Line #15 UsefulNotes/NewSpanishArmada


1	->''"Allende nuestros mares,''
2	->''Allende nuestras olas,''
3	->''¡El mundo fue una selva''
4	->''de lanzas españolas!"''[[labelnote:In English]]"Beyond our seas, / beyond our waves, / the world was a jungle / of Spanish lances"[[/labelnote]]
5	-->--attributed to '''Calderón de la Barca''', probably anonymous
6
7	The Spanish Armed Forces (''Fuerzas Armadas Españolas'') are the military forces of Spain. The King of Spain is the Commander in Chief and ultimate leader of the armed forces, holding the rank of Captain-General. The three branches of the Spanish Armed Forces are the Army (''Ejército de Tierra''), The Navy (''Armada Española'', the TropeNamer) and the Air Force (''Ejército del Aire'') with 80,000, 25,000 and 27,000 personnel respectively. After Franco's death, Spain joined NATO and now participates in the Eurocorps.
8
9	!History
10	The earliest origins of the Spanish Army can be traced back to the late 15th century. UsefulNotes/TheCatholicMonarchs of Castile-Leon and Aragon (Isabella and Ferdinand) developed a royal 'milicia' system of, well, militia to provide troops under direct Royal command to fight their war against the Moorish Duchy of Granada. The existence of these forces lessened and eventually removed the monarchy's need to rely on the nobility and clergy to provide troops for their wars. This reduced the sway both had over society in general and the monarchy in particular.
11
12	The Castilian-Aragonese army at that point was almost solely specialized in the guerrilla warfare waged against the Moor strongholds of the peninsula. Although it was up to time in weapons and armors, it was in many ways a GlassCannon, with most of his training and experience devoted to guerrilla and hit-and-run tactics. However, when general UsefulNotes/GonzaloFernandezDeCordoba was forced by the King of Naples to fight and lose a pitched battle against the powerful French army, he took to completely remodel the system. He made the army into smaller units called ''coronelías'' and combined pikemen, arquebusiers and swordsmen with a strong focus in infantry action, and unlike most armies of the times, where heavy cavalry played a vital role to break the enemy, he relegated his own cavalry to finish broken enemies. The next time he faced the French, he completely crushed them. This was the birth of the ''tercios'', the further evolution of the ''coronelías''.
13
14	Castile, Aragon and their properties in America and Italy were eventually inherited by UsefulNotes/CharlesV of the [[UsefulNotes/TheSoundOfMartialMusic House of Habsburg]], also Holy Roman Emperor, which employed his ''tercios'' to great effect to defeat the old-fashioned armies of France and the German Protestants (in fact, it was around this time that they received the name ''tercios'' in the first place). Like Charles' own empire, the units became truly multi-national teams, with a core of Castilians and Neapolitans complemented by both levies and mercenaries extracted from Germany, the Netherlands, other parts of Italy, and even more remote lands like Albania, Poland and Croatia. Even when Charles and his descendants got overconfident and entangled themselves in more wars they could chew, their armies generally stood up to the challenge, consistentely racking up victories against French royalists, French Protestants, Dutch rebels, English smugglers-turned-privateers, Ottomans and African Muslim pirates.
15
16	Countries like Portugal and the UsefulNotes/HolyRomanEmpire would rush to copy the system, with the Portuguese in particular creating their own ''terços'', although the logistic and intellectual aspects that were behind the system's many successes were never quite matched at its time. These included a highly refined chain of training which allowed grunts or ''soldados nuevos'' to quickly and safely become veterans or ''soldados viejos''; soldiers were usually gathered, trained and headquartered in the empire's Italian territories, where they could benefit of the military science of the Italian engineers and be available to be deployed anywhere. It was also there that Charles V became the first to formalise the idea of naval infantry, what with their marine forces (the ''Compañías Viejas del Mar'') being officially founded in Naples in 1537 and remaining the oldest still active. Their usage was then pioneered by UsefulNotes/AlvaroDeBazan, Marquis of Santa Cruz, who also popularized the usage of the big Spanish galleons everybody knows.
17
18	Although media loves to picture the ''tercios'' as a MightyGlacier composed of blocks of pikemen and arquebusiers, their advantages were actually much more eclectic than that, and in several ways came from having evolved past this very mindset. Córdoba's school of thinking greatly focused in playing to counter, on one hand employing highly mobile warfare to catch the enemy in unfavorable positions, on the other hand employing conservative strategies to prevent his own forces to be caught flat-footed and grind the enemy down in the meanwhile -- something that was, in many ways, a YinYangBomb for the less adaptable armies of the time. Italian military engineering was greatly favored and developed by the Spanish Empire at this point, as it was peninsular-style unconventional warfare, like their famed camisados and camuflaged incursions, which would be launched to disrupt enemy forces. Many of their greatest victories -- Garigliano, Pavia, Jemmingen, Gembloux, Nordlingen... -- involved the application of these principles, while in turn, their worst losses -- Ceresole, Nieuwpoort, Rocroi -- tended to come whenever a subpar general tried to play the old game and meet an opponent toe-to-toe.
19
20	Interestingly, and also contrary to popular belief, the formation of the ''tercios'' was not static, but constantly evolving. Even textbooks, normally taking after Protestant war sources that tried to picture the Catholic Spaniards, Germans and French as archaic and outdated, have led to the belief that the model of line infantry, pioneered by their Dutch enemy Maurice of Nassau, left obsolete the ''tercios'', which selected defeats like Nieuwpoort and Rocroi being proposed as the point in which the Spaniards saw the light and reformed their forces in the image of their opponents. In reality, evolution of both Catholic and Protestant armies happened more or less simultaneously, with innovations coming from both sides towards what would only later become line infantry. This included expanding the proportion of arquebusier:pikemen from 3:1 to 6:1, introducing volley fire, and reducing the size of the infantry blocks. At the end of the UsefulNotes/ThirtyYearsWar, the armies known as ''tercios'' didn't resemble very much the units first created by the Great Captain.
21
22	The true bane of the ''tercios'' appeared after all those generations of endless war, and it was simple wear and tear. The Castilian ''milicia'' system was simply unable to cope with the manpower and bureaucratic demands increasingly placed upon it, leaving mercenaries to fill the gap more and more. When King UsefulNotes/PhilipIV attempted to divide reasonably the war effort among his many non-Castilians subjects, what he called ''unión de armas'', they basically revolted against him. The ''tercios'' eventually faced another problem -- not their own decadence, as it often claimed, but rather the fact that the French (and to a lesser degree the Dutch) finally caught up with Spain on the military field. After the UsefulNotes/WarOfTheSpanishSuccession, when the Spanish Habsburg dynasty was replaced by the French House of Bourbon, the ''tercios'' were finally retired, being replaced by the new ''regimientos''.
23
24	!!At the other side of the world
25	The conquest of the ''Nuevo Mundo'' or New World of The Americas was actually not a military issue, at least on paper. Conquest expeditions were actually mostly private enterprises, backed by particulars with their own money on the expectation that they would make it back with what they found, and their leaders were often people without any real military experience - such as UsefulNotes/HernanCortez, who was actually a politician and a civile administrator - who had to hire true military veterans and consultants out of their own pocket to do the job. Essentially, Spanish conquests were the equivalent to your city mayor suddenly hiring war vets and any available volunteer to invade another state. The result is that many of those expeditions were poorly equipped and supplied and usually not supported at all, which, mixed with the wholly unknown lands, forced them trust more on experience, grit and fighting for their life more than elegant strategy. It helped that many of those veterans did hail from the ''tercios''
26
27	The true factor in the Spanish conquest, however, would be indigenous diplomacy, at least as much as battlefield finesse -- as the Hispanic idiom says, ''la conquista la hicieron los indios y la independencia los españoles'' ("the conquest was done by the Indians and the independence by the Spaniards"). Ruthless and very cunning bastards like Cortés and UsefulNotes/FranciscoPizarro used their charm and negotiation abilities to place themselves at the heads of powerful indigenous coalitions to [[UsefulNotes/SpanishConquestOfTheAztecEmpire defeat the universally-loathed Aztec Empire]] (a small state surrounded by others which it raided for human sacrifices, obviously leaving many people upset) and [[UsefulNotes/SpanishConquestOfTheIncaEmpire the perenially factious Incan Confederation]] (a collection of several dozen kingdoms, bound together in only the very loosest of senses, that was also infamous for the bloody punishing actions of their reigning head). Adding to that, the Old World plagues accidentally brought by the Spaniards would play an important factor in reducing the manpower of their enemies (and sometimes accidentally their allies too).
28
29	With the UsefulNotes/SpanishConquestOfThePhilippines, we can also add action against Chinese and Japanese pirates, who often raided the islands to feed on their bouyant trade. The archipelago was conquered by a motley crew of conquistadors, composed by Iberians at the head of a company of Mesoamericans and mestizos, all of which soon secured the loyalty of Filipino islanders as locals auxiliaries -- after which a coalition of Asian pirates immediately tried to conquer ''them'', requiring a joint effort of all this Pan-Hispanic host to repeal the attack. A second Japanese pirate army was expelled during the UsefulNotes/CagayanBattles, which would be followed by smaller skirmishes here and there. Much greater plans were drawn with Portugal and Japan to conquer China, the appropriately called ''Empresa de China'', but they never left the drawing board.
30
31	!!Bourbon era
32	Spanish military were deeply reformed with the arrival of the House of Bourbon to the Spanish throne in 1700 and served in the American Revolution, where the King UsefulNotes/CharlesIIIOfSpain supported the newborn United States against the British Empire. Spanish Marines were able to defeat the British Redcoats in battle during the American Revolution under UsefulNotes/BernardoDeGalvez, and its commander rode next to UsefulNotes/GeorgeWashington in the parade after the war was won. Indeed, as mentioned about the Marquis of Santa Caruz above, Spain invented the concept of Marines both in paper and action. This was copied by the British, who were in turn copied by the Americans. During the invasion by UsefulNotes/NapoleonBonaparte in 1808, the Army was mostly smashed by the Napoleonic forces (with the exception of Bailén, which was the first defeat of Napoleon's army ever, or the First Siege of Zaragoza), and most of the military actions were done by the guerrilla fighters spread out over all of Spain. It would take some time until Spain recovered an army.
33
34	All along the 19th century, the military became a big part of society. It faced thrice against the Carlist insurrectionists and several times they launched a coup d'état against the government. From this time came [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ram%C3%B3n_Mar%C3%ADa_Narv%C3%A1ez_y_Campos,_1st_Duke_of_Valencia Ramón María Narváez]], nicknamed "El Espadón de Loja" (''Loja's Greatsword''), who said while he was dying that he wouldn't pardon his enemies: [[BadAssBoast "I have none. I have had them all shot"]]. The Spanish military suffered a big defeat in the UsefulNotes/SpanishAmericanWar of 1898 (''el desastre del 98''), losing the last colonies outside of Africa in the effort. This would spark the need for a "regeneration" amongst Spanish people, realising that Spain wasn't the great empire of the Austrias anymore.
35
36	An invasion of the Rif (in Northern Morocco) required that many reservists were sent there. Most of them were married and would have to leave behind their families, which they wouldn't be able to support on a soldier's salary. This, and several other factors, sparked the ''Semana Trágica'' of Barcelona, which ended with around 150 deaths, many injured, five people condemned to death and Antonio Maura's politic career. In 1923, Miguel Primo de Rivera led a coup d'état in the spirit of UsefulNotes/BenitoMussolini's one the year before, with UsefulNotes/AlfonsoXIII's support (there are many indications that one of the reasons for this was that the Picasso commission, which was investigating the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Annual Disaster of Annual]], was finding proofs of the King's involvement in the disaster). In 1930, Primo de Rivera was forced to resign due to the fact that most of the country was fast losing their confidence in both him and the monarchy. A direct result of this was that, in 1931, the Second Spanish Republic was proclaimed.
37
38	In July 1936, part of the army rose against the Republican leftist government. The partial failure of the coup meant [[UsefulNotes/SpanishCivilWar 3 years of civil war]], which ended with the victory of the rebels, led by UsefulNotes/FranciscoFranco.
39
40	The coup d'état of 23 February 1981 came because the army was getting angry at the democratic government's supposed incompetence at trying to restore the economy and stopping the ETA terrorist group, which had been trying to spark this by killing soldiers and officers. It started with Antonio Tejero, a Guardia Civil colonel, invading the Congreso de los Diputados with 200 guardias civiles.[[note]]The putsch is also known as El Tejerazo for this reason; an approximate translation would be "Tejero's Screwup".[[/note]] Jaime Milans del Bosch, the commander of the 3rd military district (HQ in Valencia) declared the state of emergency. King JuanCarlosI would, in the end, send a message while wearing the ''Capitán General de los Ejércitos'' uniform, condemning the coup, putting an end to it by the next day. Since then, the Spanish Army, Navy and Air Force have mostly played a part in NATO and UNO missions, playing important roles in peacekeeping both at the Balkans, Afghanistan and Lebanon, amongst others.
41
42	One controversial move was José María Aznar's decision to send troops to Iraq to support the invasion in 2003 despite almost complete opposition to it from the Spanish population. This would become one of the main points of contention during the 2004 elections, when socialist José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero promised to bring the troops from there as soon as possible if he got elected, which he did.
43
44	! Spanish Army (Ejército de Tierra)
45	From Website/TheOtherWiki:
46
47	The terrestrial army of the Spanish Armed Forces responsible for land-based military operations. It is one of the oldest active armies — dating back to the late 15th century. The Spanish Army has existed continuously since the reign of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. Its mission is the defense of Peninsular Spain, the Balearic Islands, the Canary Islands, Melilla, Ceuta and the Spanish islands and rocks off the northern coast of Africa.
48
49	The Spanish Army consists of 15 active brigades and 6 military regions. Modern infantry have diverse capabilities and this is reflected in the varied roles assigned to them. There are four operational roles that infantry battalions can fulfil: air assault, armoured infantry, mechanised infantry, and light role infantry.
50	! Spanish Navy (Armada Española)
51	From Website/TheOtherWiki:
52
53	The maritime branch of the Spanish Armed Forces and one of the oldest active naval forces in the world. The Spanish navy was responsible for a number of major historic achievements in navigation, the most famous being the voyages of Christopher Columbus to America and the first global circumnavigation by Magellan and Elcano. For several centuries, it played a crucial logistical role in the expansion and consolidation of the Spanish Empire, and defended a vast trade network across the Atlantic Ocean between the Americas and Europe, and the Manila Galleon across the Pacific Ocean between Manila and the Americas.
54
55	The Spanish Navy was the most powerful maritime force in the world from the late 16th century to the early 18th century. In the early 19th century, with the loss of most of its empire, Spain transitioned to a smaller fleet but maintained a shipbuilding industry which produced important technical innovations. The Spanish Navy built and operated one of the first military submarines, made important contributions in the development of destroyer warships, and again achieved a first global circumnavigation, this time by an ironclad vessel.
56
57	Under the command of the Spanish Admiral Chief of Naval Staff, stationed in Madrid, the Spanish Navy has four area commands:
58
59	* Cantabrian Maritime Zone with its headquarters at Ferrol on the Atlantic coast
60	* Straits Maritime Zone with its headquarters at San Fernando near Cadiz
61	* Mediterranean Maritime Zone with its headquarters at Cartagena
62	* Canary Islands Maritime Zone with its headquarters at Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.
63
64	The current flagship of the Spanish Navy is the amphibious assault ship/aircraft carrier Juan Carlos I. In addition, the fleet consists of: 2 amphibious transport docks, 11 frigates, 3 submarines, 6 mine countermeasure vessels, 23 patrol vessels and a number of auxiliary ships. The total displacement of the Spanish Navy is approximately 220,000 tonnes. As of 2012, the Armada has a strength of 20,838 personnel.
65
66	Also includes the '''Spanish Marine Corps (Infanteria de Marina)''', the naval infantry sub-branch of the Spanish Navy responsible for conducting amphibious warfare. The Corps was formed in 1537 by Charles I of Spain (also known as Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor), making it the oldest marine corps in existence in the world. It has a strength of 5,000 troops divided into base defense forces and landing forces. One of the three base defense battalions is stationed with each of the Navy headquarters. "Groups" (midway between battalions and regiments) are stationed in Madrid and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. The Tercio (fleet — regiment equivalent) is available for immediate embarkation and based out of San Fernando. Its principal weapons include light tanks, armored combat vehicles, self-propelled artillery, and SPIKE antitank missiles.
67
68	! Spanish Air Force (Ejército del Aire)
69	From Website/TheOtherWiki:
70
71	The aerial warfare branch of the Spanish Armed Forces. The Spanish Air Force currently has 10 fighter squadrons, each with 18-24 airplanes. The Air Force also has 15 operational air bases around the country. The Air Force operates a wide-ranging fleet of aircraft, from fighters to transport aircraft and passenger transports to helicopters. It maintains some 450 aircraft in total, of which around 130 are fighter aircraft (Eurofighter Typhoons and F-18 MLU). The Spanish Air Force is replacing older aircraft in the inventory with newer ones including the recently introduced Eurofighter Typhoon and the Airbus A-400M Atlas airlifter. Both are manufactured with Spanish participation; EADS CASA makes the Eurofighter's right wing and leading edge slats, and participates in the testing and assembly of the airlifter. Its aerobatic display team is the Patrulla Aguila, which flies the CASA C-101 Aviojet.Its helicopter display team, Patrulla Aspa, flies the Eurocopter EC-120 Colibrí. In July 2014 the Spanish Air Force joined the European Air Transport Command, headquartered at Eindhoven Airbase in the Netherlands.
72
73	!The Spanish Military in Fiction:
74
75	* Appears several times in Literature/HoratioHornblower, usually with rather a contempt for their skills. Note that in real life they were extraordinarily bad in pitched battles whether by land and by sea-but they were absolutely terrifying in guerrilla warfare and UrbanWarfare at the time. So Captain Hornblower's prejudices would have been only partially true.
76
77	* Creator/WashingtonIrving describes several badass Spanish warriors in his books.
78

Context UsefulNotes / NewSpanishArmada