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For many years, we have noticed that different courses of action (COA) developed by Joint Operational Planning Groups (JOPG) for solving the same mission seldom rarely differ more than marginally. This can lead to plans that are predictable for an opponent. If we want to be able to expose an opponent to surprise and complex problems, predictable plans are not good.Planning doctrine only based on the past experience is most often not the best when preparing for missions in future operations, therefore more creative and divergent thinking is needed.In this paper we discuss conditions for COA development that stimulate creative and divergent thinking. We also discuss how planners continually alternate between divergent and convergent thinking before and during execution of operations.

This report, Conflict Prevention and Security Cooperation in the Arctic Region: Frameworks for the Future, captures consensus of the Newport Arctic Scholars Initiative 2020 scholars. Building upon the 2018-2019 NASI work on the limitations of the current cooperative security fora in the Arctic region, this cohort explored existing international frameworks and assessed their abilities to ensure freedom and security in the Arctic through political-military means. NASI 2020 also examined existing frameworks to determine whether they enabled increased dialogue and maritime security cooperation in the region. The frameworks were further evaluated for their abilities to prevent and manage conflict and enhance cooperation on areas of common security and defense interests in the region. Scholars were tasked to identify new frameworks that could be useful in establishing – and maintaining – open channels of communication, preventing conflict, and enhancing cooperation on areas of common security and defense interests among nations and navies in the Arctic region. Finally, the group sought to identify practical arrangements for a future meeting or summit that could bring together states to enhance dialogue on security and cooperation in the Arctic region.

Background In Sweden the surgical surge capacity for mass casualty incidents (MCI) is managed by county councils within their dedicated budget. It is unclear whether healthcare budget constraints have affected the regional MCI preparedness. This study was designed to investigate the current surgical MCI preparedness at Swedish emergency hospitals. Methods Surveys were distributed in 2015 to department heads of intensive care units (ICU) and surgery at 54 Swedish emergency hospitals. The survey contained quantitative measures as the number of (1) surgical trauma teams in hospital and available after activating the disaster plan, (2) surgical theatres suitable for multi-trauma care, and (3) surgical ICU beds. The survey was also distributed to the Armed Forces Centre for Defence Medicine. Results 53 hospitals responded to the survey (98%). Included were 10 university hospitals (19%), 42 county hospitals (79%), and 1 private hospital (2%). Within 8 h the surgical capacity could be increased from 105 to 399 surgical teams, while 433 surgical theatres and 480 ICU beds were made available. The surgical surge capacity differed between university hospitals and county hospitals, and regional differences were identified regarding the availability of surgical theatres and ICU beds. Conclusions The MCI preparedness of Swedish emergency care hospitals needs further attention. To improve Swedish surgical MCI preparedness a national strategy for trauma care in disaster management is necessary.

The Second World War was the most devastating conflict in human history and one which provides innumerable lessons - military, political, and moral. Across the globe, both soldier and civilian endured suffering on a scale previously unknown to humanity as nations grappled with the demands of total war.

This article analyses the recent military ‘turn to reflexivity’ in relation to current reflexive commitments in critical studies of the military. With reflexivity, military organizations have begun to inquire into its own role as a producer and user of knowledge, and into the constitutive effects of knowledge in and on the world. A reflexive concern with the conditions and effects of knowledge has thus made militaries sensitive to the epistemic dimensions of military force. The broader socio-political implications of the military’s attention to epistemics, in terms of how knowledge may constitute and bring into being novel socio-political orderings, make it an urgent task to explore this development in relation to the reflexive state of critical research on the military. The first argument that I make in the article is that existing reflexive commitments in critical military studies are conceptually able to target scholarly-military epistemic interactions and the constitutive effects thereof, but less able to address epistemic distinctions in terms of how knowledge is produced and how different conditions shape the content of knowledge. This, however, is what is needed to critically address the military reflexive development. Based on this, I argue secondly that a fruitful broadening and enriching of the reflexive gaze may be achieved by further taking reflexivity in a Bourdieusian direction – a move that ultimately works complementary to existing reflexive commitments in critical military studies.

Peacebuilding debates increasingly revolve around questions about knowledge and expertise. Of particular interest is what (and whose) knowledge(s) ends up authoritative in interventions. This article addresses a problem in the literature on the epistemics and epistemic authority of peacebuilding interventions: the acknowledgement of but lacking attention to plural knowledges, the transgressive character of expertise, and knowledge struggles. It does this by discussing recent suggestions that peacebuilding epistemic authority can be fruitfully analysed as a Bourdieusian field. The article identifies a tension in Bourdieu’s own thinking about fields, which has shaped some of these recent proposals. This tension, nevertheless, also enables a reconsideration of fields and struggles, and thereby an analysis that takes plurality and transgressiveness into account. By developing such an alternative conceptual position, the article sees peacebuilding epistemic authority as object- and struggle-bound; conditioned and dependent on dynamics that go beyond peacebuilding as a distinct field of practice. This position is illustrated in an analysis of the emergence and (temporary) establishment of epistemic authority in peacebuilding interventions on informal economies.

This article diagnoses a representational bias in current scholarshipon the materiality and spatiality of urban peacebuilding. The biasreduces peacebuilding knowledge production to situatedprocesses that unfold in urban environments but that are notconstituted by them. To counter this, the article draws on ‘morethan-representational’ thinking to develop a research agendathat reframes the study of urban peacebuilding epistemics. Theagenda reconceptualises post-/conflict urban environments as‘governance objects’ that need to be made known and made‘governable’. Further, the agenda approaches the peacebuildingproduction of such objects as a process in itself situated in and(co-)constituted by urban environments.

In light of the recent turn to ‘inclusivity’ in peacebuilding practice, this article problematises established ways of ‘doing critique’ in peacebuilding scholarship. Inclusivity refers to the building of peace as a situated and co-constituted process. This entails what can be termed a new epistemic commitment: the acknowledgement that peacebuilding as a dynamic and emergent phenomenon is also an epistemically co-constituted process. In the article, I make two arguments. First, the move towards inclusivity places currently dominant modes of scholarly critique at an impasse. Persistent ontological and epistemological binaries preclude a productive investigation and challenging of inclusivity projects and their epistemic commitment. Second, I argue that, by returning to historical conditions that were formative in the very emergence of the category of ‘the local’, the conceptual basis of an alternative mode of critique (re)appears. This alternative critical project allows for an analytical sensibility to peacebuilding as emergent and adaptive. It makes it possible to disentangle power relations as these emerge between different and possibly unexpected configurations of actors and knowledge claims in inclusivity projects.

This article explores what is considered by some to be a dangerous pathway:the development of a theory of special forces. The world is now inthe third age of special forces and these secret military units are atthe forefront of the use of force in international relations. This research identifies a large theory-knowledge gap concerning these military “first responders” for modern nation-states and offers a tentative theory of special forces that goes beyond traditional annihilation/attrition models of wartoward a new anaphylaxis model. It makes the case that the theory pathwayis not dangerous, but emancipatory.

This paper addresses the research question of what kind of leadership, processes, and work climate best support employee-driven/bottom-up innovation in SOF. It starts with the suggestion that the term, Special Operations Forces (SOF), needs to be intellectually unpacked and its diverse elements (of which Special Forces are just one part) disaggregated in order to elicit definitional clarity. From this conceptual starting point, it becomes immediately clear that Special Forces represent the ‘special’ component in the SOF designation. This research contends they are a new type of soldier (and a product of modern warfare) that is defined by differentness in relation to conventional forces and activities within a battlespace, working in traditionally restricted areas. David Stirling, one of the founders of the famed British Special Air Service (SAS), is highlighted as an exemplar of the sort of leadership that provoked rare operational level effects. The paper also suggests that unorthodox forces operating in a unique operational environment demand unusual personality types and atypical command/control processes encapsulated by the so-called ‘Chinese Parliament’ that emerged in the SAS.

This study suggests that the world is now in a third age of Special Forces and one that in all likelihood will witness an increasing utility of these unusual military units in orthodox and unorthodox warfare in international relations.

This research explores the shape of warfare to come over the next twenty-five years from a Swedish perspective. It is evident that change in the practice of warfare is apparent in international relations today due to the use of innovative new technologies. These developments raise profound practical and conceptual questions for armed forces as to what do these new systems mean for the prosecution of warfare and the intellectual ideas/knowledge base that underpin the contemporary application of force. This research offers a tentative exploration of three aspects (artificial intelligence, autonomous platforms and the future battlefield: the soldier level) framed in the context of the traditional environments of air, land and sea to interrogate their meaning for Sweden and future warfare.

Detta kapitel syftar till att diskutera hur markoperationer och taktik kan genomföras utifrån ett fiktivt exempel där en motståndare angriper Sverige genom en landstigning söder Mälaren. Texten avhandlar miljö, motståndaren, markoperativa möjligheter, dilemman och utmaningar. Vi avslutar med en allmän reflektion över taktik. Strid i kustmiljö innebär särskilda utmaningar och dilemman för armén. Vid försvar mot en kustinvasion har armén en viktig roll. Närvaron av kvalificerade arméstridskrafter tvingar en motståndare att kraftsamla sitt anfall i en riktning vilket gör överskeppningsföretagen sårbara för insatser med våra flyg-och marinstridskrafter, ett exempel på synergieffekter mellan olika stridskrafter.1 Lyckas våra flyg-och marinstridskrafter med tidig bekämpning av fiendens  transportfartyg nedgår hans numerär vilket ger armén större chans till framgång med sin strid på land. Lyckas fienden med sin landstigning är det främst armén som kan försvåra fiendens fortsatta utbredning på land och vid gynnsamma förutsättningar slå fienden samt återta vårt territorium. 

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s military contribution to deter Russian aggression in the Baltic region should begin with an overall strategic concept that seamlessly transitions from deterrence through countering Russia’s gray zone activities and onto conventional war, only if necessary. NATO should augment its ongoing program to enhance the denial-based deterrence for the region with threats of punishment that demonstrate to Russian leaders they cannot achieve their aims at acceptable costs. Rather than forward-position military forces in the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), NATO should consider keeping forces further back to take advantage of strategic depth to limit vulnerability to Russian attack and increase operational flexibility. To support the overall denial-based deterrence concept, the Baltics must commit wholeheartedly to the concept of total defense including significant increases to their active and reserves forces.

Small states have always been at risk when great power competition intensifies in a region, those in the Baltic Sea Region (BSR) and the Arctic being no exception. Sweden and Finland are located at a strategic cross-roads between Russia and NATO, which “Northern Flank” once again receives serious attention from defence planners. Russia is pursuing a strategy of military dominance in the BSR and the European Arctic, and its perceived assertiveness is a major concern among its neighbours. China, for its part, pursues a multilateral approach as a “near-Arctic state”, seeking to make the BSR a strategic springboard to the Arctic by invest-ing in joint ventures with small states. The U.S. more competitive stance on China globally, and on China and Russia in the Arctic, has implications for the security dynamics in the BSR. In the resulting Baltic-Arctic Strategic Space, Finland and Sweden opts for navigating jointly.

Uppföljning och utvärdering av militära operationer utgör ett sammanhängande system som spänner över alla ledningsnivåer. Behovet av detta system har sitt ursprung i de ökade krav på spårbarhet och mätbarhet av resultat och progression vid genomförandet av militära operationer som ställs i Sverige, EU och Nato. Identifieringen av de parametrar som skall mätas med därför avsedda verktyg under den militära operationens genomförande är en process som tar sin början i de högre ledningsnivåerna, det givna uppdraget, samt operationens slutmål. Genomförandet är däremot en process som föds från de förband som är insatta i operationen, vars insamlade information samman­ställs enligt förberedda riktlinjer, aggregeras och tillvaratas på de olika militära ledningsnivåerna. Denna text beskriver inte bara uppbyggnaden av Sveriges och Natos system för uppföljnings- och utvärdering av militära operationer, samt introducerar de analysverktyg som används på olika ledningsnivåer för att mäta framdrivning och framsteg, den diskuterar även de utmaningar som är förknippade med att implementera en effektiv uppföljnings- och utvärderingsprocess.

The Baltic Sea and the Arctic have once again become scenes for geostrategic great power competition, influencing regional economic, military and environmental security. Here, international relationships span a spectrum from friendship to fear. We observe that a host of different units of analysis currently compete for our attention in this part of Europe. But while “Scandinavia”, “the Nordic area”, “the Baltic Sea region”, “the High North” and “the Arctic” help focus strategic analysis on important and sometimes overlapping components of this area, security complex theory prescribes that we must adopt a broader, multi-layered view in order to understand how great and small power interests play out in this part of the world today. Such analysis must consider China’s global role, NATO’s increasingly elaborate military planning and the Russian Federation’s perception of vulnerabilities and opportunities, in an area that stretches from the Suwalki gap in East-Central Europe to the Barents Sea. In addition, security complex analysis benefits from including the perspectives of small states that control key territories – such as resource-rich continental shelves and exclusive economic zones – and from taking relevant international bodies into account as enabling and constraining factors. As part of a larger project, this paper reviews several sets of open source documents indicative of the incentive structure of such key players, published over the past five years. We delve into the political, economic and military dimensions of aims and actions by three categories of actors, namely: i) China, Russia, the United States; ii) Denmark, Norway; Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Canada; and iii) the EU, NATO and the Arctic Council. We conclude that, while smaller units of analysis still make sense for limited research purposes, the concept of a Baltic-Arctic security complex is necessary for meaningful strategic analysis.

Ideally, military doctrines are not just written; they are implemented. However, there exists a theory gap on why new doctrines are sometimes successfully implemented and other times not. Based on ideas presented in previous research, this study develops a theoretical model for under what conditions new formal doctrines are most likely to be implemented. The model suggests that cultural coherence, authority and credibility are decisive for the implementation of new doctrine.