Recent research is largely concordant in that the core roles of the military instrument has expanded after the end of the cold war to include peacetime support to the nation.This study examines the reach a security policy transformation has in ex-plaining this role for the Swedish armed forces. It is done through at deduc-tive approach by examining national security policy documents from 1987 to 2017 using a risk theoretical perspective deriving from sociologist Ulrich Becks conceptualisation of the World risk society.The result shows that even though the rhetoric indicates a widened picture of a complex future of risks and uncertainty, such a transformation has not taken place in full. The view on the causes of danger and how to handle these are more in line with traditional threat-based views and functional reasons seemingly have a better reach in explaining the use of the military in-strument.