This year's edition of Militärhistorisk Tidskrift offers a wide variety of historical highlights with important knowledge-based military connections.
Two articles deal with conscription issues. One is written by Associate Professor Fia Sundevall, MA and PhD student Therese Christofersson, and MA Karla Jonsson, and deals with the intensive attempts that were made to increase the proportion of female conscripts and female soldiers and officers in the Swedish Armed Forces between 1980 and 2020.
The second is written by the former military chief psychologist Kristina Pollack and is about how the Swedish draft system gradually developed increasingly better psychological assessment instruments with the aim of "fine-tuning" the selection of conscripts for the right position in the Swedish Armed Forces' war organization.
Jakob Stridsman writes a very interesting article about how the Korean War came to be expressed in terms of opinion in Swedish newspaper debate during the early 1950s.
Professor Steve Murdoch and Kathrin Zickermann, both working at the Swedish National Defense University, write about a controversial battle, the Battle of Lembo in 1638, which involved Swedish forces.
Military history writer Marco Smedberg, in collaboration with Göran Larson, describes the Scanian cavalry, whose development since Scania became Swedish, is highly interesting military history, both from a purely military perspective but not least also as a part of Scania's incorporation into Sweden as an important part of the Swedish empire.
The series of articles concludes with a more modern historical account of the development of air warfare doctrine from a Swedish perspective. The article is written by Lieutenant Colonel Stefan Ring, with an Air Force background and long-time strategy instructor at the Swedish National Defense University.
In addition, three interesting books are reviewed. The first is about Charles X Gustaf's war in Poland and is written by a Polish historian who examines the famous jurist Samuel Pufendorf's description of this war. The reviewer is Lars Ericson Wolke.
The second is about the book that highlights the first phases of development of armored troops within the Swedish army and also shows the close connection between technical development and tactics on the battlefield. The reviewer is Karlis Neretnieks.
The third review concerns a book that deals with the military cultural heritage from the Cold War and highlights the various initiatives that have been taken to preserve facilities, equipment, etc. from the long period that Swedish defense was prepared to fight a war against the Soviet Union. The reviewer is Eva Silvén.
The editor, Björn Körlof, as usual, also makes some reflections on a military history topic, this time it concerns the problems of research.
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