Defence Planning as Strategic Fact

Defence Planning as Strategic Fact provides and elaborates on an "upstream" focus on the variegated organizational, political and conceptual practices of military, civilian administrative and political leaderships involved in defence planning, offering an important security and strategic studies supplement to the traditional "downstream" focus on the use of force.

The book enables the reader to engage with the role of ideas in defence planning, of organizational processes and biases, path dependencies and administrative dynamics under the pressures of continuously changing domestic and international constraints. The chapters show how defence planning must be seen as a constitutive element of defence and strategic studies – that it is a strategic fact of its own which merits particular practical and scholarly attention.

As defence planning creates the conditions behind every peace upheld or broken and every war won or lost, Defence Planning as Strategic Fact will be of great use to scholars of defence studies, strategic studies, and military studies. This book was originally published as a special issue of Defence Studies.

Henrik Breitenbauch heads the Centre for Military Studies in the Department of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. The Centre advises Denmark’s parliament and government on strategy, defence, and security issues.

André Ken Jakobsen is a Carlsberg Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Military Studies in the Department of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, with a project on grey zone conflicts and great power politics.