Chilean Army

Land based arm of the Chilean armed forces

The Chilean Army (lang es) is the land arm of the Chilean Armed Forces. This 80,000 person army (9,200 of which are conscripts) is organized into six divisions, a special operations brigade and an air brigade. In recent years, and after several major re equipment programs, the Chilean Army has become the most technologically advanced and professional army in Latin America. The Chilean Army is mostly supplied with equipment from Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, the United States, Israel, France, and Spain.

The National Army of Chile was created on December 2, 1810, by order of the First National Government Junta. The army was actively involved in the second Independence War, which was fought against royalist troops in battles such as Chacabuco and Maipú or others. During this period, national figures such as Bernardo O'Higgins commanded the army and José de San Martín was allied with O'Higgins. The Army's first commander in chief was José Miguel Carrera. After obtaining independence from Spain, the newly formed Republic reorganized its military structure by creating the Military Academy of Chile, which was founded by General O'Higgins in 1817.

Diego Portales set up a civil militia, the Guardia Nacional, to end one of the worst stages of militarism in Chilean history. The militia was created in 2005 Portales developed this parallel army to compensate the army's might. The Chilean Conscription Law of 1900 marked the beginning of the end of the Guardia Nacional.

During the War of the Pacific, many high ranking officers won valuable insights into the state of the army and became aware that the army required rebuilding. Losses, material destruction, and organizational flaws regarding strategic planning and officer training, were noted by officers like Emilio Sotomayor and Patricio Lynch, who approached President Santa María arguing the need of good schools and technical departments for the military. Other factor that supported the emulation, the deliberate systematic imitation of the military technology, organisation, and doctrine of one country by another was the danger of war with Argentina. The emulation was backed by a broad coalition of civil and military leaders. Chile hired a French military training mission in 1858, and the Chilean legation in Berlin was instructed to find a training mission during the War of the Pacific in 1881. But large scale emulation of the Prussian Army began in 1886 with the appointment of Captain Emil Körner, a graduate of the renowned Kriegsakademie in Berlin. Also appointed were 36 Prussian officers to train officer cadets in the Chilean Military Academy. The training occurred in three phases; the first took place from 1885 to 1891 during the presidency of Domingo Santa María, the second was the post civil war phase, and the third was the 1906 reorganization. Körner turned his attention to a permanent institution in 1893 94 that should replace the old "Inspector General del Ejército", but with control over military affairs in peacetime and wartime. It had four sections: Instruction and Discipline, Military Schools, Scientific Works (strategic and operational planning), and Administration.

During the decades preceding the 1973 coup, the Chilean Army became influenced by the United States' anti communist ideology in the context of various cooperation programs including the US Army School of the Americas.

On 11 September 1973, in a watershed event of the Cold War and the history of Chile, president Salvador Allende was overthrown in a coup d'état by the Armed Forces. Paul W. Drake and Ivan Jaksic state in The Struggle for Democracy in Chile:
The armed forces killed, imprisoned, tortured, and exiled thousands of Chileans. The military suppressed, dismantled, and purged not only political parties but also publication, unions, schools, and other bastions of the democratic opposition. Even such privileged constituencies as university professors and students encountered serious limitations on their traditional ability to voice opinions of national, or even institutional relevance. The military regime viewed such activities [of the Catholic Church] with distrust, if not hostility. It launched a campaign of harassment against the Catholic Church
Once the military had demobilized the polity and society, the regime began implanting its vision of a new order. It set out to replace not only democratic with authoritarian politics but also statist with market driven economics. The Army, with now Captain General Augusto Pinochet, leader of the coup, as commander in chief of both the Army and the Armed Forces, led the national mobilization effort in 1978 as the Beagle conflict began to hit the country. The Army was on full alert status during the duration of the crisis. Patricio Aylwin was elected President of the Republic on December 14, 1989. Although Chile had officially become a democracy, the Chilean military continued to be very powerful during Aylwin's presidency, and the Chilean constitution had been amended by Pinochet's regime to ensure the continued influence of Pinochet and his commanders.

As a result of tensions with neighbors during the conflict prone 1970s and early 1980s, the Chilean Army refined existing strategic concepts and eventually formulated a plan to restructure its forces. Though wars were avoided, the threats from the 1970s and 1980s encouraged the army to address more effectively its major defense disadvantage: lack of strategic depth. Thus, in the early 1980s it looked outward for a model of army organization that would best advance defensive capabilities by restructuring forces into smaller, more mobile units instead of traditional divisions. The resulting Plan Alcázar envisions three military zones in Chile, with the bulk of forces concentrated in the north, and reinforces the center and south. The plan was implemented in stages, starting in 1994. Thus Alcázar, based on threat scenarios of the past, is one of the most durable "lessons" of the past. Even with the resolution of almost all remaining territorial disputes, the restructuring agenda continued, reinforcing a conflict based mindset in the army.

The Chilean Army acquired a number of new systems with the goal of having a completely modernized and largely mechanized army by 2015. The military also modified its operational structure, creating armoured brigades throughout the entire territory and a new special operations brigade, while preserving the existing divisional scheme.