Brazilian Army

The Brazilian Army grew out of Portuguese colonial defense forces and was formally established under Brazil's 1824 constitution, two years after independence, though Brazilian troops had already fought under the national flag from 1822 and the institution traces a symbolic, if not directly continuous, lineage back to the First Battle of Guararapes in 1648. The army's most significant nineteenth-century test came in the Paraguayan War from 1864 to 1870, which expanded Brazilian ground forces to some 135,000 soldiers and underscored the military's importance even as postwar budgets were sharply reduced. In the Second World War the Brazilian Expeditionary Force sent its 1st Infantry Division to fight in the Allied Italian campaign of 1944 to 1945, where Brazilian troops achieved a key victory at the Battle of Monte Castello after adapting from costly frontal assaults to flanking maneuvers. Organized around the brigade as its basic combined-arms unit and increasingly specialized for jungle, mountain and urban operations alongside rapid-deployment capability, the modern Brazilian Army numbered roughly 212,000 active personnel and well over a million reserves as of the mid-2010s, the largest standing army in South America.