Foreign Policy: Nordic Air Force takes flight NATO may soon have an alliance within the alliance

Does the idea of a Nordic Air Force sound crazy? It doesn’t to the Nordic countries. 

With Sweden aiming to enter NATO around the time of the 31-nation alliance’s annual summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, in July, all of the Nordic states would be in. And they have an ambitious plan to centralize command of about 250 combat aircraft across four countries under one command-and-control system, according to the article published by Foreign Policy platform.

“The plans for the northern part of the alliance will be much easier to develop, whether it’s the closeness to the Baltic States or the fact that, beforehand, it was a very short border between Norway and Russia,” said Camille Grand, a former NATO assistant secretary-general. “The working assumption was that the other two might be out of the conflict if a conflict were to happen. And now you have a much, much more coherent group in the north.” 

And it will be a major test for the troubled U.S.-made F-35 fighter jet, which will comprise the bulk of the Nordic air fleet. Finland put in an order for 64 of them in 2021, Denmark has ordered 27, and Norway will grow its fleet to 52 in the coming years. These aircraft haven’t seen action in Ukraine, but they patrol the skies over Eastern Europe and have been seen as a better option than European-produced aircraft for countries trying to upgrade aging fleets of U.S.-made F-16s. Even militarily neutral Switzerland announced a $5.5 billion deal for the F-35 in 2021.

There is some historical precedent for such an alliance-within-an-alliance, too. Even though Finland and Sweden have long been on the outside looking in at NATO, it wouldn’t be their first rodeo in coordinating joint air operations. Sweden previously participated in the 2011 NATO-led air campaign over Libya, and Finland just began sending out air rotations for the massive Air Defender exercise that took place earlier this month. 
 
In March, the four countries announced plans to link up the Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, and Danish air forces. Though the plans had been under consideration since the mid-1990s, Sweden and Finland’s non-member status in NATO had prevented the idea from advancing any further, because the two nations were not working on alliance-standard command-and-control systems. 

The move will also help NATO compensate for gaps in air coverage over the Baltic Sea region, where Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia—all of which broke away from the Soviet Union around the time of the bloc’s collapse—boast much smaller air forces and have leaned on NATO for an air-policing mission for the past two decades.

“It increases the costs and reduces the likelihood that Russia or any other aggressor will be able to inflict rapid and significant strikes on any of the Scandinavian countries,” James Black, assistant director of the Defense and Security research group at Rand Europe, said of the proposal.

But that’s where the Nordic countries might face some challenges operating at a NATO standard, former alliance officials said. Finland and Sweden were given a path to NATO accession last year without membership action plans, the alliance’s tool for getting the entirety of NATO-aspirant militaries up to Brussels’s standards. And without that practice, Finland and Sweden, if it is admitted, have some catching up to do. 

“[The Nordic Air Force is] an air force that is larger than the [British] Royal Air Force,” Grand said. “The Swedes and the Finns will have to integrate air and missile defense posture, the whole NATO air policing. Those were precisely one of the few things that were not really open to partners. So that’s where they have a big learning curve.” 

Finland and Sweden were, however, part of NATO’s so-called Federated Mission Networking, an information-sharing platform that is available to six non-NATO nations, but they will still need to do extensive work to integrate sensors and control mechanisms with the alliance, which operates as a single airspace. 

Perhaps the most consequential addition to NATO’s fleet will come when the alliance gets more access to Sweden’s domestically produced Gripen fighter jet. The country is unique in deploying a home-brewed, high-tech fighter at a time when most countries in the region develop aircraft through multinational programs or purchase them from abroad, and the diversity could be an asset.

“It’s an advantage for us that everyone doesn’t have the same fighter aircraft,” said Per Erik Solli, a senior defense analyst at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. “If you have to employ electronic warfare, and also countertactics, it’s difficult if you’re facing different types of aircraft.”

Nimble and lightweight, the Cold War-era Gripen can operate on a shorter runway than the F-35, giving it the ability to take off and land everywhere from a military base outside a city to a wooded highway in the Swedish countryside. The fact that it’s a “sovereign platform” is also significant, according to Black. “For other aircraft like the F-35, or the F-16, there might be lots and lots of different countries, all of whom are competing for spare parts and maintenance and so on,” Black said. “Sweden can kind of sit outside of that.”

After Sweden and Finland’s efforts to join NATO, the move is among the most serious attempts these Nordic states have made to shore up defenses against Russian aggression since the invasion of Ukraine last year, and centralizing command of the air forces will likely give the alliance more flexibility in dealing with threats on the fly.

“When you take all of those Nordic countries together, you have a completely different situation,” said a Swedish military official, speaking on condition of anonymity to talk about still-evolving plans. “That’s quite different if you’re a planner, if you have to plan for a big gap in NATO or you can plan for an entire area.”