The 1970 election of Salvador Allende as Chilean president, his downfall in the 1973 coup, and the subsequent 17 years of military rule under Augusto Pinochet are an emblematic Cold War story. They are, however, more fundamentally a Chilean story with long and local roots. John Bawden has applied this type of long-term historical vision to an actor largely and surprisingly sidelined in the literature on the dictatorship: the armed forces. His book looks to better understand particular characteristics of the coup, the political repression, the economic and social policies under Pinochet, and the transition to democracy, by tracing the intellectual and cultural trajectories of a specific generation of Chile's soldiers.

The soldiers who took over the country were largely a mystery to civilians in September 1973, and in many ways they still are. With a few notable exceptions, historians have shown little interest in the armed forces of the late twentieth century, despite their central role in the country's recent history. Some of the reasons for what Bawden calls a ‘paucity of historical knowledge of the officers who overthrew Salvador Allende’ (p. 1) reflect broader tendencies, but one practical reason specific to the armed forces is a lack of access. Bawden examines the worldview of the ‘Pinochet generation’ – officers who entered the armed forces in the 1930s or 1940s and held positions of power in the 1970s – and his sources are primarily military periodicals, published interviews and memoirs. The memoirs and interviews were produced almost exclusively in the 1980s, 1990s and first decade of twenty-first century, but the author does not characterise them as recollections, with their associated potential for inaccuracy and embellishment. At times, too, the book adopts the soldiers’ perceptions without much interrogation.

The book is organised into nine chapters, with each chapter divided into a stop–start series of short, one-to-three-page subsections. Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5 cover the decades between the 1931 ‘return to the barracks’ and the 1973 coup; the final four chapters cover the dictatorship and the transition; and these chapters are set up by a sweeping first chapter. Bawden opens by tracing the intertwined histories and mythologies of the nation and the military through the nineteenth century. These ‘traditions’ were augmented by a reform process at the turn of the twentieth century that increasingly isolated the military from civil society, and installed among officers a sense of superiority to civilians and a mistrust of politics and politicians. The armed forces’ new mission to mould the nation in its own image led soldiers to intervene in the nation's politics in 1924. This intervention ended when the Great Depression brought an end to government of General Carlos Ibáñez.

In the subsequent chapters, Bawden advances three main arguments that address important gaps and central questions in the historiography. First, he argues that the ‘memory’ of the 1891 civil war and civilian backlash against the armed forces in the wake of Ibáñez’ demise fed the military's reluctance to again intervene in politics. He traces military ‘constitutionalism’, presenting the pattern of plots and conspiracies from the 1940s until the 1973 coup as exceptions to the rule of apolitical non-intervention. This rule was complemented by military values of ‘loyalty’, ‘obedience’, ‘honour’ and ‘sacrifice’, which throughout the book appear to be slippery and opaque notions, strategically evoked. It was, Bawden writes, officers’ opinion to the effect that political neutrality was increasingly impossible that shifted views in the 1970s. Once in power, the same ‘institutional memory’ meant officers were determined to leave on their terms and having completing their mission. Importantly, and in contrast to 1931, it also led them to enshrine a role for the armed forces in Chile's ‘protected’ democracy.

Second, Bawden emphasises inherited traditions and local thinking as more important to understanding the postwar Chilean military than US influences. This is part of a historiographical thread rejecting the notion that the post-1931 military existed in an ideological vacuum filled by the imposition of the Doctrine of National Security. Specifically, for example, Bawden argues that the use of devastating force of the coup was a strategic decision best understood in the context of officers’ analyses of foreign wars, in particular the Six-Day War (1967) and the Indo-Pakistani Wars (1965–71). With respect to the brutality of the political repression, he recognises the role of US assistance and training and the broader Cold War mentality, but cautions against the ‘facile notion that all coups and anticommunist violence in the hemisphere can be traced directly back to the Pentagon’ (p. 61). Instead Bawden acknowledges the well-known mix of external factors and adds an emphasis on local military analyses of the Vietnam War and regional counter-insurgency efforts, as well as the dehumanising potential of geopolitics.

Third, and most significant, Bawden argues that the threat of war with Chile's neighbours accompanied the waging of the ‘internal war’. Moreover, he asserts that this threat was central to the armed forces’ strategy and their assessment of their legacy. Chile faced threats on all geographic fronts and from a position of relative weakness, and this isolation produced a siege mentality that shaped diplomacy and steeled the military government. Significantly, this argument helps decentre what is often a Santiago-centric narrative, extending it also to the country's borders. Subsequent isolation of the regime on the broader international stage as the result of human rights abuses only deepened the military's siege mentality, producing an outward unity that masked internal tensions.

Bawden's book is important. It offers a long-term view into the armed forces, privileges local dynamics, and expands the idea of conflict beyond the ‘internal war’ to include potential wars with Chile's neighbours. It is also timely. Corruption scandals and a lack of transparency on human rights issues hang over a new generation of officers, and large numbers of Chileans have taken to the streets in recent years to demand that elements of the societal transformation implemented and protected under Pinochet be undone. In this context, a historical study of the institution's motivations, thinking and self-perception is necessary.