Military

military branches: 
Spanish Armed Forces: Army (Ejercito de Tierra), Spanish Navy (Armada Espanola, AE; includes Marine Corps), Spanish Air Force (Ejercito del Aire Espanola, EdA) (2010)

military service age and obligation: 
20 years of age (2004)

manpower available for military service: 
males age 16-49: 11,759,557
females age 16-49: 11,204,688 (2010 est.)

manpower fit for military service:
males age 16-49: 9,603,939
females age 16-49: 9,116,928 (2010 est.)

manpower reaching militarily significant age annually:
male: 217,244
female: 205,278 (2010 est.)

military expenditures:
1.2% of GDP (2005 est.)country comparison to the world: 124

The Spanish Armed Forces (Spanish: Fuerzas Armadas Españolas, FFAA) are the military forces of Spain. It encompasses the Army, Navy, Air Force and to a lesser degree the Royal Guard, Civil Guard and the Emergency Military Unit. The Spanish Armed Forces are a modern military force charged with defending the Kingdom's integrity and sovereignty. The monarch heads the armed forces, with the title jefe supremo de las fuerzas armadas (Supreme Chief of the Armed Forces)

The Armed Forces are also active members of NATO, the Eurocorps, and the European Union Battlegroups. The current Chief of the Defence Staff is Air General José Julio Rodríguez Fernández.

• Spanish Army: 92,000
• Spanish Navy: 26,980
• Spanish Air Force: 24,800

The Napoleonic Wars and the loss of the Americas

The Napoleonic Wars were to have a tremendous impact on Spanish military history, both within Spain itself and across her American colonies. French armies invaded Spain and in 1808, rapidly deposing the Spanish king. Spain's subsequent liberation struggle marked one of the first national wars and the emergence of large-scale guerrillas, from which the English languageborrowed the word. While the French occupation destroyed the Spanish administration, which fragmented into quarrellingprovincial juntas (in 1810, a reconstituted national government fortified itself in Cádiz) and proved unable to recruit, train, or equip effective armies, Napoleon's failure to pacify the people of Spain allowed Spanish, British and Portuguese forces to secure Portugal and engage French forces on the frontiers while Spanish guerrilleros wore down the occupiers. Acting in concert, regular and irregular allied forces prevented Napoleon's marshals from subduing the rebellious Spanish provinces. The Spanish navy, put to sea in support of France during the War of the Third Coalition in 1805, suffered terrible losses at the Battle of Trafalgar, having been weakened by yellow fever in the preceding years; in many ways this marked the nadir of Spanish naval history.

The events in mainland Spain had extensive consequences for her empire. Spain's colonies in the Americas had shown an increasing independence in the years running up to the Peninsular War; Britishattempts to invade the Río de la Plata in 1806-7, for example, had been rebuffed by well organised local militia. The occupation of the Spanish homeland, however, resulted in first a sequence of uprisings in support of the imprisoned king, and then a struggle for independence that increasingly formed a series of civil wars across the Spanish dominions in the America. The conflict started in 1808, with juntas established inMexico and Montevideo in reaction to the events of the Peninsular War. The conflict, lasting twenty years, was far from one sided. Patriot forces were often underequipped, largely peasant militia armies commanded by amateur officers; Royalist forces, partially supported from Spain over huge sea distances, were frequently able to gain the upper hand. The Spanish navy was easily able to dominate the local, coastal navies of her colonies. Campaigning across the huge distances of South America, frequently in winter conditions with minimal supplies, resulted in terrible privation. Ultimately, Royalist exhaustion and growing political maturity amongst the new states resulted in the creation of a chain of newly independent countries stretching from Argentina and Chile in the south to Mexico in the north. Only Cuba and Puerto Rico remained under Spanish rule.

19th Century Carlist Wars and the final days of empire

In the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, Spain's military found itself involved in an increasing number of internal conflicts, distracting military attention from other priorities, and continuing to undermine the Spanish economy. The first of these, theSpanish Civil War (1820-3) involved a revolt by mutinous soldiers against King Ferdinand VII in the aftermath of a failed campaign in the Americas. France intervened militarily to support the monarchy, restoring order, but this was short-lived. When Ferdinand died in 1833, his fourth wife Maria Cristina became Queen regent on behalf of their infant daughter Isabella II. This splintered the country into two factions known as the Cristinos - the supporters of the Queen regent - and the Carlists, the supporters of Carlos V, who had rejected the Pragmatic Sanction of 1830 that abolished the Salic Law. The First Carlist Warlasted over seven years and the fighting spanned most of the country at one time or another, although the main conflict centered on the Carlist homelands of the Basque Country and Aragon. Many of the military officers involved had served in the Peninsular War a few years before. The Second Carlist War was a minor Catalonian uprising in support of Carlos VI, lasting from 1846 to 1849. The Third Carlist War began after Queen Isabella II was overthrown by a conspiracy of liberal generals in 1868, and left Spain in some disgrace; four years later, the latest Carlist pretender, Carlos VII, decided that only force of arms could win him the throne. This Third Carlist War lasted until 1876.

Under Isabella II of Spain, there were several, ultimately unsuccessful, attempts to reassert Spanish military influence around the world, often in partnership with France. In 1848 Spain intervened to support Pope Pius IX against local republican opposition. In February 1849, five warships, including the frigates steamed to Gaeta fromBarcelona, three more from Cadiz following in May. In total, 4,000 Spanish soldiers were deployed in Gaeta and placed at the Pope's disposition. This marked the Spanish Army's first expeditionary venture into Italy since the War of the Austrian Succession a hundred years prior. In partnership with the French, Spanish columns secured the region. In 1858 Spain joined with France to intervene in Cochin China, donating 300 Filipino troops to the invasion. Spain joined an allied expedition in support of the French intervention in Mexico. In 1859, Spain fought a short war with Morocco, resulting in a stronger Spanish position in North Africa. By the 1860s, Spain had built up a very large navy again, and in 1864 Spain intervened along the South American cost, seizing the guano-rich Chincha Islands from its former colony of Peru. Although the new Spanish steam frigates were superior to local vessels, the huge distances and lack of land support ultimately concluded with Spain handing back the islands at the end of the Chincha Islands War. An attempt to recolonise Santo Domingo similarly failed by 1865 in the face of fierce guerrilla resistance.

Spain faced a sequence of challenges across her colonies in the second half of the century that would result in a total defeat of empire at the hands of the growing power of the United States. Spain's colony of Cuba rebelled in 1868, leading to a sequence of brutal guerrilla insurgencies and retaliations, through the Ten Years' War (1868–1878), the Little War (1879–1880) and finally the Cuban War of Independence (1895–1898). Spain, although militarily occupied with the Carlist troubles at home, put increasing resources into the conflict, slowly taking the upper hand, and assisted by American sales of modern weaponry. By 1898, however, increasing U.S. political interests in Cuba were encouraging a more interventionist policy. The sinking of the USS Maine in Havana harbour provided the trigger for the Spanish-American War, in which Spain's aging navy fared disastrously. Cuba gained its independence and Spain lost its remaining New World colony, Puerto Rico, which together with Guam and the Philippines it ceded to the United States for 20 million dollars. In 1899, Spain sold its remaining Pacific islands — the Northern Mariana Islands, Caroline Islands and Palau — to Germany, reducing Spain's colonial possessions to Spanish Morocco, the Spanish Sahara and Spanish Guinea, all in Africa.

Early 20th century and the Civil War

Although Spain remained neutral during the First World War (1914–18), despite suffering considerable economic losses to German submarines, she was militarily active elsewhere during the early part of the 20th century, attempting to strengthen her position in North Africa. Despite successes in the late 19th century, the first Rif War (1893-4) around Mellila had also shown the potential weakness of the Spanish position along the coast. The second Rif War (1909–10) was initially a fiasco for the under-equipped and undertrained Spanish, until heavy artillery was brought in; in the aftermath of the war, Spain began to raise units of local Regulares. The third Rif War (1920–1926) also began badly for the Spanish, especially after the disaster of Annual (1921), resulting in various changes to the Spanish approach. Working in alliance with French forces in the region, Spain created the Spanish Legion along similar lines to the French Foreign Legion to provide additional experienced forces. Spain also became the first country to deploy chemical weapons by air, dropping mustard gas from aircraft.

The Spanish Civil War (1936-9) began after an attempted coup d'état by parts of the Spanish Army against the government of the Second Spanish Republic. The ensuing Civil War devastated Spain, ending with the victory of the rebels and the founding of a dictatorship led by Generalissimo Francisco Franco, the leader of the Nationalist army.

The civil war was marked by the extensive involvement of international units. Many joined the Republican side under the banner of the International Brigades. The Nationalists enjoyed support from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, with several new technologies being trialled as a result. The Nationalist side conducted aerial bombing of cities in Republican territory, carried out mainly by the Luftwaffe volunteers of the Condor Legion and the Italian air force volunteers of the Corpo Truppe Volontarie- the most notorious example of this tactic of terror bombings was the bombing of Guernica. The first combat use of the Stuka occurred during the conflict. The civil war influenced European military thinking on the alleged supremacy of the bomber.Armoured warfare was also trialled by Nationalist supporters; German volunteers first used armor in live field conditions in the form of the Panzer Battalion 88, a force built around three companies of PzKpfw I tanks that functioned as a training cadre for Nationalists. Weakened and politically still fragile, Spain remained neutral during the Second World War (1939–45).

The Post-war period

In the post-war period, Spain was initially still heavily influenced by events in North Africa, particularly surrounding its colony of Western Sahara The first of these conflicts, the Ifni War (1956-8) saw Spanish forces, including Spain's first paratroop unit, clash with the Moroccan Liberation Army, a Moroccan state backed insurgency movement. In 1958, a joint French-Spanish offensive, using massively superior European air power, crushed the revolt. In the 1970s, the rise of another insurgency movement, Polisario, resulted in the Western Sahara War (1973–1991), with Spain withdrawing from its colony in 1975 and transferring its support in the continuing conflict to Morocco.

From the 1950s onwards, however, Spain began to build increasingly close links with the U.S. armed forces. The Spanish Air Force received its first jets, such as the F-86 Sabre and Lockheed T-33, from America, whilst the equipment of the Spanish military was again modernised in the 1970s to prepare for Spain's membership of NATO in 1982. Spain sent a small medical unit to the Vietnam War, with Spain lending airpower to the NATO efforts during the Bosnian War and the Kosovo War. Most recently, Spain has participated in both the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as in the on-going Basque Conflict.