The recently announced defence restructuring measures constitute a new wave of consolidation on the human and territorial levels, as well as in terms of functions and the effects on the public. This new process forms part of a tendency of reducing the military to its function of ba­sic soldiering, at the same time as this function itself is subject to changes. The particularity of the profession of arms thus finds itself under discussion. War is now far-off and localised: it poses risks of course, but not threats. The reduction of the military to its ‘core busi­ness’ implies a dismembered institution. Ultimately, this is a process leading to the ‘dumbing down’ of the military, its condition, its world, its ethos; and hence possibly to a trivialised defence.