Neuron och den demokratiska styrkedjan
On the 13th of June 2005 the Minister of Defence, Leni Björklund, was subjected to a formal complaint addressed to the Committee on the Constitution concerning her handling of a specific co-operation project with France. The project concerned the development of a technology demonstrator for an UCAV called Neuron. The reason for the complaint was that the Minister of Defence had failed to present the project to the parliament and thus bypassed a parliamentary decision. Such negligence might be considered unlawful under the Swedish Constitution. The issue became public during an unscheduled meeting with the Committee on Defence, a meeting that was arranged at the request of the Minister of Defence. During that meeting the Minister announced that the Government in a couple of days planned to take the decision to ?go ahead? with the Neuron project without a formal decision by the Parliament. The then estimated cost for the project was about 700 million SEK. The ?verdict? from the Committee on the Constitution was ?not guilty? according to the Constitution. The Committee on the Constitution limits its investigations to the relation between the Parliament and the Government, which is its main task. The purpose of my essay is to investigate the relation between the Government and the Swedish Armed Forces. This investigation is conducted in order to find out what kind of role the Armed Forces as a Government Agency has played in the formulation of defence policy regarding the Neuron project. The foundation of a representative democratic system is based on the premise that the formulation of political objectives is the exclusive right of politicians. Only the elected politicians are supposed to have this power, since they are performing their duties on a mandate from the electorate, the people. The formulation of political objectives is, according to this foundation, not something that civil servants, in or out of uniform, should be doing. If and when that however happens we are facing what is normally called ?a democratic black hole?. In order to fulfil the purpose of my essay I investigate the communication between the Government and the Armed Forces. The empirical study is performed on two kinds of documents from the Armed Forces. These documents are regularly used as basis for the Government?s decisions and propositions to the Parliament. The first kind is the Armed Force?s yearly reports concerning Long Term Planning, the second kind is documents that the Government needs for the yearly Budgetary Proposition. Both documents are wholly or partly prepared according to instructions from the Government.