A criação do Comando Conjunto Atlântico sul como ferramenta de governança do entorno estratégico brasileiro pela Marinha do Brasil

Abstract

Brazil recognizes, as its Strategic Environment, a region that encompasses South America, part of the west coast of Africa and Antarctica. In this vast region, the greatest natural interface between Brazil and the other States is the South Atlantic Ocean, a source of wealth, such as those existing in the Blue Amazon, and the scene of diverse threats, many of them transnational, such as illegal fishing and drug trafficking. This same maritime environment serves as a path for most international trade that leaves or arrives in Brazil and has shown an increase in the presence of extra-regional actors, such as China. Such presences can generate geopolitical tensions that do not directly involve Brazil, but that can directly impact the flow of goods imported or exported by the Brazilian State, adversely affecting its trade balance. Thus, the South Atlantic Ocean serves, at the same time, as a border and as a buffer zone between Brazil and other States in its Strategic Environment, being directly related to national economic health. However, unlike the aerospace and cyber domains, the maritime domain does not have a permanent military structure, with interagency capability, to exercise some degree of regional governance. This makes the Brazilian Navy practically the only actor focused on combating threats in the South Atlantic and representative of the Brazilian State in the governance of maritime areas in its Strategic Environment. Amid a scenario of scarcity of financial resources and reduction of personnel, such demand becomes a complex challenge. However, precisely the complexity of this challenge points to the need to think about the creation of a joint, permanent defense structure, with interagency capacity and that may also add combined capacity, to create synergy between different national and international actors. This structure will allow the elaboration of strategies to mitigate and better oppose the existing threats in the portion of the Brazilian Strategic Environment bathed by the South Atlantic, as well as provide governance capacity in that region, at its level, through alignment with the other governmental levels. In this way, such a structure will also contribute to maritime security, peace, and also regional stability. The United States of America, for example, has a permanent military structure that performs similar tasks, the U.S. Southern Command, where the author had the opportunity to work for a period of one year. Thus, taking advantage of the author's professional experience and other subsidies, this thesis presents a permanently activated Joint Command model, inspired by the U.S. Southern Command, but with its own characteristics and consistent with the Brazilian reality, whose main operating environment will be the portion of the Brazilian Strategic Surroundings bathed by the South Atlantic, but not limited to it, both for the importance of that region for Brazil and for the inexistence of a permanent Brazilian structure that can carry out its governance.