A few weeks ago, at Florida International University, I presented to academics, analysts, and officials specialized in defense and hemispheric security an idea that defines the moment we are living: the extreme south of the continent is our starting point.
I framed it as a strategic reading of a global scenario that has transformed profoundly and durably.
The world has changed. And the very nature of the threats that states must face has changed. Today we coexist with structural competition among great powers, with hybrid threats that blur the lines between peace and war, with transnational actors operating on the margins of the interstate system, and with technological disputes that redefine the balance of power at an unprecedented speed.
That is the diagnosis shared today by the main international defense and security forums. And from there, Argentina must build its position.
A scenario that changes the questions
For decades, the debate on defense in our country rightly revolved around the role of military power in a democratic state. It was a necessary discussion that left valuable legal and institutional frameworks. But that debate belongs to the time that generated it.
The questions that the world poses to us today are different.
How do we protect critical energy infrastructure —Vaca Muerta, gas pipelines, offshore platforms— against state, paramilitary, or criminal threats? How do we guarantee sovereignty in the South Atlantic and Antarctica amid global competition for strategic resources? How do we confront influence operations, cyberattacks, and hybrid networks with instruments designed for another kind of conflict?
These are the scenarios that the defense ministries of the countries we reference are managing today. And these are the scenarios for which Argentina must be prepared.
The Argentine opportunity is real. Its geographical position, its availability of strategic natural resources, and its willingness to insert itself as a serious and predictable partner in the international system place it in a position of increasing relevance. At the Americas Shield conference, we clearly stated our aspirations: to lead the projection towards the Antarctic continent, to be the most solid logistical base to the south, and to assume concrete responsibilities in the protection of high-value objectives in the hemisphere.
Aspiring to that role demands coherence between words and capabilities.
What the transformation requires
When we talk about fine-tuning the Armed Forces, we usually think of equipment: planes, frigates, cyber defense systems. All of that matters. The arrival of the first F-16s, the operational integration with the United States Navy during the passage of the Nimitz aircraft carrier, the combined exercises with special forces at various points across the national territory are concrete signals of a direction that the country has taken and that should be sustained.
But the transformation goes beyond the operational level. A 21st-century armed force operates within a coherent institutional system, with regulatory frameworks that allow it to fulfill its functions effectively and with the controls that the rule of law demands.
And it also requires financing tools that meet the challenge. Decree No. 314/26 initiated the Argentine Military Adaptation and Reequipment Plan —Plan ARMA—, a tool aimed at generating additional and sustained funding sources for strategic reequipment projects. The ARMA Plan represents a qualitative leap in the way the Argentine state financially supports its Armed Forces, within the framework of fiscal responsibility that defines this administration.
In parallel, the operational functioning of the forces is fully guaranteed: rationing, fuel, maintenance, and essential expenditures for the development of military, logistical, and operational activities were fully preserved in the budget adjustments of the last period. The compensations made primarily responded to reorganizations among programs requested by the military jurisdictions themselves, a sign of institutional maturity in managing their resources.
An institutional debt settled
In the current global scenario, marked by uncertainty and strategic threats, Argentina also had an outstanding institutional debt.
For almost twenty years, the defense intelligence system operated with an anomaly foreign to any comparable reference system: the artificial separation between intelligence functions and military counterintelligence. This division, established by doctrinal criteria with a precise ideological bias, created real vulnerabilities: it limited the capacity to detect influence operations on military personnel, to protect sensitive information, and to safeguard infrastructures and capabilities against external actors.
Any serious defense system that must protect its strategic capabilities integrates those functions. That is how the allies with whom we seek to interoperate operate, and that is how any contemporary defense architecture works. Argentina, during that period, was a sustained exception based on ideology rather than logic.
The resolution that the Ministry of Defense promoted this year corrects that anomaly. It reorganizes the Defense Intelligence System, strengthens joint leadership, integrates the system within the new coordination scheme of the National Intelligence System, and clearly maintains the existing legal prohibitions regarding any activity related to politics, unions, social organizations, or lawful activities outside the specific realm of defense.
It is about restoring basic prevention capabilities that any contemporary defense architecture needs to function. Institutional reform is a condition for military transformation.
Coherence as a strategic asset
In a more competitive, more uncertain world, where threats move faster than regulatory frameworks, predictability is a strategic asset. Countries that are predictable in their commitments, consistent in their decisions, and solid in their institutions are the ones that build the most enduring alliances.
Argentina wants to be that country. And to a large extent, it already is.
However, that aspiration demands coherence across all levels: the discursive, the operational, and the normative. Saying that we are strategic partners requires defense systems capable of operating with the standards that such an association demands. Renewing equipment requires institutional frameworks that are in line with the scenario we face.
The Argentine Armed Forces retain something that time has respected: their professional ethos. Four decades of budgetary difficulties, operational restrictions, and institutional mistreatment have, however, preserved the identity of a force that continues to train leaders, that chooses discipline and excellence as its own values, and that sees in each generation of officers and non-commissioned officers the capacity to rise to the level of the country they must serve.
On that basis, we are building. We start from what has always been there: an institution that stood firm when everything became complicated, and that now has the historic opportunity to grow to meet the challenges presented by the 21st century.
The south is not the end of the map. It is our starting point. To honor that starting point, the Argentine state must be up to the world that is coming.
We are working on it.
Carlos Alberto Presti is a Lieutenant General and Minister of Defense of the Argentine Nation.
