Finland, Sweden offer NATO an edge as rivalry heats up in the north
WASHINGTON (AP) — The first surprise for the Finnish conscripts and officers taking part in an Arctic military exercise hosted by NATO this spring: the sudden roar of a U.S. Marine helicopter gunship landing in a field right next to the Finns’ well-hidden command post.
The second surprise: Finnish Signal Corps communications workers and others inside poured out of their field headquarters and directed the U.S. Marines—the Finns’ designated adversaries in the NATO exercise and members of America’s professional and premier expeditionary force—in the mock firefight that ensued.
Finnish camouflage for the Arctic snow, scrub and swell had likely prevented the Americans from even realizing the command post was there when they landed, Finnish commander Lt. Col. Mikko Kuoka suspected. “For those who years from now will doubt it,” Kuoka, modestly shocked by the outcome of the random skirmish, wrote in an infantry-focused blog, recording the outcome of an episode he later confirmed to The Associated Press. “It actually happened.”
As the exercise made clear, NATO’s addition of Finland and Sweden — what President Joe Biden calls “our allies in the high north” — would provide military and territorial advantages to the Western defense alliance. It is especially so as the rapid melting of the Arctic from climate change is stirring up strategic rivalries at the top of the world.
In contrast to the NATO expansion of former Soviet states that needed major boosts in the post-Cold War decades, the alliance would bring in two sophisticated militaries and, in Finland’s case, a country with a remarkable tradition of national defense. Both Finland and Sweden are in a region in one of Europe’s front lines and meeting places with Russia.
Defending itself against Soviet Russia’s invasion just before World War II, Finland relied on warriors on snowshoes and skis, expertise in snow and forest camouflage, and reindeer to carry weapons.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in late February, along with his pointed reminder of the Kremlin’s nuclear arsenal and his repeated invocation of broad territorial claims dating back to the days of the Russian Empire, have spurred current NATO nations to bolster their collective defenses and create onboard new members.
Finland – until 1917 a Grand Duchy of that empire – and Sweden abandoned long-standing national policies for military non-alignment. They applied to come under NATO’s nuclear and conventional umbrella and join what are now 30 other member states in a powerful mutual defense pact, which stipulated that an attack on one member is an attack on all.
Putin justified his invasion of Ukraine in the West as pushing back against NATO and the West, as they, he said, were encroaching ever closer to Russia. A NATO that includes Finland and Sweden would come as an ultimate rebuke to Putin’s war, strengthening the defensive alliance in a strategically important region, which surrounds Russia in the Baltic Sea and the Arctic Ocean, and pushing NATO closer to Russia’s western border for more than 800 additional miles ( 1,300 kilometers).
“I spent four years, my term, trying to persuade Sweden and Finland to join NATO,” former NATO Secretary General Lord George Robertson said this summer. “Vladimir Putin did it in four weeks.”
Biden has been part of the bipartisan US and international cheerleading for the two countries’ candidacies. Reservations expressed by Turkey and Hungary prevent NATO approval from being a lock.
Russia has in recent years “rearmed in the north, with advanced nuclear weapons, hypersonic missiles and multiple bases,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said this month. “Russia’s threat, and Russia’s military build-up, mean that NATO is strengthening its presence in the north.’
Finland and Sweden would add a lot to that mix. But they are not without flaws.
Both countries downsized their militaries, slashed defense funding and closed bases after the collapse of the Soviet Union eased Cold War-era fears. Just five years ago, Sweden’s entire small national defense force could fit into one of Stockholm’s football stadiums, noted one critic.
But as Putin became more confrontational, Sweden reinstated conscription and went about other means of rebuilding its military. Sweden has a capable navy and a high-tech air force. Like Finland, Sweden has a valued home-grown defense industry; Sweden is one of the smallest countries in the world that builds its own fighter aircraft.
At the same time, Finland’s armed forces are the stuff of legend.
In 1939 and 1940, Finland’s small, poorly equipped forces, fighting alone in what became known as the Winter War, made the nation one of the few to survive an all-out assault by the Soviet Union with its independence intact. Over the course of an unusually, deathly cold winter, Finnish warriors, sometimes clad in white sheets for camouflage and usually moving unseen on foot, snowshoes and skis, lost some territory to Russia but forced out the invaders.
Finns were responsible for up to 200,000 deaths among invading forces compared to an estimated 25,000 Finns lost, said Iskander Rehman, a fellow at the Johns Hopkins Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs.
It helped fuel a Finnish national credo of “sisu” or gravel. Finnish Winter War veterans were recruited for the U.S. Army’s Winter War training, Rehman noted.
Finland’s constitution makes it an obligation for every citizen to rally for the national defense. Finland says it can muster a fighting force of 280,000 men, built on near-universal male conscription and a large, well-trained reserve, equipped with modern artillery, fighter jets and tanks, much of the U.S.
The US and NATO will likely increase their presence around the Baltic Sea and the Arctic with the accession of the two Scandinavian countries.
“Just looking at the map, if you add in Finland and Sweden, you basically turn the entire Baltic Sea into a NATO lake,” said Zachary Selden, former head of NATO’s Parliamentary Assembly. defense and security committee who is now a national security expert at the University of Florida.
Similarly, Russia will become the only non-NATO member among countries with claims to Arctic territory, and the only non-NATO member of the Atlantic Council, an eight-member international forum created for Arctic issues.
Selden predicts a larger NATO presence in the Baltics as a result, perhaps with a new regional NATO command, along with US military rotations, though likely no permanent base.
Russia sees its military presence in the Arctic as critical to its European strategy, including ballistic missile submarines that give the other strike capability in any conflict with NATO, analysts say.
The Arctic is warming much faster under climate change than the Earth as a whole, opening up competition for Arctic resources and access as the Arctic ice disappears.
Russia has built its fleet of nuclear-powered icebreakers to escort expected future commercial shipping through the melting Arctic “as a way to create this transit toll,” said Sherri Goodman, a former US first deputy defense secretary. , now at the Wilson Center’s Polar Institute and at the Center for Climate & Security.
Goodman points to future threats that NATO will have to deal with as the melting Arctic opens up, such as the kind of shadowy, unofficial forces that Russia has used in Crimea and in Africa and elsewhere, and the increased risk of a hard-to-manage Russian nuclear accident.
NATO’s strategy will increasingly incorporate the strategic advantage that Finland and Sweden would provide for such scenarios, analysts said.
Kuoka’s U.S. counterpart in NATO’s Arctic exercise this spring, Lt. Col. Ryan Gordinier, wrote in an email from Navy spokesmen that he and his Marines were “impressed” by the Finnish infantry’s ability to reach otherwise inaccessible positions on foot, with snowshoes and skis. and to move undetected over snow.
It “gave us pause” — and likely any real adversary would, too, Gordinier wrote.
___
Associated Press writers Lolita C. Baldor in Washington, Lorne Cook in Brussels, Karl Ritter in Stockholm and Jari Tanner in Helsinki contributed to this report