It’s sad to see Argentina’s sabre rattling this week and especially disappointing to observe the encouragement from Washington as a result of messing up their war with Iran. It was very different 25 years ago.
After 9/11, Argentina extended a hand of friendship to the USA and UK and I was asked to accompany Sir Marrack Goulding to Buenos Aires and to address a government conference about peacekeeping. At that time, the Argentinian Army was interested in the British way of conducting peace support operations and also the international security force that was about to deploy to Kabul.
After giving my talk on the Thursday, I was invited to a personal audience with the Head of the Argentinian Army. The British Defence Attaché accompanied me deep into the heart of the Ministry of Defence and confided that I was the first British officer to receive this invitation since the Falklands War. What I didn’t realise was that there would be fourteen senior Argentinian officers around the table and that they would ask many detailed questions about the state of the British Army in 2001.
In the end, Argentina chose not to become involved in Afghanistan, but to remain committed to traditional peacekeeping operations such as the Cyprus Green Line. So, what does this mean in the context of President Milei’s bluster this week?
Well, to my mind, Argentina’s military missed out on a decade of difficult operations, which helped many countries maintain their ability to fight high intensity warfare. This leads me to believe that although, British forces have reduced in the past decade, they are still ahead of their South American counterparts and if we went to war over the Falklands tomorrow, the result would be the same as 1982. That is not to say the gap cannot be closed, but at the moment, I rate Argentina’s rugby and football teams as better than their military.
Rupert Wieloch 