This solid and coherent tripod is the foundation for the credibility and reliability of the State: its sustainable community project. Our political-strategic diagnosis must focus on two areas that have profound implications for State Security and national competitiveness: the real threats, risks, and present strategic facts; and the nature of war and peace on the threshold of the 21st century. If we recognize that Iberoamericans have a serious conflict, stemming from our inability to adapt to the evolution of civilization, let us know that the way out of the conflict lies in knowledge and strategic art. Every evolution implies conflict. The foundation of national security in any developed country in the world originates from understanding the dynamic nature of conflicts, in determining the risks and threats that menace the Nation, and in updating timely strategic intelligence. IT IS A STRATEGIC RISK THAT AFFECTS THE ENTIRE COMMUNITY AND THE STATE. With a Defense Structure that preserves our future in peace and progress, in an interdependent and global world, from a defined national identity. Consequently, National Security Policy does not exist; its corresponding National Strategy has not given rise to a reasonable Defense Policy, from which we should derive the Joint-Combined Military Strategy and the campaign, operational, and contingency plans. The fault lies with “the others”. They could not understand the “paradox of war”, which is planned and forecast so that it does not arrive. In our country, the term “National Security”, a universal concept from the science of strategy that arose in the immediate post-war period in 1945, has been demonized. There is no adequate adaptation, in terms of functional-strategic conceptualization, to foresee and comprehensively cover the implications of the accelerated international and our own situation that we are living through. Our progressive cultural weakening has reached the point of denying the possibility of conflict and even its hypothesis, when it is inherent to human nature. Asymmetric forces, such as those of International Organized Crime or religious fanaticisms, which until recently were not considered in any strategic planning. The untimely appearance in our country of the concept of “Internal and External Security” as a substitute for the universal and accepted concept of National Security arose from the fallacious “Comblin Theses” as a “skillful” masking of the “legislative-ideological solution” to the “coups d'état”, which were becoming increasingly frequent and resorted to the cyclical use of the Armed Forces to support a weak, unconsolidated political system. There lies their “ultima ratio”, “the reason for force and the force of its reason”, there lies their most reliable and credible capacity and guarantee of relationship, whether in alliance or enmity, in integration or confrontation. National Security, which includes National Defense, is the primary and essential responsibility of the Nation-State. It is its reason for being. Our strategic security is in “grave danger” because we face current conflicts with 19th-century concepts. One thing is to sidestep, evade, or ignore conflict, and another very different thing is to foresee, overcome, or win it. You cannot modernize “a part” of the state structure and retain the old relics around it. On this solid and coherent tripod, the credibility and reliability of the State ride: its sustainable community project. The hostile “state” aggressor with advanced technology was the “traditional” threat against which our National Defense and Strategic Intelligence communities have historically organized. From these bases, a National Security Policy is built, its corresponding Strategy, and the Defense Policy, a consequence and permanent support of Foreign Policy and Economic Policy. This requires new foundations, new forms, new functionalities, interrelated with the ALL. That all, where the structure of National Security and Defense is inserted, is our NATION-STATE. We can no longer see war simply as the armies of a Nation-State or group of Nation-States fighting each other. Nation-States are no longer the only ones that hold a monopoly on force when going to war. From these bases, a National Security Policy is built, its corresponding Strategy, and the Defense Policy, a consequence and permanent support of Foreign Policy and Economic Policy. Theoretically, all defense budgetary efforts were oriented towards capabilities of advanced technology, for wars against symmetrical, state, and conventional armed forces. The current situation renders those capabilities abstract, obsolete, and inapplicable, and makes us extremely vulnerable to the unnamed and imponderable aggressions of individuals, clans, bands, or networks of transnational networks. That ruined and misappropriated Nation-State, corroded by its weakness in the face of globalization, must be REHABILITATED as soon as possible, in function of the stage of civilization we are traversing. The structure of National Defense is, without a doubt, the “hard core” of the Nation-State. There, in its intimacy, are the altars of national symbols, the traditional liturgies; the cultural axes of identity, belonging, and the personality of the Nation that, from its social entrails, determines its juridical organization as a political system to coexist in peace, in freedom, and in progress. Hybrid War in all its magnitude. For the Defense and Strategic Intelligence communities, the great challenge of the 21st century is going to be the “Real Time” factor. A variety of entities can wage war, something they have done in other periods in history: corporations, religious groups, terrorist organizations, tribes, guerrilla bands, drug cartels, and other criminal syndicates and clans. As long as human beings continue to dedicate themselves to producing, distributing, financing, selling, and using their goods, soldiers and armies will continue to be the ultimate guarantee of the strategic security that shelters and supports the ideals and vital interests of a Nation. Finally, the true causes of war will remain constant: people—whether they are political leaders of a Nation or State or leaders of “other” organizations—will start wars out of fear, hatred, greed, ambition, revenge, or because of other completely human emotions and ideas that promote “hostile intention”. Peoples will go to war when they perceive that they can achieve their objectives by resorting to force, when they have no other alternative or when honor, pride, principles, or “the gods” so require. Our National Defense Structure has been magnificently destroyed, “with complete success” and, “carelessly adapted to a world that no longer exists”. This has been achieved mainly through the National Defense Law (1988), its absent regulation, and its perverse complement, the Internal Security Law (1992). In the future, as in the present, the “scope” of international strategic security will be much more important and profound than mere purely domestic concerns. “STRATEGIC SECURITY” ALSO GLOBALIZED, EVEN FOR THOSE WHO LIVE IN THE BUBBLE OF THEIR PREJUDICES. It is worth insisting again: to survive, at the dawn of the 21st century, we must have an agile, strong, and modern Nation-State. With it, we went much further than what Defense was, an expression specifically turned towards military force. Without it, there is no “social health”. Therefore, nothing is more Political in essence than the structure of Security and National Defense, as a solid support of the political system. We find that the concept of “conflict” and “war” has expanded in diluted directions. Although it does not require a military strategy as a central element, it is the risk that should be at the core of the National Policies of Security and Defense, which are indispensable and absent in the environment of a world war. Let us add another dimension to this matrix: the current misconception of “time”. Therein lies the importance of resolving conflicts and making predictions about those to come, through their correct conceptualization and strategic treatment. From them arise the “needs” for organic training, equipment, deployment, budget… On our continent, the strategic aggression of Narco-Terrorism is present: the symbiotic alliance between the illegal trafficking network and the leftover revolutionary terrorism, operating in network with mega-terrorism. As is entirely evident, this scourge is NOT deterred or foreseen by our obsolete Security and Defense system. The core of reference, articulator of “social integration” and “national unity”. As early as 1943, Walter Lippmann pointed out: “A nation is secure when it does not have to sacrifice its legitimate interests to avoid war and is able, if challenged, to defend them, resorting to war”. There they are today, clinging to the treacherous carbine, without shame and with eloquent reasons that, of course, cannot bear the inexorable rigor of the facts that are developing today in our horrified society. They left the Nation without strategic planning at a critical historical stage, where conflicts are massively “internal”. They are the “legal” responsible for the deaths already incurred in the current “social war”, until we get out of the voluntary defenselessness and generalized insecurity through which we are traversing the current Argentine drama. With the utmost urgency, it is necessary to again distinguish “Strategic Security” from “Public Security”. Our inexpressible strategist-legislators have redefined “Security” in the “Internal Security” law as “a factual situation, tied to law…!” Factual situation! The CODENA (National Defense and Security Committee) has never met. Nothing is more important for the orientation and reference of the second-generation reforms that this unique time demands of the nation-state. To impose the neologisms, the strategic defeat of the “Process” against the terrorist-revolutionary aggression was exploited, after the collapse caused by the war in the South Atlantic. Among the proponents of this “geographical” fallacy were the “ideological sympathizers” of revolutionary terrorism, devenus in “progressives”, the “dilettantes” of the specific strategic topic, and those who ride the circumstances for personal survival. *Dr. Jorge Corrado is a Lawyer (UBA), Director of the Buenos Aires Institute for Strategic Studies, professor at the International Campus for Security and Defense in Seville, Spain, full professor of Strategy and Geopolitics, and of the graduate program in Public Policies in Security at UCALP, professor and collaborator of the War School of the Peruvian Army. They believed, as they are upstarts, that war was always “external, symmetrical, of theater and between-states” and wrote a law based on that “there will be no war”. The structure must be seen as the organizing scaffolding of the homologous and functional systems that occupy it. Maintaining these categories of thought in the current day is suicidal. They could only satisfy their own emotions and feelings… or resentments. The end of the conflict would be equivalent to the end of evolution. They did not see or did not want to see their circumstance and, as they are culturally weak, they do not correct their errors, they project them. It can do this and much more, overnight, without prior warning. One of the main weaknesses of our Defense System and the derived Intelligence subsystem is that the current dimension of “pace” and “opportunity” has not been considered. None of them noticed that this tricky fallacy was also an “Ambrose's carbine”. Nowadays the enemy can be anonymous, it can use unconventional capabilities, electromagnetic or electronic attacks against essential communications and computer nodes. We lack the capacity to act in real time as a decisive factor. Those in other latitudes who speak of “Internal Security” have “Strategic Security” secured with steel cables, through Common Defense and Collective Security Treaties and a very developed combined strategic planning. Those who copied badly omitted the key to the score. For this the inescapable demand of C4I2 in the structures to be developed. They produced an outburst of the most serious consequences: insecurity and defenselessness.
