5 ms·

Maybe 25 years even. (After that, it went downhill fast.) The defense was truly remarkably in depth and at all levels prepared to continue operations without a

Maybe 25 years even. (After that, it went downhill fast.) The defense was truly remarkably in depth and at all levels prepared to continue operations without a remaining chain of command. A Soviet invading force would have of course "won" within weeks, but not before suffering huge losses thanks to always-at-the-ready 200 state of the art fighter bombers using highways all over the country for runways, with a ground crew of only 5 per plane, and a handful of the worlds best (for littoral waters) submarines. When the coastal artillery would be neutralized, presumably with nukes or speznas, the mobile artillery would retreat inland. The cities were assumed to be nuked, but a large fraction of the city population had underground shelter. Even with Air and Naval forces depleted, the real struggle for a would be invader would only begin. There were weapons and food stored all over the countryside, and the communicated doctrine was "if you hear about a surrender from anyone, even the prime minister, it's false news. Keep fighting until the country is liberated." It would have been like Afghanistan, except the insurgents would have had access to better weapons. All of this had the purpose of deterring the Soviet command from full on ground invasion. Perhaps only nuke the larger cities, destroy some strategic assets and kill the government. In a WW3 scenario, that would have been a win for Sweden.

mongol 7y ago
I wonder what happened with risk awareness. I know many who even at the time thought it was insane to decommission so much of preparedness. Could it have been a generational thing? Or just a huge sigh of relief after the cold war ended? I think risk awareness decreased approximately in the same pace conscription numbers decreased. 1980: 50 980 new conscripts trained 1986: 45 572 1990: 41 349 2000: 16 658 2005: 10 169 2008: 6 804 2010: conscription paused https://www.forsvarsmakten.se/sv/information-och-fakta/var-historia/artiklar/varnplikt-under-109-ar/ https://www.forsvarsmakten.se/sv/information-och-fakta/var-h...
- jacobush 7y ago
  Terms such as "the end of history" were popular for a while, so I think a big part of it was a huge sigh of relief after the Cold War. Even during the heyday of the Cold War, some thought defence was futile, some thought it would never be needed at all, so I can imagine that when everything looked alright for a while, cooler/more cynical/hawks didn't have as much sway and the balance shifted. We are way past it and back to where 50k conscripts should be trained a year again, but I guess everyone is used to lower taxes etc nowadays.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  I'm guessing economics happened. Beancounters got into power and all the surplus and redundancy was cut out as a "fat", in the process of becoming "lean" and "just-in-time". It's the same story everywhere.
  - TuringTest 7y ago
    I really hope, in the future, business schools will forget this "lean" idea of optimality and will again appreciate the value of keeping reserve resources.
- Yetanfou 7y ago
  The Swedish word for what happened is that the country is 'fredsskadat', i.e. 'damaged by peace'. The country has not seen a major conflict in more than 2 centuries which has created a zeitgeist in which it has left that sort of problems behind it and does not really need to prepare for the eventuality. The narrative goes along these lines: Why spend time and money in preparation for conflict when you can just talk your way out of it? If people just listened to all the reasonable arguments put forward they'll see reason and refrain from whatever nefarious plan they were hatching. The money spent on defence - civil and military - is so much better spent on improving the world at large, in spreading the blessings of the Swedish model abroad. This is not the whole story of course since Sweden does have a sizeable arms industry which exports to all sorts of countries which stray very far from the above narrative. Conscription into the Swedish army was reinstated a few years ago, conscripts are now being called upon to help managing the SARS2 crisis. Depending on how the country emerges from the crisis there might be a chance of rebuilding part of the total defence system starting with the civil defence aspects.
- vidarh 7y ago
  To a large extent it was realised that the cold war preparedness was collective madness: In retrospect we know that the Soviet leadership in many respect were posturing because they were terrified of a Western first strike. Reagan wrote about his realisation after Able Archer 83 that the Soviets genuinely seemed to think NATO was a threat, rather than see it as a defense; both sides saw it as inconceivable that their side would start a war. The point being that even at the height of the cold war, the threat was massively overblown, largely because of lack of understanding of how the other side was thinking. The threat of Russia today is much smaller - for all of Russia's threats to some countries, it is contained to a threat against countries with Russian minorities, and there's no realistic scenario where Russia is suicidal enough to attack an EU country. And this kind of preparedness was a massive economic drain. Now one can certainly argue that some of the civil defense in terms of field hospitals etc. ought to have been kept up, for a tiny fraction of the cost, and that would be a separate issue. I grew up in Norway during the cold war, with similar levels of preparedness; air raid siren tests on a regular basis, bomb shelter at our school etc.. The assumption that there was a real threat of invasion was there until Gorbachev, basically, and then it evaporated as the increasing openness and eventual collapse of the Soviet Union showed that the threat assessments throughout the cold war had been completely wrong, and vast amounts of resources that could have gone to e.g. better healthcare had basically been thrown away. EDIT: This is from Reagans memoirs (taken from [1]), regarding his realisation of the Soviet view of the US: "Three years had taught me something surprising about the Russians: Many people at the top of the Soviet hierarchy were genuinely afraid of America and Americans. Perhaps this shouldn't have surprised me, but it did...During my first years in Washington, I think many of us in the administration took it for granted that the Russians, like ourselves, considered it unthinkable that the United States would launch a first strike against them. But the more experience I had with Soviet leaders and other heads of state who knew them, the more I began to realize that many Soviet officials feared us not only as adversaries but as potential aggressors who might hurl nuclear weapons at them in a first strike...Well, if that was the case, I was even more anxious to get a top Soviet leader in a room alone and try to convince him we had no designs on the Soviet Union and Russians had nothing to fear from us." Likewise the West kept posturing on the basis of a belief that the Soviet Union might well decide to attack. The regular air raid siren tests in Norway were not for fun. The regular NATO exercises were not for fun. There was a genuine fear. Only, as it turns out both sides were certain the only party that would be evil enough to strike first was the other side. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83#American_reaction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83#American_reacti...

mongol 7y ago

I wonder what happened with risk awareness. I know many who even at the time thought it was insane to decommission so much of preparedness. Could it have been a generational thing? Or just a huge sigh of relief after the cold war ended? I think risk awareness decreased approximately in the same pace conscription numbers decreased. 1980: 50 980 new conscripts trained 1986: 45 572 1990: 41 349 2000: 16 658 2005: 10 169 2008: 6 804 2010: conscription paused https://www.forsvarsmakten.se/sv/information-och-fakta/var-historia/artiklar/varnplikt-under-109-ar/ https://www.forsvarsmakten.se/sv/information-och-fakta/var-h...

jacobush 7y ago
Terms such as "the end of history" were popular for a while, so I think a big part of it was a huge sigh of relief after the Cold War. Even during the heyday of the Cold War, some thought defence was futile, some thought it would never be needed at all, so I can imagine that when everything looked alright for a while, cooler/more cynical/hawks didn't have as much sway and the balance shifted. We are way past it and back to where 50k conscripts should be trained a year again, but I guess everyone is used to lower taxes etc nowadays.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
I'm guessing economics happened. Beancounters got into power and all the surplus and redundancy was cut out as a "fat", in the process of becoming "lean" and "just-in-time". It's the same story everywhere.
- TuringTest 7y ago
  I really hope, in the future, business schools will forget this "lean" idea of optimality and will again appreciate the value of keeping reserve resources.
Yetanfou 7y ago
The Swedish word for what happened is that the country is 'fredsskadat', i.e. 'damaged by peace'. The country has not seen a major conflict in more than 2 centuries which has created a zeitgeist in which it has left that sort of problems behind it and does not really need to prepare for the eventuality. The narrative goes along these lines: Why spend time and money in preparation for conflict when you can just talk your way out of it? If people just listened to all the reasonable arguments put forward they'll see reason and refrain from whatever nefarious plan they were hatching. The money spent on defence - civil and military - is so much better spent on improving the world at large, in spreading the blessings of the Swedish model abroad. This is not the whole story of course since Sweden does have a sizeable arms industry which exports to all sorts of countries which stray very far from the above narrative. Conscription into the Swedish army was reinstated a few years ago, conscripts are now being called upon to help managing the SARS2 crisis. Depending on how the country emerges from the crisis there might be a chance of rebuilding part of the total defence system starting with the civil defence aspects.
vidarh 7y ago
To a large extent it was realised that the cold war preparedness was collective madness: In retrospect we know that the Soviet leadership in many respect were posturing because they were terrified of a Western first strike. Reagan wrote about his realisation after Able Archer 83 that the Soviets genuinely seemed to think NATO was a threat, rather than see it as a defense; both sides saw it as inconceivable that their side would start a war. The point being that even at the height of the cold war, the threat was massively overblown, largely because of lack of understanding of how the other side was thinking. The threat of Russia today is much smaller - for all of Russia's threats to some countries, it is contained to a threat against countries with Russian minorities, and there's no realistic scenario where Russia is suicidal enough to attack an EU country. And this kind of preparedness was a massive economic drain. Now one can certainly argue that some of the civil defense in terms of field hospitals etc. ought to have been kept up, for a tiny fraction of the cost, and that would be a separate issue. I grew up in Norway during the cold war, with similar levels of preparedness; air raid siren tests on a regular basis, bomb shelter at our school etc.. The assumption that there was a real threat of invasion was there until Gorbachev, basically, and then it evaporated as the increasing openness and eventual collapse of the Soviet Union showed that the threat assessments throughout the cold war had been completely wrong, and vast amounts of resources that could have gone to e.g. better healthcare had basically been thrown away. EDIT: This is from Reagans memoirs (taken from [1]), regarding his realisation of the Soviet view of the US: "Three years had taught me something surprising about the Russians: Many people at the top of the Soviet hierarchy were genuinely afraid of America and Americans. Perhaps this shouldn't have surprised me, but it did...During my first years in Washington, I think many of us in the administration took it for granted that the Russians, like ourselves, considered it unthinkable that the United States would launch a first strike against them. But the more experience I had with Soviet leaders and other heads of state who knew them, the more I began to realize that many Soviet officials feared us not only as adversaries but as potential aggressors who might hurl nuclear weapons at them in a first strike...Well, if that was the case, I was even more anxious to get a top Soviet leader in a room alone and try to convince him we had no designs on the Soviet Union and Russians had nothing to fear from us." Likewise the West kept posturing on the basis of a belief that the Soviet Union might well decide to attack. The regular air raid siren tests in Norway were not for fun. The regular NATO exercises were not for fun. There was a genuine fear. Only, as it turns out both sides were certain the only party that would be evil enough to strike first was the other side. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83#American_reaction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83#American_reacti...