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Moderate Party elites in Sweden have played a central role in redefining what “the problem” of defence policy is, moving from downsizing to NATO-aligned rearmament between 2004 and 2025. Guided by Bacchi’s WPR framework and Elite Theory, this thesis treats defence policy texts as sites where security problems are constructed rather than neutral responses to an objective threat environment. Through a phase-sensitive design, it analyses eight authoritative speeches, reports and opinion pieces by Moderate leaders across three key periods: (1) “The Era of Downsizing and International Cooperation” (2004–2013), (2) “The Rise of Securitization and Regional Tensions” (2014–2019), and (3) “The Debate over NATO Membership” (2020–2025). The study shows how Moderate elites first represent oversized territorial defence as anachronistic in a low-threat, globalised context, later recast defence as suffering from dangerous capability gaps in a darker regional order, and finally construct Sweden’s non-membership in NATO as institutional misalignment and vulnerability requiring alliance entry. Across these phases, shifting assumptions and systematic silences about threats, alliances, democratic contestation and distributive consequences narrow the horizon of what appears necessary, legitimate and debatable, while discursive, subjectification and lived effects successively normalise downsizing, permanent rearmament and NATO-centred security as responsible policy paths. The thesis concludes that elite problem representations not only justify major defence shifts but also delimit the democratic imagination of security by constraining which alternatives are rendered thinkable over time.