The concept of security in the Canary Islands has undergone an irreversible shift. General Alfonso Pardo de Santayana, head of the State Major of the Canary Islands Command, has articulated what intelligence analysts have been warning for some time: the archipelago operates in a ‘very complex’ strategic environment where enemies are no longer conventional armies, but hybrid actors operating in the gray area of international legality. The strategy of the Canary Islands Command has been redesigned to combat threats that do not seek direct confrontation, but rather the erosion of institutions through criminal networks linked to irregular trafficking of people, arms, and illicit activities. For the general, the danger lies in these actors leveraging human and economic flows to camouflage operations that undermine national sovereignty, using the instability of the African region as a launchpad. In the face of this ambiguous scenario, the Army has imposed the doctrine of ‘footing the ground’. The permanent physical presence of units from the Ground Operational Command in strategic enclaves is not just a control measure, but an antidote against the power vacuum. In hybrid warfare, any geographical or institutional space that the State leaves unattended is immediately occupied by external influence networks or transnational mafias acting as pawns of foreign geopolitical interests. Visibility of the deployment has therefore become the main tool of deterrence. By physically occupying the territory and accompanying it with aggressive institutional communication, the Spanish State sends a direct message to these various actors: there are no cracks in border control. The goal is for any attempt at destabilization through irregular flows to be detected and neutralized before it escalates into a sovereignty crisis, reinforcing the Canary Islands as an impregnable stronghold against the new forms of conflict that define the 21st century.
© 2026 canarymaritime