Abstract
It has become a norm to bemoan the unending stream of new concepts in defence policy, many of which sparked a lively debate on their actual novelty, utility and, more generally, added value. Those discussions often lack a shared language or benchmarks. The paper argues that the analytical utility of concepts for practical policy in areas of defence and security is fundamentally based on the same qualities that make concepts suitable for academic research, and that scholarly criteria for conceptual quality can therefore serve as a basis for evaluating and discussing the utility of concepts in practice. The article introduces one such set of scholarly criteria, discusses its applicability for practice and illustrates it through a case study of the concepts of hybrid warfare.