What is your professional background from civilian life, as well as from the Swedish Armed Forces (Försvarsmakten) and the Swedish Home Guard (Hemvärnet)?

My background is primarily from manoeuvre units, where I spent a number of years as an instructor and platoon commander for a reconnaissance platoon. That work placed considerable demands on resourcefulness and flexibility. Beyond that, I have worked with field engineering and sniper service. Apart from my first deployment abroad, the other deployments took place in environments with loose structure and limited or non-existent infrastructure, which in turn forced a great deal of resourcefulness in itself.

During the period 2016 to 2020, I left the Swedish Armed Forces as an active officer and served as a reserve officer while working as a project manager for a construction company, where I learned an enormous amount related to financial flows and bringing together different stakeholders.

You have previously worked as a Weapons Officer within the Swedish Home Guard. Can you tell us about that experience?

As the Home Guard's Weapons Officer, I worked on an almost daily basis with issues ranging from pure tactical-technical level to purely political. For example, I have both supported individual Home Guard soldiers and instructors on the best placement of the magazine pocket on a combat vest, while at the same time supporting government departments with questions about how the ecosystem of civilian shooting, our voluntary organisations, military shooting, and the other armed authorities fit together.

I often try to illustrate this by saying that Zlatan did not simply turn up one day in the national squad. He started somewhere as a youth, with coaches who stood on a voluntary basis at some football pitch outside Malmö (southern Sweden) and created the conditions. The same applies to our shooting instructors in the Swedish Armed Forces. That context is not always obvious to those who do not work with these issues. Beyond this, the role has also involved a great deal of contact with industry and with the armed forces of other allied nations in connection with shooting training and its development.

In Sweden, since 2021 we have had an exceptionally strong shooting training programme that holds its own internationally. The United States Marine Corps (USMC) has now adopted a shooting training approach with many similarities to ours and a comparable underlying philosophy.

The work has, above all, given me the opportunity to work with the shooting training system from start to finish. I have worked with the purely practical function of small arms, the training surrounding this, creating digital training material, revising curricula to generate synergy, developing regulations aimed at ensuring fair competition and benchmarking, and assignments directed at our voluntary defence organisations (FFO) so that they receive the right conditions to support us in this work.

What have you learned from your previous professional experience?

Before I left the Swedish Armed Forces in 2016, I was perhaps not known for sitting on my hands, staying within my lane, and prioritising form over function. My time as a project manager at a company in an expansive sector has contributed strongly to my attitude towards how I can drive things forward and take ownership of the challenges in front of me.

Just as our Supreme Commander (Överbefälhavare) emphasises time and again, we carry a legacy of near-institutionalised timidity and restraint in our relationship with our own regulations, and culture can often trump doctrine. We need to reshape our culture in the face of the challenges ahead of us.

The two greatest lessons I brought back with me from civilian life are: to solve my own and the organisation's problems where I encounter them and can actually do something about them, and to act in a cost-effective manner, primarily in relation to time. These have become key success factors in my work.

This may sound banal, but as recently as two years ago I sat with representatives from another branch of service who found it very difficult to grasp that we in the Home Guard had created training material simply because we had identified a need and it was in demand. Who had ordered it? Can you really just do things without it being specified in the operational mandate?

It has been a strength to be able to point to what time costs, both in financial terms and in terms of what that same time could otherwise be spent on.

If, for example, we use system X instead of system Y, which creates an initial cost in time and money related to implementation, we can then recoup that through saved training time, preparation, and follow-up work for instructors.

Time we can either use for other training or simply save. This has been particularly important given the Home Guard's contracted personnel.

Equally important is creating conditions for personnel to partly absorb training at home, so that they then need to be present for a shorter period of time.

What does your new role as Head of the Innovation Department within the Swedish Home Guard mean in practice?

The Innovation Department is one of the pillars of the Home Guard's Experiment Office (HeX). The Innovation Department is the part of HeX where the lion's share of the practical work takes place. In practice, I lead a number of different teams of contracted personnel working on various projects across several areas.

We meet both in person and digitally at regular intervals, where guidelines are set for the work ahead.

We are now working to synchronise our activities with the experiment and innovation departments of the other branches of service, in order to avoid duplication of effort and to identify synergies.

At the moment, much of my work involves both creating structures and, above all, trying to respond to the enormous influx of good ideas and requests for collaboration from personnel, other units, government agencies, and companies.

I have a constant sense of guilt about our capacity to follow up with everyone who has been in touch. It is clear that there has been a pent-up need for somewhere to channel ideas and projects.

What drew you to your current role, and what do you hope to contribute?

I have always driven development and innovation, so when this position came up for discussion it felt quite natural to take a step in that direction. I hope to be able to build a bridge between a good idea and a finished product that increases capability and makes life easier for our soldiers and commanders.

Finally, what are you looking forward to in the coming years from the Home Guard's perspective, and what challenges do you foresee ahead?

I hope we can see an even greater degree of autonomy for the branch and its resources, that we can move towards becoming an independent service branch, and that we can welcome new soldiers into the system.

The greatest challenges are internal, linked to our regulations, processes, and the few who still have not understood the Supreme Commander's and the Armed Forces Administrator's view on risk appetite and priorities.

NDS has previously interviewed, among others, Tobias Billström and Karin Swanson in this series. If you know someone who would be suitable for this interview series, or feel that you yourself would be a good fit, NDS can be reached at news@nordicdefencesector.com. Please mark the email "New on the Job".