Life – a user's manual Part II - Boksidan

Defence
Owning weapons and to be familiar with their use was during the earliest times, every man's natural right
and duty. This was the fundament for the war organization with universal conscription through ages, and it
formed the basis of the Swedish defense.
For the "country protection" or defending their own /province, a share (which varied with the need) of the
free male population was called to military service. In extremis all wars capable men, both free as slaves,
was called.
In the Middle Ages came the armor-clad knights in Europe, which was a terribly powerful weapon against
the transient militant farmers and it also forced Sweden to obtain such elite soldiers. But only society's
wealthiest members could keep a horse and an armoured knight.
To increase the size of the cavalry it was decided that those who lined up a knight with armor were called
nobles, and the whole organization was called the nobility rust service. In Sweden, in contrast to what was
the case in the rest of Europe, that system never replaced the peasant army but they complemented each
other. In the war for liberation from Denmark, however, the system's shortcomings were obvious. Farmers
must, at harvest and sowing, go home to their farms. They had furthermore not much to put up against the
battle-tested professional soldiers. The time required professional troops, but these were expensive to
maintain, so the king (Gustav Vasa) organized a national standing army, the first of its kind in Europe. For
this, he used both voluntary military service and forced ditto. In the beginning out of ten men one had to join
the forces. But during the 1600s also another systems occurred where a certain number of farms should fix
and equip a soldier.
The large field armies that we in the 1600s (in particular the Thirty Years War) held abroad, consisted
largely of foreign soldiers of fortune with the domestic standing army as a core. 1630, for example, the
recruited foreign troops were about 36 000 and the domestic standing army, about 40 000 men.
The peasantr, however, found, the system heavy and unjust, especially as few survived the service, and they
demanded a relief. In 1682 it was decided that the owners of a number of farms should, in both peace and
war, raise and pay one warrior 21 , which belonged to one of those in the countryside located regiments.
After the stinging loss of Finland in the war of 1808-09 against Russia, we realized that something radical
needed to be done, so we revived the general conscription again. And like other countries in Europe and
soon most european countries we got an army based on universal conscription. Then the organization was
about the same until 2000, although funding and investment in defense varied with turmoil abroad.
21.
Two farms with a certain size should provide a walking soldier.
In the same way it was with the cavalry with the big difference that these soldiers also had a horse that would be
maintained.
The sailors were maintained in the coastal areas and in the cities. In the latter case, it was the urban burghers who
had to keep the sailor with housing and cash pay.
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