Introduction to the Special Collection on Military Logistics: The Transformation from Peace Support Operations to Territorial Defence

This introduction to the Special Collection on military logistics brings together seven articles that collectively advance our understanding of military logistics and defence supply chain resilience. The articles are clustered into four groups: governance frameworks (Deverell, 2025; Pedersen, Jahre & Norrman, 2025), supply chain resilience (Ekström, 2025; Elvemo, 2025), force expansion and infrastructure (Hellberg & Antai, 2025; Takvam, Wallace and Müller, 2025), and a historical perspective (Rouquet, 2025). Together, these articles underscore that resilience in defence logistics is not a singular attribute but a composite of governance, organizational design, industrial relations, analytical foresight, and historical learning. By integrating conceptual, empirical, operational, and historical perspectives, the collection highlights logistics as a strategic capability central to defence effectiveness in past, present and future contexts, and thereby responding to a call for military logistics research by Yoho et al. (2013). The articles selected for this Special Collection consequently highlight several pertinent aspects of the current transformation of Nordic military logistics, including rapid growth; relationships between the government and the defence industry; defence supply chain issues such as trust, resilience and routing; and a historical retrospect to put the transformation into perspective. They examine how defence supply chains, logistics organizations, and governance mechanisms must adapt to new demands of resilience, preparedness, and wartime operations. The collection thus comprises a multi-layered exploration of military logistics transformation.