Between the 1950s and late 1990s the Swedish armed forces prepared for an invasion from the Soviet Union. However, after the cold war, the conditions changed, and the perceived threat slowly faded away. In lack of threats against the Swedish sovereignty, Swedish armed forces changed strategy. It led to extensive cuts in the Swedish army’s capability to defend the Swedish territory. The more extensive changes began in the late 1900s and in 2015, the Swedish government declared a military re-armament. This study is a comparative study of the justifications from the Swedish government for the changes in military capability. The propositions behind the defense acts of 2000, 2004, 2009 and 2015 represents the analysis material of this study. This study shows that the development of the security policy constituted the main justification for the disarming, as well as the military re-armament. The Swedish government has adapted its military capabilities according to how Russia has been acting militarily. The adaption has been made with respect to Russia’s current military capability. Thus, future changes in the Russian military strategy has been miscalculated. In addition to how Russia has been acting, disarmament has also been affected by other factors such as economy, culture and technology. The re-armament has also been affected by the defense’s low operational ability and increased need for cooperation capacity.

With the aim to situate the study of military professionalism and its relationship to change firmly in an empirical analysis, this thesis uses the method of grounded theory to study the elements of military professional mindset that impacts on the professional capacity to understand and handle military change. Theoretically the study situates itself in both the study of military professionalism and the study of military change, and challenges previous literature by stating that there are elements of the military profession that makes it adaptable to change. The results are based on data from interviews with military officers working for the Swedish Armed Forces and the analysis is developed through a multiple-step coding procedure which thoroughly grounds the study in empirics. The study finds that military professionals have a holistic mindset when understanding their own profession in relation to the military organisation and military change. Both rigid and definitive elements, such as hierarchy and loyalty, and less rigid elements, such as flexibility, adaptability and military preparedness, impacts the capacity to handle change and are seen as important elements of the professional mindset.

Following state-building campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, the UK has increasingly eschewed large-scale intervention in favour of local proxy forces. Whilst this strategy might appeal to the war-weary and cash strapped interventionist, frequent use of military capacity building as a tool of foreign policy inevitably raises questions about the accountability of those local forces being trained. This thesis examines the exportation of Western concepts of civil-military relations into the Republic of Sierra Leone Armed Forces (RSLAF), carried out by the British-led International Military Advisory and Training Team (IMATT) during intervention and post-conflict stabilisation in Sierra Leone. It argues that external interventionists can reshape local military culture, to promote both democratic civil-military norms and professional military effectiveness, but only through extensive institutional change. In Sierra Leone, IMATT attempted to change the organisational culture of the RSLAF by reforming its institutional mechanisms for socialisation, training, education and promotion. By inculcating a new normative ethos in a cohort of junior RSLAF officers, IMATT sought to promulgate cultural change throughout the military via a structured process of intra-service competition and generational replacement. This novel blend of internal and external processes of military change challenges existing scholarship on military innovation and adaptation, advancing our understanding of the relationship between military culture, military change, and external intervention. However, this process of institutional redevelopment and cultural change in the RSLAF proved to be both heavily contested and deeply political, ultimately leading to partial results. Consequently, IMATT’s experience of RSLAF reform holds important implications for the study of civil-military relations and security sector reform, and with it, the conduct of contemporary military capacity building and liberal intervention.