As chief of defense, retired General Jarmo Lindberg was the Finnish Defense Forces’ highest-ranking officer from 2014 to 2019.[…]
RFE/RL’s Georgian Service spoke with Lindberg about the evolution of Finland’s relationship with NATO, Finns’ volte-face on membership once Russian troops were pouring over Ukraine’s border, and the current war’s effect on NATO’s new northern flank. […]
RFE/RL: Finland’s defense forces are already interoperable with NATO, but still, should we expect any new bases and such? Should we expect growing numbers of the professional standing army?
Lindberg: […] If we’re talking about bases, then first we need to have discussions about what kind of a NATO profile Finland has — and those discussions are ongoing. Then afterward, when the profile is figured out together with NATO, then there can be smaller details, additional discussions. NATO is now very busy closer to Ukraine, having deployed a lot of forces closer to Ukraine, so probably this is not the first thing for NATO to do — to have a base here up north — because the more acute need is down south in Central Europe. […]
For Finland, being a neighboring country of Russia, after the Cold War ended, some other nations viewed us as being a bit conservative — having general conscription and large reserve forces and territorial defense — when a lot of [other] nations started to focus on crisis-management operations.
You know, with our history, and having fought during our history with Russia previously and during World War II, we kept up the combination of having the large reserve, general conscription, and when some other nations were giving up their weapons, selling their weapons, we were there buying the surplus weapons at a cheaper price because we wanted to keep up our traditional defenses.
But on top of the traditional capabilities, we were already buying the high-end, long-range, precision-guided weapons: the missiles for the air force, the rockets for the army, and the missiles for the navy.
The combination that Ukraine is looking for in this war that we are now watching — having sufficient forces, having the armor capabilities, having the tanks, having the missiles, the long-range capabilities, having the modern fighter jets and air defense — we have them all. So now people are saying that the defense planning in Finland has been correct for the war that we are now watching [in Ukraine].
This would be my advice to any nation: You need to plan in advance, and you need to have the capabilities in-country to defend your country, whether you are a member of an alliance or not. And you’re not freeriding an alliance; you have to be able to defend your own area and even help others, if needed, if you think that within the alliance somebody else is going to help you. It’s vice versa, and it doesn’t work [if] you don’t have the capabilities in your own country and you join the alliance and you say, ”OK, somebody come and help us, because we didn’t do our homework.” Läs intervjun