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Benjamin A. Cowan

American Quarterly, Volume 66, Number 3, September 2014, pp. 691-714

(Article)

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DOI: 10.1353/aq.2014.0043

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 Masculinity, Violence, and the Cold War Remakings of Counterinsurgency in Brazil | 691

Rules of Disengagement: Masculinity,

Violence, and the Cold War Remakings of
Counterinsurgency in Brazil
Benjamin A. Cowan

E
arly Cold War anxieties about masculinity among Brazilian, US, and
French military theorists led to the creation of the later, transatlantic
cult of “unconventional” warfare. “Special forces,” including Green
Berets and the various official and unofficial commandos fighting “dirty
wars” in the global South, arose out of and found justification in a carefully
constructed, prior military narrative that forecast counterinsurgency (CI) as
the centerpiece of combat in the postwar world. This narrative circulated
among high-ranking officers, who published their thoughts on strategy in
critical, widely read, and translated forums from across Western Europe and
the Americas. These theorists, operating as self-conscious representatives of
“Western” militaries in modern (and, they insisted, radically different) warfare,
made soldiers into futuristic, hypermasculine killing machines, positing that
these “counterinsurgents” were the salvation of military manhood and of the
West itself. Counterinsurgency emerged in the years immediately after World
War II as a response to perceived crisis in the world of manly war making—a
crisis sparked by the sense that “new” forms of warfare (nuclear, technological,
psychological, guerrilla) loomed, threatening to obviate traditional, soldierly
masculinity. The US military did not invent counterinsurgency theory on its
own; in this essay, I trace the ideological contours of the transnational alliance
of military theorists that collaborated in its conceptualization and inception.
Central to the cohesion of this alliance was a vision of remasculinization as
the bulwark of Western defense.1
Counterinsurgency theory addressed a perceived loss of masculinity, deemed
vital to the geopolitical world order after World War II. This vision of remas-
culinization was highly specific, based not only in toughness and resiliency
but, crucially, in lack of restraint or willingness to get one’s hands “dirty,” jet-
tison the “niceties” of classic warfare, and engage in indiscriminate violence.
Midcentury counterinsurgency theorists from disparate cultural backgrounds

2014  The American Studies Association

692 | American Quarterly

promoted a masculinity without physical or moral restraints, a departure

from prior masculine scripts: Victorian manliness of morality and restraint;
the civilizing “Strenuous Life” of Theodore Roosevelt; the modernizing and
citizen-crafting projects of Brazilian and other Latin American militaries; and
even Robert Baden-Powell’s “rough-and-tumble” Boy Scout masculinity.2
Thinkers from North and South Atlantic militaries actively exchanged ideas
in transnational and oft-translated forums that included trade journals, tacti-
cal instructional pamphlets, exchange programs, and institutions of military
learning. Brazilian counterinsurgency theorists formed a key part of ideologi-
cal currents circulating between North Atlantic powers (especially the United
States and France), and Brazilian and other national militaries in Latin America.
We can speak of a hemispheric military establishment, a unified whole emerg-
ing in the bipolar geopolitics of the Cold War. A deep sense of a communal
intellectual project suffuses not only Brazilian counterinsurgency documents
(military journal articles, army publications, command school papers and
publications) but also the North Atlantic and hemispheric counterparts with
whom Brazilians conversed.
This remarkably tight-knit union of military elites manifested not only in
the establishment of tactical and training institutions but also in a coherent,
self-consciously “Western” identity and ideology whose construction has gone
relatively unremarked in the historical literature. Translations, retranslations,
transnational citations, and common references were the rule and demonstrate
that counterinsurgency theory was a transatlantic and hemispheric conceptu-
alization, shaping the collective, defensive project of a self-styled community
of Western, democratic armies outside strict national allegiances.3
Counterinsurgency has long been recognized as a strategic initiative spear-
headed by the United States and France, but Brazil was a crucial partner in
the transatlantic conversation that developed around the “new” warfare and
how to respond to it. The United States’ largest military ally in the region
and a historical source of and destination for training missions, tactical and
intellectual cooperation, and troop commitment, Brazil exchanged increased
numbers of instructors and students with US military institutions in the im-
mediate postwar years. Scholars of Brazil, following Jan Knippers Black, have
long noted that influence did not simply flow in a unidirectional way from the
United States to Brazil. Rather, intellectual, matériel, and personnel exchange
fostered a burgeoning and ever more sustained community of military men
from the two countries who considered their personal, institutional, and na-
tional interests to be similar when not identical.4
 Masculinity, Violence, and the Cold War Remakings of Counterinsurgency in Brazil | 693

What, members of this community wondered, would happen to the manly

art of soldiery in this world of “new” warcrafts? The military leaders who shaped
transatlantic conversations demonized guerrilla warfare in particular as the
machination of lawless, unmanly communists, unbound by honor.5 Guerrilla
tactics themselves, of course, long predated this moment; but those who hashed
out postwar strategies in Europe, the United States, and Brazil doctrinalized
their notions of the “new” guerrilla threat in a framework they called guerre
revolutionnaire (revolutionary warfare, or guerra revolucionária—often abbrevi-
ated GR). Eastern communist malefactors, agreed military forums in all three
locales, had corrupted the ancient arts of war, rendering devious GR in place
of putatively honor- and rule-bound “classic” warfare. Yet ironically it was in
guerrilla warfare that the pundits of Western military theory would find their
holy grail—a putatively modern form of warfare in which “man” continued to
play the central and determining role. Brazilian military thinkers participated in
a transnational conversation that facilitated slippage between shadowy guerrilla
threats, “new” counterguerrilla guardians, and the manliness and defensibility
of the West. This conversation held deep and dangerous portent for Brazil,
where military rule would soon subject thousands to extralegal repression and
violence in the name of countersubversion.
The historian Carlos Fico has argued that by the 1980s, late in Brazil’s
twenty-year military dictatorship (1964–85), the country’s military and gov-
ernmental elite had reductively come to see national society as a mass divided
between “men of worth” and “others.” This distinction—with all its crucial
implications for turning the machinery of counterinsurgent warfare on civil-
ians—emerged long before, in hemispheric context, as a primary criterion
for determining vulnerability, subvertibility, and “worth” in terms of national
security, in the midcentury military culture that spanned the Americas and
the Atlantic. The men of most worth, as fashioned by CI theory, were the
guardians of the West’s cultural, ideological, and physical borders, as well as
of its masculinity. These unconventional warriors would rescue the nation and
the hemisphere from its dire masculine failings. Moreover, they would have
to execute this duty in the morally and tactically murky world of “irregular”
combat, where enemies might be (and were) found anywhere, in the hearts,
minds, and bodies of everyday civilians.6
694 | American Quarterly

“This Upside Down World”: The Postwar Moment and Fears

Surrounding the “New” Warfare

Beginning in the immediate postwar years and intensifying in the late 1950s,
military men on both sides of the Atlantic and both sides of the equator
confronted a new and deeply troubling world. Warfare itself seemed to have
entered an unstable stage. After August 1945, military intellectuals and strat-
egists struggled to determine the meaning of the new, nuclear age. In their
estimation, the warcraft of yesteryear had vanished, and “modern” warfare had
arrived. Strategists and theorists marked this transition as a crisis—a rend in
the fabric of military tradition that occasioned considerable doubts about the
future. In Rio de Janeiro, as in Paris and Washington, a collective lament rose
to mark the passage of “classic warfare” into oblivion.
The widely publicized work of Antônio Carlos Pacheco e Silva, a prominent
Brazilian psychiatrist and counterrevolutionary whose influence and respect in
military circles spanned decades, epitomized this tendency. His 1959 Subversive
Warfare on the March yearned for the days of bodily fighting and bemoaned
contemporary warfare’s devaluation of physical prowess. Pacheco e Silva wist-
fully recalled a legendary past of medieval lances and shields: “In the wars of
the past . . . battle was fought body-to-body, the strength and the skill of a man
who handled a lance, brandished a sword or ably bent the bow of an arrow,
were enough for him to make a good soldier. . . . Physical strength, however,
has been relegated to a secondary role in modern warfare.” Defesa Nacional,
Brazil’s most prominent military journal, echoed this wistfulness. Similarly
explicit in their nostalgia for mythicized, premodern combat, the journal’s
editors complained of “the advent of various forms of subversive warfare.”
Today’s enemies were “all around us, and they are unseen”—and as a result,
“war has lost its medieval loyalty.”7
These harkings back to soldiery’s fabled glory days spanned the equator and
the Atlantic Ocean, linking military leaders in South America with counterparts
in the Northern Hemisphere, all of whom thought of themselves not merely
as parts of national armies but as the embattled guardians of Western military
prowess and portent. Such passages beg questions about why military intel-
lectuals, the very men charged with analyzing and theorizing new forms of
warfare, faced these new forms with such angst in the years after World War
II. Why should soldiers (or ex-soldiers) long for brutal killing fields, for a time
when “foot-slogging,” extreme personal risk, and—as a US counterinsurgency
theorist nostalgically put it in 1959—“direct, personal killing” were a fighting
 Masculinity, Violence, and the Cold War Remakings of Counterinsurgency in Brazil | 695

man’s only options?8 The panic about “modern” warfare and the concomitant
longing for older forms of fighting revolved around a burning question raised
by the arrival of nuclear, technological, and psychological warfare: what would
happen to the archetypal soldier? What place could masculine warriorship hold
in a new world order dominated by the more subtle arts of subterfuge, engineer-
ing, technology, and nuclear diplomacy? Military discourse did reflect more
mainstream anxieties about what the US Military Review, to take an example,
called “the irrationality of total mutual [nuclear] annihilation.” Military men
writing on these topics, however, appeared more concerned with the fate of
war craft itself, when such annihilation could be accomplished by the touch
of a button rather than the commitment of troops and the pitting of wills.9
In other words, a sense of crisis emerged about the nature and sustainability
of men’s (and manhood’s) roles in warfare; that sense of crisis spanned several
decades and continents, and led to calls for a new, relatively unmoored breed
of military masculinity.
The sense of panic about nuclear weapons and destructive technologies
emerged in Brazilian military circles in the late 1950s, when the country’s
military remained (despite the much-touted commitment of troops in Italy
in 1944) far removed from the metropoles of military technology.10 None-
theless, Brazil’s military thinkers avidly joined the conversation taking place,
first between US and French counterinsurgency thinkers, and then including
counterparts in Europe and Latin America. These Brazilians, with dire implica-
tions for the country’s coming decades of military rule and violence, shrilled
warnings about the revolutionized nature of warfare and the need for a national
and international (Western) response to such change. In a 1960 article that
received particularly warm praise from Defesa Nacional editors—who noted its
applicability to the West as a whole—Brazilian colonel Germano Seidl Vidal
blamed “Science, Technology, and Industry” for the precipitous transforma-
tion of war and the martial spirit. Vidal, a rising star in Brazil’s military intel-
lectual establishment, cited global “panic” and the technological subversion
of traditional warfare: “the ‘moment’ in which the world is living right now is
one of true panic, of subversion of orthodox [military] conceptions until now
accepted, based on the truly shocking development of Science, Technology,
and Industry.”11
Military and protocounterinsurgency forums abounded with wild rumors
about this threat from “science” and the space-age weapons putatively poised
to revolutionize global violence. The list constituted a gallery of the morbidly
fantastical: the infamous “death ray” cropped up repeatedly, cited by tactical
696 | American Quarterly

experts in Brazilian, French, US, British, and other self-consciously Western

military institutions. This specter joined “radar guns,” rumored to have already
appeared in California; “death by ultra-sound”; “psycho-chemical weapons,”
including but not limited to drugs that would “instantaneously turn an entire
army’s soldiers timid or cowardly.” The bogeymen of modern warfare threatened
not just individual mortality but the chemical obviation of the soldier-man’s
bravery. Pacheco e Silva waxed even more fanciful, citing the French scientific
journalist Lucien Barnier on the technologies with which Russian innovators
threatened traditional warfare. The skies would fill with “flying tele-center
planes, used by Soviet technicians [for] retransmitting television programs from
Bucharest and Kiev”; such planes might easily be equipped with “a ‘mechani-
cal electronic memory’ capable of registering data and reports, based on the
principles of idea-association” or with “a machine called a tele-library accessible
simultaneously to numerous subscribers.” Other space-age developments would
include “forces that agglomerate molecules,” “a giant particle accelerator,” and
even “a machine for transforming lead into gold.”12
Tellingly, this type of panic focused concern on the role of men in combat.
I do not mean, of course, to suggest that notions of manliness and masculinity
were uniform across (or even within) continental and national contexts—but
a concern with the fate of fighting men themselves and of the importance of
rugged physicality as an element of soldiery transcended national and temporal
frontiers in these anxious years. A first-year essay at Brazil’s Command and
General Staff College (ECEME) condemned the ways that “material progress”
had subordinated fighting men to machines that wrested control of death
from the hands of individual soldiers. Such progress “imprisons men more
and more in the machine and creates means of destruction that approach the
uncontrollable.”13 Concerns about the mechanization of warfare and its ef-
fects on soldiery emerged most viscerally in discussions of the “push-button
war,” a phrase that itself became a commonplace of strategy discussions that
traversed the Americas and Europe. Brazilian commentators agreed with their
counterparts in the United States and Europe: technology, particularly nuclear
weaponry, had reduced the art of war to the mere flick of a switch or push of
a button—something that relegated infantry and combat skills to the status
of relics.
Brazil’s Defesa Nacional brimmed with articles reflecting the transnational
currency of this “push-button” anguish and the national military elite’s de-
terminative participation in it. Among myriad transatlantic and hemispheric
translations, the journal’s 1964 publication in Portuguese of French general
 Masculinity, Violence, and the Cold War Remakings of Counterinsurgency in Brazil | 697

Louis Le Puloch’s article “The Future of the French Army”—dubbing infantry

the “dethroned queen of the battlefield”—mused that nuclear warfare had made
infantrymen ridiculous, an “anachronistic remnant of a bygone military world.”
Fretting that soldiers were a “weak and laughable species that the modern
weapon, the atom, condemns to an ineluctable end,” Le Puloch questioned
the “purpose [of these] cohorts of fighting ants . . . , whom the flash and shock
wave of the atom will disperse, this atom that the simple pressure of a finger
on a very comfortable button can unleash?” As if Le Puloch’s verbal analysis
of the tenuousness of soldierly manhood did not suffice, Defesa Nacional’s edi-
tors published their translation alongside a photograph that showed a soldier
dwarfed by an ineluctably phallic missile.14
Brazilian army officers had themselves deployed “push-button” phraseol-
ogy as early as 1960. In his authoritative “Brazilian Military Doctrine,” Defesa
Nacional editor Major Amerino Raposo Filho argued that button-based warfare
constituted an unprecedented break with the military past: “Although the in-
fluence of Science and Technology in War has made itself felt since the most
remote past, it is undeniably with the advent of the industrial age that that
interference pronounces itself in such accentuated form. . . . Thus, the ‘war of
the buttons’ is already widely talked about.” Raposo continued his explication
of Brazilian military doctrine in a separate issue of Defesa Nacional—where he
again referred to the “war of pushing buttons” and cited not only the famous
French commander Colonel Louis Berteil (among those commanders whose
Indochinese experience vaulted them to CI theory preeminence) but also US
Army chief of staff General Matthew Ridgway to argue that based on such
button-pushing, soldiers were experiencing an extreme form of alienation
from their craft: “We live in an epoch of material tyranny, so ingrained in the
spirit of everyone that, many times, it makes us forget the relations that link
materiel to personnel.”15
If push-button war had brought about distressing material alienation, other
“new” forms of warfare caused similar consternation among this community
of military theorists, based on the threat to the very metaphysics of military
conflict. US and Brazilian sources agreed that psychological and other “ir-
regular” warfare had made psychological, spiritual, and moral strength the
newest key factors in winning strategy. If for aeons the heart of warfare had
been individual soldiers’ dedication, courage, and fitness, the new war was
primarily, and disturbingly, moral, mental, and nebulous. As the Brazilian
intellectual and former fascist sympathizer Lourival Fontes put it in 1950,
the battlefield was no longer where wars were won and lost: “A nation is lost
698 | American Quarterly

before the [physical] battle through decadence, through demoralization, . . .

through moral dissolution.”16 A continent away, at the US Command and
General Staff College (CGSC) in Kansas, Commandant Lionel C. McGarr
lamented this same change in war’s focuses, referring to “this upside down
world” that military men must now face. Significantly, no other Allied, let
alone Latin American, country sent as many officers to the CGSC for training
as did Brazil in the period surrounding World War II.17

Rescuing Men of War: The Anticommunist New Man

The seeming uncertainty looming over the role of men in warfare soon led to
counterinsurgency theorists’ obsessive campaign to maintain and/or recuper-
ate this role. Military strategists, North and South, engaged in an increasingly
shrill, near-fanatic insistence on the continuing and immutable centrality of
manly soldiers in combat. Responding to the seeming implications of innova-
tions in warfare, military men affirmed that infantry was not outmoded, that
soldiers were not and could not be the obviated “ants” of Le Puloch’s anguished
assessment. Brazilians, alongside the Americans, French, Portuguese, and other
Europeans with whom they trained and exchanged doctrinal and strategic
ideas, concluded that “irregular” warfare itself was the answer to the gendered
problems it had posed for thinkers like Le Puloch, McGarr, and Pacheco e Silva.
Throughout the late 1950s and the 1960s, dogmatic insistence on soldiers,
particularly infantrymen, as the “principal weapon” or “decisive force” of
warfare, no matter what the latest innovations, pervaded military discussions
stretching from Paris to Kansas to São Paulo. French generals, read and trans-
lated in Brazil and the United States, feared “material progress” and “push-
button war” but concluded time and again that “human dynamism” and “the
valor . . . of enlisted men [and] the will to serve” remained standard, and that
men could never be felled from their pedestal.18 In the United States, Lieutenant
Colonel Forrest K. Kleinman echoed these affirmations of the immutable cen-
trality of “man,” implying that winning, past and present, required the manly
“heart” of idealized war-movie heroes. Drawing on US and French military
wisdom, Kleinman insisted that technology could never replace manliness in
the “preliminary contest of will” that truly determined a battle: “no man-made
control system can be placed in the heart of the ground combat soldier whose
weapon can ‘drop from his hands’ despite years of instruction in how to use
it!” The “man-made” of any historical moment, then, could never substitute
the necessary courage—the “heart”—of a traditional ground combat soldier.
 Masculinity, Violence, and the Cold War Remakings of Counterinsurgency in Brazil | 699

To illustrate his point, Kleinman suggested that the only soldiers destined for
victory were those who approximated the glorified, stoic manhood of war-movie
heroes, quoting with approbation a World War II veteran who explained the
literal theatricality essential to successfully performing this style of manhood
in the theater of war: “in the clutch, it’s as if a curtain drops behind you . . .
You were always a hero then.”19
Brazilian commentators, despite geographic distance and local variations
in hegemonic masculinities, chimed in to underscore the unassailable perma-
nence of skilled “Man” as battle’s “basic element” and “decisive weapon.” This
insistence emerged against the backdrop of what Frank McCann once identi-
fied as the Brazilian army’s “problem of mission”—the difficult resolution of
its doctrinal focus (modernization and professionalization along the lines of
North Atlantic militaries) with its practical reality (that of acting as an internal
police force with little likelihood of foreign engagement).20 This institutional
“problem of mission” became a true crisis of mission when extended to the role
of the soldier-man himself, a crisis that Brazilian military intellectuals resisted
with resolute denials. Major Cid de Goffredo Fonseca neatly summarized: “The
soldier will be a foot soldier nearly always, using whatever firearms he may
have with the ability of an artillery man. . . . The intrinsic value of Man will
be the decisive factor. Isolated on the battlefield, he will have to appeal to his
own moral, physical, and mental force alone—which will be enough to carry
him to victory.”21 Not just soldiers, but foot soldiers; not just man, but man
alone; and not just force, but moral, physical, and mental superiority—these
were the basic elements of warfare, now and forever. High-ranking French,
Brazilian, and US officers argued that, to win the “new” global contest, Western
militaries would have to rely on an impressively versatile foot soldier whose
masculinity combined prowess in each of these realms.
Perhaps the most striking example of military men’s impassioned insistence
on the fundamental relevance of soldiery to warfare, even modern warfare,
appeared in a recurrent “Ode to Infantry” that peppered the pages of Defesa
Nacional. If, for Le Puloch, infantry had been “dethroned” as “queen of the
battlefield,” Brazilian infantry captain Ney Salles poetically reinstated it: “I am
Infantry, queen of the fields of battle.” The “Ode” provided a laundry list of
infantry’s heroic accomplishments in Brazilian history, concluding with the
“beautiful pages of bravery” written during World War II; the “restoration of
democracy” putatively achieved by the 1964 coup d’état; the government’s
war on guerrillas; and the much-touted Brazilian presence in the joint inva-
sion of the Dominican Republic in 1965. The closing lines of the “Ode” are
particularly revealing:
700 | American Quarterly

My basic element—Man, with all his virtues and faults

Despite modern technology, Man above all others
He alone, capable of thinking and acting consciously . . .
Onward, forward, advance, INFANTRY!22

The ode thus summed up a broad insistence on infantry’s—men’s—continuing

relevance. Tellingly, the ode couched this insistence, shared as we have seen with
European and American counterparts, in hemispheric geopolitical terms—with
references to Brazil’s alliances in World War II and to the multilateral action
in the Dominican Republic. It was in a theater of such alliances, then, that
the presence of “Man” in warfare would remain relevant.
Many others undergirded this contextualization via transnational and
transcontinental quotations, especially those attributed to Dwight Eisenhower.
Several Brazilian strategists cited Eisenhower beneath their affirmation that “the
principal weapon of armies is Man.” As Brazilian general Almério de Castro
Neves would reiterate (in a quotation apparently so familiar as to defy cita-
tion): “The best weapons that science can produce will mean nothing if we do
not have, to handle them, combatants both capable and courageous, endowed
first and foremost with an elevated morale and an indomitable spirit. Man is
still the ‘decisive force.’” This supposed Eisenhower sound bite, regurgitated
in a Brazilian forum, epitomized the nature and hemispheric scope of mili-
tary anxieties about the future role of men in a technologically revolutionized
battlefield. Where Pacheco e Silva had fretted over modern warfare as the
death knell of combat, Eisenhower’s repetitious admirers fervently reaffirmed
the soldier’s triumph over bellic modernity. “Capable and courageous” men
remained war’s “decisive force”; only those endowed with the soldier’s inner
strength could emerge successful, borne to victory by those age-old essentials:
“elevated morale and indomitable spirit.”23
Availing itself of a curious tension, this insistence on the centrality of men
ultimately justified Western military errands into the abuse-laden, putatively
lawless terrain of “jungle warfare.” Positing guerre revolutionnaire as the death
knell of traditional warriorship, military theorists rained derision down on
the “new” warfare. Yet the despised GR itself became the vehicle through
which these theorists managed to conceptually revalorize men and manhood.
As military experts in Latin America, France, and the United States together
struggled to rescue “man” as “the decisive force” in a time of increasingly
mechanized warfare, unconventional tactics—and particularly guerrilla opera-
tions—provided an ideal theoretical locus for resolving these anxieties. Guer-
rilla warfare—or more accurately, guerrilla tactics adopted as counterguerrilla
 Masculinity, Violence, and the Cold War Remakings of Counterinsurgency in Brazil | 701

measures—went beyond purely military actions to evolve into a rhetoric of

rescue. By the mid-1960s, French, US, and Brazilian military intellectuals had
all confirmed unconventional warfare as the very place where manly combat
skill would continue to dominate “push-button” softness. Despite the far-flung
origins and contexts in which these intellectuals worked, they agreed on the
basic tenets of the renovated, shared manliness of the counterguerrilla warrior.
The new soldier, as one Brazilian counterguerrilla specialist put it in 1967,
must be one for whom “any ruse was valid.”24
The ECEME first-year essay quoted above voiced near-panic about mecha-
nized warfare’s obviation (and “imprisonment”) of men. Yet the author also
expressed confidence that guerrilla warfare would return individual manhood
to center stage. According to the paper, nuclear warfare’s unmanageability
would force a “return to the primordial origins of the art of war, where practi-
cal, individual valor was the preponderant, decisive factor.” Apt warriors would
find this salvation of individual soldiery in “Guerrilla and Counterguerrilla
Operations.” Defesa Nacional likewise contended that in the emerging field of
irregular, sylvan warfare, men trumped technology as the key factor: “Though
we find ourselves in an era of nuclear weapons, . . . tele-guided projectiles
and space capsules, it is essential and fundamental that we equip soldiers for
employment in the wilderness.” To underscore the context of this discussion,
and the global importance of sylvan warriors, this 1964 article pointed to the
militaries of the North Atlantic, all of whom had begun training infantrymen
for jungle wars “in tropical areas.”25
Strategists agreed, across forums in the United States, France, and Brazil,
that guerrilla warfare formed an attractive locus for renewing Western militar-
ies’ ideological and cultural commitment to individual soldiery—but a central,
uncomfortable question remained. How could the moral, military men of
the West engage in guerre revolutionnaire, whose tactics they denounced as
unmanly, dishonest, dishonorable, and non-Western? George A. Kelly articu-
lated this question in a 1960 issue of Military Review, with pointed reference
to the geographic and cultural (“Western, Christian, and Mediterranean”)
context he presumed to represent: “How is it practical and morally defensible,
that Western, Christian, and Mediterranean values can be defended through
recourse to the methods of the very enemy that is seeking to destroy these val-
ues?”26 Western forays into guerrilla tactics, manly or no, would thus seemed
doomed—were it not for Atlantic military theorists’ resounding agreement on
a moral and masculine response to this quandary: an unconventional warrior,
or what we might call an anticommunist New Man.
702 | American Quarterly

Clarion calls for the free world’s new man appeared as early as 1954, when
US captain Herbert Avedon wrote of “a new breed of warriors” for psywar.
Avedon exhorted Western militaries to produce standard-bearing soldier-men:
“warriors of this caliber, wearing the colors of the free nations of the earth on
their lance tips.”27 By the late 1950s—and certainly by the early 1960s—Eu-
ropean and American military forums rang with calls for what one European
general, writing in the Military Review, called the “new fighting man,” a war-
rior specially designed for limited or unconventional war.28 In 1959 Military
Review published a highly suggestive image (complete with phallic bayonet)
of the unconventional warrior, here represented by the US Strategic Army
Corps. The caption listed this new warrior’s dazzling characteristics: “STRAC
. . . skilled, tough . . . ready around the clock . . . U.S. Strategic Army Corps
. . . the immediate answer to limited war.”
CI theory forums on both sides of the Atlantic insisted that the new war-
rior constitute a total package—elite, skilled, and masculine in every regard.
McGarr—the commander of the CGSC, where officers from around the
Americas trained in the new doctrine—authored a “Keeping Pace with the
Future” series in which he stressed the new soldier-man’s need to incorporate
a broad gamut of strengths. In “Fort Leavenworth Develops the COMPLETE
Man,” McGarr related the CGSC’s new program of “teaching its students to
fight with their heads as well as their hearts.” Rubbing elbows with “fellow
students of high moral caliber,” McGarr crowed, officers at the CGSC could
“integrate” a sort of “whole package” of traits, such that these officers could
command war’s “most precious commodity—MAN.”29 A 1964 study on Special
Warfare training reemphasized the “complete man” approach, highlighting the
extremely demanding nature of the new warfare:

Combat fitness, weapons training, map reading . . . and survival techniques . . . need special
emphasis. An individual must be capable of doing everything himself. One difference in
criteria between a unit which is capable of successfully fighting guerrilla warfare and one
that is not is that the individuals within the successful unit are able to perform all of the
basic skills.30

The new soldier, then, must significantly outperform his predecessors—herein

lay a self-consciously new brand of military masculinity that McGarr sought
to spread between “fellow students” of various national backgrounds from
around the hemisphere.
Beyond such traditional skills, however, many CI theorists demanded the
new man’s preparation for nonmilitary exigencies. Commentators called for
 Masculinity, Violence, and the Cold War Remakings of Counterinsurgency in Brazil | 703

“soldier technicians,” men who could “utilize to the fullest extent all the de-
velopments of modern technology” while demonstrating cultural savvy and
familiarity with politics, social science, engineering, economics, and psychol-
ogy, among other areas. Finnish lieutenant colonel K. E. Lindeman, read on
both sides of the Atlantic, summed up the broadening of the soldier-man’s
realm of interest and expertise into the explicitly nonmilitary. The new and
improved “professional soldier,” he wrote, “must understand war, but we
must also acquaint ourselves with politics.” McGarr himself insisted that “the
military professional must . . . fully integrate military knowledge, talent and
experience with the capabilities of the researcher, engineer, physical scientist,
industrialist, political scientist, educator, psychologist, and clergyman.” One
US Army educational consultant explicitly called for superiority to fighting
men of the past: “Today, the enlisted man must be smarter and better trained
than his forebears. He must be a more knowledgeable soldier and a more competent
technician b/c he will have to make his own decisions.” The anticommunist new
man, then, must prove not only an ultimate fighting machine but a superior,
more self-reliant, and ecumenical version of his predecessors.31
Physical prowess, of course, was a key component of the counterguerrilla’s
masculine superiority. CI soldier-men, defending “Western, Christian, and
Mediterranean” culture on behalf of Brazil, the United States, or European
nationhood, were to serve as paragons of a rugged, resourceful masculinity that
could withstand the combined physical and mental strain of Special Operations
in nontraditional—most often jungle—terrain. Summarizing the challenges
facing such men, Albert L. Fisher hailed the “the hunter-killer type,” a highly
developed killing machine in touch both with the complexities of modern
life and with the primordial work of jungle warfare. Fisher insisted that only
the most elite soldiers, able to survive “several weeks at a time in the jungle,”
must form the “backbone of the antiguerrilla forces.” The new soldier-man’s
“motivation must be so high that he will be aggressive, courageous, and loyal
under even the most dangerous, difficult, and trying conditions. He must be
able to destroy the guerrillas.”32
Boyd T. Bashore—a graduate of the CGSC, sometime instructor at West
Point, and the developer of the United States’ earliest counterinsurgency
plans for Vietnam—likewise referenced the “hunter-killer type,” who must
come from “elite troops . . . recruited from the more aggressive government
military men,” a cream-of-the-crop capable of “hard-hitting combat patrols
[in] mountains jungles and swamps.”33
While Le Puloch fell shy of direct reference to a “hunter-killer,” his “com-
mandos” shared with Bashore’s and Fisher’s idealized warriors an unprecedented
704 | American Quarterly

ruggedness bred of combat in harsh conditions. The new warfare, Le Puloch

affirmed in an article translated for Brazilian military readers, presented
“extreme physical and psychic conditions” that would require “combatants
. . . filled with the will to fight to the finish.” As a result, the West’s warriors
would have to hone themselves into moral and physical champions of Spartan
manhood. “‘Commando’ training seems to be the best for this physical and
moral stiffening. This should, in the future, be the basic training for [our]
combatants, and for this we have set up centers for ‘commando’ training. Such
training requires from each and every man . . . constant physical improvement
and the will to be an example.”34
Such messages elicited warm response in Brazil, where proponents of rugged
physical and moral training saw themselves acting in concert with counterparts
in the North Atlantic. Drawing on US training publications, the infamous Cold
Warrior Thaumaturgo Sotero Vaz affirmed in 1961 that in Brazil “the Man of
Special Forces” would have “the necessary conditions to work underwater, in
any kind of terrain (mountain, jungle, swamp, or desert).” Lieutenant Colonel
Nelson Luiz Bellegard’s “Aspects of the Commando Course” (1967) described
a Brazilian training program that he praised as a “replica of the RANGERS
course in the USA.” Bellegard extolled the course’s “rigorous” selection and
physical training process—including judo, intended to “develop aggressive-
ness and confidence, . . . of considerable value in the formation of the fighting
man.” Bellegard emphasized the tough Darwinism of training, describing the
primordial standoff central to unconventional warriordom. “In our attack
and defense classes, any ruse was valid: a fistful of sand in the adversary’s eyes,
a shout, a gesture to distract attention, etc. Anything works—the important
thing is to garner results. When two men of war [homens de guerra] face off,
the will of one of them must prevail.” “Men of war,” then, give themselves over
to aggressiveness, to fighting “dirty,” and to a contest of wills. The individual,
manly heroism of this combat style led Bellegard to wax nostalgic about the
rough masculinity of boyhood. “Our course,” he wrote wistfully, “made us
recall our childhoods, when we dreamed of having adventures in the forests, of
driving trains, of hunting animals, of exploring unfamiliar places.” Unconven-
tional warriors, in Bellegard’s vision, channeled not only the tough manhood
of hand-to-hand combat but the robust enthusiasm of boys.35
While nearly all CI theorists in this broad, transatlantic conversation referred
vaguely to the moral prowess of the complete man, some made explicit his moral
dimension, though not in terms of responsibility to potential civilian casualties.
Rather, these theorists demanded the “complete” man’s revivification of the code
 Masculinity, Violence, and the Cold War Remakings of Counterinsurgency in Brazil | 705

of “medieval loyalty” and soldierly brotherhood that communist warfare had

putatively undermined. Fisher acknowledged that “creating the ideal soldier for
the hunter-killer units is the most difficult part of this proposal”—soldiers had
to be not just physically but morally and psychologically perfected as killing
machines with brotherly solidarity. Fisher wrote that “the most important of
[training techniques] will be to develop an esprit de corps to the point where
the soldier would rather die than let his buddies or his unit down.” Sotero
Vaz concurred, envisioning all-terrain techno-soldiers whose intensity would
extend to loyalty. The “resolute men” of Special Forces, he admonished, “should
live as loyal companions, brothers in the fight with everything they have.”36
These ultimate warriors must also include psycho-social fitness in their
paradigmatic, moral masculinity. CI theorists returned again and again to
the idea of moral-psychological screening for the new warriors. As a report at
Brazil’s National War College confirmed, selection commissions charged with
nominating new soldiers would have to depend on “four distinct aspects: the
physical (medical-clinical), cultural, psychological, and moral, which will be
evaluated by health inspections, selection tests, interviews, and assessments . .
. in particular in the realm of moral aspects.” In the United States, Kleinman
emphasized the need to screen with technical precision for quotidian morality
and manliness. “Psychoneurotic” studies must find ideal, “superior fighters”
with “aggressiveness and natural leadership.” According to Kleinman, Army
human resources studies had already found that such “superior fighters” co-
incided with properly gendered and socialized husbands, fathers, and joiners.
The “psychoneurotic” studies “established that the most effective fighters were
more intelligent, better educated, had more stable home lives, had taken a more
active part in athletics and social activities, and more of them were married.” An
appropriately gendered life, what McGarr called “all-American,” thus formed
a requisite for the new soldier, the complete man, who was not only skilled and
well-trained but well-adjusted to the standards of civilian manhood, including
“social activities” and marriage.37
On both sides of the equator, proponents sought to guarantee the sexual
stability of the new soldier-man. Brazilian major Octavio Alves Velho em-
phasized sexual health, citing North American recommendations that special
operatives marry, both to avoid venereal disease and to forge emotionally
and psychologically well-rounded soldier-men. Kleinman argued that these
measures were necessary to safeguard unconventional warriors from commu-
nists’ sexual propaganda. Only the athletic, social, married, “stable” men that
he described could withstand Korean communists’ “psychological warfare”
706 | American Quarterly

attempts to convince POWs that “their wives and sweethearts were unfaith-
ful.” Well-adjusted warriors, Kleinman implied, must have such masculine
confidence in their heterosexual stability that they would never fall for such
sex-based tricks. The new tactics demanded a new soldier-man whose deeply
ingrained gender identity and gender confidence extended beyond traditional
military prowess into his everyday sexual and moral life.38
In Brazil, training manuals for servicemen, as well as for the Cold War’s
less visible frontline soldiers—agents in the secretive national intelligence
services—stressed the need for everyday abstemiousness. A training pro-
gram for the Federal Intelligence and Counterintelligence Service (SFICI,
the predecessor to the even more powerful National Intelligence Service, or
SNI), taught by future SNI director and then military president general João
Baptista Figueiredo, included a unit titled “The Fault Lies Always with the
Man.” The unit called for operatives whose personal, quotidian virtuousness
would guarantee invulnerability to communist revolutionary war. Specifically,
the program warned future officers to avoid “drink, gambling, an immoderate
lifestyle, and character faults.” Likewise, an evaluative questionnaire in which
SNI administrators sought to categorize aspirants to agency asked about the
candidates’ “personal habits (alcoholic drinks, drugs, gambling, women).” The
form that such candidates themselves had to fill out included questions like
“Do you drink alcohol? With what frequency? In what situations? . . . Do you
often participate in gambling? Of what sort? In what situations? For money?”39
Many of these traits, of course—from physical to moral–psychological
fortitude—pertain to previous incarnations of military manhood; but CI
theorists themselves clarified that the West’s new man had to be “better .
. . than his forebears.” Traditionally, US Air Force colonel Russell Ritchey
acknowledged, aspiration to the officer corps meant “a young man should be
[reasonably] intelligent, physically fit, mentally stable, aggressive, able to make
decisions, able to accept responsibility, loyal, logical . . . and should have a
pleasing personality.” But “revolutionary changes” in warfare would require
military men who held themselves to a higher standard. “The weak should
be eliminated,” because in the new warfare “the fundamental requirement . .
. is that the military leader be a man who can make decisions under extreme
situations.” Ritchey did envision a place in the modern world for “the weak”:
as button-pushers, far from the battlefields where combat leaders would bear
the standard of man-to-man warriorship. The push-button war’s technicians
“need not be brave, fit, or a leader”—they could leave that to the manly heroes
of counterguerrilla operations.40
 Masculinity, Violence, and the Cold War Remakings of Counterinsurgency in Brazil | 707

Tensions beneath the New Man’s Surface

Urgent pronouncements about the future of fighting thus denounced Eastern

communist deviousness while lionizing the anticommunist New Man. Military
theorists on both sides of the Atlantic constructed an idealized warrior capable
of resuscitating manhood in Western warfare while confronting a new, perceived
threat from the East. Confidence in this new warrior, however, was imbricated
with deeper anxieties about masculine, military, and Western identity. We can
best understand conjurings of the anticommunist new man as a foil for two
distinct, opposing gender constructs: (1) a failed or failing Western masculin-
ity, and (2) a complexly fetishized guerrilla manliness.
In the United States, recurring (or continuous) crises of masculinity crescen-
doed during the mid-twentieth century. The height of the Cold War witnessed
an “unusual . . . preoccupation with masculinity” that might be termed “male
panic.”41 Such fear of emasculation certainly influenced transatlantic discussions
of counterrevolutionary strategy. From France and Portugal to the United States
and Brazil, concerns about “decadence” and the failure of Western masculinity
underlay suggestions that the West develop a new format for the fighting man.
In the same essay that extolled the “superior fighters” forged in the social-
izing fires of athletics and heterosexual marriage, Kleinman bemoaned what
he described as an attack on “manly virtues,” which threatened to dilute
Western masculinity with “homosexuality.” Echoing midcentury intellectual
currents decrying emasculation and homoeroticism throughout mass culture,
Kleinman saw the feminization of culture as a direct threat to the future of
American warriors. Where Leslie Fiedler’s famous 1948 “Come Back to the
Raft Ag’in Huck, Honey,” had judged American literature daubed with the
scandalous hues of homosexuality, Kleinman argued that modern mass cul-
ture directly attenuated military manliness. “The recent novels and dramas of
war,” Kleinman wrote, presented figures who threatened the “manly virtues.”
“The stupid, sadistic sergeant, the cowardly captain, the latent homosexual
war-lover” had “become stock characters in modern fiction.” This, he argued,
put the United States and its allies on unsound footing in the Cold War, since
“psychologically . . . the moral force of an army derives much from the social
mores of its nation.”42
Other observers worried less about general feminization than about the
overcivilization of Western men, whose immersion in the comforts of modern
society and technology might, it seemed, predispose them to physical and
mental decadence. The Military Review expressed concern about military
708 | American Quarterly

men’s descent into bookish, emasculated shadows of their predecessors. The

magazine voiced the “fear that officers might become excessively intellectualized
and turn into pale, incapable-of-action, learned bookworms,” which would
“impair military ardor” and the “qualities and spirit of a fighter.” McGarr’s
“COMPLETE man” translated these apprehensions into practice at the CGSC.
The warrior trained there must achieve comprehensive familiarity with con-
temporary technology—but “nevertheless, he must not lose his soldier’s soul
in the laboratory.”43
That “soldier’s soul” had to balance not only technology with manly prowess
but also moral restraint with manly aggression. Some CI theorists tied fears
about overcivilization to the very morality that they claimed differentiated
the West from its nemesis. Overcivilized men—those too dedicated to moral
restraint—would never prove capable of the murky fighting now necessary. The
Military Review deemed the West’s men too “sensitive . . . so refined in moral
responses that they cannot defend themselves against brutish forces” of com-
munists’ “undeclared revolutionary war.” This line of thinking urged a return
to a primordial past in which the “brute courage and brute force” of warriors
had defended “Western civilization.” The weak, intellectualized men of the
modern Atlantic world would not suffice—particularly not the “conscience
leaders who say we must accommodate ourselves to the proletarian nations.”44
In Brazil, moral masculinity seemed only questionably capable of meet-
ing the demands of the new warfare. Though a midcentury Brazilian crisis
of masculinity has not been treated categorically by scholarship, counter-
revolutionaries feared that Brazilian men’s decadence would facilitate putative
communist designs on their sexuality. General José Campos de Aragão made
these designs seem immediate in a 1971 speech in which he implored new
army officers to live up to the standards of moral warriorship both needed for
and threatened by guerra revolucionária. At the heart of Aragão’s concerns was
the manliness of service-age Brazilian youth, whom, he declared, communist
infiltration and moral decadence had left emasculated in the most bodily of
ways—“Scientists,” he claimed, “affirm that [communist-distributed] drugs
leave a man sexually impotent afterward.”45
Colonel Hermes de Araujo Oliveira, published time and again in his native
Portugal and in Brazil, affirmed that men throughout the West had allowed vice
to spark “degeneracy” (degenerescência), which threatened to sap their civiliz-
ing and defensive potential. His book Guerra Revolucionária opened with the
warning that “the Occident is gravely ill, and that illness . . . is more moral in
nature than economic or political. . . . Man—has allowed himself to be taken
 Masculinity, Violence, and the Cold War Remakings of Counterinsurgency in Brazil | 709

over by vices and faults—selfishness and lies, lust and jealousy, sloth and pride,
vanity and ambition.” Oliveira’s pronouncements echoed those of Brazilians
and North Americans concerned about a postwar masculine slump. Moreover,
they bore more than passing resemblance to the degeneracy discourses of an
earlier generation; he warned that if Western men did not retreat from their
“sterilizing” path of moral decadence, “we will drown ourselves in the deep
abysses of chaos and degeneracy [degenerescência].”46
These warnings recombined with another anxiety-ridden gender construct:
a fetishization of guerrillas’ rugged manhood. A 1964 Brazilian National War
College paper epitomized such fetishization, describing “the guerrilla” as an
impossible ideal of ascetic manliness. He could “support the hardships of a
dangerous, uncomfortable, and exhausting life”; his “physical qualities” were
necessarily those of a “rustic, resilient, strong man”; he had the stamina to
“march much more than regular soldiers, to abide the lack of supplies, and
to live with what nature offers him.” Defesa Nacional’s translation of Army
magazine’s “Soldier of the Future” likewise grudgingly admired an idealized
insurgent; the titular soldier was himself a guerrilla, hardened and adapted to
difficult jungle battlegrounds. The article described “soldier Le Cao Quang,
Viet Cong,” a “rustic soldier” whose hardy life of toil compensated for his
“little civil and military training.” A formidable opponent, the imaginary
Quang demonstrated his toughness and skill each day: “In his daily routine,
Quang performs exceptional exercises of vigor and discipline. . . . Let him
loose in any rice field or forest . . . and it will be difficult to track him.” The
West, it seemed, had to awaken to the realities of Quang’s superior adaptation
to modern warfare: “We must never underestimate ‘Soldier Quang.’ He could
very well be the Soldier of the Future.” Commentators stressed the need to
cultivate warriors who could outman the fearsome guerrillas.47
As indicated by the source of the “Quang” article, US Americans likewise
engaged in these fetishizations. Writing in 1960, the strategist Robert B. Rigg
insisted that Western soldiers stop clinging to “modern weapons” and catch up
to guerrillas’ versatility and self-reliance. “The communist soldier,” he wrote,
“travels on many legs: military, political, economic, sociological, propaganda,
and psychological. But the Western Soldier up to now has walked on only two—
both military.” Colonel George B. Jordan likewise lionized guerrilla leaders as
all-terrain warriors, “unperturbed in any grave emergency” and characterized
by “personal leadership . . . and endurance of hardships.” Jordan, writing from
his post at the Inter-American Defense Board, underscored the transcontinental
scope of these concerns; he insisted that “renewed efforts should be made” to
710 | American Quarterly

train American (hemispheric) military men to outdo the rugged manliness that
he attributed to insurgents: “The answer lies in training which will teach our
soldier to be better than the guerrillas in all phases, so that he is disciplined,
is in superior physical condition, and is an expert in his weapons as well as in
those of his enemy. He must be able to live and operate in the jungle, desert,
and mountain.” “Our soldier” thus had to be refashioned into a hardier, more
self-reliant and resilient version of the guerrilla himself—capable of demon-
strating the physical, tactical, and disciplinary excellence that unconventional
warfare demanded of the new soldier-man.48
Brazilian military manuals operationalized such calls for this kind of mascu-
linization, via basic training programs. In dialogue with military training and
expertise from the United States, these manuals sought to create paragons of
rugged masculinity—techno-soldiers impervious to bodily or environmental
discomforts. The authoritative manual “Revolutionary Warfare,” for example,
mandated that troops develop “resilience in marching on foot . . . superior
to that of the revolutionaries” and “rusticity equal to that of the rebel, mak-
ing [counterguerrillas] resistant to fatigue, somnolence, hunger, thirst, bad
weather, emotions, and capable of operating at night.” The manual “Provisional
Instructions—Counterguerrilla Operations” subscribed to the same logic of
surpassing the guerrillas. “By nature,” warned the manual, “the guerrilla is an
audacious and resilient enemy,” and troops must be made to understand the
“advantages that enemy guerrilla forces have in . . . discipline, motivation,
experience, obtainment of supplies, cruelty, impiety, vigor, knowledge of the
terrain and population.” As a result, “the fighting force of counterguerrillas
must be superior to the enemy in its physical preparation,” and cadets should
accordingly be prepared via forced marches, hand-to-hand fighting, bayonet
training, survival training, competitive sports, and “tests of confidence.”49

Conclusion: Counterinsurgency as Ongoing “Crisis” and Abandoning

the “Rules” of Engagement

Today’s military-intellectual production highlights the ways in which ideas

about counterinsurgency, modernity, and moral equivalency continue to circu-
late as critical conversations between hemispheric war makers. In January 2013
Defesa Nacional’s cover story argued that nefarious “insurgents” had recently
innovated a “new” warfare that challenged traditional combat morality: “War,”
the author Sergio de Oliveira held, “has assumed, in the last few years, a differ-
ent form. Now, insurgency is the rule, no longer the exception.” In 2011 a US
 Masculinity, Violence, and the Cold War Remakings of Counterinsurgency in Brazil | 711

CGSC official mused—in an article for the Brazilian edition of the Military
Review—about a role in counterinsurgency for the soldier-man’s morally un-
bound “beast within.” As recently as 2006, the US Army (on whom Brazilian
strategists like Oliveira continue to draw) compiled a Counterinsurgency Reader
available via several institutions of US and hemispheric military learning.50 Yet
despite this ongoing focus on counterinsurgency as the crucible of warfare in
the now, Brazil—like other sites in the Americas and farther afield—has long
since, infamously, witnessed the training and deployment of jungle warriors.
Indeed, Sotero Vaz, discussed above as a proponent of counterinsurgency train-
ing in 1961, became an instructor at the School of the Americas and headed
Brazil’s Jungle Warfare Training Center. In the early 1970s he participated in a
massive military mobilization to eliminate a small cadre of guerrilla insurgents
in the Araguaia region of the Brazilian Amazon. Here, in the Amazon, as well
as in the massive apparatus of Brazil’s dictatorial security state (1964–85), the
anxieties explored in this essay came home to roost. The counterinsurgency
doctrines that blossomed in midcentury Brazil, in conversation with North
Atlantic interlocutors, fostered not only comfort with but idealization of an
anticommunist warrior who would not scruple to engage the “enemy” on
his own putative terms—fighting a secret, soon-to-be-called “dirty” war that
exposed thousands of Brazilians to extralegal detainment, torture, and even
death in the name of Cold War security.51
Since its inception, counterinsurgency has become a commonplace in
discussions of modern warfare within and outside military intellectual cir-
cuits. Indeed, even when it is not directly referenced, the central contention
of unconventional warfare training—that of a devious, well-disguised enemy
who blurs the lines between combatant and noncombatant—remains among
the most potent shapers of contemporary fighting. Seeming lawlessness (and
resultant potential for atrocity) in such warfare dogs leadership debates as well
as soldiers on the ground. While the Military Review’s “Changing the Army
for Counterinsurgency Operations” (2005) grudgingly admits that US rules
of engagement in Iraq were “more lenient than other nations” and promoted
an atmosphere that was “offensively-minded,” one anguished US veteran of
the invasion of Iraq offhandedly questioned the existence of rules of any kind.
Responding to an investigative reporter in 2012, the veteran mused, “Rules
of engagement? I don’t think I’ve ever thought about that. We got a couple of
briefs. They were brief. Generally we were told that the enemy had no uniforms.
Anyone could be hostile. . . . Of course our force was excessive—but that is
how we are trained. We use maximum force.”52
712 | American Quarterly

This slippage, between rule-bound warfare and enemies indistinguishable

from civilians, reflects anxieties that date back to the dawn of hemispheric
counterinsurgency theory. Military intellectuals fretted, at the outset of the
Cold War’s most intense decades, about the role of men in a brave new world
of combat, beset by nuclear, psychological, and other “unconventional” forms
of fighting. The issues of men and honor in combat were among several ques-
tions that transatlantic military discussions confronted in these decades. How
to rescue traditional soldiery from oblivion? How to maintain war-making
masculinity in a world where key battles might be decided by “pushing but-
tons”? How to theorize and doctrinalize guerrilla warfare in ways that would
not seem to betray self-ascribed notions of Western honor in combat?
Military leaders describing themselves as “Western, Christian, and Mediter-
ranean” found answers to all these questions in a single construct, increasingly
popular in discussions from France, the United States, and Brazil. Counterguer-
rilla warriors would be the West’s answer to the new circumstances of global
warfare. An anticommunist New Man, endowed with moral and physical
superiority to (admittedly formidable) enemy guerrillas, would serve several
purposes. He would cement the ongoing importance of soldier-men in future
wars; he would develop the near-impossible skills necessary to defeat the
frightening specter of the guerrilla; and he would resolve the tension between
Western ideals of chivalrous combat and denigration of unconventional warfare
as Eastern, lawless, and dishonorable. In Brazil—as in Central America, Viet-
nam, and elsewhere—this hemispheric military brainchild was a portentous
dream of a techno-soldier destined, programmed, and doomed to carry the
West into a world of sanctioned violence, of “maximum force,” against civilians.

Notes
1. Canonical scholarship on counterinsurgency doctrine has avoided investigation of this crucial element
in its genesis. See D. Michael Shafer, Deadly Paradigms: The Failure of U.S. Counterinsurgency Policy
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); Andrew J. Birtle, U.S. Army Counterinsurgency and
Contingency Operations Doctrine, 1942–1976 (Washington, DC: Center for Military History, 2006);
and Grégor Mathias, Galula in Algeria: Counterinsurgency Practice versus Theory, trans. Neal Durando
(Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2011).
2. See Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United
States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for
American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); Matthew C. Gutmann, ed., Changing Men and Mas-
culinities in Latin America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Martha S. Santos, Cleansing
Honor with Blood: Masculinity, Violence, and Power in the Backlands of Northeast Brazil, 1845–1889
 Masculinity, Violence, and the Cold War Remakings of Counterinsurgency in Brazil | 713

(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012); and Peter M. Beattie, The Tribute of Blood: Army,
Honor, Race, and Nation in Brazil, 1864–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).
3. See Benjamin A. Cowan, “‘Beat Them at Their Own Game’: Manhood and the Barbarism of Atlantic
(Counter)Insurgency,” paper presented at the American Historical Association conference, Pacific Coast
Branch annual meeting, Pasadena, CA, August 2008; and Cowan, “‘Useful Idiots’ in the Death Throes
of ‘Cute’ War: Brazil and the Atlantic Military Effort to Name the Enemy Within,” paper presented
at Naming the Enemy conference, Occidental College, November 2012.
4. For traditional accounts of the French and US sources of counterinsurgency, see Shafer, Deadly Para-
digms; Birtle, U.S. Army Counterinsurgency; and Jan Knippers Black, United States Penetration of Brazil
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977), 162, 167, 224–25.
5. Cowan, “‘Beat Them at Their Own Game.’”
6. Carlos Fico, Reinventando o otimismo: Ditadura, propaganda e imaginário social no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro:
Fundação Getúlio Vargas, 1997), 44. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the Portuguese are
my own.
7. A. C. Pacheco e Silva, A guerra subversiva em marcha (São Paulo: CIESP, Coleção Forum Roberto
Simonsen, 1959), 19; Editorial, Defesa Nacional, July–August 1968, 3.
8. Roger Hilsman, “Internal War: The New Communist Tactic,” Military Review, April 1962, 11.
9. Commander Friedrich Forstmeier, “Academic Education for Bundeswehr Officers: A Demand of Our
Time,” Military Review, May 1964, 36.
10. Frank D. McCann Jr., “The Brazilian Army and the Problem of Mission, 1939–1964,” Journal of
Latin American Studies 12.1 (1980): 107–26. Brazil would not gain nuclear capacity until the 1970s.
11. Germano Seidl Vidal, “Nossas forças armadas e a nova doutrina,” Defesa Nacional, August 1960, 147.
12. Lieutenant Colonel Henry H. Rogers, “The Role of Electronics in Warfare,” Military Review, July
1949, 25–26; Aspirante Salgueiro, “Também as armas químicas e biológicas nos ameaçam,” Defesa
Nacional, July 1960, 143–47; Pacheco e Silva, A guerra subversiva em marcha, 20–21.
13. Captain Ary de Aguiar Freire, “Guerrilhas e operações contra guerrilheiros” (term paper), Biblioteca
31 de Março, ECEME 0048 1965.1.
14. Le Puloch, “Futuro,” 53.
15. Major Amerino Raposo Filho, “Guerra Moderna,” Defesa Nacional, June 1960, 87.
16. Lourival Fontes, Homens e Multidões (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1950), 31.
17. Major General Lionel C. McGarr, “Keeping Pace with the Future—the Power of Thought: New Ho-
rizons,” Military Review, September 1959, 3; Frank D. McCann Jr., The Brazilian-American Alliance,
1937–1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 354.
18. General [Jean] de Lattre de Tassigny, “Adaptação da organização military para a Guerra Moderna,”
Defesa Nacional, September 1960, 104; General Grosgeorge, “Guerra e Técnica,” trans. Lieutenant
Colonel Paulo Gaucho Leal de Oliveira, Defesa Nacional, January–February 1965, 27–34.
19. Lieutenant Colonel Forrest K. Kleinman, “Men, Motivation, and Materiel,” Military Review, April
1964, 74, 77–78.
20. McCann, “Brazilian Army.”
21. Major Cid de Goffredo Fonseca, “Uma tendência de hoje?,” Defesa Nacional, January–February 1966,
132.
22. Captain Infantry Ney Salles, “Ode à Infantaria,” Defesa Nacional, July–August 1966, 128.
23. General Almério de Castro Neves, “O serviço militar obrigatório e a Segurança Nacional,” Revista
Militar Brasileira, October–December 1968, 51–58; General Almério de Castro Neves, “O oficial da
reserva e a Segurança Nacional,” Defesa Nacional, May–June 1964, 12–13; emphasis added.
24. Tenente-Coronel Nelson Luiz Bellegard, “Aspectos do curso de commandos,” Defesa Nacional, Janu-
ary–February 1967, 194. I analyze this article further in what follows.
25. Freire, “Guerrilhas e operações contra guerrilheiros”; Captain Luís Aníbal Sánchez C., “Importância
da instrução de guerra na selva,” Defesa Nacional, November–December 1964, 103; emphasis added.
26. George A. Kelly, “Revolutionary War and Psychological Action,” Military Review, October 1960, 13.
27. Captain Herbert Avedon, “War for Men’s Minds,” Military Review, March 1954, 59.
28. General Ottavio di Casola, “The Nature of Future Wars: An Italian View,” trans. LaVergne Dale,
Military Review, January 1964, 42.
29. Major General Lionel C. McGarr, “Keeping Pace with the Future: Fort Leavenworth Develops the
COMPLETE Man,” Military Review, October 1958, 6.
714 | American Quarterly

30. Colonel John K. Singlaub, “Special Warfare Training in 7th Army,” Military Review, February 1964,
58.
31. William Tracey, “Needed: Progressive Military Education for the Career Enlisted Man,” Military Review,
February 1963, 66–69 (emphasis added); McGarr, “Power of Thought,” 6; Lieutenant Colonel K. E.
Lindeman, “The Professional Soldier and Political Understanding,” Military Review, March 1960, 93.
32. Albert L. Fisher, “To Beat the Guerrillas at Their Own Game,” Military Review, December 1963, 85.
33. Major Boyd T. Bashore, “Organization for Frontless Wars,” Military Review, May 1964, 7–8.
34. Le Puloch, “Futuro,” 53.
35. Tenente Thaumaturgo Sotero Vaz, “Guerra Revolucionária: Operações Especiais,” Defesa Nacional,
March 1961, 47–48; Bellegard, “Aspectos do curso de commandos,” 194.
36. Fisher, “To Beat the Guerrillas,” 85; Sotero Vaz, “Guerra Revolucionária,” 48.
37. Joberto Ferreira Dias, “Serviço Militar e Guerra Revolucionária” (term paper), Biblioteca General
Cordeiro de Farias (hereafter cited as ESG BGCF), TT2-15-68; Kleinman, “Men, Motivation, and
Materiel,” 75.
38. Major Octavio Alves Velho, “O soldado para-quedista,” Defesa Nacional, April 1960, 11, 18–19;
Kleinman, “Men, Motivation, and Materiel,” 76.
39. “SFICI Programa de Aula: Curso para encarregados de casos de agents. Agosto de 1961,” Arquivo
Nacional, Fundo Informante do Regime Militar, X9.0.TAI 1/15-16, 24; “Questionários para candi-
datos a serem considerados para agentes,” Arquivo Nacional, Fundo Informante do Regime Militar,
X9.0.TAI 5/2-7, 4.
40. Russell V. Ritchey, “Identifying and Training the Potential Combat Leaders,” Military Review, May
1964, 27–35.
41. See, among others, James Gilbert, Men in the Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2005), 2.
42. See Gilbert, “Men in the Middle,” esp. 199; Kleinman, “Men, Motivation, and Materiel,” 78.
43. Forstmeier, “Academic Education,” 43; McGarr, “Fort Leavenworth Develops the COMPLETE Man,”
6.
44. Anthony Harrigan, “War and Morality,” Military Review, June 1964, 82–83.
45. General de Divisão José Campos de Aragão, “Mensagem aos jovens alunos do curso de formação do
III Exército—Aula Inaugural,” Defesa Nacional, July–August 1971, 15–20.
46. Colonel Hermes de Araújo Oliveira, Guerra Revolucionária (Rio de Janeiro: Bilioteca do Exército,
1965), 25.
47. Colonel Geraldo Labarthe Lebre et al., “A Guerra Revolucionária” (speech, ESG, s/d) ESG BGCF
C2-07-64, 34–35; “Soldado do Futuro,” Defesa Nacional, April 1963, 59. Translated from Army,
September 1961.
48. Robert B. Rigg, “Twilight War,” Military Review, November 1960, 28; Lieutenant Colonel George B.
Jordan, “Objectives and Methods of Communist Guerrilla Warfare,” Military Review, January 1960,
59.
49. “C100-20. Manual de Campanha—Guerra Revolucionária,” 2nd ed. (Rio: Ministério do Exército,
Estabelecimento General Gustavo Cordeiro de Fárias, 1971), 168; “IP 31-16: Instruções Provisórias.
Operações Contraguerrilhas,” 2nd ed. (Rio: Ministério do Exército, 1973), 128, 132.
50. Sérgio Alexandre de Oliveira, “Liderança militar no contexto da moderna contrainsurgência,” A Defesa
Nacional 821 (2013): 81–100 (emphasis added); Douglas A. Pryer, “Controlar a Fera interior: A chave
do sucesso nos campos de batalha do século XXI,” Military Review (Edição Brasileira), May–June
2011, 2–13; Combined Arms Center, Military Review—Special Edition: Counterinsurgency Reader
(Fort Leavenworth, KS: Department of the Army, 2006).
51. Archdiocese of São Paulo, Brasil: Nunca mais (Petrópolis: Vozes, 1985); Comissão de Familiares de
Mortos e Desaparecidos Políticos et al., Dossiê dos mortos e desparecidos políticos a partir de 1964 (Re-
cife: Companhia Editora de Pernambuco, 1995); Elio Gaspari, As Ilusões Armadas, 4 vols. (São Paulo:
Companhia das Letras, 2002–4); Martha K. Huggins, Political Policing: The United States and Latin
America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).
52. Lance Corporal Bruno Moya, quoted in Dexter Filkins, “Atonement,” New Yorker, October 29 and
November 5, 2012, 101.