Neutral but not defenceless: Sweden, Finland and their contribution to NATO

Defense ministers from NATO's 30 member states are meeting in Brussels. Among the issues on the table is agreeing a common position on the accession of Finland and Sweden. It is their last meeting in Brussels before the Madrid summit at the end of this month and follows a visit by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg of Norway to the two Nordic countries.

On 12 June, Stoltenberg met with the 74-year-old President of the Republic of Finland, Sauli Niinistö, and the following day with the 55-year-old Swedish Prime Minister, Magdalena Andersson. In both cases, they reviewed face to face the situation of the two democracies' process of joining the Atlantic Alliance and the "legitimate concerns" raised by Turkey, in the words of the allied political leader.

Jens Stoltenberg's stay in the far northern European nations coincided with the important naval and amphibious manoeuvres Baltops 22, which are taking place in the Baltic Sea from 5 to 17 June. Forty-five ships, 75 aircraft and some 7,000 military personnel from 14 allied countries - Spain is not taking part - and also from Finland and Sweden are taking part to train jointly in anti-submarine warfare and rescue and salvage actions. 

The Finnish and Swedish military have also taken part in NATO's integrated air defence exercise in the Baltic region and Poland. The armed forces of the two countries have been NATO partners since the mid-1990s and focus on strengthening the interoperability of their weapons systems with those of allied countries. 

The accession of Finland and Sweden to the North Atlantic Treaty will provide a decisive security boost to both nations and strengthen the defence organisation. The Swedish Army occupies the strategic island of Gotland, located in the middle of the Baltic, about 100 kilometres from mainland Sweden and 160 kilometres from the Latvian coast. It controls maritime access to the naval base in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, the former Köenisberg, the capital of East Prussia. And Finland boasts of its military intelligence, for decades devoted to observing, analysing and drawing conclusions from its powerful Russian neighbour.

Operational defence of their territories

But the Swedish and Finnish armed forces are sized and equipped for the defence in depth of their respective nations, coastlines and airspace, not for a full-scale invasion by Russia's military. 

Sweden has some 80 domestically produced Saab JAS-39C Gripen fighters and has another 60 on order in the E version, which incorporates a more powerful engine and advanced active electronically scanning radar. It is a fighter aircraft that Brazil, the Czech Republic, Hungary, South Africa, Sweden, Thailand and the UK have opted for - just to train their pilots - and of which 250 have already been produced.

Finland, the land of a thousand lakes, has just over 50 Boeing F/A-18 Hornets that are already begging to be replaced. The government in Helsinki decided in December 2021 to purchase 64 US F-35A Block IV 5th generation fighters, the first batch of which will be delivered in 2025 following the signing of the government-to-government cooperation agreement with Washington in February this year. It has come as a blow to Sweden, which had hoped to have its modernised Gripen as the choice of President Sauli Niinistö's air force.

Stockholm adds to its air potential with a pair of domestically produced Saab 340 AEW&C airborne early warning and control aircraft, covering its long border with Russia. This is a capability that NATO cooperatively provides to its members and that France and the United Kingdom have in Europe, but Germany and Spain do not.

For the purpose of defending their respective territorial waters, the focus of the two nations' navies is on repelling attacks by sea. The Swedish Navy has just celebrated the 500th anniversary of its existence and has five submarines. Three are of the Gotland class, in service since 1996, with a displacement of 1,500 tonnes and a length of 60 metres.

High mobilisation capacity

They are optimised for a minimal acoustic signature and are extremely quiet. This is helped by the fact that they are equipped with air-independent propulsion (AIP) based on the regenerative closed-cycle Stirling engine, which allows them to remain submerged for about a fortnight.

The other two are of the Södermanland class - in service since 1989 - which have been retrofitted with AIP. The surface fleet consists of 5 stealth Visby class corvettes and 2 Goteborg, 9 minesweepers, 1 offshore patrol boat, 13 patrol boats, 147 launches and a signals intelligence ship. The Finnish Navy is a coastal force with only four patrol gunboats and five minelayers, three minehunters and four minesweepers.

The human potential of the armed forces of both countries is related to their population, which is 10.4 million in Sweden and 5.5 million in the country of a thousand lakes. Accordingly, their land armies have a small manpower of between 17,000 and 7,000 troops. But the mobilisation capacity of their populations is very high, and both nations have proven induction systems capable of getting the first 280,000 reservists to arms in a matter of days.

In terms of major ground weapons systems, Sweden has 150 German-origin Leopard 2A4 battle tanks and some 400 wheeled infantry fighting vehicles. This is in addition to thousands of wheeled and tracked personnel carriers and some 400 CV90 tracked combat vehicles with 40-millimetre guns or mortars. The heavy arsenal is completed by around 50 self-propelled artillery pieces, dozens of mobile air defence missile systems and a large number of indigenously produced anti-tank missile firing positions. 

The Finnish Army is equipped with another hundred Leopard 2A4 tanks, about 200 domestically produced AMV and Russian BMP-2 tracked 8x8 wheeled combat vehicles and more than a thousand tracked and wheeled troop carriers. Its firepower is supported by a hundred self-propelled guns of Russian (122-millimetre PSH-74) and Korean (155-millimetre K-9) origin, a hundred US and Czech rocket launcher systems and about 500 howitzers. Anti-tank and anti-aircraft defence is based on a wide variety of missile models.