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The commander of the army, general Edson Leal Pujolsaid Thursday, that the Brazilian army It does not have sufficient resources to guarantee the sovereignty of the country and cited antiaircraft defense as one of the points in which the Army’s capacity must improve. Pujol ruled out that there was any real threat to Brazil and said he has acted to prevent political parties from entering the barracks. He defended the creation of a National Guard, which would assume functions, such as combating environmental crimes in the Amazon, which today are transferred to the Army, which he called “Ipiranga post.”
The statements were made during an act of the Institute for the Reform of Relations between the State and the Company, which was attended by former Defense Ministers. Raul Jungmann and the Office of Institutional Security, general Sergio Etchegoyen. “General Etchegoyen asked me if there was any country on our continent that could be a threat to Brazil. I say. Not today, but we don’t know in 3-4 years. That’s why we do our strategic planning ”.
The event took place two days Jair bolsonaro that is, when addressing the relations between Brazil and the future management of Joe biden in the USA, that when “the saliva runs out, it has to have gunpowder.” For Pujol, as there is no immediate threat to our borders, society and politicians leave national politics as a lower priority.
When Jungmann asked him about the participation of the Armed Forces in politics, Pujol said: “What I have to say is that in these two years the Ministry of Defense and the three Forces have dealt exclusively and exhaustively with military matters.” And he took the opportunity to make a diagnosis. “We need to significantly increase our operational capacity.” For him, the Armed Forces – and the Army – are proportionally the smallest in the world in relation to the size of our territory and population and in relation to the geostrategic and economic importance of Brazil.
“We are a reserve of food for the next decades and of water and strategic minerals that humanity will need.” He compared the total number of fighters as less than that of small European countries. “We are very far from what Brazil needs for the Armed Forces to fulfill their constitutional missions.”
Pujol completed the reasoning by defending the Army’s distancing from political parties. “Our theme is military, training and employment. Political problems? We do not enter areas that do not concern us. We do not want to be part of the politics of the government or the National Congress, much less we want politics to enter our barracks ”. For the general, the fact that the military “are eventually called to assume government positions is the exclusive decision of the Executive.”
This was the first time that Pujol spoke publicly about the contamination of the barracks by politics, mainly by Bolsonarismo.
The general was also asked about “foreign greed” in relation to the Amazon. “Brazil has always been positioned and the military always think that the Amazon is ours. We can not give up. What we have preserved from him in these 500 years is incomparably superior to what happened on other continents ”. Pujol said that the Armed Forces have multiplied the presence of soldiers from the three forces in the Amazon. “Seeking to increase our capacity to defend the sovereignty of our Amazon.”
Strategic planning
Pujol defended the Army’s strategic planning and cited as an example of new challenges and cited the example of the use of drones against armored forces in the recent conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia. “Conventional combat has not been abandoned by any nation in the world, but there are new demands, such as cyberwar, the war of the future,” said Pujol.
He defended 17 strategic Army projects, such as the Guaraní armored program and the Astro 2020 system, with the Brazilian rocket and tactical missile with a range of 300 kilometers with “a dispersion of eight meters in relation to the target.” “We have to equip the Army with antiaircraft defense capabilities, which are far from facing threats. We need a program to develop the structure of our air defense. ”
He said that he believed the country should have a bigger army. “But in the short and medium term, we cannot escape the budget (the ceiling). “According to figures from Pujol, the Ministry of Defense saw its 2012 budget decrease from R $ 19 billion to around R $ 10.1 billion in 2019.” Next year the budget will be 11.7 billion, even with pandemic problems. ”
The commander said that the solution to the lack of resources is to increase the number of temporary soldiers, in addition to increasing the time that part of them remain in the Force, from eight to ten years. “We can only increase with extra-budgetary resources, an EmgeDefesa (reference to Emgepron, the naval projects company), or through the creation of a defense fund, as approved by Argentina.
National Guard
Finally, the commander said that he considered that there was an exaggeration in the Public Order Guarantee operations. “The problem begins there with the prediction of the Constitution. Our main business is the defense of the Homeland, but our work has been fundamental to fulfill other missions and the needs of the Brazilian nation ”. Pujol said, as an example, that he did not see solutions to problems such as the fires in the Amazon that did not involve the Armed Forces.
“We are concerned that Operation Brazil Verde will become another Operation Pipa, in which the Army has been employed on an ’emergency’ basis since 1998.” According to Pujol, he raised this concern with the Minister of Defense, General Fernando Azevedo e Silva, when it was decided that the Army should participate in Operation Brazil Verde 2. According to him, the idea of the vice president, Hamilton Mourão, is that Brazil needs a guard strong forester or a national guard to carry out these missions. But as long as this structure does not exist or the Federal Police does not have enough personnel to guard our borders, “they will inevitably call us”. “Ideally, we can focus solely on the preparation and use of the troops.”
Currently, the Army has 28,000 men in Operation Covid, 5,000 in Operation Brazil Verde 2, 3,000 in Operation Pipa. “And so many others in Operation Acolhida, in Roraima,” he said. “But I don’t see any solution in the short term due to our governance structure and the size of the Army. Some things are just calling Posto Ipiranga, ”said Pujol. “On Sunday we will participate in more than 600 municipalities in guaranteeing the vote and counting the elections.”
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