New to the job: Joachim Peru

What is your professional background from civilian life, 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 demanded resourcefulness and flexibility. Beyond that, I have worked to some extent with field operations and sniper service. Apart from my first overseas deployment, the other deployments took place in environments with loose structure and limited or non-existent infrastructure, which in turn necessitated resourcefulness in its own right.

During the period 2016–2020, 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 relating to financial flows and the coordination of 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 the purely tactical level to the purely political. For example, I have both supported individual Home Guard soldiers and instructors on the best placement of a magazine pouch on a combat vest, while simultaneously 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 with the example that Zlatan didn't just turn up one day in the national squad — he started somewhere as a youngster and had 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 self-evident to those who do not work with these issues. Beyond this, the role has also involved a considerable amount of contact with industry and with the armed forces of other allied nations in relation to 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 end to end. I have worked with the purely practical function of small arms, the training surrounding this, the creation of digital training materials, the revision of syllabi to generate synergy, the development of 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.

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 recast our culture in the face of the challenges before 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 do something about them — just as in the civilian world — and to act in a cost-effective manner, primarily in relation to time. These have become success factors in my work.

This may sound banal, but as recently as two years ago I was sitting with representatives from another branch of service who found it very difficult to grasp that we in the Home Guard had created training materials simply because we had identified a need and there was demand for them. 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, but also in terms of what that same time could otherwise be devoted to.

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

Equally important is creating the conditions for personnel to partly absorb training at home, so that they can then be present on-site for a shorter period.

What does your new role as Head of the Innovation Department within the Swedish Home Guard entail 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 identify synergies.

At present, much of my work involves both creating structures and, above all, attempting 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, in essence, pushed for 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 the good idea and a finished product that enhances capability and makes the lives of our soldiers and commanders easier.

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 that we can see an even greater degree of autonomy for the branch of service 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 we face are internal, linked to our regulations, processes, and the few who have still not understood the Supreme Commander's and the Armed Forces Administrator's view on risk appetite and priorities.