The Swedish armed forces deterrent strategy today has a lot of similarities with the deterrent strategy applied by Sweden’s armed forces during the cold war era. However the resources, which constitutes the foundation on which the deterrent threats are based, differ a lot and have decreased severely since the 1960s.
This paper compares the deterrence strategy applied by the Swedish armed forces from the 60s with the one today and examines similarities and differences in order to put a military perspective on Swedish deterrence strategies and shine a light on problems regarding the Swedish deterrence strategy and its limited resources.
The result shows a lot of similarities within the deterrent threat issued by Sweden from the two eras and concludes that the biggest difference lies within the change towards a more collective actor deterrence. Which in turn constitutes a problem because it implicitly undermines Sweden’s military capability and doesn’t guarantee any kind of military support from another state, if attacked, what so ever.