Executive Summary
This paper examines how the UK can strengthen its national resilience and warfighting readiness by applying pragmatic lessons from Sweden's decade-long rebuilding of its Total Defence concept. It assesses the UK's current strategic mandate for resilience against parliamentary scrutiny and proposes a roadmap for implementation, categorizing actions by ease of delivery.
Why It Matters
This document provides actionable insights for defense analysts on how the UK can enhance its national resilience and warfighting capabilities by adapting Sweden's comprehensive Total Defence model, crucial in a deteriorating European security environment.
Key Takeaways
- The UK aims to strengthen national resilience and warfighting readiness through a whole-of-society approach, drawing lessons from Sweden's Total Defence model.
Source evidence · PDF page 3
Against this backdrop, the UK’s whole-of-society ambitions for national resilience, as articulated in the Strategic Defence Review (SDR) and the National Security Strategy (NSS) of 2025, must be assessed, and lessons from Sweden’s own rebuilding of Total Defence since 2015 take on particular relevance.
- Sweden's Total Defence concept integrates military and civil defense, focusing on societal functions and preparedness for a minimum three-month security crisis.
Source evidence · PDF page 6
Sweden’s crisis preparedness (krisberedskap) and ‘Total Defence’ (totalförsvar) rest on a simple but powerful organising principle: peacetime and wartime resilience are two integrated halves of a single national effort (Swedish Defence Commission Secretariat 2017).
- Implementation of Swedish concepts in the UK can be categorized into adapting existing structures, requiring institutional/legislative change, or piloting new mechanisms.
Source evidence · PDF page 12
Table 3 groups the ten applications into three categories: adaptations to existing UK structures that would not require new legislation; measures requiring institutional or legislative change; and new mechanisms for which no UK equivalent currently exists.
Strategic Relevance
The paper offers a practical framework for enhancing national resilience and warfighting readiness, directly impacting the UK's ability to deter aggression and respond to crises. It highlights the importance of a whole-of-society approach and provides concrete steps for policy implementation, which is critical for national security in an era of heightened geopolitical tension.