Swedish Strategic Culture after 1945

Abstract

This article examines the evolution of Swedish strategic culture during the twentieth century and up to the present.Although Sweden is the only Scandinavian country that has stayed out of war since the age of Napoleon, it still has proud military traditions stemming from Sweden's age of empire (1561–1721) and from the Cold War period, when this nonaligned country became partly self-sufficient in modern military technology, producing its own fighter-jets, tanks and submarines, even planning to acquire nuclear weapons in the 1950s. On paper, Sweden maintained an impressive number of armed forces (850,000 men after mobilization), although at the end of the Cold War their equipment and training left much to be desired. Only around the year 2000 did this huge Cold War defence complex begin to be dismantled. In line with the Swedish administrative-political culture (which is often traced back to the seventeenth-century statesman Axel Oxenstierna), the military enjoyed a high degree of autonomy compared with most other Western countries. This made it possible for the Army, the most influential of the services, to preserve its size rather than modernize gradually. Also, like other sectors of Swedish society, national defence was adopted by wellorganized popular movements with corporatist traits, movements such as voluntary defence organizations with hundreds of thousands of members and by defence industry. Sweden was the first country in the world to abolish the system of professional NCOs in the 1980s, creating a unified corps of enlisted officers. The tension between the ideals of popular defence and broad democratic participation – hailed in Swedish society at large – and the demands of military professionalism, and Sweden's national self-image as an advanced industrial country, increased towards the end of the Cold War. Only after the end of the Cold War did academization of officers’ training, the adoption of an official military doctrine and advanced thinking about network-centric warfare bring about much-needed modernization of the Swedish armed forces. Today, however, the mental gap is wide between the military elite on the one hand — which sees international operations as the primary mission in the future — and public opinion and large segments of the officers’ corps, on the other, which still consider defence as defending national territory.