What is the added value of strategic theory in the understanding of Swedish securityand defence policies? By introducing a series of concepts that identify policiesthat are pursued in both peace and war such as escalation, deterrence, andweapons acquisition, we argue that strategic concepts contribute to the analysisof Swedish security policy mainly by highlighting forms of policy that do not conceptuallyrest upon the dichotomy of war and peace. Differently from mainstreamscholarly analysis that treats deterrence as one, uniform concept, we differentiatebetween four different logics of deterrence. Using this conceptual tool, we analyseSwedish policies in the 1950s and 2010s and discover that although Sweden pursueddeterrence during both this periods, her policies depend on a different logic. Bycomparison, 1950s Sweden understood to pursue deterrence understood as a wall,while 2010s Sweden understands the term in terms of a shield.
Vad betyder det svenska medlemskapet i den Europeiska Unionen för svensk säkerhets- och försvarspolitik? I vad består och vem bedriver svensk säkerhetspolitik idag? Vilka former tar sig svensk säkerhetspolitik? Vilka beröringspunkter finns med andra politikområden? Vad betyder det nordiska samarbetet? Frågorna ställs i den reviderade andra upplagan av "Svensk säkerhetspolitik i Europa och världen" och analyseras utifrån en rad olika perspektiv; från teoretiska till praktiska, från militära till civila och från beslut till implementering.
The security behavior of small states has traditionally been explained by different takes of realism, liberalism, or constructivism - focusing on the behavior that aims toward safeguarding sovereignty or engaging in peace policies. The issue of why states with limited military capacities and little or no military alignments or engagements decide to participate in an international mission has received limited attention by previous research. In contrast, this article argues that a three-layered discursive model can make the choices of small states more precisely explained and thereby contribute to an increased understanding of small states' security behavior beyond threat balancing and interdependence. Analyzing a deviant case of a non-aligned small state, this article explains why Sweden became increasingly involved in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) mission in Afghanistan. By focusing on the domestic political discourses regarding the Swedish involvement in this mission, it is suggested that a narrative shapes public perception of a particular policy and establishes interpretative dominance of how a particular event should be understood. This dominant domestic discourse makes a certain international behavior possible and even impossible to alter once established. In the Swedish case, it is demonstrated that this discourse assumed a catch-all' ambition, satisfying both domestic and international demands. In general terms, it should thus be emphasized that certain discourses and narratives are required in order to make it possible for a country to participate in a mission such as ISAF and prolong the mission for several years.
Contribution warfare removed the influence of Sweden's politics from the Afghanistan War (2001-14) and created learning conditions favoring case-specific, tactical lessons over the strategic ones. This article applies the concept of "contribution warfare" to analyze the lessons from Sweden's involvement in the war. The inconsistent application of this knowledge resulted largely from the political and operational realities of a small nation contributing to an alliance dominated by a single actor.
In this article, I argue that hybridization is a contingent result of the dynamics of some conflicts but not others. In particular, faced with opponents with great power, weaker powers seek a situation of asymmetry to gain victory. Drawing on within-case analysis of the conduct of war during the past thirty years in Afghanistan, I demonstrate that what we now consider to be "hybrid" represents an important continuity and strategic option in Afghan warfare. Still, the analysis also demonstrates that choosing "hybrid" has not been a strategy that has worked. Hezb-i-Islami's rather limited attempt for conventionalization of the war against the forces of Dostum and Massoud in 1992 failed and the Taliban's more far-reaching attempt for conventionalization has so far also failed to reap strategic success. This suggests that the threat of hybrid war is inflated.
In this paper, I will develop a slightly different approach that instead assumes that the future is path-dependent. This approach allows for a greater impact of agency and can be easily summed up as what happens in 2030 depends upon what we do in 2029, and what happens in 2029 depends upon what we do in 2028, and so on. Agency thus becomes crucial for shaping the future. Moreover, rather than focusing on actions, in this paper, I will primarily focus on norms. Norms change only gradually and slowly and are therefore a more promising baseline than current actions. Specifically, I will focus on norms of political order: about what it means to govern and be governed, how we understand the relationship between the public and private, and the concepts of civil and military. This paper is structured as follows. First, I will briefly discuss current patterns in war and warfare to evaluate whether or not there are trends that can be discerned. This part of the paper is based on the second approach and it serves a springboard to begin to think differently about the future. Throughout the paper, I will use the trends as a point of departure. Second, I will begin with a discussion on what we already know about the future. In doing so, I will critically engage with the NIC documents Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World and Tomorrow’s Security Challenges: The Defence Implications of Emerging Global Trends. In short, my critique will stress the lack of attention given to ideational factors. Third, and finally, I will suggest ideationally driven scenarios and identify the challenges to such a development of war and warfare.
Who will win the war in Ukraine? For centuries the outcome of war has been described in terms of victory and defeat. Since the Russian invasion began in February 2022, scores of articles in the daily press have touched on the issue of the Ukraine war. At the same time, an increasing number of analysts and scholars argue that the concepts victory/defeat are not the most adequate to describe the outcomes of several modern wars. It is empirically rare with unequivocal outcomes where one side unconditionally surrenders and war almost never follows a clear template. Superpowers are seemingly defeated by poor developing countries and planned blitzkrieg operations get stuck in the mud and lack of maintenance. At the same time, it is easy to see that there is a significant interest for the parties involved in a war to continue using the concepts victory/defeat because one of the few things that can legitimize the enormous costs of that war is precisely victory. In this text, the outcome of the Ukraine war – as it looks like in early 2023 – is analyzed according to Johnson and Tierney’s model of the so-called score-keeping and match-fixing.
This article addresses why the US in its military operations tends to focus on only one dimension in war – the military narrowly understood. More precisely, in the US case, its armed forces tend to be preoccupied with platforms and understand military capabilities as those that deliver death and destruction. I explain this one-sided understanding of the military dimension in war with how the US armed forces think about future war. How the US understands future war is, in turn, a reflection of how it organizes its long-term defense planning procedures. In particular, by approaching the concept of future as by and large structurally determined, a focus on platforms becomes natural. Investments in weapons systems, too, are more easily motivated to Congress since it is easier to attach a price to developing, for example, a new submarine than it is to attach a price to the cost of developing a military organization that is adaptive, learning and anticipating. The understanding of the future as something that happens whether you like it or not is particularly odd in the US context where of course a central tenet of the American dream is that the individual creates her own future.
Strategic studies deals intimately with the topic of power. Most scholars in the discipline work with a concept of power as an adversarial zero-sum competition. This is natural and necessary. However, other conceptions of power developed within political science and sociology could enrich strategic studies. Approaching two typical, traditional tasks of strategy – alliance building and war-fighting – this article demonstrates the heuristic mileage of theories of collective power. In particular, we can shed new light on the post-Cold War transformation of NATO as well as state-building as a strategy in counter-insurgencies with new ideas of power. Broadening the palette of theories of power is thus valuable if strategic studies is to prosper as an independent field of study.
In Western operations in Afghanistan, small European powers escalate in different ways. While Denmark and the Netherlands have contributed to Western escalation through integration with British and US forces, Norway and Sweden have done so by creating a division of labour allowing US and British combat forces to concentrate their efforts in the south. These variations in strategic behaviour suggest that the strategic choice of small powers is more diversified than usually assumed. We argue that strategic culture can explain the variation in strategic behaviour of the small allies in Afghanistan. In particular, Dutch and Danish internationalism have reconciled the use of force in the national and international domains, while in Sweden and Norway there is still a sharp distinction between national interest and humanitarianism.
The existence of a clear-cut division between “civil and military” is in many ways a foundation for international law and diplomacy. It is also a given starting point in many studies on current issues relating to war and peace, as well as in historical interpretations of past conflicts. Yet the civil–military dichotomy is not always a useful way of approaching complex matters, and by adopting such a starting point, some issues risk being overlooked. There are numerous historical examples, from the American Civil War, to wars of national liberation ending colonialization, to insurrections shaking political status quo such as the Marxist–Leninist revolutions; all illustrate that neither the agents of war nor the victims fit neatly into one of two clear categories. In a contemporary setting, non-traditional forms of warfare that make use of cyber space or autonomous systems further serves not only to undermine ideas of internal–external security but also to blur the distinction between civil and military. In the everyday making and implementation of policy, these concepts are indeed fluid and the borders between them highly variable, continuously contested, and renegotiated. As concepts, they can be seen as co-constitutive in the everyday usage. Civil and military are therefore best understood as norms, whose contents and interrelationship are contextually determined. At the same time, civil and military are organizational principles of the state, and as such the distinction is, arguably, too important, too deep-seated within the modern state- system, and too engrained in how legal and political order are understood to disappear in the near future.
What is the strategic logic of so-called ‘total defence’? At first glance, total defence may appear as one coherent strategic concept. Indeed, it was predominantly small, non-aligned states that pursued total defence during the Cold War. In this article, however, we demonstrate that depending on how ‘total war’ is understood, there are subsequently different strategic logics ingrained in total defence. We show this by developing a typology of different total defences; and by empirically illustrating variation in strategic logics over time through a historical analysis of the total defence(s) in Sweden. Recognising the inherent variation of total defence is important since it helps us to understand that hidden behind a nominal pursuit of a total defence strategy are multifaceted strategies.
In this article, we develop the strategic rationale behind weak party escalation against stronger adversaries. There are, we suggest, four main strategies: to provoke a desired over-reaction from the stronger adversary; to compartmentalize conflict within a domain in which the weak party has advantages; to carve a niche with a stronger ally, and to forge a reputation of not yielding lightly. Spelling out these different logics contributes to the literature on small state strategies and escalation. It also suggests, contrary to much of the existing literature, that it can be rational for weak parties to escalate against great powers.
The prevailing explanation of the institutionalization of the principles of war is misleading. Although the introduction of the principles into Western doctrine coincided with total war and the need to train unprecedented numbers of soldiers and junior officers in tactics, the fact that the principles disappeared from doctrines immediately prior to and during the Second World War suggests that they were not institutionalized to meet an increased need to educate the military. Instead, we test two other explanations: one drawing on the principles’ military effectiveness and one drawing upon the principles’ explanatory power. We find that neither one of these hypotheses stand. Instead, we conclude by elaborating on how the institutionalization of the principles of war can be made understandable using non-rationalist frameworks, in particular the growth of a particular kind of identity of staff officers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. According to this framework, the two world wars interrupted—rather than promoted—the institutionalization of the principles, since the wars with their large death tolls and mass recruitment increased the difficulties of creating a separate and unique identity for the burgeoning corps of staff officers.
In this article, we address the often ignored issue of quality standards for doctrine. In doing so, we contribute to the existing literature on military doctrine, since much of previous research has focused on outlining the effects of doctrine or the causes of particular doctrinal content, rather than how we should measure its quality. The predominant way of understanding quality of doctrine is based on the rationalist understanding of doctrine as a force multiplier. However, rationalist aims do not necessarily tell us anything about the contents of doctrine. Hence, a doctrine can be seemingly of high quality, but ultimately impede or lead armed forces astray. Rather than focusing on the utilitarian side of doctrine, we suggest that doctrine should mainly be understood as articles of faith or a belief system. And thus the quality of doctrine becomes inextricably linked to military norms and military identity. Writing doctrine thus becomes part of ritual, rather than reason.