Between 1980 and World War II, South America experienced the unsettling first stages of modernization. During this half-century of economic, political, and social change, the armies of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Peru underwent a process of professionalization as European military missions transformed their officer corps into copies of French and German officialdom. In so doing, European officers inculcated their ideals and values, thought and self-perception?their professionalism?in countries historically vulnerable to militarism. ø Based mainly on a comprehensive examination of European and South American military literature, this study describes the significant contribution of European military professionalism to South American professional militarism. Nunn not only details the workings of the French missions in Brazil and Peru and the German missions in Argentina and Chile, but gives great emphasis to the themes and topics that most concerned the European mentors and their overseas disciples. He demonstrates convincingly that much of their professional literature was based on a yearning for an idealized past, discontent with an unsatisfactory present, and apprehension about a future that might threaten the most cherished of traditional officer-corps principles and aims. ø The study ends with World War II, yet is makes an important contribution to our understanding of South American history since 1940. The military organizations of the four countries considered here confronted what they perceived to be the major problems of their modernizing nations with solutions learned from their European teachers. Since 1940, they have resorted to golpes de estado?most notably the post-1964 institutional golpes?in order to impose forcibly some of those same solutions. Thus, despite increased U.S. influence, many of the programs implemented by military regimes in the latter half of this century bear the indelible stamp of "yesterday's soldiers."

The book tackles the subject of the military and politics in Latin America from a broad historical perspective, drawing on literature in the field and other information based on personal interviews with officers.

A visceral and unflinching memoir of a young Russian soldier’s experience in the Chechen wars. In 1995, Arkady Babchenko was an eighteen-year-old law student in Moscow when he was drafted into the Russian army and sent to Chechnya. It was the beginning of a torturous journey from naïve conscript to hardened soldier that took Babchenko from the front lines of the first Chechen War in 1995 to the second in 1999. He fought in major cities and tiny hamlets, from the bombed-out streets of Grozny to anonymous mountain villages. Babchenko takes the raw and mundane realities of war the constant cold, hunger, exhaustion, filth, and terror and twists it into compelling, haunting, and eerily elegant prose. Acclaimed by reviewers around the world, this is a devastating first-person account of war that brilliantly captures the fear, drudgery, chaos, and brutality of modern combat. An excerpt of One Soldier’s War was hailed by Tibor Fisher in The Guardian as “right up there with Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Michael Herr’s Dispatches.” Mark Bowden, bestselling author of Black Hawk Down, hailed it as “hypnotic and terrifying” and the book won Russia’s inaugural Debut Prize, which recognizes authors who write despite, not because of, their life circumstances. “If you haven’t yet learned that war is hell, this memoir by a young Russian recruit in his country’s battle with the breakaway republic of Chechnya, should easily convince you.” —Publishers Weekly

This book provides an authoritative history of the Brazilian army from the army’s overthrow of the monarchy in 1889 to its support of the coup that established Brazil’s first civilian dictatorship in 1937. The period between these two events laid the political foundations of modern Brazil—a period in which the army served as the core institution of an expanding and modernizing Brazilian state. The book is based on detailed research in Brazilian, British, American, and French archives, and on numerous interviews with surviving military and civilian leaders. It also makes extensive use of hitherto unused internal army documents, as well as of private correspondence and diaries. It is thus able to shed new light on the army’s personnel and ethos, on its ties with civilian elites, on the consequences of military professionalization, and on how the army reinvented itself after the collapse of its command structure in the crisis of 1930—a reinvention that allowed the army to become the backbone of the post-1937 dictatorship of Getulio Vargas.

The original essays collected in this book offer a comprehensive evaluation of realism as a theory of international relations.