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.
“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.” […]
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. Läs artikel