As they met the press sitting cosily on the Minister of Defence’s couch, the representatives of the five political parties behind the Defence Agreement looked tired but relieved. They had managed to reach an agreement on how to spend the defence budget of ca. DKK 19 billion a year for five years. A broad political consensus on defence was in itself an important goal for the new Minister, Søren Gade, but the fact that people representing 157 seats of the 179 in the Folketing were sitting easily in the Minister’s couch also demonstrated the existence of a remarkable consensus about the way forward for the Danish armed forces. Especially given the fact that the government and opposition had been at odds over how actually to use military force in the case of the invasion and ensuing occupation of Iraq.
Because the parameters for Danish defence are decided once every five years, the final year of a defence agreement is normally a time of heated debate over defence.4 All the issues that have been neglected for the previous four years, because the agreement does not really allow them to be addressed, now come into the open, and a short, heated political season begins. This time the season began with al-Qaeda’s attack on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001.
The experience of catastrophic terrorism did not create a completely new security agenda in Denmark, any more than it did in the United States.5 For the first time since the end of the Cold War, however, the 9/11 experience created a clear hierarchy concerning which of the plethora of security challenges and risks that characterise a globalising world were the most important. Thus the use of military force to search and destroy enemies rather than create stability came on to the agenda in a way it had not been during the 1990s. At the same time the Danes
4 For a description of this peculiar Danish way of deciding defence policy, see Heurlin, 2003.
5 I have elaborated on this argument in Rasmussen, 2002.
suddenly found themselves faced with the prospect, or at least the possibility, of a direct attack on their own soil. This was not the kind of attack that people feared during the Cold War, when the possibility of Warsaw Pact forces landing on Danish beaches was on people’s minds, but was now more concerned with the much more unpredictable threat of a terrorist group setting off a bomb in downtown Copenhagen. In April 2004, 37 percent of the Danes found it probable or very probable that Denmark would be subject to a terrorist attack.6 However, what matters is not the perceived probability of a threat, but how a certain kind of threat creates a certain kind of political debate, one that dictates certain realities and makes the call for certain measures very hard to avoid.
The direct nature of the terrorist threat represented a break with the strategic premise of the existing defence agreement. The 1997 Defence Commission, which produced the White Paper on which the political agreement was based, concluded that Denmark was not under any ‘direct’ threat following the collapse of the Soviet Empire. The ‘indirect’ threat to peace and stability in Europe was the most important Danish security concern. Therefore, ‘the task of the Danish armed forces has changed in nature,’ the White Paper noted, ‘from being an element in a reactive, deterrence-based guarantee of security to also being an active and confidence- building instrument of security policy’.7 Bertel Heurlin has described the result as the ‘militarisation’ of Danish foreign policy.8 During the 1990s, Danish forces were increasingly used in peacekeeping operations and, eventually, peace-enforcement operations, primarily in the Balkans.9 ‘The history books of the future,’ the journalist Christian Brøndum has observed, ‘will describe the 1990s as a decisive period in which Denmark committed itself internationally and discarded its sceptical and reluctant security and foreign policy.’10
Following 9/11, keeping the peace seemed to be somewhat irrelevant in a world at war with terror, as the American President, George W. Bush, puts it, especially if keeping the peace at home was by no means guaranteed by the deployment of troops abroad. On the contrary, Danish involvement in the Iraq war, however limited, was widely believed to make Denmark a terrorist target, just like Spain.
The prospect of direct threats and the need to deploy troops to fight wars rather than keep the peace framed the debate on the new Defence Agreement. In spite of some initial reluctance from the government to implement large-scale reforms,
6 Poll by Megafon for TV2 News, Ritzau, 4 April 2004.
7 Danish Defence Commission of 1997:3.
8 Heurlin, 1993: 45-6.
9 Jakobsen, 1998.
10 Brøndum, 2003.
therefore, an increasingly ambitious agenda began to take shape during the autumn of 2002 and the spring of 2003. An idea of the increase in the level of ambition can be obtained by observing how the comparatively radical reform agenda of the Social Liberal Party (Det Radikale Venstre) became increasingly mainstream. This was not because the party spokesman, Morten Helveg Petersen, trimmed his sails. On the contrary, Petersen’s ideas about specialisation, the focus on deployability, doing away with conscription and focusing on civil defence against terrorism was in- creasingly accepted by the other parties too. The party’s policy paper, presented to the other parties in the Defence Agreement negotiations, noted – not without glee, but also not without justification – that Det Radikale Venstre was the only party whose policy had not been overtaken by events and the ensuing debate.11
This increased level of ambition was driven by the new parameters of the debate, which created a new demand to ‘do something’ about terrorism. The level of ambition was also being increased by the direct experience of fighting operations in Afghanistan, where Danish F-16s and Special Forces had been actively involved.
The fact that NATO wanted to create more effective and more deployable European armed forces also played an important part. The most important factor, however, was probably the way the leadership of the armed forces proved able and willing to exploit a discourse that was very favourable to new defence initiatives in order to launch its own vision for change.12 Timed perfectly with the leak of a government White Paper that spelled out the new demands that the security environment was placing on the armed forces,13 the latter were able to present their vision of how to meet these demands in August 2003. Taking together the conceptual paper and the more practical initiatives of the Chief of Defence, a political consensus for reform was cemented, and most of the proposals ended up in the Defence Agreement, which the party spokespersons presented together while sitting on the Minister’s couch.
Armed forces are by nature conservative institutions, but in this case the armed forces had asked for and received permission from their political masters to become an institution defined by change rather than continuity. They were henceforth to be defined by the nature of the ‘product’ and the values by which it was ‘produced’
rather than by the number of troops, barracks or platforms.14 Thus the defence agreement went on:
11 Det Radikale Venstre, 2004: 29.
12 Forsvarschefen, 2004.
13 The Security Policy Conditions for Danish Defence, 2003.
14 Forligsaftale, 2004: 2.
The armed forces are to be adjusted and developed. Together with allies, the armed forces are to be able to be effective in high-intensity operations in difficult and changing circumstances, thus providing the preconditions for the stabilisation of conflict areas. Furthermore, the forces are to be rapidly deployable.15
Danish military forces should be focused on ‘high-intensity operations’ (i.e., fighting wars) rather than peacekeeping. They should also be rapidly deployable. This focus on the quality of the forces led to a planned decrease in the number of active units.
The army was thus reduced to two brigades of professional soldiers. In focusing on fighting capabilities, conscription was no longer deemed viable. The navy was to contribute with a ‘flexible support ship’ and a number of smaller vessels, while the air force contributed with eight F-16s at a high level of readiness and another eight aircraft at a lower level plus various logistical elements.16
The specialisation in high-intensity operations was the first part of the Defence Agreement; the second part was a focus on homeland security. Before the agreement was signed, the government made the Minister of Defence responsible for civil defence, thus moving the Emergency Management Agency from the Interior to the Defence Ministry. Now civil defence was to be an integrated part of the armed forces to such an extent that the very low number of conscripts (6,000) which were still to be drafted were to receive 700 hours of civil defence training during the course of only four months.
Most of the 27,900 personnel employed in the armed forces will keep doing what they have always being doing following the Defence Agreement. The terms under which they carry out their tasks, however, have been significantly redefined by the men sitting on the Minister’s couch. What matters now is the capability to deploy forces abroad and defend against terrorism at home. The armed forces have been defined by a long-term agenda for change. The question is how the civilian and military leadership of the armed forces will implement it.
The course of this reform process is not only determined by policy, however: the actual operations that the Danish armed forces are conducting may well prove to be the most important factor in filling in the framework created by the 2005 Defence Agreement. The latter provides that the hardware needed to conduct expeditions will be available within the next five years. In terms of logistics and fire-power, in all likelihood the Danish armed forces will be in the top tier of minor European NATO powers in 2009. While military hardware is a precondition for the ability to
15 Forligsaftale, 2004: 4.
16 Notat: deployerbare kapaciteter, 2004.
intervene far from home, such expeditionary capacities represent only half of an expeditionary capability. A capability consists of capacity plus political will. The latter becomes very important in a time of wars undertaken by choice rather than necessity. The debate over Danish participation in the Iraq war made it clear that Denmark can choose whether or not to take part in foreign wars, and different political parties may make different choices. Danish participation in the occupation of Iraq also shows that an expeditionary capability is determined by political acceptance of the kind of action that ‘high-intensity operations’ necessitate. Capa- bility therefore depends on the political will to carry out the mission, but realising the ambitions of the defence agreement also depends on developing what could be called a ‘mission culture’ within the armed forces that realises the political priority of expeditionary capabilities in a new corporate culture.
These issues were tested much sooner than most people expected when a Danish officer was accused of torturing Iraqi prisoners. It is to the ensuing debate that we turn next.