazilian Defense, 2020a). For those purposes, the Brazilian Army, Navy, and Air Force were to offer operational and logistical resources to the Joint Forces Commands (Brazilian Defense, 2020a).

In addition to the Joint Operations Center and Commands, the Defense Ministry activated new cells within its Center for Coordination of Logistics and Mobilization (CCLM), dedicated to health, transportation, mobilization, and funding to support the operation. The CCLM liaised with governmental agencies and non-governmental organizations, integrating and processing information flows from the Armed Forces, the Commands, and other public and private actors related to military logistics and mobilization (Brazilian Defense Ministry, 2020b). According to the Operational Manager of CCLM, “the Armed Forces had a protagonist role in all actions, even surpassing the actions managed by the Ministry of Health” (quoted in Pereira, 2021, p. 74).

For the Brazilian Army, its logistics capabilities were fundamental in facing a situation conceived as a general meltdown of essential public services (Jardim, 2021). When analyzing the strategic framework with which the military protected the population and cooperated with other government sectors to reduce the effects of the pandemic, Lieutenant Colonel Germano Botelho Pereira, of the Brazilian Army Command and General Staff School, claims that the logistical support offered by the Army to governmental agencies in that context has shown the “versatility, modernization and usefulness” of the military force, most notably of its Logistic Branch (Pereira, 2021).

Such expertise is considered of even greater importance in times of crisis, when “the processes of planning and executing activities aimed at managing the logistics chain require quick and punctual adaptations, in order to provide continuity of user access to products and services, impacting the entire logistics cycle” (Jardim, 2021). For Major Jardim, according to whom the recent pandemic made health logistics the Army’s flagship, the solution to crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic relies on intelligent management, allowing for the military professional to “master the use of logistical functions so that such tools can assist him in the use of the necessary capabilities to ensure the breadth of the operational reach required in each situation” (Jardim, 2021).

To be sure, the pandemic is one of the most recent expressions of crises to which the military have been expected to provide assistance. The experience in the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) ⁴ and in the “Acolhida Operation” ⁵ has been repeatedly used to emphasize the importance of the Brazilian military as managers of crises. Discussions about doctrine reform in this domain have also been recently stimulated by climate change prospects and the expected recurrence of natural disasters with great humanitarian impacts.

According to a recent study published by two Navy and Air Force officers on the necessity of the Brazilian Armed Forces to update its logistics doctrine, military involvement in natural or human catastrophes are not only a way of protecting people in contexts of crises, but also an opportunity for the Armed Forces to train and advance ready deployment, command and control structures, as well as logistics capabilities (Soares & de Moraes, 2021, p. 6). Considered by Soares and de Moraes as one of the largest operations ever conducted by the Brazilian Armed Forces with an explicit humanitarian logistic nature (2021, p. 7), the COVID-19 Operation is an example of an increasing affinity between military and humanitarian logistics. More specifically, disaster scenarios and areas of armed conflict are seen as converging in their demands on coordination and communication, since both require “immediate responses, which translate into: the right supplies, at the right time, in the right place, and distributed to the right people” (Leiras et al., 2007, p. 29 quoted in Soares & de Moraes, 2021, p. 8). This diagnosis has started a discussion in the Army on the need to develop a specific doctrine for “humanitarian logistics operations” (Soares & de Moraes, 2021). Connected with the latter is the recent publication of the first field manual on Humanitarian Aid Operations in which 15 out of the 22 tasks of the Army in contexts of humanitarian crisis are listed as “combat function logistics” (Brazilian Army, 2023).

The affinities between humanitarian and military logistics are reflected in the range of actions undertaken by the Brazilian Armed Forces under the heading of the COVID-19 Operation. From March 2020 until mid-2022, when the Operation was terminated, these logistical support activities ranged from an immediate response phase (e.g., supporting border control, citizens’ repatriation, and field hospitals), to virus dissemination control (e.g., manufacturing and transporting personal protection equipment), to the support of immunization (Patusco, 2022, pp. 35–36). As of February 2021, 34,000 troops of the three forces had been deployed under the Operation. According to the Brazilian Defense Ministry (2021), “the territorial reach of the Armed Forces and the logistics deployed at the COVID-19 Operation” enabled the “quick response to emergency situations and the reduction of impacts on public health.”

The Brazilian case reveals yet another expression of military participation in the management of COVID-19: the fact that the Health Ministry was led by General Pazuello between May 2020 and March 2021. When nominated, Pazuello was painted as an expert in logistics, due to his experience in humanitarian logistics as head of the Acolhida Operation and as the logistical coordinator of Army troops that supported policing activities at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro (Santos & Siman, 2022; Shalders, 2020). Although Pazuello had no previous experience in the health sector, his nomination, first as Executive Secretary of the Minister of Health, was justified based on his logistics records, seen as required to face the pandemic more efficiently. Indeed, when nominating Pazuello as the “number 2” in the Ministry of Health, Nelson Teich, Minister of Health at that time, declared that “we have to be much more efficient than we are today. We are talking about logistics, purchasing, distribution and he [the new executive secretary] is very experienced in this (…). He is a person who comes to help us in a race against time” (Venaglia, 2020).

Along with Pazuello, over 20 active-duty and retired military professionals were incorporated into the health bureaucracy, replacing civilian personnel in key positions of departments dedicated to logistics and management. In those positions, they were in charge of managing strategic health supplies, from their purchase to their storage and distribution, as well as coordinating a series of administrative affairs and relations (Mota, 2021). Such presence of military officers in the Brazilian Ministry of Health has been criticized for their lack of knowledge and experience on health issues, despite their alleged expertise in logistics and crisis management acquired through military training and deployment. As we have witnessed, this criticism was far from obstructing the increase in the number of military professionals occupying posts traditionally associated with civilian authority in the Brazilian government—an ongoing process that was intensified during the pandemic (Akkoyunlu & Lima, 2021, p. 45).

According to the Brazilian Observatory of Defense and Armed Forces, ⁶ while this expanding military presence in governmental management positions during the pandemic has received significant media attention and scrutiny, the deployments associated with Operation COVID-19 were left out of the spotlight, with coverage being largely confined to the Armed Forces’ own public communication notes (Bigatão et al., 2022, p. 13). In other words, while the presence of military officers in political positions was widely seen as problematic and worthy of close monitoring, the deployment of troops throughout the country in the distribution of supplies and the transportation of patients were deemed ordinary and unproblematic. And yet, we argue, the public justification for both kinds of engagements ultimately arose from the same discursive ground: the claim that military actors are bearers of an expertise in logistics that is as useful in times of peace as in times of war.

We interpret this economy of visibility as intrinsically connected to an imaginary reproduced in the traditional critique of militarization, focusing on the military uniform as the expression of the presence of a “war ethos” in positions associated with a civilian nature. As we will discuss in the third section of this article, such rendering of the problem of militarization marginalizes an engagement with the discursive regime through which the presence of military professionals has been increasingly justified in the recent period. After all, ministries come and go, but rationalities endure. Indeed, the claims to expertise upon which both expressions rely reveal a rationality that was not exclusively found in Jair Bolsonaro’s Presidency (2018–2022)—in fact, the operation led by the Ministry of Defense bears traces of previous military engagements, as will be analyzed in the next section. Furthermore, the emergence of this discourse of a managerial military expertise is enmeshed in broader transnational transformations of military practices. The next section turns to the historical footprints of how logistics came to enjoy a privileged position in the edifice of military expertise, in Brazil and beyond.

The Emergence of Logistics as a Valorized Military Expertise

Expertise is usually defined as “authoritative knowledge at a given decision point,” and experts are those who (re)produce and communicate this knowledge (Leander & Wæver, 2019, pp. 2–3). Importantly, as the authority component in the definition of “expertise” suggests, the legitimacy of the privileged position from which experts speak finds social adherence according to a set of validation criteria (Bigo, 2016; Huysmans, 2006, pp. 4–10), which means that an expertise is both an expression of a technocratic group whose knowledge is socially valorized, and an expression of the historical time when this legitimation gains traction in social life (Bonditti, 2014, p. 193).

In the case of military knowledge, this expertise is packaged and conveyed in routinized and standardized forms that can be aimed at those within and outside the armed forces, such as doctrinal documents and manuals, training courses, and social communication efforts; and it is constantly produced and updated through the consolidation of a variety of inputs (Wasinski, 2012), including practical experience in the field and the doctrine of “friendly nations.” There are also many ways in which the authority of this knowledge can be assembled and assessed—a central one being the attribution of particular tasks to these forces, as well as the grounds on which this attribution is legitimized. Here, we are particularly interested in a realm of military expertise mobilized by the Brazilian military as part of the justification for their role in pandemic management: logistics.

The historical emergence of logistics as a privileged component of modern military strategy dates back at least to the late 19^th century. In that period, logistics gained prominence as a key enabler of military strategy and a determinant factor in the success of military campaigns. Especially after World War II, this knowledge of the “seemingly banal and technocratic management of the movement of stuff” was gradually incorporated into the private sector as a business science and became “a driving force of war and trade” (Cowen, 2014, p. 4).

Since then, the political effects of the expansion of logistical techniques onto multiple realms of social life have been receiving increasing critical engagement (Chua et al., 2018; Cowen, 2014; Schouten et al., 2019), ranging from the analysis of the role of third-party logistics firms on which humanitarian and development missions rely for delivering aid (Attewell, 2018; Ziadah, 2019); to the “logistical pathways that connect colonial warfare and domestic policing” through the circulation of armored vehicles (Denman, 2020). In light of these studies, logistics is no longer “reducible to a mundane science of cargo movement or a discrete industry among others”; instead, it is “better understood as a calculative rationality and a suite of spatial practices aimed at facilitating circulation—including, in its mainstream incarnations, the circulatory imperatives of capital and war” (Chua et al., 2018, p. 618). Its emergence and consolidation as a field of expertise over the last decades, in turn, is inseparable from the rise of a managerial perspective in which a range of activities that had traditionally been handled in isolation, such as purchasing, manufacturing, transportation, and warehousing, came to be conceived as part of the same “calculative frame” (Chua et al., 2018, p. 619). Humanitarian crisis response was not immune to those re-articulations, giving impulse to a “new technocratic science” (Ziadah, 2019, p. 13) that came to be increasingly organized under a logistics lens ⁷ aimed at optimizing supply-chains (cf. Attewell, 2018) through which aid is delivered.

For the Brazilian Army, “logistics” refers to both a “set of activities related to predicting and providing all sorts of resources that are needed for actions imposed by a strategy” and “a part of the art of war that deals with the planning and execution of activities that sustain the forces in the field, through the procurement and provision of all sorts of means and through the procurement and provision of administrative and technical services” (Brazilian Army, 2018). As discussed in the previous section, this realm of expertise was central to military engagement in Operation COVID-19, which was meant to facilitate the coordination between the Armed Forces and the civilian government agencies they would support, in tasks such as the provision and transportation of medical and food supplies across the country. As such, the crystallization of a military expertise in logistics implies its claim as easily translatable both for times of war and peace—and for times of normality and crisis (Grigoli et al., 2020).

The development of military logistical capabilities blurring the war-peace and civil-military distinctions is not new to military professionalization programs. In Brazil, a French military mission was established in 1919 to support certain military capabilities. The presence of the French mission in the following two decades contributed to the establishment of “Intendência” as a Service divided into two main groups: one focused on war-time logistics, the other on management. Members of this Service began to be trained at a specialized academy that covered these logistical and managerial capabilities (the Escola de Intendência e Administração, in Portuguese), resulting in the progressive consolidation of “Intendência” as the “military specialization that had grown the most in almost 20 years” (Pereira, 2020, p. 46639).

After World War II, this military branch has undergone important transformations in Brazil, becoming the subject of increasing US military influence. During the Cold War, the country’s Military Assistance program to Third World countries had its focus on managerial skills intensified (US Congress, 1970, p. 107). At the same time, counterinsurgency doctrines have helped consolidate, in various Latin American countries, a form of professionalization that promoted military intervention in public administration and internal order. For Stepan (2001, p. 27), the contact with American and French writings on counterinsurgency amounted to a “new professionalism” that further blurred the boundary between political and military skills, contributing to “military-political managerialism and role expansion.” In Brazil, these military-political managerial practices were expressed, at the time, not only by the series of military dictators who led the government between 1964 and 1985, but also by the occupation of a wide range of public management positions in ministries as varied as Communications, Education, Culture, and Labor (Mathias, 2003).

Throughout the years, Brazilian military professionals have increasingly sought the branches specialized in managerial skills. At the Agulhas Negras Military Academy (AMAN, in Portuguese), ⁸ for instance, cadets must choose the specialization they will pursue in their careers, and the ones with higher grades get to choose first. Between 1998 and 2012, Sá Costa (2020, pp. 174–175) found that the first vacancies to be chosen were, on average, the branches that provided logistical support regarding weapons, ammunition, and equipment (Quadro de Material Bélico) and the one that handled general logistics (Serviço de Intendência), ensuring the supply of food, equipment, clothing, transportation, financial administration, and internal control, amongst others.

Importantly, this valorization is itself the expression of a context of widespread privileging—in Brazil and globally—of the managerial expertise to solve social problems. Indeed, it takes place amid important public management reforms initiated in Brazil in the second half of the 1990s, mainly under the influence of “New Public Management” (NPM). ⁹ As a theory of Public Administration, it seeks to instill effectiveness and efficiency in government practices through lessons drawn from the business domain and managerial principles, such as defining goals according to timeframes distributed along short, medium, and long run, standardizing performance reporting among governmental agencies, and assessing policies in light of a set of validated indicators and a cost-benefit rationale (Andion, 2012, p. 8).

All Brazilian state bureaucracies, including the Armed Forces, were involved in reforms triggered by this new model of public administration. In the case of the Brazilian Army, in 2003, the military approved the Excellence Program on Management (Programa de Excelência Gerencial do Exército Brasileiro, in Portuguese), which, as in subsequent reforms, ¹⁰ pushed for the adoption of new managerial principles and national and international standards on performance measurement and management excellence. Among the several spheres of action addressed in the Program, a strong emphasis was placed on logistics, conceived not only as a key area to optimize available resources, reduce costs, and improve performance, but also as the domain whereby excellence would give impulse to other military specialization areas (Braz, 2004). Since then, updating the logistics doctrine and implementing an integrated approach to logistics ¹¹ became a priority for the Brazilian Army (Braz, 2004).

More recently, this perspective gained additional substance with “Project for the Nation: Brazil in 2035,” launched in May 2022 by three institutes led by prominent Brazilian Generals—Instituto Sagres, Instituto General Villas-Bôas, and Instituto Federalista. Based on a prospective scenarios’ methodology, the Project seeks to offer a national strategy in response to multiple challenges concerning security, development, and well-being (Instituto Sagres et al., 2022, p. 47). For Makrakis (2022), the Project is the most recent expression of a military managerialism ¹² trend initially developed in the United States, one that fuses “managing” (optimization of limited resources in a context of competition), “commanding,” and “governing” and places the military in a privileged position to solve or alleviate social problems facing the future of the nation.

As we have seen in this section, the Brazilian military claims to expertise in logistics are an expression of a long-term and widespread valorization (both in terms of Brazilian bureaucratic agencies and of global trends) of a rationale that offers logistics as a means to optimize the mobilization and distribution of resources when providing solutions to social problems. It is in this sense that the historical processes here analyzed have been conditions of possibility for the expansion of military roles observed not only in their occupation of positions traditionally understood as of civilian authority, but also in the normalization of their role in managing the provision and circulation of various supplies throughout the country in contexts of crisis.

In the next section, we land this discussion on a reflection about how it affects the main frames through which the critique of militarization has been articulated in the literature on civil-military relations. Our purpose is to identify the limits of this literature’s critiques in grasping the discursive re-articulation of the military as managerial experts, as well as the conditions for the emergence and endurance of the rationale of which that claim is an expression.

For a Critique of Militarization in View of Managerial Expertise

In the last few decades, the tasks constituting the “proper” mission of military forces in the region have been the object of numerous discussions, especially after the end of the military regimes in the Southern Cone countries. In the so-called re-democratization period in Brazil, the repeated deployment of military forces in public security policies has fueled debates about the implications of professionals socialized in war-making being mobilized against their own population. ¹³ Nevertheless, the military has been increasingly involved in much more than public security operations, including disaster relief, humanitarian assistance, peacekeeping missions, and health management, as seen in the previous sections. This expanding role has gradually justified increases in defense spending (see Castro, 2010; Santos, 2004; Winand & Saint-Pierre, 2007), raising alarms regarding the possible translation of the military budgetary strength into political leverage in those contexts.

As previously shown, the COVID-19 pandemic has given new breath to discussions about the proper roles of the military in times of peace. These debates have shaped various forms of critique of militarization. In the field of civil-military relations studies, we identify three frames that have shaped much of the critique of this kind of expansion: (i) calls for a “professionalization” that sends the military back to barracks and submits them to civilian control; (ii) calls for military deployments to be restricted to realms of activity that are congruent with their preparation, even if beyond defense from external threats; and (iii) discussions focused on how contemporary military role expansion in activities that do not entail the use of force re-articulate conceptions of threats to democracy. While these frames work as an analytical tool for our reflection on prevailing perspectives in the field of civil-military relations, we acknowledge that there are overlaps between the works associated with each frame and that there are relevant differences within each group.

The first frame that has frequently shaped the critique of militarization interprets the presence of the military in positions traditionally understood as civilian (e.g., in internal missions such as public security operations or political offices) as a symptom of a lack of civilian control mechanisms, which needs to be remedied for the compliance with a core civil–military relations prescription. Here, the concept of military professionalization has been crucial. For Samuel Huntington (1957), a canonical reference for this body of works, the professionalization of the armed forces would be essential to ensure their obedience to civilian control; and this professionalization would include their specialization in armed combat against external enemies. At the core of this prescription is a concern with the civil-military problématique: the challenge of reconciling “a military strong enough to do anything the civilians ask them to with a military subordinate enough to do only what civilians authorize them to do” (Feaver, 1996, p. 149).

Since Huntington’s work, however, the relationship between military professionalization and engagement in internal missions has been the subject of more nuanced analyses, revealing the limits of this “solution” to social ordering problems. After all, in many instances, this professionalization—including the principles of hierarchy, centralized command, discipline, and esprit de corps—could in fact contribute to a military disposition to intervene in politics. In other words, there is a paradox here: if military professionalization programs were conceived as a solution to the problematization of their participation in politics in mid-19^th century Latin America, their insulation created the conditions for a microcosmos of the “perfect society” inside the barracks, projected to the social fabric as a whole through the military coups that marked the second half of the 20^th century (Rouquié, 1984). Moreover, as seen in the previous section, processes of military professionalization—including the transnational flows of assistance and training it involves—have been central in the very expansion of military missions, including the consolidation of logistics and other managerial skills as part of a set of capabilities as useful in war as in “peaceful” crises (Passos, 2023; Penido et al., 2021; Stepan, 2001). Therefore, it is paramount to move beyond the prescription of professionalizing military actors as a way of sustaining the civil–military distinction.

A second frame often found in the critique of militarization highlights the possibility of the military effectively performing tasks other than defense against external threats. Effectiveness and efficiency are introduced as additional criteria, alongside civilian control, against which military deployments and their effects on democracy should be judged (Bruneau & Matei, 2008). As an expression of such analytical move, Pion-Berlin (2016) assesses the performance of Latin American military forces in defense, internal security, natural disasters, and social programs. In each case, he considered “the institution’s innate organizational strengths that could prove useful in non-combat situations: its coordination, its command and control, its national reach and geographical dispersion, its capacity to move huge numbers of men, materials, and machines, and its diversified skill set” (Pion-Berlin, 2016, p. 183). He argues that “there has to be a fundamental congruence between the organization’s abilities and the functions it is asked to perform” (Pion-Berlin, 2016, pp. 182–183). This argument would provide a flexible alternative to the “narrow Huntingtonian definition of professionalism, which has militaries pursuing only sovereignty missions where they put their war-fighting prowess on display” (Pion-Berlin, 2016, pp. 182–183).

The engagement of Latin American military actors in response to COVID-19 has been the object of recent discussions reflecting this second frame. Passos and Acácio (2021), for instance, argue that some of the tasks taken up by the military are more suitable because they draw on existing military organizational capabilities, such as border security, logistics, medical care, and the use of the defense industry. Other tasks, in turn, would be potentially problematic, such as “the appointment of military officers for crisis-management positions or the involvement of the military in policing missions to enforce stay-at-home orders,” since they might lead to “repercussions such as a higher potential for human rights violations and serious implications for democratic control over the military, compromising the quality of democratic regimes” (Passos & Acácio, 2021).

This second frame of critique, therefore, acknowledges that military forces (in Latin America and beyond) are not only deployed in non-combat missions, but also prepared for them; and aims to offer nuanced tools for making sense of their performance. However, the coexistence of the unproblematized silence about Operation COVID-19, on the one hand, and the critique of a militarized Ministry of Health, on the other hand, reveals that the troops' mobilization in the first case could be deemed effective on the grounds of previous military training and experience and, therefore, normalized. Left out of this picture is the fact that both engagements actually rely on a single rationality that came to increasingly valorize a military expertise of managerial contours as the source of solutions for social problems, as evidenced in similar discursive justifications for the expansion of military missions in the health domain, as we have claimed in the first section.

A third relevant frame mobilized in contemporary literature on the expansion of military roles in Latin America and beyond connects this phenomenon with its effects to our conceptions of threats to democracy. For Akkoyunlu and Lima (2021), this degree of expanded presence of military officers in civilian institutions represents a “stealth military intervention”—which, unlike the past civil-military dictatorship in Brazil, has not involved breaking the law, suspending the democratic process, or overthrowing the government. In a related movement, Rodrigues et al. (2021) see the military presence in the Health Ministry during the pandemic as a way of democratic erosion by deference, which might lead to an increasing military influence in policymaking more broadly. For Harig (2021), in turn, the Brazilian context merits scholarly attention because the civil-military relations literature has largely focused on threats to democracy emanating from the armed forces, but still needs to explain recent processes of political leaders, military elites and social approval increasingly drawing the military into politics. This militarization “on demand” has also called the attention of Pion-Berlin and Acácio (2020, pp. 152–153), for whom the expanded military presence in Latin America in general (and more acutely in Brazil) does not mean a return to the past coups that marked many of these countries in the second half of the 20^th century, once it often takes place because of civilian control rather than in spite of it.

Moreover, there have been concerns about how military action in realms understood as civilians may affect the capacities of non-military bureaucracies. In this vein, Acacio et al. (2023, p. 3) have noted that a risk associated with disaster relief-related tasks lies in the potential over-reliance on the military, which would discourage investment in civilian agencies and give the armed forces an upper hand in negotiating larger defense budget shares. However, they warn against sweeping generalization on the dangers of militarization, noting that “[w]hen societies have urgent needs for relief in the face of catastrophe, soldiers can and do perform worthy functions” (Acacio et al., 2023, p. 17), as long as there is adequate civilian control and oversight. Under these terms, while the tasks undertaken in the Operation COVID-19 might be a suitable use of military capabilities, the presence of military officers in key public administration positions can entail harmful consequences—an understanding that gathers elements associated with both the second and third frames discussed here. Finally, Jenne and Martínez (2022) highlight how the expansion of military roles affects democratic standards and reduces the legitimacy of civilian actors. For them, the prolonged internal use of the armed forces (i) challenges the rule of law when domestic deployments contravene existing legal frameworks; (ii) prevents pressures for armed forces reform; (iii) hampers civilian capacities; and (iv) undermines public confidence in democratic systems (Jenne & Martínez, 2022, p. 81). This view contests pragmatic justifications for the internal deployment of the armed forces which frequently emphasize the military logistical capacities and the structural financial and institutional limitations of Latin American countries (Jenne & Martínez, 2022, p. 81).

This plural literature on the effects of military role expansion on democratic governance offers important insights on the political stakes of militarization, going beyond both the mere assumption that a natural civil/military boundary should be reasserted and the disregard of this boundary in favor of the criteria of effectiveness. It connects debates on civil-military relations and broader debates on democratic erosion, backsliding, and governance, going beyond a concern about the risk of coups in order to further theorize the place of military actors in democratic settings. However, what is generally left out of these discussions is the difference that particular types of expertise claims make on this relationship—for instance, the effects of the fact that, in contexts such as the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil, military roles are not only being expanded, but that this expansion is grounded in claims to (an increasingly valorized) managerial expertise.

In our view, the three frames presented above share a common assumption for problematizing expressions of militarization: the need to tame the military when they participate in spheres understood as civilian realms. In the first case, this control entailed restricting the military to the realm of defense, and promoting professionalization to avoid other kinds of deployment. In the second frame, internal missions emerge as potentially suitable – as long as the military is controlled by strong civilian oversight mechanisms. In other words, while additional criteria are proposed for assessing the performance of military actors in non-combat missions, a certain conception of a “war ethos” characterizing the military continues to pose the final limits against which each operation must be assessed. In the third frame, discussions of these effects are often grounded on important assumptions about the “nature of democracy” itself, but these assumptions are often left implicit rather than directly engaged; and little attention is dedicated to how these assumptions are affected by changes in how the expansion of military roles is discursively justified.

Now, it is certainly an important move to keep track of the expanding tasks performed by the military and to diagnose their effects on democracies. As we have seen in this section, however, there is an underlying assumption that the problem of the military relies on an imaginary based on its professional preparation as an expert on the use of violence—hence the need for civilian control to avoid potential human rights violations. Contrastingly, as processes analyzed in the previous section testify, the professionalization programs of the military have come to historically reproduce a managerial rationale, especially in the logistics realm, as an expertise which is more suitable to the “needs” of emerging scenarios of “crisis.” Therefore, leaving the “war ethos” as an unproblematized category at the root of the “problem of the military” has important consequences for the critical work against militarization.

As we have also shown in the previous sections, there is an emerging pattern in the regime of justification that places the military as the discursive authority to deal with an expanding range of contemporary social problems, especially in situations perceived as crises: a discourse grounded on a managerial expertise centered on logistics that can be readily deployed both in times of war and peace. In this sense, the absence, identified in this literature, of an attention to historical changes in the justification of contemporary military role expansion risks limiting the potential of this literature for grasping the sociopolitical conditions for militarization, as the place of managerial expertise and what it does to the character of the military’s “war ethos” is missed. In other words, if militarization is problematized only by (implicit or explicit) reference to the use of violence as the distinguishing mark of military socialization, the resulting critique may fail to address changes and nuances in the specific expertise claims on which different expressions of militarization are presently grounded.

Finally, and stimulating avenues for future discussions on this matter, the managerial discursive authority we have analyzed in this article is often unproblematized because seen as technical, and not political—again, evoking one of the tenets guiding our imaginary of civil-military relations in democratic contexts. Digging into the terms of the “problem of militarization,” we argue that one must not only consider this claim to a military managerial expertise, but also inscribe it into a transnational and durable rationality this discourse incorporates and from which it benefits. Here, we can learn from debates in critical logistics studies that the historical transformations allowing for state bureaucracies—including the armed forces—to expand and strengthen integrated logistics knowledge and apparatus always entail some kind of reorganization of power dynamics and, therefore, of political order itself. In fact, logistics and political order co-produce one another, in the sense that ensuring circulation always requires intervention, and political orders are always reliant on logistics (Schouten et al., 2019, p. 786).

Final Remarks

By looking at the discourse through which the participation of the military in managing the pandemic came to be legitimized in Brazil, we have sought to grasp the terms with which the military credentials were presented so as to justify their role both in Operation COVID-19 and in positions of authority in the Ministry of Health. The archives we have explored reveal the emergence of a managerial rationality offering the cement for the military to be increasingly claimed as indispensable, especially in crisis contexts. As we have seen, their mobilization in both cases has become admitted on the ground of their logistical expertise—not as a presence of a “war ethos” breaching the civil-military distinction. In order to grasp this expression of militarization, we have thus proposed an attention to how the “war ethos” is reshaped in contexts where military role expansion has been increasingly grounded not on their expertise in the use of violence, but on their characterization as “good managers,” as bearers of an expertise claimed as efficient and useful for both times of war and peace—that is, for a wide range of “crises.”

Considering that, in contexts such as the management of the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil, many military professionals have been occupying civil positions or performing tasks associated with the civilian domain based on their managerial expertise, we must ask ourselves: if the war ethos is insufficient for interpreting these recent dynamics, then how can we rephrase the problem of militarization? Rather than offering answers to this question, we are here interested in posing the challenge to the critique of these phenomena, aiming at strengthening reflections on what such problematization can possibly mean in the present.

By stimulating a critical engagement with the assumptions anchoring the problem of militarization, we can grasp different contemporary expressions of militarism—understood as “the penetration of social relations in general by military relations” (Shaw, 2012). After all, military claims to a managerial expertise can only circulate effectively insofar as they are lent discursive authority by other social actors. This analytical disposition allows us to capture what historical transformations came to make about the “military ethos”—perhaps not despite the war ethos (since the military have also been increasingly mobilized in public security operations), but alongside it.

Such endeavor involves investigating what is reminiscent, in the present context, of previous assumptions upon which the problem of militarization has historically relied. A key perhaps is found in what Cardoso (2019, p. 54) terms a “managerial-militarized model,” resulting from the encounter of the authoritarian, hierarchical tradition of military institutions with an organizational logic inspired by the private management literature and training. As an illustration, a future avenue for investigation could explore how centralized command, hierarchy, and discipline (as constitutive traits of military professionalization programs) are transformed by this encounter. Similarly, it seems promising to engage with how the managerial expertise itself affects what we have come to know as the “war ethos.”

The critique here articulated also opens an avenue to discuss an emergent militarization trend: the expanding managing role of the military in disaster response. Some may see the partnership between humanitarian agencies and the military essentially through problem-solving lenses in which, for instance, interagency cooperation is evaluated in terms of the efficiency gains in a supply chain. However, debates should also include interrogations about the consequences of a military humanitarianism growingly legitimated to technical claims of a comparatively better logistic expertise. In these cases, how does the enmeshment of private, military, and humanitarian logistics rationales affect conceptions of the importance of the civil–military boundary to democracies? How does the engagement of the armed forces in managing humanitarian crises sanitize important disputes on the limits of military role expansion in contemporary times?

Finally, as previously noted, expertise is relational, which means claims of the military as the privileged providers of solutions in contexts of crisis can only gain traction as long as they enjoy discursive authority among civilians. Therefore, it seems promising to explore the broader social changes that enable the legitimation of military presence while displacing its usual association with war—a process that crucially affects the possibilities for disputing the spaces that are gradually occupied by the military in politics.