Internal versus external security.
Regardless of who rules, large countries can afford to separate external and internal security functions (even if internal control functions predominate under authoritarian regimes). In fact, given the logic of power concentration and institutional centralization of coercive control that defines them, authoritarian regimes do not completely separate internal police and external military roles. Instead they prefer to overlap (if not fuse) the two (especially when confronted by mobilized internal dissent). In some cases the overlap or fusing is accompanied by an expansion of intelligence services with paramilitary capabilities, most of which are directed against domestic dissent. Conversely, small countries often find that the best way to achieve economies of scale in military matters is to combine some internal and security functions, such as through a national gendarmarie that merges police and paramilitary functions (border control, organized crime interdiction, counter-terrorism, etc.). However, a political problem makes the issue a bit more problematic for small democracies. That is because the combination of internal and external security roles may suit the political needs and threat perceptions of small country authoritarian regimes, but is at odds with the liberal democratic tradition with regards to the management of organized violence by the state.To wit: democratic regimes of all sizes prefer to administratively and legally separate internal police from external military security functions as part of the decentralization of economic, political and normative power that defines them as a system of rule.
This has traditionally extended into the field of intelligence, although some small democracies such as New Zealand have historically centralized their intelligence gathering services as a matter of economy given their abject reliance on foreign patrons for external intelligence provision. More recently, some liberal democracies, led by the United States, have adopted more integrated approaches towards intelligence gathering in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks and subsequent acts of rightwing/white extremist terrorism. For post-authoritarian regimes such as those of Chile and Portugal, the tension between the urge to centralize internal and external military and intelligence functions versus the normative preference for democratic decentralization became one of the major issues of civil-military relations after the restoration of electoral rule.
Regardless of size, the external/internal division of the combat function versus police duties has been the source of debate with regard to its impact on the ability to fight and win external wars. Some analysts believe that the ability to achieve victory in external wars is not a function of regime type, which means that the external versus internal security dichotomy only matters with regard to domestic control issues. What is most important for victory in conventional war is the relative size of the adversaries, specifically large size (see Desch, 1999). For other authors military preoccupation with domestic security, especially those such as the counter-insurgency operations that was the focus of Latin American national security doctrines in the 1960s-1980s, adversely impact of their ability to carry out external military missions. Here the diversion of resources towards internal warfare, especially when carried out by military authoritarian regimes with political agendas that involve the military as an institution remaining in power for extended periods of time, is a certain recipe for external combat weakness. The Greek invasion of Cyprus in 1973 and 1982 Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands, done for diversionary reasons by military regimes confronting rising socioeconomic unrest after extended periods of internal repression, are considered emblematic in that regard.
It should be noted that the argument in favor of internal mission orientation being a drain on the external combat function is based upon the modern experience of recent military authoritarian, not democratic regimes. Even then, those who see no significance to the internal/external combat distinction point to other authoritarian regimes—the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Vietnam, as well as Nazi Germany and Japan prior to 1942—to argue that the issue is problematic only when the military as an institution occupies the highest political decision-making roles in the regime. Military colonization of the state apparatus outside of its areas of professional expertise, coupled with the politicization of the officer corps that inevitably entails, is widely considered to be deleterious to military professionalism, particularly with regard to the external combat function. If for no other reason than this, many authoritarian regimes as well as all democratic regimes hold axiomatic that the armed forces as an institution, regardless of strategic focus, will subordinate to civilian political authority. The Peoples Republic of China, Cuba, Iran and contemporary Russia conform to this norm.
Whatever the truth of the matter with regard to the internal/external combat orientation and conventional warfare fighting ability, separation of external combat and internal security functions under democratic regimes is a normative preference rather than a practical requirement, even when logistical support infrastructures overlap to a significant degree. It is by no means an immutable norm, since the distinction between combat and police functions can be (and has been) blurred by democratic regimes in the event of major internal unrest or conflict. In fact, concern with internal threats can and are often a focus of major attention by democratic regimes, as evidenced by Portuguese military concern well into the 1980s with so-called “indirect threats” (Marxist third columns) after the abortive Communist government take-over of 1975. As a result, analysis of threat perception herein will not be confined to externally focused assessments, and will include internal threat assessment as well. But by and large, the combat function of militaries in democracies is an externally focused enterprise. After all, policing is about law enforcement and disciplining those who would violate universal standards of mores, norms and acceptable codes of social conduct; military combat is about killing foreign enemies of the state. Rather than maintaining domestic law and order, it is in carrying out the latter task where small democracies are at a disadvantage.
Because of the benefits conferred by size, the combat role of the armed forces in small democracies (demographically defined as those with populations under 20 million) is generally limited to being the junior partners of multi- or bi-national external military alliances, rather than the ultimate guarantors of national self-defense. Armed forces in small democracies most often serve as territorial and border patrols, be it at sea in the case of maritime nations such as Chile, Portugal and New Zealand, or on land as in the case of Chile and Portugal, or as an internal reserve should civil disorder assume mass proportions unmanageable by the police (as in New Zealand). For most small democracies, contributions to larger security alliances pay dividends in the form of national defense being guaranteed by collective security reciprocities within those alliances. Some may choose to enhance value per soldier in the form of combat specialization, to include special operations (such as the New Zealand Special Air Services, or SAS, which often are attached to British or Australian SAS units when deployed overseas). Others may prefer to deploy troops for humanitarian and police operations such as nation building and peacekeeping under multinational aegis (where New Zealand has extensive experience with “blue helmet” deployments). In such missions the skills utilized are more akin to civil defense and disaster relief infrastructure. In any event, the nature of these commitments and missions differ, which brings up the question of political justification, mission definition, operational control–and of mission creep.
There is a two-fold external orientation among the militaries of small democratic regimes. The armed forces of small democracies tied to formal military alliance structures like NATO or ASEAN tend to specialize in defined combat roles (such as long range patrol and tracking) as part of joint force integration with their larger partners. In doing so they respond to the political justifications for the use of force offered by their larger allies, and seldom have their specific national interests at stake or used as a primary rationale for the deployment of troops abroad. This is sold to domestic constituencies as the necessity of burden sharing, where the protection afforded by larger allies is the return on the investment of troops in the larger conflicts those allies may be involved in.
On the other hand, the armed forces of small democracies with independence of mind and a non-aligned posture often seek refuge under the multilateral umbrella of United Nations mandates. Participation in “blue helmet” exercises such as peacekeeping and nation-building gives reason for keeping troops on the payroll, thereby offering a bureaucratic rationale of self-preservation for the military as an institution. Here the political justification for the external deployment of troops responds to the broader concerns of the international community as expressed through the United Nations or regional security agencies. It has a basis in self-interest because it reaffirms notions of mutual self-defense that smaller states embrace as a deterrent against the unilateral depredations of larger states. It also reaffirms the role of the armed forces in providing for the well being of others as well as being the last line of national defense. It is seen to encourage military professionalism via collaborative exposure to and interaction with other military forces.
The international role of the armed forces in such cases is mostly directed towards engineering, medical and police support, often in concert with civilian non-governmental or multinational organizations. These not only can be deployed internally in the case of an emergency, but also serve as human resource training for skilled labor inputs to the domestic market (the two sides of its internal support role). The combat function, although trained for, is clearly subordinate to the humanitarian and other non-lethal functions of the military apparatus.
Next: The Military Politics “Partial Regime.”