Abstract
Abstract The article discusses the idea of comprehensive national defence from a wide historical and geographical perspective. Countries facing different security challenges have used the concept of involving the entire society in state defence. From a historical perspective, ‘total defence’, with an emphasis on military components, was used primarily by non-aligned states during the Cold War; the breakdown of the Soviet Union reduced the importance of ‘total defence’; however, the emergence of hybrid threats in the 21st century has contributed to the rebirth of the concept in the form of ‘comprehensive national defence’, for application in circumstances wherein potential adversaries use military and non-military means in an integrated manner.
Highlights
This paper is a continuation of a previous work (Berzina, 2019), which was based on case studies of Finland, Israel, Singapore, Switzerland, former Yugoslavia and other countries, and defines four general dimensions of the concept of comprehensive national defence: military, civilian, informational and psychological
Based on the existing literature, this study aims to conceptualise comprehensive national defence as a form of modern-day total defence by focussing on the essence and major determinants of this defence concept in Europe
The paper traced the development of the comprehensive national defence concept from the end of World War II until the present day
Summary
This paper is a continuation of a previous work (Berzina, 2019), which was based on case studies of Finland, Israel, Singapore, Switzerland, former Yugoslavia and other countries, and defines four general dimensions of the concept of comprehensive national defence: military, civilian, informational and psychological. The information presented here is structured as follows – a brief description of the security environment of each period is followed by an outline of the perception of major threats and the solutions used to counter them by countries that have adopted total or comprehensive national defence concepts. The essence of a total war, according to Ludendorff (2015, 21), is that ‘the armed forces and civilian population is one whole’ because in the 20th-century ‘theater of military operations in the true sense of the word extends to the entire territory of the belligerent nations’. Hoffman (2010, 443) defines a hybrid threat as ‘any adversary that simultaneously and adaptively employs a fused mix of
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