Major General Jonny Lindfors’ latest article, curiously in English, on the need for change within the Swedish Army really summarises the previous Swedish articles. I thought I would reply to this latest article by presenting how I would go about finding a solution to the challenges presented in that article rather than directly repeating what I have already said previously. As an engineer, I would take an engineering approach. Even though developing an army for the 21st century is not quite the same as building a computer system there are overlaps (they both have to work in the real world) so an engineering approach may have its merits.
Finding the port of call
Definition :
Army (n) : an organisation badly betrayed by the government it serves.
I would start off with the vision. What does the customer envision the final product to be? With this need to change there appears to be a set of customers. On the one hand we have the army itself; it needs to change but to what? Then we have the government. The government, acting as representatives of the people that the army is ultimately responsible to, lays down what it wants the army to be and do in various documents released from time to time such as decisions from the defence committee. Finally, we have NATO. Sweden needs to provide an army that can contribute to NATO, thus, NATO also has a say in what the Swedish army is or isn’t to some degree. From this an overall vision has to be constructed. At this stage we can play fantasy armies and let our imagination run riot. At this stage, we are far from the final product so everything is vague, full of unknowns, and uncertainty is high but we have to start somewhere. A vision maybe unrealistic but as we develop the idea, things will come more and more into focus but we could still use imagination. If we were to wake up tomorrow morning and open our bedroom window and see the Swedish army in its ideal form, what would it look like? No financial limitations. No political involvement. At this stage we have a blurry, fluffy, cloud of an idea.
The next step for me would be to define a goal. We already have this step done but I would like to clarify it in the context of the army’s need for change. The Swedish government defines a set of goals as given here :
- Defend Sweden against armed attack.
- Assert Sweden’s territorial integrity and protect sovereignty rights and national interests in Sweden and outside Sweden’s territory in accordance with international law.
- Promote our security and prevent and manage conflicts and wars by conducting peacetime operations on our own territory and in the immediate area and participating in international peace-building stakes.
- Protect society and its functionality by using existing ability and resources to assist the rest of society both in peace and at high alert.
So, there are a number of points that need to be clarified. Like what an armed attack is. Terrorists? Full scale invasion by a near peer aggressor (and what is that?)? Would civil unrest come under the definition of “armed attack”? Defend Sweden? What about other NATO countries? Even if outside of the NATO area? What does “high alert” mean? War? But we could also ask how does “high alert” relate to NATO?
When we have a clear goal we can then move on to requirements and specifications.
The road we travel on
The goal is our port of call. Getting to the port of call is our requirement. Which route we should take is the specification. When it comes to the Swedish Armed Forces (SAF), there are no shortages of requirements and specifications. They are all over the place and often, to my mind, ill defined. This whole process of “need of change” generates a set of new specifications and requirements as well (the major general’s article is full of them). I would like to gather them all together and evaluate them. Some, to me, are problematic and they will need to be handled in some way.
To my mind, specifications and requirements coming from the Government present the most problems (not all of them, sometimes the government does get things right that SAF gets wrong, in my opinion). And these problems end up being passed down into SAF. Rather than go through the whole lot, I’ll just focus on two of the most serious. The first one is the reactive nature of Swedish defence policy. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Sweden cut back it’s defences and we had a “strategic time out”. When Russia reasserted itself, Sweden goes into panic mode as it rushes to rebuild its defence. I would argue that this is a serious mistake of Swedish defence policy and creates requirements and specifications on the military that meet the technical definition of stupid (one could argue, dangerously so). This, from what I see from my corner of the universe, results in a meandering of the defence and argumentation with no clear direction. As we don’t know what we really need for defence we, therefore, have no idea if the changes being made are what we need on the battlefield.
The second is, what I would consider to be, out of date ideas. From what I see, we have a rush back to the 20th century instead of moving forward to the middle of the 21st century. One could argue that there is a plethora of out dated ideas visible in the Swedish defence policy. I will just pick one and that is what could be described as the reinvention of the Home Guard as manifested in the territorial force. This idea, it could be argued, goes back to the Cold War days (or even before) where the idea was to defend Sweden within Sweden. Yet, we are now part of NATO. The defence of Sweden starts at the boarders of NATO. Swedish soldiers could even find themselves fighting a war on the other side of the planet (with China, for example). We need to rethink how we work with the part time defence like the Home Guard and with internal defence (there is a lot to consider on this point; skill retention for a start).
The need for change doesn’t only mean we need to rethink these out dated concepts we have but we also have new things to think about. The integration of technology, for example, puts requirements on the army. I would like to say “new requirements” but there has always been a need to integrate technology but, today, that technology has become more complex and needs more skill. This, I think, puts a requirement on the army to not only train and build up the skill and competence needed but also to retain that skill and competence. To my mind, that leads to the need for a professional army and for a rethink of the part-time defence towards a need of a part-time army reserve force rather than the current territorial / Home Guard system we have today. For me, it means there should not be a time limit for soldiers’ engagement with SAF (until retirement age). For me, it means there is a need (and, therefore, a requirement) for a professional NCO corps. Some of this could be seen as falling into the fantasy army of the overall vision. A fully professional army is highly unlikely in Sweden due to various factors including culture. But how close can we come? The emphases should be on volunteers both full time and part time and then conscription (up to three years) to make up the numbers.
The battlefield adds its own specifications and requirements as well and there needs to be a battlefield focus in every decision the army makes. The battlefield is the ultimate judge, jury, and executioner of what the army does. If it doesn’t work on the battlefield then don’t do it! For example, what’s the main danger for soldiers on the battlefield? What protection do they need? What’s the problems with that protection? How do we reach a compromise?
Then there are requirements from NATO such as Multi-Domain Operations. These are going to effect the whole of the defence, not just the army or the full time Armed Forces. This means we need to think of the defence in a holistic sense.
There are also some hidden requirements. I would argue that we don’t build armies for today but for tomorrow. Decisions made today take time to implement and can effect the army for years if not decades to come. This reality is why we shouldn’t be looking at what is happening today in the geopolitical arena. We should not be reacting to what Russia is doing today. This is another way of pointing out what is wrong with Swedish defence policy. Instead, I would argue, we need to build a defence regardless and we need to think about what could happen in the next 30 years or so. What about sustainability? Fuel? Materials (rare earth metals, for example)? Where do we get our kit from? Can we secure supplies of new kit in the future? And so on.
Taking the ideas for a test drive
Use case scenarios allows us to explore what might happen and how we might respond. Looking at various different scenarios from peace keeping operations to COIN and on to full scale war and even beyond (imagining what might happen in the not so distant future with technology yet to be developed) allows us to create a blue print for action. How would we solve each challenge presented in each scenario? The solution becomes a map for us to navigate the sea of change that lays before us.
There are some scenarios around. An example is “Hotet” published by the Swedish War Academy of War Science in 2016. This was part of their future battlefield KV21 project. But there should be a number of such scenarios covering the continuum of violence. Explorations of solutions should be done with the requirements and specifications as well as the overall goal in mind.
Assembling the puzzle of progress
Once we have a set of specifications and requirements as well as a goal, use cases, and a vision, we have woven the foundations, bit by bit, for the design. At this stage it should be clearer what needs to be done and we will have a guide that can lead us on our journey of building an effective defence. No longer a fuzzy, out of focus, fluffy cloud but something that is starting to look more like wibbly wobbly jelly. Not quite solidified but starting to take shape. Laying the foundations should also give us ideas on how things should be implemented and how they will work. Then we can start designing. Although this process isn’t perfect. So, we will have some puzzle bits that don’t fit perfectly and we may need a bit of sticky tape to hold things together. But the focus is the battlefield and so long as we keep our focus on the battlefield and build something, even if it is not perfect, that works on the battlefield then we are ok.
Design is planning. Creating blocks and plugging them together. Building an architecture. Where the blocks are units from individual soldiers, platoons, and companies to all the way up to brigades, and divisions. What kit each soldier or unit needs and how they will interoperate.
From my corner of the Universe, I could see, at this stage, a number of aspects that the design would most likely have. A few I’ll present here :
- Flexibility and adaptability. We should have units that can be moved around and be able to operate not just in Europe but anywhere in the world. To my mind that means territorial units would be out (as well as for other reasons).
- A professional core to the army. It is unlikely that Sweden would be able to maintain a credible defence with professional soldiers only but the aim should be to prioritise volunteers.
- An army reserve. With units that mirror the full time regular army. This means that the volunteers would be able to enter the army straight from the street and do the soldier and officer training without having to do full time / conscript service.
Once a design has been created we should have a much more solid idea of how to build and implement an army that would meet the requirements and specifications and achieve the goal that we have previously worked out. Then we can start implementing and testing.
This whole process isn’t as linear as presented. Nor is the design static once developed. There are feedback loops. As we work out the specifications and requirements we will learn and understand more about what is needed to be done. That can mean that we have errors to correct in the earlier stages so we go back and correct them. Same when we get to the design and implementation stage. It is easier to correct errors in the earlier stages than after implementation. This is one of the reasons why we want to plan what we are doing. Why the laying of the foundations matter. It’s not just about clarifying and understanding what we are doing.
When it comes to design, we don’t need the full design to be able to start implementing. An overall design with some details will suffice. We can then start implementing those details as we work on other aspects of the design. Lessons learnt from implementation is fed back into the design to improve on what we are doing.
When we have something implemented we have moved from the fluffy, fuzzy, cloud to the wibbly wobbly jelly of an idea and on to something that has solidified and become concrete. Now we need to test it. And that’s part of the function of exercise. We need to take what we have out into the field and see if it can do what it is supposed to do. See what it takes to break it. More lessons are to be learnt here and fed back through the previous stages.
