Trilateral defence cooperation in the North: an assessment of interoperability between Norway, Sweden and Finland

ABSTRACT

Norway, Sweden and Finland have proclaimed a willingness to cooperate militarily in a future crisis or conflict despite their diverging alliance affiliation. This article assesses their ability to do so through various elements affecting their interoperability, with Arctic Challenge, a multinational military exercise, as an empirical basis. The analysis finds that the NATO/non-NATO-divide has a negative impact on the trilateral defence cooperation, especially on exchange of information and aspects related to command and control. At the same time, Finland and Sweden have become largely NATO-standardized through their active partnership with the Alliance. This has affected interoperability aspects, such as communication, culture, and the compatibility of technical solutions, in a positive manner. Through agreements with the Alliance, as well as domestic legal changes, the two NATO-partners have facilitated receiving military assistance from Norway and other NATO-members during a crisis. Other agreements between the Nordic countries, however, have been limited to peacetime.

KEYWORDS:

• Interoperability
• defence cooperation
• Norway
• Sweden
• Finland
• North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
• Nordic Defence Cooperation (NORDEFCO)

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The Arctic Challenge Exercise has been selected as it is the only multinational exercise in the Nordic region that occurs in Norway, Sweden and Finland simultaneously, and where all three countries participate with approximately the same amount of personnel and equipment. In the process, some research was done on the Aurora-exercise in Sweden in 2017. However, this proved to be less appropriate as an empirical basis for the analysis as it was mainly a Swedish exercise with considerably smaller contributions from Norway and Finland. The Cold Response exercise was also disregarded due to the overrepresentation of the host country, Norway.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Forsvarsdepartementet.

Notes on contributors

Joakim Erma Møller

Joakim Erma Møller (b. 1990) is a fellow at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies (IFS), Norwegian Defence University College (NDUC) in Oslo, where he is part of the research programme Security and Defence in Northern Europe. His research focuses on security and defence related cooperation between the Nordic countries. Møller holds a Master’s Degree in Political Science from the University of Oslo. His latest publication is a book chapter co-authored with Professor Magnus Petersson entitled “Sweden, Finland and the Defence of the Nordic-Baltic region – Ways of British Leadership” (R. Johnson and J. H. Matlary, eds., The United Kingdom’s Defence after Brexit. London: Palgrave Macmillan).