NATO’s Arctic Strategy: Nordic Nations’ Integration Bolsters Defense Against Russian Threats

NATO’s New Map – Foreign Policy

In the chow hall of this hulking Norwegian Coast Guard patrol ship, a seasoned conscript sailor explains the plan to a half-dozen American visitors. The guests—U.S. government bureaucrats, congressional staffers, think tankers, and this reporter—will sail for four hours aboard the Bison from the service’s home port in Sortland to about 200 miles inside the Arctic Circle. Then, the guests will be lowered into small rescue boats and transported into the harbor at Andoya.

If Russia were to challenge Norway, it might do so in a place like this, where 6,000-ton ships like Bison are too big to go into port. It’s a place where the Norwegian military once thought that, if the Cold War turned hot, it would be fighting alone for days until help from the United States and continental European allies arrived.

For parts of their history, three Nordic countries—Finland, Sweden, and Norway—were one country, united under the Swedish crown. Now, with Finland and Sweden having abandoned neutrality and joined their fellow Nordic countries Denmark, Norway, and Iceland in NATO, they want to fight together again—as if they were all one military. And NATO has to redraw its map to make their inlets, bays, seas, and territories into one area covered by Article 5, the alliance’s collective-defense pledge.

“The Baltic Sea and the High North are so closely linked together that it’s basically one strategic theater operation, but with different directions,” said Gen. Eirik Kristoffersen, Norway’s chief of defense. “North in the high north, and to the east in the Baltic Sea.”

But how to shrink all of that geography into one sweeping strategy? How to patrol such a vast area—from Russia’s bases in Kaliningrad, to the fjords, to ice-capped Svalbard, to the submarine internet cables that run across the Atlantic Ocean? Where to draw the line in the Baltic Sea between the Nordic countries and mainland Europe?

On NATO’s new map, everything has to be connected. The alliance’s fledgling command in Norfolk, Virginia, which has the mission of fighting across the Atlantic, has to double its staff to put the new allies under one hat; it needs to figure out how far it can integrate the Nordic militaries into one fighting force; and Norway, Finland, and Sweden even need to reconfigure their roads that run in different directions to get thousands of troops into the fight when needed.

“The question of Sweden and Finland joining NATO means, from a geostrategic point of view, that the North Atlantic, the High North, and the Baltic Sea are now tied together for the first time,” said Tobias Billström, Sweden’s foreign minister. “This is a major shift of geopolitical proportions that is taking place.”

But compare that to the area it has to help cover: Norway’s coastline is as much as 63,000 miles long–depending on how you measure it. Norway doesn’t want China and Russia to be sitting alone up in the Arctic, because its fish, oil, and gas all come from there—by the bucket. The Norwegian Coast Guard has just four frigates to patrol all of the High North—and they’re only being rented until 2030.

The only way to cut the Arctic, the North Sea, and the Baltic down to size is to have help. “We should integrate our forces in the region and into NATO,” Kristoffersen said. “It means integrating in the land domain, in the air domain, in the maritime domain, in cyber, and in space.”

The idea of force integration dates back as far as World War I, when the U.S. military sent its troops to fight directly within better-established—if worn out—British and French units. “We should not have different responsibilities,” Kristoffersen added. “We should all have a balanced force, but we should integrate them.”

The Nordic chiefs of defense are already envisioning putting a land command for the region in Finland, an air command in Norway, and a logistics command in Sweden. The Nordic chiefs haven’t figured out where to put a naval command yet, as they juggle how to split their ships among the North Sea, the Baltic Sea, and the Atlantic Ocean. They do know, however, that they want to have a combined naval task force with the Baltic navies in the Baltic Sea.

Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden are looking at integration all the way down to tank units and infantry platoons. (Iceland has a base for the U.S. P-8 Poseidon aircraft that can hunt submarines, but no standing military.)

The region’s air forces have been exercising together for years now. “We can initiate an activity the day before and we cross borders and we train and exercise in each country’s airspace,” said Gen. Micael Byden, the Swedish chief of defense. Norway already lands its air force jets on Finnish runways.

On the ground, Sweden has started the process of sending brigade-sized units over the border into Finland for live-fire exercises. There are only four in the whole Swedish Army.

The question is how far the integration can go. They’re getting on the same page of using all of the same weapons. But they will still need U.S. enablers. About 70 percent of NATO’s military capabilities still come from the United States, said Ketil Olsen, Norway’s former military representative to NATO who now runs Andoya Space, a rocket launchpad in northern Norway.

The Nordic countries formed a defense bloc in 2009, but they have fought over minute details for more than a decade. They fought over building a jointly procured armored personnel carrier—only 25 percent of the vehicle was commonly made. They even fought over what color their uniforms should be.

“We couldn’t agree on anything, to be honest,” Olsen said. Norway’s most sensitive defense talks are not with other Nordic countries, but with the Americans and the Brits on intelligence, space, and special operations.

The countries will need to establish a corps-level headquarters for the region that’s big enough to house up to 45,000 troops in wartime. But the biggest problem is fighting at scale. Finland can conscript some 280,000 troops from civilian ranks for war – and put more than three times that number of reservists on active duty – but Norway and Sweden can only call up a fraction of that. They’ll need even more to take on the Russians.

“We’re going to be swimming or sinking together,” Swedish Defense Minister Pal Jonson said in an interview. “There’s also a strong linkage between what happens in the Baltic Sea and the High North as well.”

A map shows the landscape of NATO’s Nordic members with Norway, Sweden, and Finland labeled in the north, along with Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Germany around the Baltic Sea. Russia, including Kaliningrad on the Baltic, is also labeled.

“If you look at the map, it’s obvious for me that Nordic countries should go together,” Byden said. “And when you look at the Baltics, they glue together with the continental Europe.”

That would mean drawing a line across the Baltic Sea—between Finland and Sweden in the north, and the Baltic States in the south.

“We do not have three NATOs in NATO,” said Hanno Pevkur, Estonia’s defense minister, referring to the alliance’s operational commands in Naples, Italy; Norfolk, Virginia; and Brunssum, the Netherlands. “We have one NATO.”

NATO has built a command center for the Baltic Sea in Rostock, Germany, where the allies will watch Russian submarines move back and forth between Kaliningrad and Saint Petersburg. But where will the Nordic naval patrols stop—and the rest of Europe take over? The allies don’t know yet.

“Do you put it on the east side of the Baltic, the west side of the Baltic, or down the middle?” said a NATO official, speaking on condition of anonymity to talk about still-pending war plans. “It can absolutely be done, but it’s quite politically sensitive.”

The Baltic States—Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia—and Poland don’t think anyone should be drawing lines in the Baltic Sea.

“Our position is very clear: The Baltic Sea should be one operational area,” said a senior Lithuanian official, speaking on condition of anonymity to talk candidly about an ongoing policy debate. “We will be fighting against dividing the Baltic Sea in two.”

NATO’s military expert committee will make a decision on where to draw the line by the end of the year, Jonson, Sweden’s defense minister, said in an interview. But in the meantime, the Nordic states will also need to get comfortable with the idea of defending not only the home front, but also continental Europe.

And the attack could come from anywhere.

“The vector of Russian attack could also come from the Atlantic,” said the NATO official. “There are obvious areas of potential tension in Kaliningrad [and] the Baltic States. It’s really dangerous to conclude: ‘It’s going to be here.’”

These areas of the Arctic have been inhabited for centuries. Some residents of Bleik have found the skeletons of Vikings buried under their houses, still dressed in full armor. When the oil companies came in to lay pipelines in the area, they had to hire teenagers to move the bones.

Now, Norway wants these places also to be populated by radars that could provide early warning of a Russian assault. But the current antennae are too big to schlep up the side of a mountain. Norway’s military needs smaller ones that it can carry up to give them clear lines of sight.

With two-thirds of the country covered in mountain ranges—and those mountains eventually covered with tiny radar stations—Norway might be able to detect an imminent Russian invasion in a timely manner, but it could still have to try to fend off such an attack all by itself for as long as 30 days. That’s been the military’s planning standard for how long Norway can hold off a Russian invasion before NATO reinforcements arrive.

But by the time those NATO troops got there, the Russians might already be over the border—and Norway, or even all of Scandinavia, completely dependent on the United States for supplies, could be cut off.

“If you look at the map, Scandinavia is basically an island … completely dependent upon the open sea lanes of communication, not only across the Atlantic and from Europe, but globally,” said Audun Halvorsen, the director of security and contingency planning for the Norwegian Shipowners’ Association and a former deputy foreign minister of Norway.

The alliance is taking steps to respond more rapidly. NATO and other allies are considering putting a drone base for long-range surveillance in northern Norway, where the U.S. military used to have turboprop surveillance planes, said Olsen, Norway’s former military representative to the alliance. NATO uses the air base at Bodo. The U.S. Marines have stored weapons, vehicles, and ammo in the Trondheim mountainsides since the 1980s. And the United States has been talking to the Norwegian government about reviving its use of Olavsvern, a secret Cold War naval base with dry docks big enough for six submarines burrowed into the mountainside.

They’re looking at a more aggressive posture, which could also see U.S. troops go to Finnish and Swedish bases, too. But Nordic officials say they have already seen the Russian military rearrange itself after Finland and Sweden joined the alliance. The Kremlin emptied land forces from Murmansk and Kaliningrad. Still, the threat is thought to be in the medium term, not right now.

“We don’t see Russian units coming over Finnish or Swedish borders as of now,” said Byden, the Swedish defense chief. Norway doesn’t, either.

What European officials do see is a rapidly deteriorating security situation. Russia has the upper hand on the battlefield in Ukraine. The Kremlin’s military planners are already looking toward a longer-term conflict with an enlarged NATO. Byden cautioned that Russia could reconstitute forces in the Western Military District that borders NATO within three to five years.

“This is just the beginning of this major military transformation,” said Katarzyna Zysk, a professor of international relations and contemporary history at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies. “NATO may face a sort of Soviet-style mass army across the border over the next decade.”

For now, Russia is still focused on training new recruits for Ukraine, said Kristoffersen, Norway’s military chief. Russia has only about one-fifth of its land forces left on Nordic borders from before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Norwegian officials believe that Russia would use troops on the Kola Peninsula in any conflict. But with NATO’s eyes on Russia along a much longer border, the allies would also be able to see the Kremlin massing troops very quickly.

“The supply lines run along the Finnish border, which is now NATO territory,” said Svein Efjestad, a former top Norwegian defense official who is now a senior advisor at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. “The reinforcements they used to send to the Kola Peninsula come from Siberia, and much of this goes on rail, and it takes a long time. We have very good intelligence in the area. I think we will see this quite early.”

A boat is seen through a rectangular window as it zips through the water in an icy landscape.

Italian Marines ply the water during an amphibious assault demonstration near Sorstraumen on March 10. Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP via Getty Images

In May, the Kremlin stunned Nordic and Baltic officials when it came out with a draft government decree to redraw the borders of the shallow sea back to where they were in Soviet times, giving Russia more turf in the Gulf of Finland, islands near the Finnish coast, and more territory near the Kaliningrad Peninsula that splits Poland and Lithuania.

It’s another sign that Russia can weaponize borders—whether by drawing them, as the Kremlin has attempted to do in Georgia, Ukraine, and now the Baltic Sea; removing border-marking buoys in Estonia; or sending people over them, as it’s doing in Finland.

The Kremlin also has a history of trying to redraw borders by force. Sweden has fought a dozen wars with Russia. Finland fought off the Russians on its own during World War II. Norwegian officials say they can’t do it alone. They have long-range precision strike on the border, but they are shorter-range U.S. multiple launch rockets, not the longer-range munitions that have been sent to Ukraine.

“The readiness of the Norwegian forces, the Swedish forces, the German forces, the Danish forces, has been almost nonexistent,” Efjestad said. “But it is improving now—finally.”

During the Cold War, Norway restricted NATO aircraft from flying past the 24th meridian east of Greenwich. Those restrictions have eased quite a bit, but there’s a reluctance in Oslo to put offensive firepower on the border, because Russia hosts one of its largest concentrations of nuclear weapons across the border from Norway.

The strategy to hold the Russians at bay is to keep an eye on them, with a network of ships and sensors that can track the Kremlin’s vessels all the way from Murmansk in the north to Kaliningrad and Saint Petersburg in the east, now surrounded by the 32-nation alliance.

Russia may be boxed in by NATO in the Baltic Sea with Finland and Sweden now allies, but U.S. and European officials expect Russia to continue to harass Western sea lanes by moving its northern fleet along Norway’s Arctic coast—all the way across the Atlantic.

The Kremlin’s submarine force “poses a risk to both the trans-Atlantic lines of communications, but it also poses a direct threat to the U.S. as well,” said Ine Eriksen Soreide, Norway’s former foreign affairs minister who now heads up the foreign affairs and defense committee in the country’s unicameral parliament. Severodvinsk submarines have enough range to reach the east coast of the United States, she said.

Norway has an intelligence ship in the Barents Sea up to 280 days a year, but not everyone is present. Swedish submarines haven’t been in the Atlantic for eight years.

The goal is to build a military that can deter the Russians by threatening to inflict enough pain to prevent an invasion, but also to build a military that would be strong enough to blunt the Russians until Nordic reinforcements—and the Americans—arrive en masse.

But they can’t move along roads that don’t meet. Norway is only about five miles wide at its narrowest points. The roads run north to south. In Sweden and Finland, roads run east to west. Norway’s troops are mostly based in the north. Sweden’s and Finland’s forces are down south.

Norway, Sweden, and Finland have to pour concrete. Lots of it. Norway is making plans to put in place more east-west infrastructure. It has a four-year plan to build bridges, railroad tracks, and ports, and a long-term plan for NATO reinforcement.

But it’s not just as simple as backing up a cement mixer: Seventy percent of the country is above the Arctic Circle, covered in permafrost—ice that doesn’t melt.

It’s not just building roads, bridges, bases—or redrawing the map. For the Nordic countries, now all in NATO, they have to change the way that they think.

“We’ve been militarily thinking only north and south,” a Nordic military official said. “Now, the whole Baltic Sea will be linked to Norway.”

Reporting for this article was made possible by the Atlantic Council.

By Jack Detsch