The questions about the relations among defence policy, defence strategy and defence planning, which have grown from relatively predictable during the Cold War to increasingly complex, underline the need to understand the logical organisation of processes, hierarchy, interconnectedness and cyclicality - the relations that determine the orderliness, as well as the interdependence and constraints, of defence policy, defence strategy and defence planning. The doctoral thesis has, on the one hand, highlighted the importance of a comprehensive study of the complexity of the relations or interdependencies among defence policy, defence strategy and defence planning, both in theory and in practice, and, on the other hand, has shown that these relationss are influenced to a lesser extent by external factors and to a greater extent by internal factors. By developing a theoretical model, using the example of small countries, we identified and analysed the impact of the international security environment, the influence of NATO and the EU on national defence policies, as well as the internal specificities of the processes of formulation of defence policy, defence strategy and defence planning, and the actors involved in these processes. External and internal factors were examined through a comparative analysis of qualitative and quantitative data from three small NATO and EU member states, Estonia, Slovakia and Slovenia, over the period from 1991 to 2020. Compared to previous research, which is mostly based on focusing approaches only on a single factor or a single area in a relations, the results of the study showed that the applicability of the theoretical model to small NATO and EU member states, based on a holistic approach, constitute an important contribution to the development of defence science in achieving both theoretical and praxeological objectives in designing a methodological and explanatory framework for the study of defence policies, defence strategies and defence planning and their interrelationships within a country and between countries.
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