Umstrittene Schweizer Sicherheitspolitik ... - ETH Zürich

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forces designed to meet external threats, and police or other security forces
designed to deal with domestic order and insecurity.
I of course am not suggesting that the armed forces be used for domestic
policing; I know that there is a debate, in Switzerland and anywhere
else, about to what extent the armed forces can provide aid to the civil
powers and to cantonal police forces. But I do think that the two halves
of security – the internal and the external halves – need to be united in
one policy, preferably one that is coordinated and coherent across the
different government departments and down to the operational level.
Security policy is, as many would say, not limited to defence policy;
defence policy is only one part of an intelligent and broad security policy.
I would also say that unity of policy has to be reflected in unity of action,
which will require new forms of coordination across departments, which
are much more used to a traditional division of labour than a genuine
collaborative relationship.
The third aspect of the transformation of risks is that compared to
previous decades or centuries, very few threats that can be identified
involve the risk of large-scale or small-scale armed violence in Switzerland
or in Europe. As the UK says clearly in its policy statement, which
is echoed in the most recent French defence policy documents: “for the
foreseeable future, no state or alliance will have both the intent and the
capability to threaten the UK militarily, either with nuclear weapons, or
other weapons of mass destruction, or with conventional forces.”
However, when military force and armed violence is a risk, it increasingly
takes one of two completely opposed forms: either it is low-tech and
asymmetric warfare, best exemplified through the use of roadside bombs,
informal explosive devices or suicide bombings and terrorist attacks; or
it is high-tech and very intense, exemplified by the use of unmanned
drone aircraft in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and very advanced battlefield
command, control and communications systems, such as the US Forces
are deploying. The equipment, training, logistics and deployment that a
modern military force has to adopt, have to take account of the extremes
of the spectrum, that is the low-tech and the high-tech end, rather than
just the middle-ground scenario most armed forces have traditionally
been prepared to deal with.
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