New Sources of Military Change – Armed Forces as ‘Normal’ Organizations

The literature on how European states have adapted to the post-Cold War security environment focuses invariably on different understandings of military transformation, a process which is seen as inherently different from other forms of organizational change. However, as this paper argues, new management practices, going back to the introduction of so-called New Public Management (NPM) reforms throughout Europe in the 1980s, have eventually penetrated also the last bastion of the old state – the defence sector. Taking a critical approach to the idea of military transformation and existing theories of military change, the paper demonstrates how other international developments have pushed towards what may be seen as a ‘normalization’ of Europe’s defence sectors – with the implications this may have for how we approach and understand contemporary defence organizations.